#i figured they were some kind of socialist but had no idea they were communists.

[choppedcowboydinosaur]

It's interesting that libertarian economists and Puerto Rican communists agree that Jones Act sucks.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous said: I didn’t know too much about the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton until I followed your superbly cultured blog. As an ivy league educated American reading your posts, I feel he is a breath of fresh air as a sane and cultured conservative intellectual. We don’t really have his kind over here where things are heavily polarized between left and right, and sadly, we are often uncivil in our discourse. Sir Roger Scruton talks a lot about beauty especially in art (as indeed you do too), so for Scruton why does beauty as an aesthetic matter in art? Why should we care?

I thank you for your very kind words about my blog which I fear is not worthy of such fulsome praise.

However one who is worthy of praise (or at least gratitude and appreciation at least) is the late Sir Roger Scruton. I have had the pleasure to have met him on a few informal occasions.

Most memorably, I once got invited to High Table dinner at Peterhouse, Cambridge, by a friend who was a junior Don there. This was just after I had finished my studies at Cambridge and rather than pursue my PhD I opted instead to join the British army as a combat pilot officer. And so I found out that Scruton was dining too. We had very pleasant drinks in the SCR before and after dinner. He was exceptionally generous and kind in his consideration of others; we all basked in the gentle warmth of his wit and wisdom.

I remember talking to him about Xanthippe, Socrate’s wife, because I had read his wickedly funny fictional satire. In the book he credits the much maligned Xanthippe with being the brains behind all of Socrates’ famous philosophical ideas (as espoused by Plato).

On other occasions I had seen Roger Scruton give the odd lecture in London or at some cultural forum.

Other than that, I’ve always admire both the man and many of his ideas from afar. I do take issue with some of his intellectual ideas which seem to be taken a tad too far (he think pre-Raphaelites were kitsch) but it’s impossible to dislike the man in person.

Indeed the Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen reportedly once refused to teach a seminar with Scruton, although they later became very good friends. This is the gap between the personal and the public persona. In public he was reviled as hate figure by some of the more intolerant of the leftists who were trying to shut him down from speaking. But in private his academic peers, writers, and philosophers, regardless of their political beliefs, hugely respected him and took his ideas seriously - because only in private will they ever admit that much of what Scruton talks about has come to pass.

In many ways he was like C.S. Lewis - a pariah to the Oxbridge establishment. At Oxford many dons poo-pooed his children stories, and especially his Christian ideas of faith, culture, and morality, and felt he should have laid off the lay theology and stuck to his academic speciality of English Literature. But an Oxford friend, now a don, tells me that many dons read his theological works in private because much of what he wrote has become hugely relevant today.

Scruton was a man of parts, some of which seemed irreconcilable: barrister, aesthetician, distinguished professor of aesthetics. Outside of brief pit stops at Cambridge, Oxford, and St Andrews, he was mostly based out of Birkbeck College, London University, which had a tradition of a working-class intake and to whom Scruton was something of a popular figure. He was also an editor of the ultra-Conservative Salisbury Review, organist, and an enthusiastic fox hunter. In addition he wrote over 50 books on philosophy, art, music, politics, literature, culture, sexuality, and religion, as well as finding time to write novels and two operas. He was widely recognised for his services to philosophy, teaching and public education, receiving a knighthood in 2016.

He was exactly the type of polymath England didn’t know what to do with because we British do discourage such continental affectations and we prefer people to know their lane and stick to it. Above all we’re suspicious of polymaths because no one likes a show off. Scruton could be accused of a few things but he never perceived as a show off. He was a gentle, reserved, and shy man of kindly manners.

He was never politically ‘Conservative’, or tried not to be. Indeed he encouraged many to think about defining “a philosophy of conservatism” and not “a philosophy for the Conservative Party.” In defining his own thoughts, he positioned conservatism to relation to its historical rivals, liberalism and socialism. He wrote that liberalism was the product of the enlightenment, which viewed society as a contract and the state as a system for guaranteeing individual rights. While he saw socialism as the product of the industrial revolution, and an ideology which views society as an economic system and the state as a means of distributing social wealth.

Like another great English thinkers, Michael Oakeshott, he felt that conservatives leaned more towards liberalism then socialism, but argued that for conservatives, freedom should also entail responsibility, which in turn depends on public spirit and virtue. Many classical liberals would agree.

In fact, he criticised Thatcherism for “its inadequate emphasis on the civic virtues, such as self-sacrifice, duty, solidarity and service of others.” Scruton agreed with classical liberals in believing that markets are not necessarily expressions of selfishness and greed, but heavily scolded his fellow Conservatives for allowing themselves to be caricatured as leaving social problems to the market. Classical liberals could be criticised for the same neglect.

Perhaps his conservative philosophy was best summed up when he wrote “Liberals seek freedom, socialists equality, and conservatives responsibility. And, without responsibility, neither freedom nor equality have any lasting value.”

Scruton’s politics were undoubtedly linked to his philosophy, which was broadly Hegelian. He took the view that all of the most important aspects of life – truth (the perception of the world as it is), beauty (the creation and appreciation of things valued for their own sake), and self-realisation (the establishment by a person of a coherent, autonomous identity) – can be achieved only as part of a cultural community within which meaning, standards and values are validated. But he had a wide and deep understanding of the history of western philosophy as a whole, and some of his best philosophical work consisted of explaining much more clearly than is often the case how different schools of western philosophy relate to one another.

People today still forget how he was a beacon for many East European intellectuals living under Communist rule in the 1980s.  Scruton was deeply attached in belonging to a network of renowned Western scholars who were helping the political opposition in Eastern Europe. Their activity began in Czechoslovakia with the Jan Hus Foundation in 1980, supported by a broad spectrum of scholars from Jacques Derrida and Juergen Habermas to Roger Scruton and David Regan. Then came Poland, Hungary and later Romania. In Poland, Scruton co-founded the Jagiellonian Trust, a small but significant organisation. The other founders and active participants were Baroness Caroline Cox, Jessica Douglas-Home, Kathy Wilkes, Agnieszka Kołakowska, Dennis O’Keeffe, Timothy Garton Ash, and others.

Scruton had a particular sympathy for Prague and the Czech society, which bore fruit in the novel, Notes from Underground, which he wrote many years later. But his involvement in East European affairs was more than an emotional attachment.  He believed that Eastern Europe - despite the communist terror and aggressive social engineering - managed to preserve a sense of historical continuity and strong ties to European and national traditions, more unconscious than openly articulated, which made it even more valuable. For this reason, decades later, he warned his East European friends against joining the European Union, arguing that whatever was left of those ties will be demolished by the political and ideological bulldozer of European bureaucracy.

Anyway, digressions aside, onto to the heart of your question.

Art matters.

Let’s start from there. Regardless of your personal tastes or aesthetics as you stand before a painting, slip inside a photograph, run your hand along the length of a sculpture, or move your body to the arrangements spiraling out of the concert speakers…something very primary - and primal - is happening. And much of it sub-conscious. There’s an element of trust.

Political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, defined artworks as “thought things,” ideas given material form to inspire reflection and rumination. Dialogue. Sometimes even discomfort. Art has the ability to move us, both positively and negatively. So we know that art matters. But the question posed by modern philosophers such as Roger Scruton has been: how do we want it to affect us?

Are we happy with the direction art is taking? Namely, says, Scruton, away from seeking “higher virtues” such as beauty and craftmanship, and instead, towards novelty for novelty’s sake, provoking emotional response under the guise of socio-political discourse.

Why does beauty in art matter?  

Scruton asks us to wake up and start demanding something more from art other than disposable entertainment. “Through the pursuit of beauty,” suggests Scruton, “we shape the world as our own and come to understand our nature as spiritual beings. But art has turned its back on beauty and now we are surrounded by ugliness.” The great artists of the past, says Scruton, “were painfully aware that human life was full of care and suffering, but their remedy was beauty. The beautiful work of art brings consolation in sorrow and affirmation…It shows human life to be worthwhile.” But many modern artists, argues the philosopher, have become weary of this “sacred task” and replaced it with the “randomness” of art produced merely to gain notoriety and the result has been anywhere between kitsch to ugliness that ultimately leads to inward alienation and nihilistic despair.

The best way to understand Scruton’s idea of beauty in art and why it matters is to let him speak for himself. Click below on the video and watch a BBC documentary broadcast way back in 2009 that he did precisely on this subject, why beauty matters. It will not be a wasted hour but perhaps enrich and even enlighten your perspective on the importance of beauty in art.

So I’ll do my best to summarise the point Scruton is making in this documentary above.

Here goes.....

In his 2009 documentary “Why Beauty Matters���, Scruton argues that beauty is a universal human need that elevates us and gives meaning to life. He sees beauty as a value, as important as truth or goodness, that can offer “consolation in sorrow and affirmation in joy”, therefore showing human life to be worthwhile.

According to Scruton, beauty is being lost in our modern world, particularly in the fields of art and architecture.

I was raised in many different cultures from India, Pakistan, to China, Japan, Southern Africa, and the Middle East as well schooling in rural Britain and Switzerland. So coming home to London on frequent visits was often a confusing experience because of the mismatch of modern art and new architecture. In life and in art I have chosen to see the beauty in things, locating myself in Paris, where I am surrounded by beauty, and understand the impact it can have on the everyday.

Scruton’s disdain for modern art begins with Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Originally a satirical piece designed to mock the world of art and the snobberies that go with it, it has come to mean that anything can be art and anyone can be an artist. A “cult of ugliness” was created where originality is placed above beauty and the idea became more important than the artwork itself. He argues that art became a joke, endorsed by critics, doing away with a need for skill, taste or creativity.

Duchamp’s argument was that the value of any object lies solely in what each individual assigns it, and thus, anything can be declared “art,” and anyone an artist.

But is there something wrong with the idea that everything is art and everyone an artist? If we celebrate the democratic ideals of all citizens being equal and therefore their input having equal value, doesn’t Duchamp’s assertion make sense?

Who’s to say, after all, what constitutes beauty?

This resonated with me in particular and brought to mind when Scruton meets the artist Michael Craig-Martin and asks him about how Duchamp’s urinal first made him feel. Martin is best known for his work “An Oak Tree” which is a glass of water on a shelf, with text beside it explaining why it is an oak tree. Martin argues that Duchamp captures the imagination and that art is an art because we think of it as such.

When I first saw “An Oak Tree” I was confused and felt perhaps I didn’t have the intellect to understand it. When I would later question it with friends who worked in the art auction and gallery world, the response was always “You just don’t get it,” which became a common defence. To me, it was reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s short tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that they say is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid or incompetent. In reality, they make no clothes at all.

Scruton argues that the consumerist culture has been the catalyst for this change in modern art. We are always being sold something, through advertisements that feed our appetite for stuff, adverts try to be brash and outrageous to catch our attention. Art mimics advertising as artists attempt to create brands, the product that they sell is themselves. The more shocking and outrageous the artwork, the more attention it receives. Scruton is particularly disturbed by Piero Manzoni’s artwork “Artist’s Shit” which consists of 90 tin cans filled with the artist’s excrement.

Moreover the true aesthetic value, the beauty, has vanished in modern works that are selling for millions of dollars. In such works, by artists like Rothko, Franz Kline, Damien Hirst, and Tracey Emin, the beauty has been replaced by discourse. The lofty ideals of beauty are replaced by a social essay, however well intentioned.

A common argument for modern art is that it is reflecting modern life in all of its disorder and ugliness. Scruton suggests that great art has always shown the real in the light of the ideal and that in doing so it is transfigured.

A great painting does not necessarily have a beautiful subject matter, but it is made beautiful through the artist’s interpretation of it. Rembrandt shows this with his portraits of crinkly old women and men or the compassion and kindness of which Velazquez paints the dwarfs in the Spanish court. Modern art often takes the literal subject matter and misses the creative act. Scruton expresses this point using the comparison of Tracey Emin’s artwork ‘My Bed’ and a painting by Delacroix of the artist’s bed.

The subject matters are the same. The unmade beds in all of their sordid disdain. Delacroix brings beauty to a thing that lacks it through the considered artistry of his interpretation and by doing so, places a blessing on his own emotional chaos. Emin shares the ugliness that the bed shows by using the literal bed. According to Emin, it is art because she says that it is so.

Philosophers argued that through the pursuit of beauty, we shape the world as our home. Traditional architecture places beauty before utility, with ornate decorative details and proportions that satisfy our need for harmony. It reminds us that we have more than just practical needs but moral and spiritual needs too. Oscar Wilde said “All art is absolutely useless,” intended as praise by placing art above utility and on a level with love, friendship, and worship. These are not necessarily useful but are needed.

We have all experienced the feeling when we see something beautiful. To be transported by beauty, from the ordinary world to, as Scruton calls it, “the illuminated sphere of contemplation.” It is as if we feel the presence of a higher world. Since the beginning of western civilisation, poets and philosophers have seen the experience of beauty as a calling to the divine.

According to Scruton, Plato described beauty as a cosmic force flowing through us in the form of sexual desire. He separated the divine from sexuality through the distinction between love and lust. To lust is to take for oneself, whereas to love is to give. Platonic love removes lust and invites us to engage with it spiritually and not physically. As Plato says, “Beauty is a visitor from another world. We can do nothing with it save contemplate its pure radiance.”

Scruton makes the prescient point that art and beauty were traditionally aligned in religious works of art. Science impacted religion and created a spiritual vacuum. People began to look to nature for beauty, and there was a shift from religious works of art to paintings of landscapes and human life.

In today’s world of art and architecture, beauty is looked upon as a thing of the past with disdain. Scruton believes his vision of beauty gives meaning to the world and saves us from meaningless routines to take us to a place of higher contemplation. In this I think Scruton encourages us not to take revenge on reality by expressing its ugliness, but to return to where the real and the ideal may still exist in harmony “consoling our sorrows and amplifying our joys.”

Scruton believes when you train any of your senses you are privy to a heightened world. The artist sees beauty everywhere and they are able to draw that beauty out to show to others. One finds the most beauty in nature, and nature the best catalyst for creativity. The Tonalist painter George Inness advised artists to paint their emotional response to their subject, so that the viewer may hope to feel it too.

It must be said that Scruton’s views regarding art and beauty are not popular with the modern art crowd and their postmodern advocates. Having written several books on aesthetics, Scruton has developed a largely metaphysical aspect to understanding standards of art and beauty.

Throughout this documentary (and indeed his many books and articles), Scruton display a bias towards ‘high’ art, evidenced by a majority of his examples as well as his dismissal of much modern art. However on everyday beauty, there is much space for Scruton to challenge his own categories and extend his discussion to include examples from popular culture, such as in music, graphic design, and film. Omitting ‘low art’ in the discussion of beauty could lead one to conclude that beauty is not there.

It is here I would part ways with Scruton. I think there is beauty to be found in so called low art of car design, popular music or cinema for example - here I’m thinking of a Ferrari 250 GTO,  jazz, or the films of Bergman, Bresson, or Kurosawa (among others) come to mind. Scruton gives short thrift to such 20th century art forms which should not be discounted when we talk of beauty. It’s hard to argue with Jean-Luc Godard for instance when he once said of French film pioneering director, Robert Bresson, “He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.”

Overall though I believe Scruton does enough to leave us to ponder ourselves on the importance of beauty in the arts and our lives, including fine arts, music, and architecture. I think he succeeds in illuminating the poverty, dehumanisation and fraud of modernist and post-modernist cynicism, reductionism and nihilism. Scruton is rightly prescient in pointing the centrality of human aspiration and the longing for truth in both life and art.

In this he is correct in showing that goodness and beauty are universal and fundamentally important; and that the value of anything is not utilitarian and without meaning (e.g., Oscar Wilde’s claim that “All art is absolutely useless.”). Human beings are not purposeless material objects for mechanistic manipulation by others, and civil society itself depends upon a cultural consensus that beauty is real and every person should be respected with compassion as having dignity and nobility with very real spiritual needs to encounter and be transformed and uplifted by beauty.

Thanks for your question.

[thevividgreenmoss]

The more I see from Mark Fisher the more fruitless his writing seems in terms of actual implications for theoretical/practical future movement of any anti-capitalist politics...like for all his talk of the impotent paralyzed state of a left unable to escape or meaningfully able to learn from its past, beset by circular patterns of discourse and movement it's tied itself up in as a result of cultural fixations/conflicts and stifling insular academic and/or online intellectual developments that are often completely detached from the actual political sphere, unable to formulate an actionable political programme that can genuinely confront power, have no relevance to the social base of a potential anti-capitalist movement, etc, like for all the talk of that shit his own critiques of those things tend to essentialize them as inextricable, even inevitable features of capitalism itself and as a result cultural or intellectual trends that are not intrinsic to but symptomatic of a system based on this particular mode of production, and that develop as a result of the interplay between societal elements existing within and formed by that system in a given time and place, are posited instead as defining features of that system (for example the insistence that regurgitation of past cultural forms must be seen as inevitable features or tendencies of capitalism - and that that alleged fact has some fundamental explanatory power - rather than being seen as trends that have come to prominence, and cyclically have become prominent before as well, due to the ebbs and flows of accumulation of intellectual property & consolidation of productive/investment capital etc and that at times have given way to or existed alongside dominant cultural/artistic movements outside of that retrofetishistic lane. Which like even when that was the case capitalism was still bad...like the problem is not encapsulated by the culture's perceived failure to find the next jungle music, nor would it be solved or meaningfully altered were the next jungle music to be found). And in that process you're bestowing an undue sense of significance upon and giving a completely misplaced centrality to things that you're purporting to be criticizing on the grounds that they distract from and are unproductive when it comes to dealing with the pressing core issues by which we're actually faced, while completely failing to incorporate the breadth of actual political & economic shifts, movements, conflicts, etc both against and in favor of the expansion of capital within your analysis in the same way that the individuals/organizations/institutions that you started out critiquing are guilty of. And that related failure to genuinely consider political reality as it exists outside of certain insular left spaces & discourses as well as the left spaces & discourses being used as the basis for the critique being advanced largely neglects anything that might be going on outside of metropolitan centers within advanced western states (and even then it seems mostly confined to the anglosphere) that might complicate or even outright contradict the narratives being advanced, which idk may also contribute to the tendency to grossly generalize and even essentialize specific aspects of society or culture that have taken shape in the first-world as being endemic to capitalism itself as it exists and must exist everywhere at all times...and even if that's being done based on the view one sometimes sees that as capitalism advances then the societal condition of the global south will come to resemble that of the current north then it's still bullshit because while of course that does and will still continue to happen in some respects, there's no broad convergence of that sort in sight at all and given increased pauperization already in motion as a result of ongoing economic trends and mass migrations as a result of accelerating climate change the future of LA or Berlin might look more like the present in Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai than vice versa...idk like there are genuinely interesting discussions of music and evocative (though by no means novel on the level or either tone or content) descriptions of a certain kind of prevalent malaise and ennui peppered throughout Fisher's work but his analyses of the way those things reflect and/or are produced by capitalism itself either fall off the mark or, again, aren't advancing any ideas that haven't long been circulating either in the marxist critical tradition or in any others that have in differing ways been in some form of dialogue with or have to some degree been influenced by it (even those that either explicitly/self-consciously or not find themselves in opposition to marxism, poststructuralism being probably the most obvious/notorious example) right down to the concept of capitalist realism itself, which as elaborated by Fisher offers nothing that isn't present in the diverse and even divergent analyses & conceptual frameworks surrounding ideology, consciousness, hegemony, the ~real~, etc that were already there in the work of everyone from Marx himself to Lukacs to Gramsci to Althusser, Baudrillard, Jameson, Eagleton or numerous other notable figures even just within the western intellectual realm. Like the only distinguishing feature of Fisher's capitalist realism is his contention that in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, not only has the social reality generated by capital successfully naturalized itself in various pervasive ways as it has been doing for the past five hundred years, but now there's been a crucial turn in that since 1991 there's been an additionally ingrained negation of our ability to conceive of or pursue alternatives to neoliberal capitalism on a collective level, which allegedly wasn't there before...which like I'm sorry but that's a ridiculous fucking claim to make especially in light of the fact that shortly before his death Fisher said that the movements behind/supporting the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to labour party leadership & the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign represented breaks in and the beginning of the end of the era of capitalist realism, which like. If that's the standard then how does the latin american pink tide of the late 90s-late 00s, which involved much larger popular movements that were much more firmly rooted in and directed by the working classes and peasantry and that pursued much more radical goals and even in the face of counter-revolutionary forces that have been ascendant in recent years still succeeded in attaining significant tangible gains for themselves, especially when compared to the negligible results that revived new deal democratic or midcentury labour agendas have had so far in the US & UK, like how did that shit not contradict capitalist realism well beforehand...or the fact that in Cuba the first post-Soviet decade entailed a renewal of genuine socialist energy & societal transformation of a kind not seen since the first 10-15 years immediately following the revolution, or on the other end of things, the clerical authoritarianism that existed in iran already at the time, or the terrifying rate at which the genuinely fascist RSS consolidated popular support and came to have an increasing hold over the various institutions governing Indian society, especially since the early 90s, until at this point there's no significant challenge to their power within the second most populous country in the world...like all those things seem to be much greater refutations from so-called capitalist realism to the point that the concept seems to have no meaning or utility at all...like whether intentionally or not,  Fisher's ~acid communism~ basically leads to the same endpoint, perhaps with different aesthetic trappings, as FALC bullshit, where residents of the first world are freed of the labor and alienation of the past by a super expanded version of the welfare states created by postwar european social democracies and can both go to raves and consume as often as we want. The problem wasn't the violent abstraction of commodified life, the value form, whatever it was that we couldn't pursue and indulge in the thrills and pleasures that per my mans Lyotard & Nick Land are undeniably present in capitalist consumer society except now we can, thanks to those beefed up fully automated welfare states, those indulgences are no longer simultaneously a source of malaise and depression as they previously were when the free market barred the masses from partaking of them with the freedom and reckless abandon that are necessary in order to give us that truly liberated libidinal fulfillment. What the effects of the magically automated extraction of the natural resources necessary to maintain that steady flow of goods and resources to the fully automated luxury acid communists might be on the environment, how that might impact the people that live in the places where extractive industries tend to be based, how they might fit into this acid FALC utopia, whether they'd be forced into ever more menial forms or labor building or providing upkeep for the robots that replaced their former fellow proletarians in the first world, whether their labor might itself be the supposedly 'automated' part of fully automated luxury communism, whether they might legally be recategorized as robots so as to prevent that seeming contradiction from shaking things up, no need to trouble ourselves with that

[violetsystems]

Silvio Gesell hated money. A German entrepreneur who moved to Argentina for business in the late 19th century, he witnessed a massive financial crash in 1890 that convinced him that money was behind the world's economic problems: poverty, inequality, unemployment, stagnation.

The problem, Gesell believed, was that money served two roles that often came into conflict: It was a way for people to store wealth, and it was the thing everybody needed to conduct business. The fact that money could store wealth meant its holders had a reason to cling to it, especially in crises like the one he saw in Argentina, when opportunities to safely put that money elsewhere looked grim. It was a typical story. When people got scared, they hoarded cash and brought business to a standstill. It led, Gesell said, to a situation of "poverty amid plenty."

Gesell wanted to create a new kind of money — a money that would "rot like potatoes" and "rust like iron" so no one would want to hoard it, a money that was "an instrument of exchange and nothing else." And the crazy part is that he did create it. Through a series of pamphlets, articles and books, Gesell inspired a worldwide movement that introduced a completely new form of money. It's one of the most fascinating, and largely forgotten, stories in economic history.

But after 70 years of obscurity, Gesell is making a comeback. All of a sudden, this obscure radical from another age has his name and ideas popping up in unlikely places — like speeches of leaders at the U.S. Federal Reserve, research papers of the International Monetary Fund and the pages of the Financial Times. As the industrialized world grapples with stagnation and as markets signal another recession, policymakers are struggling to figure out what to do. Could Gesell provide an answer?

Money with an expiration date

Gesell was born in 1862 to a German father and a French mother, and he was raised in what is now Belgium. Back then, it was part of the expanding Prussian empire. At 24, he moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he worked as an importer and manufacturer and did well for himself. On the side, he taught himself economics.

In 1891, hoping to end the depression in Argentina, Gesell published his first work, "Currency Reform as a Bridge to the Social State." He proposed a new kind of paper money that would have an expiration date. To avoid expiration, the bills would have to be periodically stamped for a fee. With no new stamp, they would become worthless. In this system, saving money would cost you money. Savings, in other words, would have a negative interest rate. Only by spending or investing it would you be able to avoid stamp fees.

Gesell called it "free money" (or Freigold) — "free" because he believed it would be freed from hoarding and also because it would encourage bankers to lend money without charging interest. The logic was this: If you're holding on to something that's dropping in value, you'll happily part with it — even if it means that it won't make you more money than you started with. It's like a game of hot potatoes. You want to pass it on. Gesell believed this would keep money whizzing through the system, preventing future depressions and increasing public prosperity.

It was a completely radical idea, especially during a time when nations were on the gold standard. That system latched money to the stable value of gold, which meant currency was a pretty safe place to store wealth. Gesell was saying he didn't want money to be like gold. He wanted it to be like most other objects, which decay and rust and go bad. Of course, many people hated this idea, especially people with a lot of money.

In 1899, Gesell began moving back and forth between Europe and Argentina, spreading the gospel of free money and writing extensively on other matters as well. He had a bunch of eccentric views, criticizing monogamous relationships and advocating free love. He lived in a vegetarian commune near Berlin for a time. He was a bohemian utopian who advocated for peace between nations. He was critical of big business and finance, but he believed in individual freedom and market competition. And he was a committed anti-racist. As fascism rose in Germany, Gesell would call the scapegoating of Jews for the nation's problems "a colossal injustice."

Wikimedia Commons

After World War I, Gesell watched Europe descend into political and economic chaos. In 1919, anarchist revolutionaries in Munich, Germany, took the helm of the short-lived Bavarian Republic, and they persuaded Gesell to become their finance minister. Led by pacifist poets and playwrights, it has been called "one of the strangest governments in the history of any country." Gesell began pursuing a program that included land reform, a basic income for women with children and, of course, stamped money. But the job lasted less than a week — ending after another group of revolutionaries, this time led by hard-line communists, overthrew the anarchist poets and playwrights. A year later, after the German government reasserted control, Gesell was tried for treason. But, successfully arguing that his only role and purpose was to rescue the Bavarian economy, he was acquitted after a one-day trial and went back to writing.

Free money becomes real money

For decades, money that expired unless stamped was mostly a theory. It took the Great Depression to make it a reality. As the economy went into a free-fall, people scrambled to find solutions. And in towns scattered throughout Europe and the United States, they found their solution in Gesell. The money reformer, who died in 1930 of pneumonia, would not live to see it.

In 1932, in the small town of Wörgl, Austria, a town leader, Michael Unterguggenberger, got Wörgl to issue stamped money as a way to combat skyrocketing unemployment and business closures. The town used it to pay the unemployed to do public works, and by all contemporary accounts, the system worked to lift the town out of misery.

The press dubbed it the "miracle of Wörgl," and it was one in a series of local experiments with stamped money. These experiments inspired many other struggling cities, like Hawarden, Iowa, and Anaheim, Calif., to do the same. It was around then that Gesell's work was finally published in English. With classical economics discredited by the prolonged depression and with leading economists scrambling to figure out what to do, many were inspired by Gesell. Among them were Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, two of the most influential economists of the 20th century.

In 1933, Fisher wrote a short book inspired by Gesell's ideas called Stamp Scrip. Fisher was an economist at Yale University, and he's now somewhat unfairly remembered for making overly optimistic predictions before the crash of 1929. He lobbied Congress to institute stamped money to provide relief to a distressed America. U.S. senators introduced a bill (S. 5125) that would have issued a billion dollars of stamped money to be distributed nationally. But it did not end up becoming law. Perhaps that's because that year was already seeing huge changes, with newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt implementing the New Deal and taking the U.S. off the gold standard.

Keynes, in 1936, dedicated five pages to Gesell in a concluding chapter of his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. While critiquing some of Gesell's overall theory, Keynes concluded, "The idea behind stamped money is sound."

Why do we care about this now?

After World War II, the industrialized world entered a remarkable period of economic growth. And central banks, now off a rigid gold standard, played a greater role in managing money to ease the ups and downs of the market. Negative-interest money lost its allure, and Gesell was mostly forgotten.

But the world's central banks are now thinking about how to keep money moving again. When the economy enters a downturn, they usually cut interest rates to encourage spending. But interest rates are already close to zero, which could be a huge problem in another recession. For a long time, economists believed rates couldn't go negative for a simple reason: If saving in places like a bank costs people money, they will instead just hoard cash, which won't cost them money. Cash becomes a roadblock to economic stimulus. One way around this is higher inflation, which devalues or "taxes" money in real terms, but central banks like the Fed have been showing that they have much less power to increase inflation than previously thought.

Central banks in Europe and Japan have been experimenting with teeny-tiny negative interest rates as a way to stimulate the economy, but the issue still remains that people will start hoarding cash if rates go significantly negative. It's why serious economic thinkers consider Gesell relevant again.

In our technological age, a Gesellian system of unhoardable cash wouldn't actually have to involve stamping paper bills for a fee. It could involve high-tech physical cash, such as magnetic strips that allow the government to impose a "Gesell tax" on holding cash, as one economist proposed some years ago. Harvard University's Kenneth Rogoff has been advocating we get rid of paper money altogether and move almost completely to a system of electronic cash. He believes it could give central banks the power to impose negative interest rates deep enough to rescue our economy from future recessions. In all of this, Gesell was a pioneer.

Silvio Gesell has been called everything from a "libertarian socialist" to an "anarchist" to a "free spirit" to a "crank." John Maynard Keynes had a much more affectionate term for him: a "strange, unduly neglected prophet."

[woman-loving]

He-Yin Zhen and the analytic category “nannü”

(Selection from The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, ed. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, 2013)

In 1903, Jin Tianhe (aka Jin Yi; male), a liberal educator and political activist, published in Shanghai what historians have commonly called a feminist manifesto entitled The Women’s Bell (Nüjie zhong). In the preface, Jin contrasts his own pathetic existence with that of an imaginary counterpart in Euro-America[…] This extraordinary confession of racial melancholy by a young man is an odd opening to what is touted as the first Chinese feminist manifesto. The desire to emulate an upper-class white European man in his marital bliss reflects the painful situation of Chinese men and their psychic struggles in relation to white European men. But what does this have to do with Chinese women and, more important, with feminism? Must racial melancholy mask itself in the image of subjugated gender and civilization? Were women readers of The Women’s Bell in China troubled by such mental projections?

He-Yin Zhen (1884—ca.1920), a preeminent feminist theorist and founding editor of an anarcho-feminist journal Natural Justice, was among the first women readers of Jin Tianhe’s manifesto. In 1907–1908, she published a perceptive critique of Jin and other contemporary male feminists in an essay called “On the Question of Women’s Liberation.” She writes:

“Chinese men worship power and authority. They believe that Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese are civilized nations of the modern world who all grant their women some degree of freedom. By transplanting this system into the lives of their wives and daughters, by prohibiting their practices of footbinding, and by enrolling them in modern schools to receive basic education, these men think that they will be applauded by the whole world for having joined the ranks of civilized nations… . I am inclined to think that these men act purely out of a selfish desire to claim women as private property. Were it not so, why would a woman’s reputation, good or bad, have anything whatsoever to do with them? The men’s original intention is not to liberate women but to treat them as private property. In the past when traditional rituals prevailed, men tried to distinguish themselves by confining women in the boudoir; when the tides turn in favor of Europeanization, they attempt to acquire distinction by promoting women’s liberation. This is what I call men’s pursuit of self distinction in the name of women’s liberation.”[2]

He-Yin Zhen’s attack on the progressive male intellectuals of her time–men who championed women’s education, suffrage, and gender equality and who would have been her allies—opens up a vast space for a new interpretation of the rise of feminism in China and in the world. […]

A long-suppressed intellectual figure in modern Chinese history, He-Yin Zhen is an original thinker and powerful social theorist often identified as an anarcho-feminist. Her writings, some of which were selected for inclusion in this volume, suggest an impressively broad awareness of women’s suffrage movements in Europe and in North America. They address not only the oppression of women in China, past and present, but also the conditions of women’s livelihood in industrializing Japan as well as the anarchist and socialist struggles around the world. Her objective was to develop a systematic global critique of the political, economic, moral, and ideological bases of patriarchal society in critical response to the social agendas of progressive Chinese men who also promoted women’s rights. The strength and richness of her critique, in particular her discovery of the analytic category of nannü 男女 (literally, “man and woman” or “male/female”), and its relevance to our own feminist theory making will be elaborated in later discussions in the present introduction. […]

Our goal in translating the texts of early Chinese feminist theorists, and in highlighting He-Yin Zhen, is threefold: First, we aim to bring to light—for the first time in English or Chinese—the vital contributions of early Chinese feminists to global feminist thought and theory. Tien Yee (Tianyi bao) or Natural Justice, in which all He-Yin Zhen’s extant writings first appeared, was an anarchist-leaning Chinese feminist journal published by the Society for the Restoration of Women’s Rights in Tokyo in 1907–1908.[5] Although short-lived, this journal, which He-Yin Zhen edited with the support of her husband, Liu Shipei (1884–1919), has a vital contribution to make to our understanding of the revolutionary and internationalist fermentations of the time in its rejection of the facile opposition of tradition and modernity.[6] The journal offers some rare early feminist critical analyses in Chinese of political economy, capitalism, the modern state, and patriarchal systems; indeed, we cannot go without pointing out that the earliest Chinese translation of The Communist Manifesto, the first chapter, was published in Natural Justice in 1908. The significance of this detail has heretofore been overlooked: it was Chinese feminism that first translated communist thought, among other radical ideas, and introduced it to China (by way of Japan), not the converse.[7] [...]

Translating Nannü as Analytical Category

Nannü is the most crucial term in Chinese feminist discourses in the twentieth century. The key slogan for the feminist movement throughout the century has been nannü pingdeng, the standard translation of which is “gender equality” (in legal status, access to education, right to vote, social benefits, and so on). In this context, the equation of nannü with “gender” as a shorthand for male-female is most appropriate. But He-Yin Zhen’s use of the term is different and singular. From early on in the translation process, the editors were struck by how He-Yin’s notion of nannü exceeds and resists facile rendition into “man and woman,” “gender,” “male/female,” or other familiar English concepts. A brief explanation of our theory and practice of translation is in order here before we go on to explore the potential theoretical contributions of He-Yin Zhen’s categories to Anglophone feminist theories in the twenty-first century.

Interpreting nannü as a kind of “gender” has the advantage of assimilating He-Yin Zhen’s work into the discourse of late-twentieth-century feminism familiar to Anglophone readers. By the same token, it could ensnare us in conceptual traps. Translating nannü literally word for word—nan for “man” and nü for “woman”—into two or several English words, “man and woman” or “male/female,” is just as unsatisfactory because the literal translation could contradict He-Yin Zhen’s theoretical project, which takes nannü as a single conceptual mechanism, used as both noun and adjective, that lies at the foundation of all patriarchal abstractions and markings of distinction. These abstractions and markings apply to both men and women but are by no means limited to socially defined men and women. In the end, we decided to leave nannü untranslated in some situations, whereas in others we allowed it a full range of semantic mobility when contextually appropriate—“gender,” “man and woman,” and “male/female.” This decision was based on our understanding that the issue here was not so much about the existence or nonexistence of verbal equivalents as it was about the translingual precariousness of analytical categories as they pass or fail to pass through different languages and their conceptual grids. [...]

For this reason, we believe that the historical valences of “gender” as an analytical category in contemporary feminist theory should itself be reevaluated in this comparative light. Joan W. Scott has observed in her classic essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” that “gender” was not part of the social theories in Europe in the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The earlier social theories had drawn on the male and female opposition to build their logic or to discuss the “woman question” or sexual identities, but “gender as a way of talking about systems of social or sexual relations did not appear.”13 When it did appear in the late twentieth century, feminists found the category tremendously useful—albeit fraught with ambiguities and contradictions—for analyzing “social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” and examining gender as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Scott 1067).

Gender historians, in particular, have allowed the category of “gender” to range across cultural and linguistic divides and across historical time. “Gender” is extended to the study of a historical past in which the category itself is missing while the epistemological distance between the subject and object of analysis is guaranteed. This cannot but pose a series of intellectual as well as political challenges to feminist theorists. Should a category that purports to analyze history remain itself ahistorical? Does its historicity from the time of Latin grammar belong only to our world and not theirs, i.e., the world of the past and that of the foreign? Why are we anxious about maintaining the distance between the subject and the object of knowledge, a distance that feminists have long identified as a patriarchal prerogative that defines the modern subject? He-Yin Zhen’s concept of nannü is helpful in suggesting ways out of these binds.

Nannü: Beyond the Sex-Gender Problematic

In “On the Question of Women’s Liberation” (1907), He-Yin posits that men have created “political and moral institutions, the first priority of which was to separate man from woman (nannü). For they considered the differentiation between man and woman (nannü youbie) to be one of the major principles in heaven and on earth.”14 This use of nannü performs a kind of analysis that the category of gender also does, but it does more. For nannü is simultaneously an object of analysis and an analytical category, which confounds the need for “distinguishing between our analytic vocabulary and the material we want to analyze.”15 Like all other terms of the vocabulary we inherit from the past, the concept of nannü is a historical elaboration and a normative distinction internal to patriarchal discourse itself. He-Yin Zhen identifies this concept as central to and ubiquitous in Chinese patriarchal discourse over the past millennia and treats it as a highly developed philosophical and moral category that has legitimated men’s oppression of women.

What, then, can we learn from He-Yin Zhen’s approach to the category of nannü? Inasmuch as nannü is a well-established concept in Chinese philosophical discourse, He-Yin Zhen’s method is to turn it inside out and against itself, making the term bear the burden and evidence of its own patriarchal work. Her critique demonstrates that the normative function of nannü is not only to create “gendered” identities (which it also does) but also to introduce primary distinctions through socioeconomic abstraction articulated to metaphysical abstractions, such as the external and the internal, or to such cosmic abstractions as yang and yin. He-Yin Zhen sees nannü as a mechanism of distinction or marking that has evolved over time, capable of spawning new differences and new social hierarchies across the boundaries of class, age, ethnicity, race, and so on. This is in part why, at the end of her “Feminist Manifesto” (1907), He-Yin argues that “by ‘men’ (nanxing) and ‘women’ (nüxing), we are not speaking of ‘nature,’ but the outcome of differing social customs and education. If sons and daughters are treated equally, raised and educated in the same manner, then the responsibilities assumed by men and women will surely become equal. When that happens, the nouns nanxing and nüxing would no longer be necessary.”16 Here, she clearly calls for the end of philosophical dualism and its naming practice, for that practice, she observes, is neither neutral nor innocent but, rather, creates and spawns insidious social hierarchies that make a claim to social truth and historical reality.[...]

Now, what does it mean for her, as well as for us today, to push the nannü distinction, rather than “gender” or “sexual difference,” as a fundamental analytic rubric for feminist theory? He-Yin Zhen insists that feminists must take nan and nü together as a single conceptual dividing mechanism rather than focusing on “nü-woman” or on “difference” per se. The notion of nü cannot possibly be captured outside of the originary structural distinctions introduced by the binary opposition of nannü, which produces both nan and nü as meaningful concepts and social categories. From a structural viewpoint, woman is the problem of man. The articulation of nannü, therefore, is not so much about biological or social differences, which can never be settled, as it is about reiterating a distinction that produces historically a political demand for social hierarchy. On this view, we can see that when Jin Tianhe issued his manifesto for women’s rights and spoke about women’s equality, he did not question the nannü category and he failed to see the nan side of the nannü distinction as operational and central to the philosophical and ideological production and reproduction of social domination. By contrast, He-Yin Zhen’s questioning of this category enabled her to identify the sources of that domination and trace the conditions of women’s oppression to the category of distinction itself. In this sense, the solution to nannü is not for “woman” to become “man,” nor for “man” to be the standard against which “woman” and social justice are measured; rather, the solution is the elimination of this category of distinction as a metaphysical-political principle.

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler does something very interesting to the idea of “sexual difference,” which parallels what He-Yin Zhen did nearly a hundred years before to the operational power of nannü. Butler writes: “Understood as a border concept, sexual difference has psychic, somatic, and social dimensions that are never quite collapsible into one another but are not for that reason ultimately distinct… . Is it, therefore, not a thing, not a fact, not a presupposition, but rather a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes—but also never quite appears?… What does this way of thinking sexual difference do to our understanding of gender?” (Emphasis added.)28 We must press Butler’s questions further by asking, What can the thinking of nannü do to our understanding of “sexual difference” as well as “gender”? Does it have something to do with “a demand for rearticulation that never quite vanishes—but also never quite appears?”

The answer lies in He-Yin Zhen’s understanding of nannü, which, as we have seen, is not about the positive or negative marking of gendered identities but about something more totalizing and foundational. To summarize her main argument: First, the nannü category—as elaborated and reinvented by philosophers and scholars in the millennia-long discursive traditions of China—was the foundational material and metaphysical mechanism of power in the organization of social and political life in China. The prestige of that category was reinforced by the Confucian philological exegesis of classical scholarship and by the imperial patriarchal system supported by its ideology. This argument is made in the most concentrated fashion in her long essay “On the Revenge of Women,” whose incantatory style will surely strike readers, as it struck us, with its comprehensive erudition and scholarly reach.

Second, as an operational category of distinction, nannü is first and foremost political because its function is not only to generate social identities but also to create forms of power and domination based on that distinction. Such domination is reiterated through lived social life by maintaining the divisions of the inner (domestic) and outer (public) in terms of how labor, affect, and the value of human life should be organized. As He-Yin Zhen argues repeatedly, the Chinese written character for “slave” (nu 奴) is inflected by the stem-radical nü 女, suggesting that the body is nannü’ed and thus “enslaved” in a political-material discursive prison even before it is “sexed.” This argument is clearly made in her essay “On the Question of Women’s Liberation.”

Finally, armed with that insight, she moves on to discern new forms of distinction, discrimination, and domination that have emerged in the capitalist reorganization of life and labor. Her essays “On the Question of Women’s Labor” and “Economic Revolution and Women’s Revolution” rehearse this argument in full. There, she observes a rearticulation and reiteration of the nannü distinction in the modernizing societies of Europe, America, and Japan, which becomes the basis for her vigorous rejection of the liberal argument on behalf of women’s suffrage. He-Yin Zhen is thus a feminist theorist in the most fundamental sense of the word.

[drawingconclusions]

THE 2020 ELECTION

Again, everyone and their gerbil is chiming in about the upcoming election, so I figure I should join in, too. Before continuing, you should know I haven't been studying anyone else's reasoning for which candidate they'll support. What I'm writing now is something I've been planning on doing for several weeks. So enough with the preliminaries, let me come right out with it.

I'll be voting for Trump and Pence this election. As I've said before, there are some of Trump's tweets that makes me wince, and certain public spats he gets involved in which I sometimes find completely unnecessary. But it's my opinion that the Trump/Pence ticket is the best choice for America at this point in time.

I suppose I could focus on the positive things Trump has done and act as a cheerleader for his campaign. But there are people who get paid to do that. And besides, you can look all that up for yourself (although you may have to do some digging, considering how the mainstream media hardly talk about it). But right now I'm going to mostly focus on something else, on why I can't vote for the Democrats.

First of all, it took far too long for the Biden campaign to denounce the violent protests that occurred throughout America over the past summer. In fact, some of Biden's staffers even chipped in to provide bail for the destructive anarchists who were causing the damage. So that makes me seriously wonder about their commitment to peace and whether their campaign will engage in machiavellian tendencies to anarchy, which you know I can't support.

If you're concerned about censorship in social media or in other aspects of life, then you may want to reconsider supporting a Democrat in the 2020 election. If you recall, the tech companies who have been engaging in censorship of conservative content or content that could potentially harm Democrat candidates are the same ones who were nearly brought to tears when Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016. They've made no secret of their support for left-leaning causes and candidates, and if Biden & Harris are elected, I suspect dissidents and people with what they consider the "wrong ideas" will likely experience censorship on a more widespread level. I heard a report that the Biden campaign actually requested that Facebook begin to censor the Trump campaign. And remember, the left is the party that in some quarters declared that "speech is violence" and actively engaged in silencing speakers (sometimes violently) on American campuses. Freedom of speech is a bedrock of America. If you value it, then you should really stop and consider which candidates will fight for it and which ones will casually erode our treasured freedoms without even batting an eye.

I cannot support the left's abhorrent disregard for human life and I can never forget Governor Northam's talk about keeping a newborn baby "comfortable" while the parents gibly decide whether to keep it alive or not. Infanticide is still infanticide no matter how you may describe it. Many Democrats support unlimited abortion (or infanticide) for any reason, and I can't embrace that. And as for the thousands of elderly coronavirus deaths from nursing homes in Democrat-run states, that's an issue for another day that deserves its very own post.

The left has repeatedly made clear their disdain for people of faith. Just look at how Democrats treated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing in 2019 and how they treated Amy Coney Barrett during her previous confirmation. Take some time and do research on how many companies & organizations besides Amazon follow the Southern Poverty Law Center's guidelines for charity giving, etc. According to them and others, many faith-based organizations are considered some kind of threat to society for simply believing (as I do) that marriage is defined as a relationship between a man and a woman. And does anyone remember how some Democrat localities and states treated churches & people who tried to attend services during the pandemic? It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that would likely continue and possibly increase under a potential Democrat administration.

I know there are some Republicans who pay lip service to faith, if only just to gain votes. And I'm not terribly concerned about either the right or the left trying to stamp out people of faith. God is sovereign and He's in control of it all, not them. Christianity & Judaism have persevered for centuries despite severe persecution at times. God's kingdom is the rock from the vision of the book of Daniel, the heavenly kingdom that will supersede and outlast all earthly kingdoms. I speak out for freedom of religion because I don't want to see America become another communist China or socialist Venezuela where both Muslims & Christians alike are targeted for what they believe.

This not-so-recent behavior of the left to attempt to change the rules if you don't like how something turns out is another reason why I can't vote Democrat this election. Look, I'm not naïve enough to believe that Democrats are the only ones who are willing to do this. Republicans have likely also been guilty of this in terms of redistricting of voter precincts, etc. But I'm just a bit astounded (and not astounded) by the fact that Nancy Pelosi & others have proposed creating an oversight committee to decide any President's fitness for leadership, and by the various calls from the left to literally pack the Supreme Court by adding more than nine judges (and likely potentially left-leaning judges). Presidents are decided by the public & the electoral college, not by a Congressional committee & unelected board members, and the Supreme Court isn't meant to be some kind of factory for churning out legislation. They're there to evaluate laws, not make them.

And I know I'm being long-winded here, but if you would just bear with me for just a little more. The progressive left have made it public that electing Joe Biden is "a doorway to a destination". In other words, Biden isn't liberal enough for them, and if he is elected, they'll push to enact their own aggresively liberal agenda in all of its toxic forms. In my opinion, there are too many far-left liberals in all aspects of government already who have done lasting damage to America. Do you really think Lt. Col. Vindman is the only liberal in the military who strives to advance their own agenda at the expense of the country? What could have been if Lt. Col. Vindman & the Democrats in Congress had chosen to focus on preparing for this pandemic instead of spending time on an unnecessary impeachment in November & December of 2019? And do you really think Sheriff Scott Israel is the only liberal in law enforcement who would rather talk about gun control instead of focusing on the real causes & other potential solutions to society's problems? I know there are good people who work in government, but I've seen others who have become nearly psychotic in their pursuit of baseless investigations and mindless causes, so much so that I'm truly concerned about our national & local security with some of these types of people in charge. And heaven help us if green new deal subjects like cow flatulence become a top priority for America in 2021 and beyond.

Unfortunately, many of these people, or liberal activists to be more accurate, can't be voted out. But that's why I'm voting for Trump & Pence this election. I believe they're the best chance we have for addressing the problems & excesses of unelected bureacrats in government. I know that Republicans sometimes give a free-pass to certain organizations. And I realize that conservatism doesn't always equal Christianity. Sometimes they do a disservice to America's other immigrants by lumping the bad ones with the good ones. The Bible says to lookout for the alien or immigrant (...but I agree with Republicans that doesn't mean open borders or being lax on immigrants who have committed heinous crimes.) And sometimes conservatives become far too chummy with corporations at the expense of the common people, when they should be fighting injustice wherever it's found. But this is how I'll be voting in this election. Of course there are some local Republicans I still can't support, and if the Republican party ever veers off into a completely crazy zone, I'll drop my support. I'm not bound to one party or the other.

And I hope you'll take what I've written today and evaluate it for yourself. Don't let me or anyone else do your thinking for you. Do your own homework, look at the issues, and cast your vote. Future generations will thank you for it.

[atimefordragons]

[ T S E S A R E V N A  ... ]

My incomplete audition for Gem Quest, didn’t have the time to participate properly, let alone finish my audition from all the other groups (yeah, I don’t know what time management is and have no idea how to pace myself). 

“В небе далеком горит звезда, | In distant heaven star shines Не одинока и не одна | It's not alone and not the one Каждый себе выбирает путь | Everyone choose their own way И она не даст свернуть | And star won't allow them to turn Не закрывай глаза | Don't close your eyes Смотри она ведет тебя.. | Look, it leads you...”

-  Звезда (Dima Bilan ft Anna Belan)

Real Name: Yekatrina “Katya/Rina” Anatolyevna Raevskaya

Age: 26

FC: Alia Bhatt

Species & Class: Dragonborn & Mage-Knight

Guild: Moonstone

Description of In-Game Powers: (what their fantasy species lets them do, basically, and all the associated drawbacks)

A dragonborn is a cross-bred species, born from the bloodline of either a human or an elf, and a Great Dragon (highly evolved, ancient dragons that can cast spells, and shit, and even speak the human tongue). Because great dragons are rare, most dragonborn are second generation or later. In the case of Tsesarevna, an ice dragon and a human (not a first gen).

Dragonborns have a natural affinity for magic, particularly elemental, even more specifically for the element of the dragon type whose blood they inherited, in the case of Tsesarevna, frozen water related magic, ice, frost, snow.

Place of Birth: Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation

Appearance: (optional textual description/notes of wardrobe, features not represented by fc, etc)

Places Most Likely to be Found In-Game: Level 20 - A Midwinter Night’s Dream (I see what you did there Ayz) and Level 38 - Murias Pass (the snow reminds her of home, ya know. The cold never bothered me anyway), also sometimes Level 39 - The Dragon, but she’s technically stuck on that level because she refuses to kill the Dragon, issa zaldrīzo ānogar.

Current Inventory:

History Book: The Dragon King Festival

Strongest character trait: eurovision knowledge Confidence (in herself and some others)

Strengths: Katya is almost surprisingly determined, it contradicts with the rest of her “I’ve never had to work hard to get what I want in my life” type personality, but she is persevering and stubborn, when she wants something, she won’t stop until she gets it. Which in her real life was never very difficult getting.  

Weaknesses: Where to even start? Spoiled Princess Brat (she has never not gotten what she wants in her life, and it shows), impatient, impulsive, not exactly a team player (I mean, she is now, but that shady shit she pulled back when she first started playing kinda got her a rep), arrogant, prideful, kind of a bitch (doesn’t really think of it as a weakness, but ya know, it’s hard to make friends), dragon obsession (refuses to kill dragons, even in order to advance the game, got herself and party members killed early on in the game ‘cause of it), kind of an adrenaline junkie, and reckless af. She doesn’t really consider the consequences of the game, wholeheartedly believes her dad, fam and connections in the real world will get her out soon enough, so has no problem running head first into fire (”I’m too hot to die in a video game”).

Player Stats: (on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the weakest, 10 being the strongest. try to balance it out!)

STRENGTH: 9

DEFENSE: 7

CHARISMA: 3

PSYCHE: 5

WILLPOWER: 9

CAUTIOUSNESS: 2

AGILITY: 5

ENDURANCE: 7

INTELLIGENCE: 8

LUCK: 4

Personality:  “Haven’t you ever seen a princess be a bad bitch before?”

Haha, yeah, but mostly, she’s just a massive nerd. She’s such a fucking nerd. Bitch learned Quenya and Sindarin just for kicks, and her own amusement. Literally no one else in her irl circle even fucking knows what those two things are (Elvish tongues in Tolkien).

As the baby of a two large families, and the only daughter of a Russian oligarch, Katya is incredibly spoiled, and very much self-centered. Something of a downplayed celebutante, she is not quite as present at every single high society, high fashion event in Russia, or elsewhere in Europe, she only goes to a handful. And really only for the free stuff, she loves stuff. Katya maintains a somewhat disinterested high social status, as she is the daughter of a major industrialist, and friends with other, higher profile wealthy Russian heirs and heiresses, and there are benefits (so many), but she isn't quite interested in attaining spotlight or attention. However, she also perceives it as something that is just naturally part of her life. She uses a lot of hand gestures when speaking, and tends to give off a naive-princessy vibe who seems to think the world revolves around her. Which, to be fair, it does in her house -she does know that it doesn’t actually, but ya know, can’t quite turn off that bitch, I’m a princess mindset.

“I don’t skate through life... I walk through life. In really nice shoes.” - Alexis Rose (Schitts’ Creek 3.04)

Notably, she speaks with a vocal fry when speaking English. She says “like” a lot, has a bit of a condescending tone, but, she like, does care. About a lot of stuff, but also humanity in general. Spoiled baby she may be, she does have a moral compass, and was amongst the public figures who signed an open letter against the Saint Petersburg Anti-”Gay Propaganda” bill (it’s some bullshit about “protecting” minors from “non-traditional sexual relationships”). She believes in doing the right thing, that the goal of any organization or even person should just be to decrease the net suffering of humanity, but also, she is a super proud Russian. Very anti-american, thinks they’re all stupid, always says shady shit in Russian whenever she runs into americans online. However, it’s not like she’s a fan of United Russia (Putin’s party), they’re right-wing nutjobs, she does not like them. Her main political party is A Just Russia, who are much less then left than her (officially, they be centre-left), but they’re the only ones (of her favoured parties) who have seats in the State Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly, Russia’s legislative body - the Duma is like parliament, or congress, I think, I don’t really know what congress is tbh, house of representatives maybe? Idk, the place where Nancy Pelosi is charge, equivalent to that). Katya also supports Patriots of Russia, a socialist, left-wing party, but they only have seats in regional parliaments, and only one seat in the Federation Council (similar to the senate, the upper house of Russia’s legislative body). There’s also Russia of the Future, but it’s not been formally registered yet. In the 2018 election she voted for the communist party’s candidate just for kicks (it’s different in Russia, there’s was zero possibility of Putin losing, come on, grow up).

As a side note, if this helps with the explainary-stuff, I basically envision her as a slavic-desi cross of Alexis Rose from Schitts’ Creek, and Gina Linetti from Brooklyn-99, also this hindi song; Sheila ki Jawani. The song is basically about owning the fact that you’re super sexy.

Biography: Katya is half-Russian, half-Indian, born to a Russian father, industrialist (and oligarch) Anatoli Ivanovich Raevsky, and an Indian mother, activist and journalist Mishti Syeda Khan. Her parents eventually separated, though technically are still married, when she was about 14, and her mother moved to Manchester in the UK, while Katya remained in Russia with her father. Katya is from a large family, on both sides, and at the time of her birth, was the first baby to be born in quite a few years (the elder cousins were like tween-teen, too old be constantly coddled and cuddled, and too young to make babies), so she was hella spoiled by everyone. The problems her maternal family had with her mother marrying a non-Muslim white boy? Well, we still hate him, but look how cute Rina is.

Despite the... complications between her family members - the whole religion/marrying a shada (white) boy thing, not to mention that Mishti herself is like agnostic at “best”, in general, as the baby, Katya (or Rina as her mother and maternal family call her), get along - well, okay, there’s always the shady auntieji’s, and bullshit drama, but like, that’s just brown families yo. We like that. We’re all 100% those bitches (see ya at Eid Nanu [grandma], ya messy bitch). While there is some distance between Katya and her mother, metaphorically and literally, she really does look up to her mother and her work, and followed in her footsteps, studying journalism at Moscow State University, and moving on to work at Известия (Izvestia), the “national” paper of Russia, formerly the state newspaper of the Soviet Union. Currently, she’s a glorified fact checker, and maintains the website with a handful of other colleagues. She’s also authored small “puff pieces” for Nedelya (a weekly Friday section about leisure actives, culture, that kinda stuff).

Katya is not exactly an avid gamer. She likes games, but it’s not like a 24/7 thing, whereas she is 24/7 thinking about like ASOIAF or Stars Wars (fuck you JJ, you were supposed to destroy the Sith R*ylo, not join them), not to mention Eurovision. Anyone who thinks Eurovision only lasts for a week is a fake fan, and anyone who thinks it’s a one day thing is an american. Ziben ziben ilulu motherfucker. Anyway.... she prefers immersive, high fantasy worlds, she likes the story and plot, so her types of games are The Witcher and Dragon Age Series, Elder Scrolls, that sort of thing. She doesn’t put in daily hours, ‘cause she got other stuff to do, but will dedicate weekends to leveling up her characters in order to accomplish quests and missions quickly and not waste time to get to the story cut scenes. She hates, hates, hatessss microtransactions and those stupid fucking mmorpg phone games which are literally just farmville repackaged with a dragon or an orc; FUCK YOU. What a fucking waste of time, quit advertising as having a plot and story, or cool character customization, ‘cause you don’t have any of that you basic ass bitch!

Gem Quest was regifted to Katya by a coworker, who had gotten it as a present, but didn’t have a VR set (of course she had one, she’s rich, and also she needed it to play Batman: Arkham VR - she’s still waiting on a game that’ll let her make out with Nightwing while playing as a custom character). She got a bit of a bad rep (understatement) in the beginning of the game. Katya hates being stuck because she doesn’t have enough exp or whatever, so she always levels up in the beginning of a game before taking the time to fuck around and do whatever, which, in the case of Gem Quest, means teaming up is the easiest way to do that. So, whenever a party member was holding them back from leveling up, she would straight up kill them in order to move on. She killed her own irl friends, to be fair, she doesn’t do that anymore, that was just in the beginning, but ya know, the rep of being that bitch kinda hard to get of.

G.’s announcement didn’t particularly freak out Katya. Whatever kind of evil Kaiba Corp execs bullshit he was pulling didn’t matter, he still had a body out there in the real world, and there’s no fucking way her dad would let die in a fucking game. There’s perks to being Oligarchs in Russia, and even if she did die in-game and was unable to return to reality, wherever G. and his real body were, motherfucker will die in excruciating pain. Polonium-210 ain’t pleasant, and the Novichok series is so much worse.

Relationships: (OPTIONAL, fill out whenever you want to)

Silverwing - rn. Anastasia “Anya” Gagarina (fc: Anna Belan), a fellow moonstone, and real life friend - well, the younger sister of an ex-boyfriend whom she still gets along with (the sister, not necessarily the ex).

Inferna - I don’t really have any plotting ideas, but Inferna’s whole; “It’s very important that I am both cute and powerful” is so relatable (to me and Katya xp)

Enthroned -

Morningstar -

Extras/Trivia (aka unnecessary information):  

Her mother, and thus maternal family, are from Kolkata, in the state of West Bengal in India, thus making Katya fluent (relatively) in Bengali as well (well, a dialect of it - West Central, you’d think as an actual Bengali person, I’d know the proper name of it, but nope. Idk, shudobasha maybe, but I think that’s for people from Dakha, which is in Bangladesh, not India. Whatever. Not like my dad will check this and be disappointed in me.)

Apart from her native Russian, Hindi, and Bengali, she speaks English, and Japanese (100% learned it because she’s a weeb), as well as the fictional languages; Quenya, Sindarin (and can use the Tengwar script to write them), High Valyrian, Mando’a, Dovazhul, and Klingon. As a teenager she also created a dictionary for ancient “Black Speech”, an in-universe constructed language in Tolkien’s legendarium, but her version is not canon, so it doesn’t count - she’s also forgotten a lot of it. She was a baby, she still has the hard copy she made somewhere in the Raevsky Manor in Saint Petersburg.  

After graduating from MSU, her father bought her, her own apartment in the Kudrinskaya Square Building in Moscow, adjacent to the ones he owned already, which she had lived in when she moved to Moscow for school. 

Katya’s family is religiously mixed (well, she’s the one who’s mixed), her maternal family are largely Muslim, some Hindu (very few though, like, you can count them on one hand), and her paternal family are either Orthodox Christian or atheist (usually depending on how long they were alive and how into the Soviet Regime they were). Katya’s parents are agnostic (Mishti), and atheist (Anatoli), Katya herself is also atheist, but sometimes she’ll say she prays to the Seven or R’hllar, or Lord Jashin, or some other made up nerd ass religion (’cause she that bitch).

But for real, she can be a real bitch about religion. The Soviets got a lot wrong, but banning religion was not one of them <- so she says. She gets super pissed when someone brings up religion during a politics chat, that fake shit should have nothing to do with running a country. 

hates starbucks with every fibre of her being, it’s such an american staple and the first time she saw one in Russia, she nearly had a heart attack.

Will die mad about:

The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker; the fuck was that bullshit? We trusted you JJ! 

the garbage show’s gaslighting and murder of Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, First of Her Name, Rightful Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men. Queen of Meereen, The Prince who was Promised, The Unburnt, Slayer of Lies, Breaker of Shackles, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, and Mother of Dragons.

Hrithik Roshan still being so fucking hot (he’s 45, please like chill a little, holy fuck)

Catarina de Lurton dying 

Former american politician John McCain constantly saying “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country” - bitch, we’re a thousand years old, how’s your 250 year old failed experiment of a garbage nation going? 

Freud.

Links:

Playlist

Pinterest

Urstyle Collection (aesthetics, and other shit)

Social Media

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Marvel's 31 Best Monsters

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Marvel is more than just superheroes, they've done their fare share of horror characters, too.

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Halloween isn't just for monsters anymore. For every Frankenstein Monster that comes to your door, there are probably sixteen Iron Men and a few Rocket Raccoons. It seems that Marvel (and DC) heroes have infringed on the monstrous monopoly of Halloween, but that’s OK, because to even things out, the Marvel Universe has its fair share of monsters dwelling under beds, behind walls, and in gothic mansions (mansions usually expertly drawn by Mike Ploog) to even things out.

Starting in the late Silver Age, the Comics Code became less restrictive (because Frederic Wertham was killed by a mummy...actually, no he wasn’t), and Marvel was able to bring in all sorts of boogeymen to share page time with the likes of Thor, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four. These new, Universal-inspired monsters joined the Kirby Kreatures like Fin Fang Foom and Googam as the Marvel Universe became a world where things that go bump in the night became as commonplace as superheroes.

Join us as we journey into the darkest realms of the Marvel Universe and celebrate the greatest monstrous creations that ever sprang from the nightmares of the House of Ideas.

31. The Glob

Listen, I’m not going to exclude a character named the Glob from this list, am I? The Glob was once Joe Timms, a petty criminal, who like every other comic book swamp character ever, was transformed into a muck encrusted monstrosity by a mysterious bog. Glob fought the Hulk a few times before Timms was recreated into the being known as the Golden Brain and used as a weapon by the villain Yagzan and the crazed Cult of Entropists (and holy shit, did I just get an almost sexual rush from typing that sentence).

read more: 13 Essential Horror Comics

As the Golden Brain, Glob was defeated by Man-Thing because of course he was.

The strange bit of business is that there were three other Globs in Marvel history. There was the monstrous Glob from Strange Tales, a creature that was originally known as the Glop from Journey into Mystery, and the young X-Man known as Glob Herman. 

30. Scarecrow

There have been many comic book characters that have used the Scarecrow moniker, but this obscure Bronze Age Marvel creation might be the most twisted. This isn’t the iconic Jonathan Crane of DC lore or the lesser known Marvel villain that fought Iron Man and Ghost Rider many times. No, this Scarecrow is a demonic figure that dwells within a painting and, at times, walks the world of man.

Sometimes known as the Straw Man to avoid confusion with the Iron Man rogue, this Scarecrow only had three Bronze Age appearance but he was bursting at the seams with potential (and with hellspun demonic straw). The Scarecrow first appeared in Dead of Night, where the hapless Jess Duncan purchased the painting and began a story of Lovecraftian cults and cackling madness. But it was a story that was never quite finished as the tale of the Scarecrow has been relegated to the dusty bargain bin memories of the '70s.

read more: The Best Modern Horror Movies

But check out that Dead of Night cover, masterfully crafted by Gil Kane and Berni Wrightson and tell me that this Marvel monster couldn’t have been one of the greats. With his cackling laughter, his smile that reeks of insanity, and his gangly body, this Scarecrow was almost part of Marvel’s monstrous greats. And that’s no straw man argument.

29. Swarm

Swarm is a very obscure villain who made his debut in the pages of The Champions of all places. So why is he on our list? Because he's a freakin' Nazi Scientist MADE OF EVIL BEES! That's absolutely terrifying!

Fritz von Meyer was once one of Hitler's leading scientists who escaped to South America after the War and grew fascinated with the idea of hive intelligence. He tried to enslave a queen bee or something nutty and was devoured by her swarm. He was such an evil piece of schnitzel that his consciousness dominated the bees and he became Swarm.

read more: The 13 Scariest Moments in Afterlife With Archie

Swarm's most notable moment was on the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon of the 1980s. The cartoon changed Swarm into an alien because I guess Nazi bees wouldn't go over well on Saturday morning after Foofur.

So yeah, genocidal Nazi bee man=monster.

28. Manphibian

In the '70s, Marvel had great success with its Universal Monsters parallels. Dracula was one of its top sellers and gained a large cult following, while Frankenstein’s Monster and Werewolf by Night each gained a level of success. Marvel had a Living Mummy so why not a Creature From the Black Lagoon knockoff?

Enter the Manphibian. Gosh, is that fun to say. Manphibian, Manphibian, Manphibian!

Anyway, old Gill Face here was kind of a tragic character. In his one and only Bronze Age tale, it was revealed that Manphibian was an alien creature that pursued a member of its own race across the galaxy after the rival creature murdered the Manphibian’s mate. The murderous swamp beast goes on a rampage until the heroic Manphibian stops it, but of course, the rest of the world now views the Manphibian as a soggy threat. Thus Manphibian was set up as Marvel’s leading Creature knockoff but it was not to be as Manny never popped up again.

read more: The Best Horror Movies on Netflix

Until recently that is, because modern day Marvel creators know that it is beyond awesome that something called a Manphibian shares the same world as Spider-Man and Wolverine. Manphibian has popped up recently in the pages of Ghost Rider, Punisher, and Daredevil and even played a major role in Marvel's recent Howling Commandos title thus proving that you just can’t keep a good alien version of a Creature From the Black Lagoon rip off down. MANPHIBIAN!

27. It, the Living Colossus

Marvel has a character named Colossus, Stephen King created a character named It, put them together and you get a child eating Russian clown with steel hard skin! Sadly, that’s not the It, the Living Colossus we are talking about although this It is still kind of cool.

It, the Living Colossus was created by Jack Kirby right before the dawning of the heroic Marvel age in pages of Tales of Suspense and was revived by Tony Isabella and artist Dick Ayers in the pages of Astonishing Tales #21 (1973).

In the Kirby tales, It was one of those rare Kirby Kreatures that appeared twice in the pre-Marvel Age monster mags. This It was a 100 foot tale Golem like stature crafted as part of an anti-Communist protest. As these things go, the stature was animated by an alien intelligence and trashed Moscow.

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Later, somehow, the statue found itself in the U.S. and once again was possessed and went on a rampage until a Hollywood effects genius named Bob O'Bryan. O’Bryan was the protagonist of the Isabella/Ayers Bronze Age tales. This time, it was revealed O’Bryan lost the use of is legs but was able to animate the lumbering piece of anti-socialist propaganda. By the way, the original It stories were inked by Ayers who got to revisit his co-creation over a decade later, how cool is that?

It has made recent appearances in the pages of Deadpool Team-Up and remains one of the most famed pronouns in Marvel monster lore.

26. Golem

While we’re on the subject of giant, lumbering stone colossuses, colossi? colossusseses? We have Marvel’s very own Golem.

There have actually been a number of Golems in the Marvel Universe but our stone monstrosity in question first appeared in Strange Tales and was created by two absolute legends, Len Wein and John Buscema. So this Golem of ours may not have had a huge historical impact on the MU but it was created by the same bard that created Wolverine, so it has that going for it. Actually, this Golem was infused with compelling Jewish lore and really captured the ancient feel of the Hebrew legend.

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The Golem is pretty much the exact character you expect it to be with killer Buscema artwork. It didn’t have many appearances but the Golem did pop up in Marvel Two in One because if a Bronze Age monster was worth anything, it probably showed up in Marvel Two in One at some point.

25. Hannibal King

Long before Angel opened his detective agency in the Whedonverse, Hannibal King was on the case. Hannibal King was a supporting character in Marvel's immortal Tomb of Dracula series. He was a skilled private detective and also happened to be cursed with vampirism. It can be argued that King was Marvel's first vampire hero and used his undead gifts in an attempt to take down Dracula himself.

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Later, when Doctor Strange rid the world of vampirism by destroying all bloodsuckers (they got better), Hannibal King was spared. Even later, the dark curse returned and King joined the Nightstalkers, a team of monster hunters that also included Blade. Film wise, Hannibal King is notable for being played by Ryan Reynolds, before he found his one true calling as Wade Wilson in Deadpool.

24. Lilith, Dracula’s Daughter

Universal introduced the concept of a female scion of Dracula with the wonderfully atmospheric and surprisingly LGBT friendly 1936 monsterfest Dracula’s Daughter. Never one to let a monstrously good idea pass it by, Marvel introduced its own version of Drac’s little girl in the pages of the ponderously named Giant-Size Chillers #1.

Lilith was Dracula’s first child, the product of an arranged marriage between Dracula and his first wife Zofia. After the death of Dracula’s father, the future Lord of the Undead cast his infant daughter and Zofia from their homeland. Zofia was raised by gypsies because of course she was.

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One night, Dracula, now undead and thirsty, attacked the gypsies, murdering Zofia’s son. Swearing revenge, Zofia transformed Lilith into a very different kind of vampire, one not weakened by holy symbols. Marvel even tried to put a modern day twist by having the spirit of Lilith possess a woman in the contemporary age, but sadly, Lilith never quite caught on in a solo feature. Lilith still makes scantily clad appearances at times in the modern Marvel Universe and if Marvel ever decides to put a horror anthology series on TV, here’s your Elvira-like host. A fan can dream, no?

23. Godzilla, King of Monsters

Yeah, it does too count! I’ll slap you.

Godzilla was once a legit part of the Marvel Universe. Godzilla starred in his own comic for about two years. During the run of the title, written by the all-star team of Doug Moench and Herb Trimpe, the King of the Monsters met and fought SHIELD, the Avengers, the Champions, Fantastic Four, and even fought Devil Dinosaur. It was as awesome as it sounds.

On any other monster list, Godzilla would be towards the top, but at Marvel, Godzilla only sparked very briefly. But listen, there was an arc where Godzilla was shrunken down by Pym Particles and fought a sewer rat. So there.

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Actually, some characters introduced in the pages of Godzilla went on to become (not big at all) parts of the Marvel Universe. Such as the only remembered by Roy Thomas Doctor Demonicus. Anyway, Godzilla stomped around the Marvel Universe for a few years and it was awesome.

22. Frankencastle

Remember that time the Punisher died and was resurrected as the Mary Shelley inspired Frankencastle? Yeah, that was a thing and it was written by Rick Remender and it was way cooler than it had any right to be. It was hard hittin’, blood lettin’, limb flyin’, ass-kickin’ monster fun and if you don’t take it too seriously, it was one of the most daringly different Marvel stories ever.

It also pissed off hardcore Punisher fans which is probably not the best group to anger.

read more: The 13 Most Bizarre Appearances by Horror Icons in Other Media

The Frankencastle arc also featured just about every great Marvel monster on this list, so if these buggers are giving you a hankerin’ for some true monster madness, give Frankencastle a whirl. I was hoping that it would start a whole plethora of Punisher/monster amalgamations. DracuCastle, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Pun, the Punisher from the Black Lagoon…

21. Man-Wolf

Any fictional universe that has not one, but two great werewolves is okay in our book. Man-Wolf was once John Jameson, son of J. Jonah Jameson, cranky publisher extraordinaire.

John Jameson isn’t just your everyday werewolf, he’s a cosmic werewolf! Marvel actually pulled off some batshit insane sci-fi adventures with Man-Wolf in the pages of Creatures on the Loose. In addition, Man-Wolf was also right at home in straight up superhero tales as he took on Spider-Man and or in gothic driven Bronze Age awesomeness in the pages of one of the million Marvel creature features.

read more: The Weird History of Friday the 13th Comics

As one does, Jameson was turned into Man-Wolf after he got a lunar gem lodged into his throat. He still pops up every now and then because space werewolves are never not cool.

20. Satana

The devil's daughter herself, Satana, burst open the Marvel black and white scene in the early seventies and was a nice tribute to cleavage laden, Technicolor Hammer Horror of the era. Satana is a succubus who seduced sinners and reduced their souls into butterflies, which she then kept in a little box and at times devours.

Some of the finest artists of the Bronze Age worked on Satana's early adventures starting with Roy Thomas and John Romita Sr. and moving on to Chris Claremont and Estaban Moroto. Her adventures were clearly cut for the same cloth as the Vampirella/Harris Comics stable of fright characters but they were also adult oriented, sexy, and atmospheric.

read more: The Essential Episodes of Tales From the Cryptkeeper

Recently, Satana played a role as a member of the Thunderbolts in one of the coolest runs of that always underrated Marvel book. So here's to Satana, the daughter of Satan, one of Marvel's most underused and frightful bad girls and possibly the most unlikely character that Disney ever owned.

19. Simon Garth, The Zombie

The first Marvel Zombie, Simon Garth, proved his immortality by surviving the pre-Marvel Age. Garth first appeared in the horror title Menace in 1953 but was shunted into the Marvel Universe proper with Tales of the Zombie #1 in 1973 (an awesome black and white mag that I have a complete collection of. Ladies, the line forms to the right).

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Garth isn't your typical zombie. He retains a vestige of intelligence and morality which is somehow intensely disturbing. Imagine, rotting from within, but being completely aware of your desiccated state. Garth is one of those old school voodoo zombies and usually tried to do the right thing despite the thing that he is a walking maggot farm spit up from the pits of Hell.

18. The Living Mummy

As we said, Marvel had great success riffing on the classic Universal Monsters pantheon, so of course the House of Ideas had its own mummy! Marvel went a little left of center with its Mummy as it didn’t look to ancient Egypt for its shambling mound of bandages, it looked to ancient Africa and introduced N’Kantu, chief of the Northern African tribe the Swarili.

read more: 13 Essential Mummy Movies

Through the Living Mummy, some great creators like the late Steve Gerber were able to explore some Ancient African mythology and add some much needed diversity to the world of monster comics. The Living Mummy might not have lasted long as a feature, but N’Kantu starred in some truly great atmospheric comics in the pages of Supernatural Thrillers.

17. Sauron

Now, get a load of this prehistoric man terror. Sauron is not only a speaking, bipedal, pterodactyl, he also has the ability to drain the life energy from his victim. So essentially, he is a weredinosaur vampire and you bet your Creature From the Black Lagoon pajamas a weredinosaur vampire is going to make this list. Sauron makes his base of operations in the Savage Land and has gone head to beak with the X-Men many times. But for real, HEY DISNEY, YOU HAVE THE RIGHTS TO A WEREDACTYL, WHY AREN’T YOU USING THEM?

16. Groot

Groot was once an almost forgotten Kirby Kreature of the pre-Marvel Age until fans became hooked on a feeling and fell in love with this space Ent in Guardians of the Galaxy. Groot makes our list because in his first appearance, Groot was one evil, monstrous tree. He stomped around, tried to conquer Earth and did all the things a good evil monster should. Groot's monstrous roots (HA!) make him worthy of this list and the fact that he transcended complete monster obscurity and became one of Marvel's most popular characters makes this beastly tree one unlikely monster hero.

15. Mr. Hyde

Sometimes portrayed as a terrifying brutish monster and sometimes portrayed as a run of the mill super villain, Mr. Hyde is one of the oldest threats in the Marvel Universe. Named after the classic creature feature, the literary Mr. Hyde, Zabo created a formula that gifts him with tremendous strength and savagery. Hyde originally teamed with Cobra to make life difficult for Thor and Daredevil, but soon, the duo broke up and Hyde’s savagery really came out. In the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #231-232, Hyde sought revenge on the Cobra and his true brutality and deviousness was revealed.

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Since then, Hyde has been portrayed as a monstrous force worthy of his classic monster namesake. Of course, in recent years, a more watered down version of Mr. Hyde played a prominent role on TV’s Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD as the father of Daisy Johnson aka Skye. TV’s Mr. Hyde was tragic and nuanced but the comic book Mr. Hyde remains a monstrous threat that has created many horrors for most of Marvel’s mainstays.

14. The Morlocks

The Morlocks might seem like just another faction of mutants, but in the X-verse, homo superior just doesn’t come more Halloweeny than this crew of sewer dwelling monstrosities. The Morlocks long represented the more horrific side of the X-verse and there is just something about a group of outcast mutants living in the muck under our feet that makes these squad of ghoulishly creepy mutants worthy of our list.

13. Mephisto

You can’t very well have a list of the most nefarious Marvel monsters without listing the devil, hisownself. Not really the Biblical devil, Mephisto is a netherworldly tempter, a soul broker, and a liar who pretty much serves the same exact purpose as the Devil but he won’t get Marvel in trouble with Christian conservatives. Mephisto first battled the Silver Surfer in the Silver Age (HEY!) and has bedeviled (hiYO) just about every Marvel hero.

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He recently pissed off fandom by cutting a Faustian deal with Peter Parker and erasing Spidey’s marriage. Mephisto was a key figure in The Infinity Gauntlet, constantly whispering Iago like in Thanos’ ear and is the very symbol of corruption in the Marvel Universe.

Plus, he is a devil in a cape and that is always awesome.

12. Helstrom, Son of Satan

Son of Satan is a Marvel character who may not appear to be a monster (other than the big, honking Satan pentagram branded on his chest), but Damon Hellstrom here is the son of the Devil, and if that ain’t monstrous we don’t know what is.

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Son of Satan appeared in the pages of Marvel Spotlight before being spun into his own magazine. After the comic that had the balls to call itself Son of Satan in the mid-70s was unsurprisingly cancelled, Hellstrom became a member of the Defenders where he had his greatest success as a character. He's even getting his own TV series on Hulu soon enough.

11. Marvel Zombies

It's the entire Marvel pantheon of characters- as flesh eating zombies! When Mark Millar and Greg Land first introduced the Marvel Zombies in the pages of the Ultimate Fantastic Four, no one could imagine the splash these shambling, costumed creatures would make.

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In a bit of pure marketing genius, Marvel spun the Zombies into their own book. All of a sudden, you had zombie version of Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America, and the rest written by Robert Kirkman. Yeah, that Robert Kirkman, the very same bearded dude that created a little thing called The Walking Dead. Marvel Zombies had more mayhem per panel than most mainstream comics do in an entire year's run. So if you ever wanted to experience the horror of a zombie Peter Parker eating Aunt May, this is your jam.

10. Morbius, the Living Vampire

In the last days of the Silver Age, the Comic Code was still in full effect. You see, the Code strictly forbade the use of undead characters in comic book stories so Marvel (or any company) couldn’t use vampires. But how about a Living Vampire?

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Dr. Michael Morbius became a human loophole when he used bat blood to try and cure himself of a deadly blood disease. Morbius was transformed by this forbidden science into a living vampire and became a longtime ally and foe of Spider-Man. Morbius may have started out as a way Marvel could scratch its monstrous itch but the not so good doctor became the first true horror character of the Marvel Age and remains a Marvel staple.

He'll be played by Jared Leto in an upcoming Morbius movie, too.

9. The Lizard

Other than that gamma fueled green engine of destruction that we will get to ina bit, The Lizard is Marvel’s greatest Jekyll and Hyde like creations. Originally scientist and family man Curt Connors, the Lizard tried to help humanity by finding a way to regenerate lost limbs. Connors himself was an amputee and he really, really just wanted to help people. That’s when things went very wrong as Connors’ formula transformed him into a bipedal, sentient lizard Hitler.

read more: 25 Movies That Will Haunt You After Only One Viewing

Now, Connors was not only feral and cunning, he could control any cold blooded creature and swore to dedicate himself to destroying all mammals. Lizard has long been Spidey’s most savage foe and would have been right at home in any Saturday matinee Creature Feature.

8. Frankenstein’s Monster

Something about the fact that a Boris Karloff looking, lumbering amalgamation of corpses is shambling around the MU fills me with comfort. The Marvel version of Frankenstein is pretty much a mashup up of Mary Shelley’s literary monster and the Universal classic creature feature. Frankenstein’s book ran for just a few years but the Mike Ploog artwork in the first bunch of issues is a sight to behold, and the manner in which the Bronze Age creators stuffed Frankie into the Marvel Universe proper was truly artful schlock.

read more: 13 Forgotten Frankenstein Movies

Over the years, ol' zipper neck here met the X-Men, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and many more Marvel mainstays and is still out there somewhere cursing the name of his creator. It’s alive, indeed.

7. Man-Thing

Most of Marvel's greatest creatures of the Bronze Age were derivative of the Universal Monster cycle of horror, but not Man-Thing. No, this classic Swamp Creature came from the strange tradition of comic book swamp beasts, the same tradition that spawned DC' Swamp Thing.

read more: The Weird History of Monsters vs. The Marvel Universe

After the brilliant scientist Ted Sallis was murdered and bathed in mystic swamp water and enhanced chemicals, he was transformed into the Man-Thing, a mindless yet empathetic beast who is drawn to intense emotion. Man-Thing was always a story engine more than a fully realized character as he would plod the swamps mindlessly drawn to the anger and terror of any human that dared to visit the Florida Everglades.

Man-Thing has a truly a horrific power as whatever knows fear, burns at the Man-Thing's touch. And what wouldn't know fear when gazing upon the misshapen form of 'ol creamed spinach face here. Marvel mainstays like Howard the Duck were introduced in the pages of Man-Thing's feature, and if you call yourself a comic book horror fan and you haven't read writer Steve Gerber's immortal run on the character, then you, my friend, are just going through the motions.

6. Werewolf by Night

Who ever thought a werewolf named Jack Russell could be so awesome? Werewolf by Night was part of the Marvel monster surge of the early '70s and remains one of Marvel’s most heroic classic monsters.

read more: 13 Essential Werewolf Movies

In fact, none other than one of Marvel greatest monster hunters Moon Knight first appeared in the pages of Werewolf by Night as Russell’s title was once an essential part of the MU. At times, Russell is cut from the classic Lon Chaney mode of lycanthrope but at others, the kind and moral Russell is fully in control of his inner beast and operates as a classic super hero (albeit a hairy one). One can usually find issues of Werewolf by Night in dollar bins and that is one hell of a bargain because Werewolf by Night was one of the strangest, most surreal titles of the '70s.

Awooohhhh!!!!

5. Ghost Rider

What more can be said about Johnny Blaze or any of the other demonic bikers who have called themselves Ghost Riders?

The legacy of the Ghost Rider began in the pre-Marvel Age with a ghostly Western character who haunted the prairie of the American frontier. In the modern era, stunt biker Johnny Blaze was possessed by the demon Zarathos and became the flame headed spirit of vengeance of legend.

read more: The Weird History of Ghost Rider

At times, Ghost Rider has been a threat to the Marvel Universe and at others, he has been a stalwart hero, but the fact that Blaze has the power to burn the souls of evildoers makes him a featured part of this Halloween list. Arguably Mike Ploog’s greatest character design, Ghost Rider has gone through many incarnations over the years but somehow, the curse always comes back to Blaze, a man who treated with the devil and no rides the highway to Hell as the legendary Ghost Rider.

4. Blade

By all appearances, Blade isn't really a monster. In fact, he might be the greatest monster hunter in comics (sorry Buffy). But consider the fact that Blade is part vampire, and you have a heroic bloodsucker worthy of making our top 5.

read more: The Evolution of Marvel's Blade, Vampire Hunter

Blade's mother was turned into a vampire as she was giving birth to the future vampire hunter, making Blade a Daywalker, a man who is half mortal, half monster. Blade not only starred in many Bronze Age adventures in the pages of Marvel's black and white mags of the '70s, he was also a major player in Marvel's classic Tomb of Dracula, a part of the '90s Midnight Sons line of books, but he is also the reason we are living in the Golden Age of super hero cinema. Without Blade's cinematic success, a relatively obscure Marvel character before the films despite his monster hunting awesomeness, there would be no Hugh Jackman and the X-Men or Marvel Studios Avengers movies.

Speaking of which, Blade will finally join the MCU as played by Mahershala Ali.

3. Dracula

The granddaddy of them all, Dracula, is not only a cinema legend, he is not only a legend of literature and television, he is a comic book legend as well thanks to the premiere scare comic of the '70s, Tomb of Dracula. After writer Gerry Conway kicked off the title in grand fashion, the immortal creative team of Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan crafted arguably the greatest monster comic of all time.

read more: 14 Times Dracula Fought Marvel Superheroes

Somehow, Marvel made Dracula into a classic anti-hero that captured the atmosphere and pathos of Bram Stokers’ novel and the Universal Horror classic. Somehow, Marvel also managed to weave in some super hero craziness as well with Dracula serving as the sometime hero in a book that featured one of the richest supporting casts of any comic of the 1970s. So many characters on our list, Lilith, Blade, and Hannibal King to name but a few, got their starts in Tomb of Dracula. But it was Vlad the Impaler himself that outshined them all with his evil brand of nobility. Dracula went on to star in major arcs in books like the X-Men, Thor, Doctor Strange, and even Howard the Duck. 

Dracula, in his modern incarnation, still stalks the Marvel Universe and remains Marvel's greatest classic monster.

. 2. The Thing

I almost feel bad calling Ben Grimm a monster; after all, he has saved the world with his pals the Fantastic Four countless times, but those early issues of Fantastic Four were filled with classic horror nods especially when it came to the Thing. Remember when Jack Kirby would draw Grimm in an oversized coat, with a classic fedora pulled down over his eyes? More often than not, Ben would go on angry rampages, lashing out at the world after his transformation into a hideous rock beast.

read more: The Best Modern Horror Movies

The early days of the Thing and the Fantastic Four borrow as much from the Phantom of Opera and the classic Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde as it did from Superman. So Aunt Petunia's favorite nephew makes our list. The horror tropes surrounding the Thing really didn't last too long, but seriously, read those early FFs, you can almost hear the classic eerie organ music when Ben steps onto the page - classic horror goodness.   

1. Hulk

Like the Thing, the Hulk is way more superhero than horror icon, but in the character's year history, there were plenty of times that this titanic creature was cast in the role of classic monster. Again, particularly during the early days of the character, the Hulk had much in common with the classic monsters of old. The Hulk had an obvious connection to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in fact, Bruce Banner has been called the Atomic Age Dr. Jekyll many times. The Jade Giant had a great deal in common with Frankenstein's monster and even had some parallels to the classic Wolf Man.

read more: Universal Monsters Timeline Explained

If you'll remember, in the original Hulk series, when the Hulk was still a malevolently intelligent grey brute, the Hulk did not transform when he got angry, instead it was at nightfall, and if that ain't classic monster goodness we don't know what is. So even though Hulk has thrown down with some of Marvel's greatest heroes and villains, underneath the skin of this Avenger beats the heart of a classic lonely and misunderstood monster that would have been right at home in a Universal classic.

Read and download the Den of Geek NYCC 2019 Special Edition Magazine right here!

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The Lists Marc Buxton

Oct 25, 2019

Marvel

Dracula

Hulk

Frankenstein

Ghost Rider

31 Days of Horror

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[gabbiani-ipotetici]

So, in last post I left you with a view of how frustrated, angry, and unsatisfied Italians felt.

The anti-protest laws were no longer in place and the WWI experience had also created in many people a sense of national belonging and helped the spread of a common language, which meant that the Socialist Party (at the time still including the Communists) could finally reach a national audience. The Party got a big boost thanks to the Russian Revolution, but more generally the war awakened people to the reality of their situation and to how Italy was quite backward when it came to workers’ rights and the State caring for its citizens (see: how veterans were treated after the war). The Spanish Flu epidemic added further uncertainty and fear (and killed another sizeable chunk of young, strong people).

1919 saw waves of protest and strikes that involved every kind of workers, in every region of Italy; they all had specific requests and reasons to protest, but the overall trend was asking for more jobs, more safety, and higher pay (or redistribution of farmlands with no owner or left uncultivated).

Veterans formed associations, Socialists and Communists joined parties and unions, and even Anarchists found a leadership figure in Malatesta, now allowed to come back to Italy after years of exile.

On the other hand, Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian Combat Fasci) were becoming bolder and explicitly and violently opposed the demonstrations. Many people who considered themselves nationalists and anti-socialist/communist created their own associations, too (including several veterans that thought Socialism’s condemnation of war was a lessening of their personal efforts and sacrifices).

There was a big strike on 19-20 July 1919, but while Anarchists wanted it to not have a set duration, Socialists decided it’d last two days and constantly called for an orderly, peaceful demonstration, while Socialist newspapers called for revolution. The result was a decrease in trust in the Party, while the government gained strength and nationalists became even more polarized despite the peaceful strike.

At the end of 1919 Bologna saw the XVI Socialist Party’s Congress, where some important lines were defined: accepting violence as a mean to destroy the capitalist hierarchy, the condemnation of WWI and more generally of war as a bourgeoisie tool (and cutting ties with Socialists that had advocated for Italy entering the war), and accepting the Russian Revolution as a key event (and also accepting the Parliament’s dissolution). You might notice how there’s a complete lack of what to do about factory workers and farmers’ fights: the Party was unable to agree on a course of action, and this meant that there was a lack of aim.

1919 elections were a huge success for the Socialist Party with 32,4% of votes, but the second party (the Catholic Partito Popolare) got 20,6% and had several allies, while the Socialists’ political stance meant alliances were very hard for them. Of note is that at this point Fascists didn’t get any of their candidates elected. So you had this big party, with a lot of votes and reach, but with few ideas on how to achieve its goals and politically isolated.

1920 saw the intensification of strikes and protests, several of them requiring police or army intervention and with several deaths. In June even Bersaglieri (a specialty infantry corp) stationed in the city of Ancona rebelled: they feared they were going to be deployed to Albania, where fighting was very hard. They disarmed their commanding officers and fought for several days against the police, Carabinieri and even the army. Ancona saw fierce fighting, tens of wounded, and about twenty deaths.

They acted with the support of Socialist and Anarchist associations, and shortly there were more protests and strikes in many cities in the Marche and Romagna, and even in Milan. People in these cities wanted to show solidarity and also to deliberately create chaos so fewer forces could be sent to Ancona to oppose the revolt (for this reason, many protests blocked railways).

The second day of fighting, receiving news of the city’s armed forces fraternizing with the rebelling Bersaglieri, the government and the king decided to send external forces, but the railway workers declared a national strike. The government managed to send all of one train, which was shot at on arrival (killing some guards), and the government decided the proper answer to this was shooting at the city center using the city’s fortress cannons, and to have the whole city bombed from the shore. After 4 days of fights, the revolt was tamed.

The direct consequence of this rebellion was Italy and Albania signing a peace treaty, since the Italian government now knew that its people would not support that war, and it was the one big revolt that showed that, even if in the end the government won, results could be achieved by coordination, cooperation and having the population’s support.

Almost at the same time, there were several big factory strikes due to unions’ requests for wage increases (to adjust them to the ever-increasing cost of living) being completely rejected. By September almost all metallurgic factories were on strike, involving more than 400 000 workers (the number reached 500 000 when the strike spread to some non-metallurgic factories).

Several occupied factories continued production, with occupying workers then selling the products to try to lessen the effects of not being paid, but that rarely worked. More often, food and help for families were given by cooperatives, unions, and other forms of workers’ solidarity. Some workers were armed and kept watch to ensure police and army didn’t try to interrupt the strike/occupations by force, and railway unions once again helped by organizing armed pickets to stop army forces from reaching the strikes’ locations.

The unions had to decide how to handle what was now a complex situation. After days of discussions, they ruled out using the situation to try and achieve some kind of workers’ revolution. After almost 20 days of strike, unions and Confindustria reached an agreement that gave workers more rights (pay increase, vacations, dismissals, etc.), but it also forced workers to stop the ongoing occupations.

In the days right before and after the agreement, there was an increase in tensions and several deaths on both sides, and the anti-communists used them heavily for propaganda reasons.

In the end, the strike was seen as a failure by many due to the Socialist leaders’ inability to take a strong stance and their lack of strategy, and there was, of course, a rift between those who thought they should have kept on fighting and those who were happy with the agreement. On the other hand, factory owners were livid: they had been removed from their factories for a month and had to agree to the workers’ requests. To summarize, no one was happy with the outcome, and public opinion became more and more polarized.

The last months of 1920 saw an increase in Fascists’ violent actions, while in January 1921 the Communists left the Socialist Party, further weakening it and closing for good the “Biennio Rosso” (the two red years), as it became known.

What followed in 1920-1922, known as the “Biennio Nero” (the two black years), is the period when Fascist’s actions became more and more bold, acting with task forces that hit local Socialist, Communist and Anarchist people and locations (unions, newspapers, etc.) to scare and weaken them, riding the anti-Socialist wave and public opinion polarization that followed the Biennio Rosso. These squads were often economically supported by factory and landowners, that saw in them the best tool to ensure their workers stopped rebelling so much.

You probably know about the March on Rome (October 1922), when Mussolini and his men basically took the nation’s political power in their own hands by force.

You probably don’t know that there were other marches that year, shows of force meant to intimidate, “conquer” and break cities where there was a strong Anarchist, Socialist and Communist presence. Of course, those cities saw the rise of self-defense squads, often as part of the Arditi del Popolo (aka The People’s Daring Ones), a militant anti-Fascist group founded in 1921 to oppose Mussolini. Weirdly, they were an offshoot of Arditi, those very militant, war-like, and often nationalist troops that found their glory by doing daring, risky actions during WWI. The founders were actually the former Arditi closer to Anarchist ideals, that did not wish for another war. The Arditi del Popolo were not supported by leftist parties, and ironically by including people from across all the left they were more inclusive than their parties (that by then were becoming quite sectarian), and you can find a few important names among them.

August 1 1922 saw a national strike to protest against Fascist violence. Of course, Black Shirts answered by escalating violence and after 2 days the strike was called off. Ten thousands of Fascists, led by Italo Balbo, marched along the Via Emilia “submitting” any city they met along the way. But Parma (a city in Northern Italy, very close to where I live) decided things would play differently. There was a very, very strong anti-communist presence, and the Arditi del Popolo’s founder, Guido Picelli, lived there. They had trained, they had several factory workers that served in WWI and now led squads, and had set up a supply and information network. They organized themselves, set up barricades in the neighbourhoods of Naviglio, Saffi and Oltretorrente (old, medieval areas, with narrow and confusing roads), and waited.

15 000 Fascists approach the city and meet a harsh resistance: men and women armed with old rifles, guns, and even a few bombs, many of these folks were not part of the Arditi but simply citizens that don’t want their city conquered by Fascists. Kids and teens patrol roofs and carry stones in their pockets, ready to be thrown below. Strategic crossroads have been mined, bell towers are used as lookouts and to communicate, and most of the bourgeoise local population has little to no sympathy for Fascists, too, supporting the Arditi with food and shelter, and even some priests gift their churches’ benches and tables to be used in the barricades. It’s not the easy victory Fascists wanted and expected.

There’s a (temporary) happy ending: after three days of fighting, Balbo has to admit defeat. He and his men retreat, and the army steps in. The city’s Prefect reaches an agreement with Picelli, and the army is welcomed warmly, with food and folk dances and no further fighting.

This unique event isn’t very known, it’s a footnote in a year where a lot of important stuff happened, but I think it’s important to know about it as a reminder that Mussolini's rise to power, while wanted by some, was fiercely opposed by at least as many, in words and in deeds. He had to resort to violence and electoral fraud, facing opposition almost at every step. Antifascism wasn’t something that arose as an answer to Mussolini, but rather the natural opposition of people that espoused different ideals (of freedom, rights, and equality) and as such could not tolerate Mussolini’s acts. They existed well before he rose to power, or wrote in a newspaper.

Here you can find a good, more detailed summary of the Parma's siege and resistance. It's in Italian but Google Translate usually does a decent job.

[beinglibertarian]

South Carolina LP Rejects “Rent Is Theft”

When the deeply free-market oriented Libertarian Party held their National Convention in New Orleans this year, the show was momentarily stolen by a self-described anarcho-communist during the contentious race for the Chairmanship of the Libertarian National Committee. During the official chairman debate, chairman candidate Matt Kuehnel became the main character of a controversial, memorable moment in Libertarian Party history, proudly broadcasting his controversial point of view in three controversial words: “Rent is theft.”

Besides setting an unusual precedent, Kuehnel broke the mold of acceptable Libertarian discourse. The statement was met with a litany of boos and Kuehnel was awarded an extra 10 seconds to his response to counter the interruption. Though the convention was just a little more than a month ago, his words are getting other state affiliates talking; considering the validity of rent being a form of theft.

A testament to the paradoxical libertarian commitments to both open-mindedness and divisiveness respectively, the Libertarian Party, which is a third party in every sense of the term, is seemingly divided into differing groups of “caucuses,” each with their own interpretations and parameters. Kuehnel’s words resonate intrinsically within one of these circles: The Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party.

“‘Rent is theft’ is a slogan for calling attention to the exploitative effects of the land monopoly’s titling scheme. It’s not saying rent is categorically theft in all times and places, it’s saying that modern contractual relations built on the titling scheme aren’t wholly voluntary because of the intervention of the state,” explained Libertarian Socialist Caucus founder Mike Shipley.

“It’s actually a deeply refined analysis that one would think Austrians in particular would appreciate, given their focus on subjective value theory.” Said Shipley, in reference to the adherents of “Austrian School” economics, a liberal and laissez-faire method of examining economies and business cycles.

The South Carolina Libertarian Party adopted a resolution Sunday expressing that “rent is not theft,” a direct response to Kuehnel’s statements during the New Orleans convention.

“Taxation is theft, but rent is you renting something whether it’s a property or a lawn mower,” stated South Carolina LP Chairman Stewart Flood continuing “it’s a contractual voluntary transaction.”

Flood explained how the delegates were upset at Matt Kuehnel’s rhetoric and that upon returning from convention, a meeting of the state committee was called to discuss the resolution which, predictably, passed unanimously. “I’ve never found anyone I detested more than Arvin Vohra until that,” stated Flood, referencing the controversial and recently deposed Libertarian Party Vice Chairman made infamous by his numerous negative statements about the military and public school teachers, among others. Flood went on to explain that he didn’t understand how libertarian socialists could consider themselves libertarian.

LNC Secretary Caryn Ann Harlos also commented on the resolution stating that state affiliates should encourage their region representatives to get the national party to adopt the resolution as well.

Though the Libertarian Social Caucus is a small and unusual group, their opinions have been made known. Members of the Caucus soon displayed their contempt for this resolution through social media although most expected this reaction and are not concerned.

“The SCLP board is not a platform committee, it is an executive committee for an affiliate in which there are both LSC members and non-LSC left libertarians,” stated Shipley, continuing “These members ought to have their voices represented with due consideration as they would with a representative platform committee, rather than the top level board which is subject to political pressures that aren’t conducive to rational consideration of deep ideas.”

Shipley even went as far as to cite Murray Rothbard, famed heterodox economist and anarcho-capitalist, stating that even Rothbard suggested that rent is not always legitimate, and that the statist land monopoly is an important discussion that many Libertarians have not yet had. A quick glance at Rothbard reveals the Rothbardian opinion:

“All that ‘feudalism,’ in our sense, requires is the seizure by violence of landed property from its true owners, the transformers of land, and the continuation of that kind of relationship over the years. Feudal land rent, then, is the precise equivalent of paying a continuing annual tribute by producers to their predatory conquerors. Feudal land rent is therefore a form of permanent tribute.” – Murray Rothbard, Ethics of Liberty

“I think it exposes where some people’s priorities are, and it’s not on topics that interest their voters,” responded Kuehnel. “I think all it really does is get our message further debated and embedded into Libertarian discussions.”

The Michigan Libertarian felt that the South Carolina affiliate wasted time on this resolution that could have been used on other things and felt that the resolution purposefully ignored selective forms of government interference.

“I think the worst part about the resolution is that it did not address real life where rent is anything but voluntary and people are being exploited, while offering libertarian solutions. They could have mentioned inflation of fiat currency, cronyism of the banking institution, even city building codes that prevent affordable housing. Instead, they chose to make some ideological point that will go over most people’s heads, and insult those that know better,” he claimed.

  The South Carolina LP’s full statement:

“At the Libertarian National Convention in New Orleans a month ago, there was a small but very vocal group of people who have labeled themselves Anarcho-communists. Forget for a moment that Anarchism and Communism are mutually exclusive philosophies. This group of people made the assertion that property rights don’t exist through their slogan that, ‘rent is theft.’In response, the South Carolina Libertarian party adopted the following resolution:

WHEREAS, Libertarians believe “respect for property rights is fundamental to maintaining a free and prosperous society, it follows that the freedom to contract to obtain, retain, profit from, manage, or dispose of one’s property must also be upheld,” as stated in the party’s platform;

WHEREAS, theft is the action of taking the property or service of another without their consent; and

WHEREAS, rent is the payment for use of another party’s property as a condition of voluntary contract; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, the South Carolina Libertarian Party asserts, without equivocation, that rent is not theft.

While it may seem ridiculous for the SCLP to respond, some members intend to introduce this resolution to the national party at the next convention. To do so in good faith requires us to adopt it here in South Carolina first.”

  At the risk of looking ridiculous, the Libertarian Party of South Carolina took up arms in a conflict wherein the underdog members of an underdog party presented a controversial opinion on the national stage. The symmetry is beautiful, as both the state Libertarian Party and the libertarian socialist minority within the party are using the same abbreviation: “SCLP.” Such conflicts are nothing new to Libertarian politics, and the trend of resolving such controversial statements on an official level is likely to continue into other statewide Libertarian Parties as this movements makes its way to the national level to reaffirm something that Libertarians are already aware of: that the Libertarian Party is a free market party.

Now we wait for the antics while the LP figures out what that means.

The post South Carolina LP Rejects “Rent Is Theft” appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[davidjjohnston3]

It appears as if my dream is coming true without me; racial understanding and unity are being achieved.  Madison, Wisconsin these days reminds me of Rutgers and China.  The sky seems almost unreal. In the past I didn't realize how big China is; I only thought about Chinese moms and girlfriends... or spies. * When I was 14 I seem to have been offered a happiness.  At 16 I had that happiness taken away and distrusted the people broke it up.  At 17 I liked or loved one of those people but was wary of her father whom I never met and didn't dare to ask a question. Instead of taking nothing, I took something else which was offered. I was offered a second or final chance recently but was unprepared or failed to follow through  / deliver the complete ready 'suitcase.'  Today I feel beyond sadness.  I have not felt guilt in a long time either but fear of the sky and the new day.  I also sense I taught the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time, and they became... I don't know why I tried to be so many things, or hold so many dreams.  I never followed through on one true thing.  I never awaited or sought God's confirmation. All I see is light and beauty.  The population of the United States is increasing / has increased.  I thought my life was over; I was satisfied with my 'museum.'   I wonder whether this is a new 'classical' age a la Yeats 'Leda and the Swan' but I hate things like that. I remember my Taiwanese aunt Jamie and I am thinking of Chairman Mao. Originally my aunt's name was 'Gloria.'  I do not know her Chinese name.  I know she lives in Redlands, CA, and last I checked had a long commute in LA traffic to a Buddhist college. I just want to disappear.  In all my life only two people trusted me, and I ripped them off - one I misunderstood; the other I miscarried or betrayed. I had all these dreams that were alive or lifelike, physical, fleshly - 'carnal' as Houellebecq says in 'Liquid Birth.'  But what's the point? I used to ride the bus around Korea thinking about an old war but now I don't know why.  It was one of those 'parallel' novels with small and large: here is the war, here is someting else, a relationship, as though to say, 'And while __ also __.' I was in Delafield which I visited first in 2009 and thought about the Iraq War.  I thought about General Mattis.  Before attacking a certain Iraqi city the Marine Corps played 'Hell's Bells.'  Why were they so eager to hurl souls into Hell instead of reaching out to them some other way?  Or am I misunderstanding? I was sitting by this river in 2009, wondering about renting an apartment - 'Do you like Asian art' said the person.  In the end I gave him like 500 dollars for the rent-deposit but didn't live there or something.  'Dirtbag!' I met Zola Jesus the same year and also gave her and her brother 500 or so. The Great Recession was cozy for me.   I was happy in a way with my downsized life, as if the pressure were off. I remember the McCain v. Obama election.  At first I was happy John McCain came from behind to win the Republican primary. It occurred to me again that I and McCain are 'Japanese' in some sense of accepting failure and wanting to go down as having had the right idea. I don't know why I lobbied for so long to get fair treatment from the world when I wasn't even asking either what I meant or ultimately wanted, or what God wanted for me, or what was going on or had been going on perhaps since the Lutheran Reformation and the Reformation Wars  - one long war, perhaps since the civil wars marking the Fall of Rome.  As if everywhere is 'Germany; the Holy Roman Empire.' * In the past I read Ecclesiastes a lot - 'and the ocean is not filled.'  I don't know why in some sense I thought I could fill the ocean, or wanted to keep sinking things in there. I remember in 2007 or so I ate buffet food with Taiwan-GF and her parents and they said, 'Why do white people eat Jell-O?'   We also ate some rice with raisins and nuts or something. I don't know why I was eating everything with everyone, trying to be cultured in small ways instead of 'made,' 'made for a purpose.' Nowadays everything seems like Rutgers with these modded cars and people 'expressing themselves.'  I don't want to critique others anymore 'cause I am not a teacher or social critic or columnist or whatever.  I wish I wrote a column for the Joongang but I don't understand their 'angle' or 'cropping' either.  I always just want to make giant arguments and if my organized argument doesn't work I tend to take a 'Red Army' approach as with pedagogy; cf. Kruschev in 'Enemy at the Gates,' saying 'Lose the other half [of your troops].'   People gave me all kinds of 'sign' advices and I don't know what I was thinking experimenting with their advice. I wish I were just working at a gas-station or something with my wife like my boss's Korean parents who became millionaires but the world is bigger now.  These country road I used to yearn to have one of to myself; my grandfather's house at the foot of the San Bernardino's, somehow reminding me of Belgium(?) or Alsace-Lorraine.  I guess in retrospect my happiness place was my apartment in Korea with its fire-door or suicide-door or whatever it was, feeling like a coffin of safe-deposit box; and 'office-tel.' I used to get mad at people for not doing what they talked about.  'My dream school; I'm offering you an idea...' No you're not.  'I want to start a kongbubang' - then he made a Smoothie King instead.   I don't know what anyone is trying anymore or what they dream.  Everyone seems to be trying everything; relationships are what they would have.   I thought of 'a small personal voice,' Chekhov, or something Nabokov said about Chekhov, about people confessing things in quiet voices.  I wanted to scream and yell at people when I was younger but I couldn't in my family and then the moment passed; I wanted to teach HS but was corrupt by then.  Nowadays people can't guess my height; they said I look 6'1 or somtehing but it's really like 5'10 5'11.  All kinds of failures and people I nuked and feeding toxic chemicals to people who love chemical-warfare. I remember in a way the person I wanted to be or the one person I tried to be was in 2002-2003 at the South Mountain Arena ice-skating with HK-ex-girlfriend.  I just liked that image of myself with my nose.  But why?   I keep trying to make a self.  There is this Korean poem, 'I made a self; like peeling an apple; like running off with a woman who was my social superior.'   I never ran away with anyone that I know of; I went to 'Taiwan and Its Contexts' Yale Conference with TW-1, ate some rice and shellfish and the guy said, 'Many of my white students become lawyers.'  I thought about IP and wrote some stuff about teaching HS civics after making money when in the back of my mind I thought, 'If a BigLaw associate makes 160K first year, in 10 years how much money can I have so I can retire and write.'  then at UW-Madison the average starting was like 90K, so... then I remmebreed S'hai's letter about not wasting your 20's and was like what if I just made a ittle deal with myself, my parents, a semi-noncomittall offering to S'hai-1?  What is the point of such gambits(?). I miss 'Maria.'  I like her sunny voice and wish I met her mom or knew more about her.  I taught 'process-writing' which in retrospect was a mistake b/c 'process-writing' is 'German, socialist, patching, bit-by-bit.'  It also mixes past and future, admits failure, and denies individuality or rather implies that individuality comes from other people or something.  Like if Chairman Mao kisses me here, KJU kisses me here, Rose-Apple kisses me here, overall, I'm the Blarney Stone of David Johnston, 'the glass man without external reference.'  Why?   The Bible says, 'God will establish you' or something... I remember all these Democrats saying stuff like, 'In my day we took our neighbors' kids aside and blah blah...'  Communists... My uncle 'Uncle Hammer' once told my dad, 'Discipline your kid.'  My dad walked out and never entered that house for years.  Years later he said, 'Actually Uncle Hammer is right DAvid is a terrible arrogant person etc...'  at the same time Dad was stealing my IP like, 'Let's figure out all DJJ's pornographic adventures, eat his brain and live vicariously...' Everyone was like, 'When everyone says something about you it's probably true...' I don't know if I have anything to say fairly about any of this.  People supposedly derive their impression of God from their parents / father but I've had more than enough time and spiritual 'invasions,' really, to have more direct knowledge of God.  I just had all other affections and dependencies and side-projects and assumed 'trying this would be good enough' without asking. I just wanted my 'little life' and later felt done.  I thought I was sincerely schizophrenic.  I was glad the pressure was off b/c everyone seemed to blow up in my face or doors closed; or I didn't know.  I looked all these Edu. programs but never determined in my heart or mind or prayed for the right to join. All these psychopaths... My dad studied Economics - my family are 'Chinese' - and now his dreams are coming true.  I wanted to be 'RCCP Mediator.'  I studied nuclear weapons but never wanted to drop them.  I was interested in 'nuclear sublime' an idea about Japanese cinema / anime.  'God gave us nuclear weapons to _ _ _.'  I wasn't there to hear His voice so I wouldn't know.  Truman said, 'The power of the sun, something something...'   Later I became intent on 'petite culture' and 'the feminine' and so on.  'I am not gonna think about this.'  I don't work for the Pentagon.  I should've applied to Cornell Hotel Management.  In the summer of 2003 I ate the hearts of burnt-outside oatmeal-cookies and thought / didn't think about Korean-Presbyterian.   * Xi Jinping is going to visit Korea after Covid.  'What's his angle?'  I didn't dislike Xi; I believed in 'Rule of Law,' questioned the Cultural Revolution.  My 'apologetics' for all this were / was flawed in that I argued about weapons-systems killing everyone and how that's why we should love each other, love / obey God.  'OMG weapons-systems?!'   I thought today of my Ukrainian old friend Stan.   I once wrote or started, 'Everything Is Spies.' I think it was about Jiheon Fromis_9(?).   Today I thought about, 'Brides.'  I wanted to say, 'You were like this, that, Korean, Black - just be someone's wife or rather you could be a bride, w/ covered hair.'  I admire the aesthetics of the Catholic Church and their talking about demons and stuff but what if... I feel like I was always reading to lose everything and I gave everything to the wrong people who just eat and eat and eat, then examine the excretions too.  I saw this picture of LOONA Yves and thought, 'My daughter, hold her.'  A beautiful hand, neither boneless nor bony like it has many purposes.  'A wifely smile.'  None of these people care what I say; they don't see what I see.   I remember being happy listening to Wonder Girls' 'Draw Me' and writing stuff.  Most of these people will never care.  Glee, glee, glee.  'Spend my life-savings!'   I wish I could offer myself as a resource to someone but no one's got questions for me anymore.   Everyone figured out what I had to say and what I was right about; those who didn't are determined to be wrong or evil anyway.  And I was evil in trying to make everyone 'right.'   I thought about 'character.'  I pretended to have good character but never stuck to it. I wasn't manly either and never studied manliness.  I didn't think about offering myself to a woman or loving a wife as Christ loved the Church; only 'making deals.'  Later I thought investing in the younger generation would be better; and I was happy to 'downsize' myself. I do not know either why I believed everything was suddenly going to change after Covid Alpha.  People still have secrets, holdings, ambitions, relationships, things which made them special, records, fellowship or lackthereof.  I thought the Millennium was upon us; foolishly as well 'engaged every target' in job-hunting and wasn't ready and I didn't understand journalism either or things like whether NK, TW is a legitimate government in terms of God ordaining a government.  I also didn't know how much of news was propaganda or not; I used to believe everything was lies or disblief was smart then believed everything in books.  I didn't understand 'the game.'  I loved Creation.  'Classic garden.'  Why not train people well?  All these well-made Koreans.  Before KR I hated others and in KR 2012 hated myself or felt alone or IDK.  It's a big country.  These AmKor Twitter ppl, Korea small blah blah.  IDK if they are even being sincere or just peddling cliches. I thought today, 'I am a failed Korean' - or 'failed to be a Korean.'  For a while I thought everybody in the future wanted to be a Korean but I guess they wanted to watch the Olympics. The Midwest is full of farmland more than ever. Man is continuing to subdue the Earth, to be fruitful and multiply. I have no excuse for myself.  What is the future? I didn't go to China so perhaps I do not know. I wonder whether people in the Midwest are still thinking, 'Sth's going to happen.' I have had too many options.   I always thought that I could 'parlay this in to that.'  I considered my CV as a series of changes or mutations.   'Seek thee first the Kingdom of God / and His righteousness'

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.

- Nancy Astor, the Viscountess Astor

Nancy Astor was an American-born British politician who was the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Common. Viscountess Astor had won the constituency of Plymouth Sutton in 1919, and after Irish Sinn Féin’s Constance Markievicz had refused to take her seat the previous year, became the first woman to sit in the House. So in effect Astor became the second female Member of Parliament but the first to take her seat, serving from 1919 to 1945.

Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born in 1879 in Virginia to a prosperous  railroad businessmen.

Following the American Civil War, prosperous Southerners who had relied on slavery fell on hard times. Such was the fate of her father, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, who had been a successful railroad businessman before the war. So when Nancy, his eighth child was born on May 19th, 1879 he was still struggling to recover. However by the time that daughter, who had been christened Nancy, was thirteen, he had re-established his fortune.

Nancy Langhorne had four sisters and three brothers who survived childhood. All of the sisters were known for their beauty; Nancy and her sister Irene both attended a finishing school in New York City.  She finished successfully and in 1897.

In New York Nancy met her first husband, a wealthy socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, a first cousin of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first unit in the Union Army to be composed of African Americans. They married in New York City on 27 October 1897, when she was 18.

The marriage was an unhappy one. For Nancy it was not such a success, since she left her husband for the first time during their honeymoon and after a turbulent and troubled four years and a son, they separated permanently.

Nancy Shaw took a tour of England and fell in love with the country. Since she had been so happy there, her father suggested that she move to England. Seeing she was reluctant, her father said this was also her mother's wish; he suggested she take her younger sister Phyllis. Nancy and Phyllis moved together to England in 1905. Their older sister Irene had married the artist Charles Dana Gibson and became a model for his Gibson Girls.

Nancy Shaw had already become known in English society as an interesting and witty American, at a time when numerous wealthy young American women had married into the British aristocracy. Her tendency to be saucy in conversation, yet religiously devout and almost prudish in behavior, confused many of the English men but pleased some of the older socialites.

She did marry an Englishman, albeit one born in the United States, Waldorf Astor - 2nd Viscount Astor, an American-born English politician and newspaper proprietor.

While crossing the Atlantic to Britain, Nancy had met Waldorf Astor, the son of the American magnate William Waldorf Astor. Waldorf had been born in New York on the same day as Nancy, but when he was ten years old his father had moved the family to Britain to raise his children as English aristocrats. Waldorf had been educated at Eton College and Oxford University.   In May of 1906 Nancy and Waldorf were married and moved into their wedding gift – the 375 acre Cliveden Estate and its 400-foot-long mansion in Buckinghamshire, which Nancy modernised and had electrified.

The Astors moved into Cliveden, a lavish estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames that was a wedding gift from Astor's father. Nancy Astor developed as a prominent hostess for the British social elite.

The Astors also owned a grand London house, No. 4 St. James's Square, now the premises of the Naval & Military Club. A blue plaque unveiled in 1987 commemorates Astor at St. James's Square. Through her many social connections, Lady Astor became involved in a political circle called 'Milner's Kindergarten’. Considered liberal in their age (but in reality very conservative), the group advocated unity and equality among English-speaking people and a continuance or expansion of the British Empire inspired by the vision of Cecil Rhodes. 

Nancy encouraged Waldorf to enter politics and he became a Member of Parliament in 1910 for the Conservative Party, although he broke ranks with his party and tended to vote for social reforms. When his Liberal friend David Lloyd George became Prime Minister of the wartime Coalition government in 1916, Waldorf became his parliamentary private secretary and part of his circle of advisors. In 1916 his father William was made a peer - Viscount Astor. When William died in 1919, Waldorf tried unsuccessfully to avoid taking the title, but was forced to surrender his seat in Parliament and enter the House of Lords as the 2nd Viscount Astor.

This triggered a by-election for his Plymouth seat, which Nancy contested and won. Women had only recent been granted the right to vote. Her American informal style was new to the British and seems to have charmed them in an age where campaigning was very much about personality.

Nancy Astor was a very remarkable woman: determined, witty and accomplished. She was also the beneficiary of considerable privilege, through birth and marriage - none of which is generally looked on with forgiveness in our age.

Her sharp wit hid a cold, aggressive, paranoid and illiberal personality.

She also clashed with her contemporary, Sir Winston Churchill and there’s a famous exchange between the two that goes along these lines “Winston, if I were married to you I’d put poison in your coffee”….”Nancy, if I were married to you I’d drink it.” This supposedly occurred during a weekend house party at Blenheim Palace in the early 1930s.

Nancy Astor's accomplishments in the House of Commons were relatively minor. She never held a position with much influence, and never any post of ministerial rank, although her time in Commons saw four Conservative Prime Ministers in office. The Duchess of Atholl (elected to Parliament in 1923, four years after Lady Astor) rose to higher levels in the Conservative Party before Astor did. Astor felt if she had more position in the party, she would be less free to criticise her party's government. She did gain passage of a bill to increase the legal drinking age to eighteen unless the minor has parental approval.

During this period Nancy Astor continued to be active outside government, supporting the development and expansion of nursery schools for children's education. She was introduced to the issue by socialist  Margaret McMillan, who believed that her late sister helped guide her in life. Lady Astor was initially skeptical of this aspect, but later the two women became close; Astor used her wealth to aid their social efforts.

Left out of the boy’s club within the all male atmosphere of Parliament, She worked hard instead to use her wealth and influence to recruit women into the civil service, the police force, education reform, and the House of Lords.

Lady Astor chaired the first ever International Conference of Women In Science, Industry and Commerce, a three-day event held London in July 1925, organised by Caroline Haslett for the Women's Engineering Society in co-operation with other leading women's groups. Astor hosted a large gathering at her home in St James's to enable networking amongst the international delegates, and spoke strongly of her support of and the need for women to work in the fields of science, engineering and technology.

Her legacy though remains very controversial as she was intimately bound to the upper-class appeasement movement of the 1930s. She was a fierce anti-Communist and like many others saw the rise of Germany as a bulwark to thwart the Bolshevik menace.

Astor was critical of the Nazis for devaluing the position of women and opposed the idea of another war. But as Harold Nicholson (among others) noted in his diaries, she was perfectly willing to indulge in the kind of ugly, reflexive anti-Semitism that was thought to be “clever” in aristocratic circles in those days. She exchanged anti-Semitic letters with the then American ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and entertained prominent members of the Nazi government. She herself asserted she was not an anti-Semite; she said in 1947, "I'm not anti-Jewish but gangsterism isn't going to solve the Palestine problem".

When World War Two did break-out Nancy Astor admitted that she had made mistakes and supported the war effort, although still causing controversy by, for example, opposing the entry into Britain of Communist refugees at a time when Russia was an ally in the war.

As her views became more extreme and eccentric she became an embarrassment to the Conservative Party and with them facing defeat by the Labour Party in the 1945 election, Waldorf Astor was persuaded to force her to step down. She did, but with anger and bitterness which she continued to express for many years.

She and Waldorf drifted apart and his movement to the political left did not help their marriage. They began to live separate lives and travel apart, although there was a reconciliation before his death in 1952.

During the 1950’s she added racism to her other views and became notorious for, among other statements, proudly announcing to the white minority Rhodesian government that she was the daughter of a slave owner and telling a group of Afro-American students that they should be more like the servants of her southern childhood. As her brothers and sisters died and she became estranged from her children, loneliness took over.

Nancy Astor died in 1964.

A statue commemorating her life was unveiled in Plymouth in November 2019 by Prime Minister Theresa May - and her future successor Boris Johnson also posed by the statue of the former Tory MP. The unveiling was one way to commemorate the centenary of women being involved in Parliamentary politics in the UK.

Theresa May said at the unveiling: “For two years Nancy Astor was the only woman in a House which was not designed for women. A place of Honourable Gentlemen, somking rooms and no ladies’ loos. She ignored the jeering, the patronising and the bawdy jokes, and began to make the Commons an easier place for the many –but all to few – women who have followed her.”

The statue was the culmination of a popular public campaign started by Labour MP for Plymouth and Sutton and Devonport, Mr Luke Pollard. The campaign enjoyed cross political party support. All of Plymouth’s living former MPs were present at the unveiling  - Alison Seabeck (now Raynsford), Linda Gilroy, Baroness Janet Fookes and Liberal peer Lord David Owen.

Prime Minister Theresa May said the whole country should be “proud of the great strides Nancy Astor made for equality and representation”. The inscription on the statue’s plinth reads: “Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer - into a selflessness which links us all with humanity.

In June 2020, her statue was placed on a target list of Black Lives Matter movement and other activist groups to campaign for its removal.

[scifimagpie]

Evil is Boring, and Other Unexpected Things

Like a chipmunk crouching in a forest next to a nuclear reactor, Canada is in close proximity to the slow-motion disaster that is the United States of America. With a president who coasted into office on a wave of electoral fraud constantly compromising the safety of the country's information and people.

A part of me - perhaps unbelievably - is a little embarrassed to be excoriating Trump as thoroughly as I am, even though it's nearly a universally understood truth at this point - and even though his party's legislation has directly resulted in the caging of immigrants and their children, and their detainment in concentration camps.

That said, I think one of the hardest things to understand about Donald Trump is that, inasmuch as he's basically as evil and villainous as it gets, he's not the kind of villain I was raised to to expect.

What is evil?

That's a complex question, but for our purposes, I'm going to reference both aesthetics and intentions. My personal stance on evil is that it's more of a verb than a noun. One's actions, weighed in the balance of their impact, as well as the current historical or contemporary perspective, tend to determine whether or not one is classified as evil. For instance, Winston Churchill tested mustard gas on Kurdish villagers before deploying it during WWII, and the otherwise admirable Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who created the "New Deal" and a number of important social security measures for American citizens, also was responsible for the internment of Japanese-Americans. Canada has its own examples of leaders with similarly mixed legacies. In the context of colonialism and that resulting violence, it's hard to canonize any leaders, especially those in the "New World."

That being said, Adolf Hitler's actions and his legacy are pretty good examples - nearly archetypcal examples - of what we see as evil nowadays. (Well, those of us who are not neo-Nazis, anyway.)

But do they look evil?

Between Disney and other fantastical films, very clear portrayals of "a villain" emerged - a villain was supposed to be stylish, attractive, usually or frequently non-white, damaged, and either coded-gay or overtly homosexual (sometimes asexual). In contrast, heroes - especially in the nineties - were usually laid-back slackers, usually white, straight, and male; always heterosexual, and both mentally and physically well, often athletic or extremely nerdy, and usually lacking self-confidence and/or social skills. Frequently, said heroes were disproportionately popular, due to some inexplicable "leadership quality," and I'm sure many of my readers will be familiar with the token reward girlfriends usually accorded to such heroes as a matter of course.

The state of the present

Much hay has been made of the idea that young white men grew up seeing themselves as heroes based on their birthright, and therefore, have not had to do anything to deserve that mantle. Said young and less-than-young men are also increasingly fond of mocking marginalized people who dare set boundaries on the portrayals of their cultures, sexuality, and themselves.

Given that white men and white women voted for Trump in droves, and have continually shuffled out of the way when held accountable for inequality issues, I feel it's fair to say that both the left and right have come to see straight, white, cisgender, heterosexual, and able people as - well, the "enemy," or at least a source of antagonism - and as a "persecuted minority," respectively. That said, from what I can tell black people and other people of colour don't really hate white people, not really - but centuries and decades of persecution and marginalization and abuse have led to a lot of pain and entirely reasonable resentment.

More recently, in addition to the many nigh-endless microaggressions and larger acts of violent discrimination perpetrated against people of colour, images of the cargo shorts-clad and tiki-torch wielding racist protesters trying to "defend their white heritage and children" are inescapable. For white queers, a similar dynamic exists with "the straights" - it's not that we hate straight people, but we exist in a constant state of trepidation, wary of that moment when a friend or relative will suddenly reveal that they hate people like us, or have no interest in preserving the rights of people like us.

Because narratives cut us out of the spotlight or cast us in antagonistic roles, queers and people of colour grew up fixating on minor characters and often, on villains. When I thought about it tonight, my heart cracked to realise that the people who were supposed to be the heroes fighting injustice - ordinary white men - seem to care little about our rights and their so-called birthright - and those who were always cast as villains had ended up being, well, the ones fighting for people's rights to marry, control their own bodies, vote, and not be incarcerated or killed on fatuous or fabricated charges.

Coping with it

On the other hand, I finally had the emotional resources and the chance to watch Black Panther recently, and I think the movie - which did not disappoint - offers both hope and some potential solutions. Martin Freeman's (hilariously) American CIA agent is overtly (and rightly) called a colonizer, but he learns to listen to Nakia and Shuri rather than questioning them or assuming he knows better. The movie nods to the historical reality of American interference in other countries' governments, but unlike Andy Serkis' character, he doesn't refer to the Wakandans as "savages."

The peaceful resolution at the end of the movie brings tears to my eyes as I recollect it. Conquest and murder won't make reparations for the sins of the past (and present). But resources and nurturing might, and will save the current and future generations - as well as enriching all of us.

And personally, that's the future I want. Let me be clear - as a scary leftist, all I want is for everyone in my city, my province, my country, my continent, and this world to be housed, fed, and safe; for people to be happy, healthy, and loved. That includes the straight, white, cisgender people, not just the marginalized.

I want to see what the world can be if we work together to take care of it. I want to see what kind of art we can produce when we have the opportunity to make it, and what we can discover if we put the resources towards the sciences. And from what I've gleaned from talking to anarchists, communists, socialists, and even many people on the liberal spectrum - that's what all of us want.

But to do that, we have to figure out what we're fighting for, and maybe, who we're fighting.

As a writer...

I was never prepared for this eventuality. Will Ferguson's Happiness (TM), a book in which the end of the world is wrought by a self-help book, had some excellent points about the banality of evil. I think a lot of us still think of evil as stylish and classy, but where in that schema do we place a tasteless human vuvuzela like Trump? The bland and smiling "worst teacher you had in high school" persona of Mike Pence has something of a place in the rogue's gallery of archetypes, especially in dystopian fiction. But how do we reconcile with the fact that the people we were taught to trust and idolize - for instance, cops and parents - are only too happy to hurt us?

Honestly? I don't have an answer, so I want to know how all of you feel about this. Reblog, comment, and answer - how do you feel about this reversal? How are you going to write about villains and antagonists?

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime, housemate, and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Catch up with Michelle's news on the mailing list. Her books are available on Amazon, and she is also active on Medium, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and the original blog.

[things2mustdo]

In one of the most nauseating displays of overt racism ever seen in modern times, Jesse Williams, an overpaid actor who pretends to be a doctor on TV, spewed venomous bile which showed hatred towards his own mother as much as it debased an entire race while accepting a BET Humanitarian Award. It’s yet another chapter in the reality is stranger than fiction world of social engineering we have entered over the past several years. Here is an excerpt from his speech, which is loaded with race baiting and villainization.

We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo. And we’re done watching, and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us. Burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil — black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them. Gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit. The thing is, though, the thing is, that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.

Williams also figuratively sent people who won’t agree with his ideals to the back of the bus.

If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest, if you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.

The studio audience went wild. They loved it, as the speech clearly touched a nerve with them. But, it also touched a nerve with other people who were left aghast at its insinuations. Telling an entire race of people they’re an invention and don’t really exist is one thing. But how could Williams say that whiteness is an invention, denigrating his own Swedish mother? And with the knowledge he is half white himself? Does that mean blackness is also an invention? What does the rest of this diatribe even mean? Most of that paragraph seems rhetorical. Ask yourself a question. What if an overpaid white actor got up on stage at the White Entertainment Awards and said the following:

We’ve been floating this welfare state on credit for generations, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called blackness uses and abuses us.

I think the country and media would rightly be preparing for World War III after a comment like that. But Samuel L. Jackson lauded the hateful Williams speech as he accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award.

That brother is right and he’s true. Make sure you vote and take eight more people with you. We gotta fix this. Don’t get tricked like they did in London.

Making this entire fiasco even more unbelievable, Jackson told blacks to vote for an old white woman who is going to “fix” what 7 1/2 years of a black President couldn’t? What does he mean? Jackson’s comments capped off a bizarre turn of events at the awards show that raise more questions than answers.

Predictably, the Marxist media hailed the Williams hate speech as wonderful. The New York Times wrote How Jesse Williams Stole BET Awards With Speech on Racism. BET wrote Jesse Williams Spits Knowledge Like a Seasoned MC. CNN lauded the race hatred with a headline stating Jesse Williams’ speech stole the BET Awards. And USA Today rounds out the echo chamber with Jesse Williams takes racism to task in powerful BET Awards speech.

What kind of world are these media people living in writing headlines that praise a man who tells an entire race they don’t exist, and conjures up mental imagery of Evil White People and the Evil White Man rather than seeking unity? You can see why I left The Twilight Zone that is the mainstream media behind. Meantime, the media jumped all over Justin Timberlake for offering this timid rebuttal on Twitter.

Oh, you sweet soul. The more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation.

The knee-jerk reaction shouting Timberlake down and attacking him for daring to make a comment that calls for healing racial divisions shows us the real agenda of the puppet masters who control the media marionettes. There is a segment of society that is not into equality as much as getting their turn to oppress. This speech and the media reaction to it marks a worrisome shift in the narrative, one that has already become increasingly hostile to one group of people, singling them out as the enemy of every other race in the world.

Racial Bolshevism

Communist revolutions are often accompanied by atrocities such as genocide, which scapegoat certain groups as “oppressors”

The push to broad brush white people as villains must be seen for what it is as a socialist revolution proceeds through America and Europe. Speeches like these are intended to be intimidation and marginalization tactics, indicitive of a type of Racial Bolshevism that has developed within the current socialist revolution in America. I featured the idea of Racial Bolshevism last December with this commentary by Jack Borroughs, even before the Beyonce Black Panther Super Bowl, the targeting of Trump supporters by ethnic rioters, Black Lives Matter violence, and other racial pot stirring that has taken place in 2016.

That’s why contemporary Progressivism should really be called Racial Bolshevism.  The psycho-political profile is identical: whereas the original Bolsheviks believed that the Communist utopia could not be achieved without the elimination of the bourgeois class, the contemporary Racial Bolsheviks believe that the multi-cultural utopia cannot be achieved without the elimination of white people–especially white men.

That doesn’t mean that they’re *planning* to kill you. That’s not how mind control works. They think they’re just “seeking justice” for non-whites. But of course they will never define in concrete terms what “racial justice” actually is. It’s all kept tantalizingly abstract for a reason–namely, so that there is no end game, ever. That means that they can never stop. Every defeated injustice yields a new racial injustice on the horizon, which must then be defeated. Finally, the unacceptable injustice will be the very existence of white people.

After all, the only way to truly “stop white men” is to kill them. Right? Because if you don’t kill them, then they can always keep right on acting white, and doing white things, in that white way that you hate so much. But if you just kill them, then the problem of whiteness is permanently solved. And then the world will be saved! See how that works?

The Williams speech stripping an entire race’s humanity as he collected a “Humanitarian Award” marks the beginning of a new narrative that does exactly what this prescient statement warned us about—it makes the very existence of “whiteness” or white people an injustice that must be defeated. Already, the left is coming after white historical symbols—taking Jackson off the $20 bill is only their first volley. This speech marks the beginning of a new offense to debase your entire existence if you are of European descent. Could Black Lives Matter or a group like them be the new Khmer Rouge? Socialist revolutions are often accompanied by atrocities such as genocides. A quick refresher on the Khmer Rouge:

The organization is remembered especially for orchestrating the Cambodian genocide, which resulted from the enforcement of its social engineering policies. Arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements are considered to have constituted genocide.

Money was abolished, books were burned, teachers, merchants, and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered to make the agricultural communism, as Pol Pot envisioned it, a reality. The planned relocation to the countryside resulted in the complete halting of almost all economic activity: even schools and hospitals were closed, as well as banks, and even industrial and service companies. Banks were raided and all currency and records were destroyed by fire thus eliminating any claim to funds.

During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups who they believed were enemies of the state or spies or had the potential to undermine the new state. People who they perceived as intellectuals or even those who had stereotypical signs of learning, such as glasses, would also be killed. People would also be executed for attempting to escape from the communes or for breaching minor rules. If caught, offenders were taken quietly off to a distant forest or field after sunset and killed.

All religion was banned by the Khmer Rouge. Any people seen taking part in religious rituals or services would be executed. Several thousand Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians were killed for exercising their beliefs.

Almost all privacy was eliminated during the Khmer Rouge era. People were not allowed to eat in privacy; instead, they were required to eat with everyone in the commune. All personal utensils were banned, and people were given only one spoon to eat with. In many cases, family members were often relocated to different parts of the country with all postal and telephone services abolished.

Save a few minor details, the play by play of the Communist Khmer Rouge’s activities as they conducted a socialist revolution which marginalized religious people, teachers, doctors, and intellectuals could easily be seen as playing out any day in the United States and Europe. Indeed, some aspects of the atrocities that happened in Cambodia are already here – the elimination of privacy, for example, or the marginalization of religion by Christophobic leftists. The largely white middle class would likely be the target of a new revolution in America. We are beginning to see a lot of smoke signals telling us some kind of fire is being stoked which plausibly could turn into the targeting of one ethnic group as scapegoats.

Brexit has already made today’s Communist and globalist revolutionaries show part of their hand in the poker game, as the European Union moves to create a European superstate that echoes the Soviet Union in a last ditch effort to create one of the linchpins of world government, which would run all of Europe out of Brussels. Indeed, world government of the type we are beginning to see the picture of as the puzzle pieces fall into place was championed by none other than Marx himself. One must wonder if the intent of those pushing centralized world government follows Ayn Rand’s analysis:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism — by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Since instituting world government with the vote is obviously presenting problems for the elite as people wake up en masse, are we seeing the stoking of racial fires and class warfare as a backup plan, that if needed, will enslave the world by force instead of by vote? Make no mistake, this speech marks a turning point in the popular narrative, and with other world events taking place, it is nothing to be dismissed. It truly makes one wonder if a new genocide is an agenda item of the globalists.

Why else would they be pouring salt into old wounds and targeting an entire race for the crime of “whiteness”?

https://www.returnofkings.com/48402/the-drunk-girl-in-public-scandal-makes-both-feminists-and-the-mainstream-media-look-foolish-but-who-was-behind-it

THE “DRUNK GIRL IN PUBLIC” SCANDAL MAKES BOTH FEMINISTS AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA LOOK FOOLISH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO96JFxLAnU

Within the past week, the feminist movement and its many outlets that claim to be “news” attempted to make another viral propaganda push with “Drunk Girl In Public (Social Experiment).” The video’s objective was to show men as prowling jackals yet again, with the parameters of the self-proclaimed experiments being fairly unrealistic.

Recently, however, it has been revealed that it all was apparently a hoax. The guys in the video saw it themselves later and were understandably pissed about being asked to do something under a false premise, and more importantly, portrayed as potential rapists by feminists all across the internet for their compliance.

As hilarious and satisfying as it is to see the feminist movement blow their load, unashamedly backpedal in their argument, and create even more elaborate routines of mental gymnastics, the whole thing seems off and has brought a number of questions. The questions are in no way to make any claims or insinuations, and are purely from personal speculation that are felt needed to be shared as food for thought:

1. What are many of the outlets that claim to be news to do now? Will they at issue an apology at least to their followers, for the failure to check their sources as they claim to be a source of news for them?

2. If this is the matter of them failing to check their sources before perpetuating the articles, what does this scandal say about the legitimacy of the claims made against them in regards to the ethics and practices exposed by Gamer Gate?

3. More importantly, what exactly is the role and the motivations of the creator of the video, Stephen Zhang, since he is the one who produced and originally released the video?

And that is where most of the interest lies. Stephen Zhang, the owner of HYGO, Inc., seems to be the linchpin in these events, and he is refusing to comment even though hoax claims and slandering the men in the video paint him as a dishonest asshole to everybody. From what is gathered, Stephen seems to be running a pretty successful company and has been in the marketing industry for five years. Impressive, considering he’s only 20.

HYGO, being his current venture, is primarily focused on social media optimization and it has a few portfolio examples to show the success of his company’s effectiveness for maximizing social media traffic and using it to yield a profit. However, he states that due to the elite status of his company, only 6, 7, and 8 figure contracts are the only things they work with.

This brings about other questions. Why did Stephen create the Youtube account that the video was originally posted, only recently, on 11/3/2014? And why did he add 3 other random videos a day beforehand, label them as pranks, then just a day after upload drunk girl and label it as “social experiment” instead, then cease all activity?

Since no statement has been made, what could the motivation be to fund, produce and promote this video? Anybody with a hair of business understanding would deduce that it’s unlikely to be just for shits and giggles. Going off that assumption, there are only two logical possibilities: 1) This was a part of some strategy within HYGO to increase their reach and revenue 2) HYGO or Stephen was commissioned to produce and distribute it, possibly with a non-disclosure agreement.

If this video was, indeed, commissioned, who then could possibly be the client? Who could possibly want to contract a business that specializes in the return of investment on social media, to create a video that depicts only men trying to take advantage of a drunk girl? Why would this video come out so quickly after the Catcall video, with the same framework of trying to demonstrate that men are degenerates?

Was it supposed to be that in this video, the appearance of the men’s race and socioeconomic status just happens to conveniently show a more diverse and varying demographic, one of the major argument against the Catcall videos? What does it mean in one of the messages they sent out among the men in the video after they began protesting, when they’re talking about the future success that this video is going to bring about?

Now, there are a lot of ifs and hypothetical scenarios that these questions are asking, and no one else has presented a similar opinion yet that I have seen. But given the course of events this year, I feel that this is not completely implausible. This video and its revelation that it was a hoax seem to allude to the possibility of being a part of a larger picture, one that they are more than likely going to try sweep under the rug.

Or maybe the questions have no grounds, imply a crackpot conspiracy theory, and I’m full of shit. Because there’s no way that various journalists, writers, content creators, social justice advocates, advertisers, and whoever else could be collaborating with each other behind the scenes to make some tangible gain off the target audiences of various industries under the guise of social justice and feminism. That’s just misogyny.

[impressivepress]

Charlie Chaplin in Moscow

Early Soviet filmmakers took great inspiration from Charlie Chaplin, but his critique of mass production put him at odds with them.

In Charlie Chaplin’s 1914 film The Fatal Mallet, you can see “IWW” chalked on a wall in the background. While no one knows if the director — who grew up in south London’s slums and became a globally recognized comedian — supported the Wobblies at the time, we do know that the characters he played in dozens of short films in the 1910s and early 1920s would have.

In The Adventurer, he plays an escaped convict; in Police, an ex-con forced into burglary by unemployment; in The Bank, a janitor working next to, but unable to get ahold of, money; in Work, a downtrodden contractor; in The Immigrant, a migrant so frustrated by his treatment he kicks an immigration officer; and, of course, in The Tramp, a homeless man looking for a stable life. All these men, who populated the rapidly changing, expanding, and radicalizing United States, might well have written IWW on a fence in Los Angeles.

Chaplin wouldn’t state his politics explicitly until well into the 1930s, a move that would put him in the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ crosshairs. But in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, young Soviet artists, designers, and filmmakers already thought they knew exactly what his politics were.

In 1922, the new Moscow magazine Kino-Fot, edited by the constructivist theorist and committed Communist Aleksei Gan, published a special issue on Chaplin. Throughout, painter and designer Varvara Stepanova depicted the actor as an abstract object, his body’s parts transformed into exploded shards and flying polygons, identifiable only thanks to his trademark hat, cane, and moustache.

Aleksandr Rodchenko’s text declares, manifesto-style:

[Charlie’s] colossal rise is precisely and clearly — the result of a keen sense of the present day: of war, revolution, Communism.

Every master-inventor is inspired to invent by new events and demands.

Who is it today?

Lenin and technology.

The one and the other are foundations of his work.

This is the new man designed — a master of details, that is, the future anyman.

That same year in Petrograd, teenagers Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, and Sergei Yutkevich, who collectively called themselves The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), published something called “The Eccentric Manifesto.” Under the sign of “Charlie’s arse,” they demanded:

ART AS AN INEXHAUSTIBLE BATTERING RAM SHATTERING THE WALLS OF CUSTOM AND DOGMA. But we have our forerunners! They are: the geniuses who created the posters for cinema, circus, and variety theatres, the unknown authors of dust jackets for adventure stories about kings, detectives, and adventurers; like the clown’s grimace, we spurn your High Art as if it were an elasticated trampoline in order to perfect our own intrepid salto of Eccentrism!

Meanwhile, a film director was perfecting a technique that would eventually bear his name: the Kuleshov effect, in which the juxtaposition of unrelated material creates a new mental link between them. He argued against slow paced, European montage, which treats cinema as a high art form akin to theater, and for the high-speed American montage that thrilled audiences.

Somehow, these people, all trying to create art in the young Soviet Union, agreed that Chaplin represented their ideal. In a series of theatrical productions and films over the next decade, they would try to make something that had the same effect on their viewers — a socialist, avant-garde slapstick comedy, informed by silent farce, technological romanticism, and contempt for high culture.

This history sits a little strangely with what many know about the Soviet Union’s first fifteen years of experimental filmmaking. Its directors, including Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevelod Pudovkin as well as documentary pioneers like Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub, have earned formidable reputation for applying Marxist methodology to film.

Their contributions, including “the montage of attractions,” the “camera eye,” the “intellectual montage,” and the aforementioned Kuleshov effect, have grounded film curricula since the 1960s, often used in contrast to Hollywood’s formulaic spectacles. In fact, when French filmmaker Jean Luc-Godard stopped making crowd-pleasers in the 1960s and opted instead for punishing Althusserian didactic tableaux, he signed his films Dziga Vertov Group.

What this story leaves out is how Soviet directors’ ideas came out of their obsessions with the crassest and most lurid kinds of American film, its chases, special effects, and pratfalls. In translating Chaplin for Lenin, they combined these elements with their equally strong interest in another aspect of 1910s America: scientific management and industrial efficiency, especially the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford.

The resulting films shared a bizarre and unstable comic Americanism, which you can see still in films like Kuleshov’s Adventurers of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, a high-speed, Keystone Kops satire about Western perceptions of the Soviet state; Boris Barnet’s Miss Mend, where an international communist secret society foils the evil plans of nefarious capitalists; Sergei Komarov’s A Kiss For Mary Pickford and Pudovkin’s Chess Fever, which used footage of American stars on Soviet visits and put them into new, bizarre farces; and Eisenstein’s first feature, Strike, where insurgent workers move with all the bounce and assurance of a mass circus troupe.

Stage director Vsevelod Meyerhold helped pioneer this style. From the early 1920s onwards, he developed a “biomechanical theater” that borrowed equally from the circus’s high-wire tricks and gymnastic leaps, from Charlie Chaplin’s and Buster Keaton’s jerky, ironic slapstick, and from the USSR’s development of Taylorism, led by government-sponsored think tanks like the League of Time and the Central Institute of Labor. The latter’s founder, Aleksei Gastev, a former metalworker, union leader, and poet, became a key figure for most of the 1920s avant-garde.

Looked at coldly, his ideas are unnerving and dystopian. He imagined the new Soviet working class as nameless machines working in seamless unified motion, a somewhat unlikely and wholly unfulfilled demand of the chaotic, largely rural, and unskilled labor force of the Soviet 1920s. Yet while Taylorism involved monitoring the worker’s motions to transform them into a predictable, high-performance cogs, Meyerhold’s biomechanics saw its protagonists as Chaplin-like comic machines, capable of humor and exuberance, not drab labor.

This appears even more strongly in another form of Soviet Chaplinism, which comes from an unlikely direction — formalist literary criticism. The great Viktor Shklovsky used Chaplin as an exemplar of his concept of “ostranienie” or “making-strange.” In his 1922 Literature and Cinematography, he tried to work out what set Chaplin apart from other actors, finally deciding that “the fact that [the movement] it is mechanized” makes it so funny.

In the American context, Chaplin was satirizing industrial, mass-production labor, but in the Soviet landscape — destroyed by seven years of war and economic collapse — the little tramp who moved with jerky assurance through a mechanized world was exactly the sort of “new man” they needed.

American visitors found this all disconcerting. The sympathetic artist Louis Lozowick had to explain to eager young constructivists in Moscow that he didn’t know anything about biomechanics, and that they, the Russians, had invented it themselves. A Ford Motor Company representative, treated by his hosts to some biomechanical theater, thought the whole thing ridiculous and farcical.

In the mid-1920s, the Soviet Eccentrists would move away from the leaps, special effects, and extravagant silliness of movies like The Adventures of Mr West and develop a more sober style, although equally indebted to the frantic pace of American montage and cartoonish American acting styles. The results, such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin’s Mother, had a mixed reception in the USSR but became international sensations. Their kinetic action sequences changed cinema history, and their rousing revolutionary narratives got them banned across the free world.

This is when Charlie Chaplin first became aware of his Soviet fan club. He opposed the bans and helped get these films shown to American audiences. When Eisenstein made an abortive attempt to film Dreiser’s American Tragedy in Hollywood, the two directors became fast friends. But the Soviet film director who had the strongest effect on Chaplin — whose feature films like The Gold Rush and City Lights had become ever more sophisticated and socially critical — was Eisenstein’s great adversary, Dziga Vertov.

A groundbreaking documentarian, Vertov thought fictional films were inherently bourgeois and escapist. Nevertheless, his special effects, comic juxtapositions, and pounding sense of rhythm made him an Americanist in his own way. In 1930, he made the first Soviet sound film, Enthusiasm — Symphony of the Donbas. This hour of grueling industrial propaganda doesn’t much resemble The Fatal Mallet. It depicts mechanizing the Donets coalfield in Eastern Ukraine and teaching the mineworkers Taylorist efficiency.

Chaplin, however, was attracted to the unrivalled intensity of its juxtaposition of sound and image. Using field recordings from Ukraine’s mines and steelworks, Vertov created an industrial jazz of still-astonishing power, a relentless clanging pulse echoing that puts the soundtrack closer to Einsturzende Neubauten than to Al Jolson. Chaplin called it “one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have ever heard.”

Six years later, he made his response. Modern Times has become justly famous for its definitive critique of Taylorism and Fordism. In the factory sequences, machines feed Chaplin, his all-seeing boss monitors him on film, and the production line eventually eats him, until he floats, weightless, through the cogs inside, a tragic and bitter image of the smooth and seamless mechanized labor the Soviets longed for. Insisting on keeping the film wordless, Chaplin used a soundtrack of rhythmic clangs and crashes that mirrored Vertov’s “Donbas” symphony.

Coming when Taylorist speed-up was sparking some of the greatest strikes in American history — not to mention the CIO’s formation — you might expect that the Soviets welcomed the film as a critique of American capitalism’s brutality.

They didn’t. In a text called “Charlie the Kid,” Eisenstein criticized his friend for his satire’s infantilizing and utopic take on what mass production does to workers. Regarding the factory sequence, he asserted, “At our end of the world, we do not escape from reality to fairy-tale, we make fairy-tales real.”

The tramp of Modern Times, exhausted by labor and made homeless by unemployment, accidentally picks up a red flag midway through a strike, getting him arrested as a dangerous agitator. Chaplin himself would be notably supportive of the Soviet Union, and his refusal to fall in with McCarthyism was admirable; but the tramp might have silently held other opinions about industrial efficiency and five-year plans than those he helped inspire.

[drapeau-rouge]

CSIS & The Popular Struggle for Civil Liberties

How was the Canadian Security Intelligence Service created, and why?

There are two ways to tell this story.

The one we are most familiar with is from the side of the Canadian ruling class, and its state which created CSIS.

In this version, CSIS exists to protect all Canadians.

From exactly what we’re being protected is unclear. These days it seems its “lone wolf terrorists” or even the young men at the center of last year’s homicides in Ottawa and St‑Jean‑sur‑Richelieu.

Never mind that its a great stretch over real evidence to link these cases to actual terrorism.

There is also the story of CSIS from the perspective of the people’s forces.

This is also the history of struggle for protection — protection not by CSIS but protection from CSIS. The Communist Party of Canada figures large in this history of political police in Canada.

Ever since our formation in 1921, the Communist Party has faced continued harassment from police and security forces. The state crafted its modern outline of modern political policing this way.

Our party has always fought hard, united with other democratic forces, to over-come these attacks — and it’s been a victory for all people in Canada.

A Long Story

Despite the official rhetoric, mass suppression of civil rights and democratic freedoms has been a constant political factor from the origins of this country.

The military defeat of the Upper and Lower Canada rebellions; then the Métis resistance struggles which brought into life the North West Mounted Police, predecessor of the RCMP; the legal suppression of indigenous people’s resistance organizations; the War Measures Act; the mass interments of ethnic groups during the First and Second World Wars; relentless police attacks against the labour movement – all these illustrate the reality that from its very beginnings, the Canadian capitalist state has used the police, military, courts and spy agencies against its “enemies” and to contain oppressed national communities within the Canadian state.

The Communist Party was founded in conditions of illegality in 1921 as the War Measures Act was still in effect — several years after WWI ended.

A few years before, the Winnipeg General Strike had been suppressed brutally. Labour had few rights and strikes were regularly broken through force from the boss class.

Although the CPC won legality in 1924, it wasn’t long before another ban pushed our organization underground again.

Tim Buck, our Party’s long-time general secretary, and seven other Party leaders were arrested and imprisoned during the 1930s under the notorious Section 98 of the Criminal Code which outlawed so-called “subversive organizations.”

An attempt was even made to assassinate Buck in Kingston Penitentiary.

In a mass campaign, Buck was released and the party won back its status as an open contributor to Canadian political life.

But the new legal status was short lived.

Internment

When the CPC took the stance of initially opposing Canada’s participation in World War Two — correctly noting that the war began as a kind of phony posturing hoping that Hitler would invade the USSR — the Canadian government was the only Western power to respond by banning the CPC.

RCMP documents of the time show that the police view of the communists was that they were Canada’s biggest security risk — more serious than fascism because, the RCMP said, fascism was still a form of capitalism.

Police officers reading Clarté, Quebec’s French language Communist newspaper after raiding their offices.

Party offices and meeting halls were closed; printing presses and other assets were seized, and our press and publications banned.

In Quebec the earlier Padlock law was implemented with reactionary swagger and used against ethnic communities like left-wing Jewish organizations.

Then, most disturbingly, labour leaders and Communists were interned at Petawawa and Kananaskis, and later blocked from joining the Canadian Armed Forces during the military struggle against Hitler fascism.

The internment had been anticipated by the mass arrest of left-wing Ukranians during World War I, and the so-called relief camps during the Depression where police rounded-up unemployed young men and sent them to work camps. It foreshadowed the mass racist interment of thousands of Japanese-Canadian citizens later on during the war.

These were dark moments in Canadian history. The Japanese internees received an apology and compensation in 1988, the Ukrainians in 2008. The Communist internees have never received either.

But they did win widespread public support which forced their release.

The loudest voice against this attack on civil rights was Dorise Nielsen, the third woman ever elected to parliament in Canada and a communist MP elected on a unity slate.

From World War II to the Cold war

In the meantime, the inevitable happened and Nazi Germany did invade the USSR, changing the content of the war.

While the USSR became ally of Canada, it took more campaigning before the interned labour leaders were released.

The period of the victory over fascism almost seventy years ago was a high point in popular progressive sentiment.

The experience of the Great Depression had made many skeptical of the economic system.

The War years had shown socialism in a positive light, and the human potential of a more planned economy.

The idea that Canada could do just as well in a democratic framework, with worker control, was very popular.

Equally broadly supported was the idea of peace and friendship with the socialist world, and not a third world war.

The then pro-socialist CCF party, predecessor of the NDP, saw its popularity rise.

So did the communists.

During this time, the Communist Party elected to provincial legislatures in Manitoba and Ontario, as well as Federally.

It has been said by some that this toe-hold into parliament was so dangerous it had to be eliminated.

With a unscrupulous defector from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, the RCMP and government concocted evidence of a spy plot implicating a number of leading scientists and Fred Rose — Canada’s first openly elected communist Member of Parliament.

Never mind that the “secrets” had already been published in scientific journals and that such exchange of information was common place between the allies during the war.

Again, scores of people were rounded up under the Defense of Canada Regulations of the War Measures Act, held incommunicado for weeks on end, without legal counsel and barred from all contact with the outside world. Meanwhile, the Royal Commission issued a stream of press releases about the “Red menace”. Prisoners were forcefully told to incriminate themselves and others under the penalty of contempt of court.

Public outcry resulted, including the Emergency Committee for Civil Rights (with prominent members like professor C.B. Macpherson, physicist Leopold Infeld, and Group of Seven artist A.Y. Jackson which asserted that the Commission endangered “the basic rights of Canadians.”

Nevertheless, the Royal Commission began another era when Party and its activists suffered state-organized persecution for decades during what became known as the “Cold War” period.

The Cold War

Monitoring by the RCMP of included labour, women’s organizations like the Consumer Housewives Association, students, immigrant groups, and any other subversives or radicals suspected of being reds. This had already been exposed in the 1920s and 30s and continued in earnest during the Cold War.

These state-sponsored attacks on our Party were part of a broader assault on the trade union movement, as well as on activists in the peace, native and other progressive movements and organizations.

1962: Vandalized Communist Party election office in Thunder Bay, Ontario These actions are not speculation. The wrongful and illegal activities of the RCMP were documented and exposed by the MacDonald Royal Commission in the early 1980s because of public outrage over the RCMP’s activities — like barn burning in Quebec.

One of the most chilling examples of this was revealed not long ago, when the corporate media uncovered the PROFUNC plans.

PROFUNC

These were secret plans — unknown by most of parliament — for the RCMP to round up radicals across the country in the event of a third world war.  The group was primarily made up of people deemed “prominent Communist functionaries” by an RCMP Security Service program known as Profunc.

But the list always included more than just reds.

Although this ‘internment plan’ specifically targeted Communists and their families, it represented a flagrant disregard for the civil and human rights of Canadians as a whole.

As new powers are ascribed to CSIS, these relatively recent revelations should concern all democratic-minded Canadians.

“National Security”

This specific plan to intern Communist leaders in the event of a third world war reflected the long-standing — but patently false — presumption that Canadian Communists were somehow ‘agents of a foreign power’ – ie, the Soviet Union – and therefore constituted a ‘threat to national security.’

Canadians have every reason to be angered and dismayed that successive Canadian governments had contemplated such draconian and illegal measures up until as recently as 1983.

Particularly horrendous was the intention to round up and intern the children of Party activists.

This shows that the deep-seated paranoia and hatred of Communists by the Canadian government knew no bounds.

The Communist Party has repeatedly called upon the Canadian Government to make public all documents relating to this sordid affair, including the actual lists of individuals whose civil and human rights were to be violated in the name of “national security.”

Furthermore, the CPC continues to demand that the Canadian government publicly renounce the decision of prior governments to consider such anti-democratic action, and officially apologize to the CPC and to the families of all those individual Communists who were targeted under this plan.

The civil and human rights of all Canadians are enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Canadians must demand that these fundamental rights must be strictly respected and obeyed, especially by governments and their police and security services.

Targets

Communists were to be locked inside three federal prisons in Ontario and Alberta.

“The present number of persons who would be arrested as subversives in the event of a national emergency are 588 males and 174 females,” says a 1970 memo from the RCMP.

The documents, obtained under the Access to Information Act, show that the war internment plan was first drawn up in the late 1940s but was revived and expanded from 1969 to 1971.

The RCMP had 762 people on their to-be-interned list in 1970, including 13 children under the age of 11 and 23 between the ages of 12 and 16.

Most were from the Toronto area, though no names are included in the released material.

Those under 17 were the children of the target internees, and were referred to disparagingly by the Mounties as “red diaper babies”.

The plan was to round up these so-called subversives quickly and place them in temporary custody while three federal prisons were emptied of their inmates.

“Punishment diet number one”

A prison in Drumheller, Alta., was to be used for the west, and another in Warkworth, Ont., for the rest of the country. Women, however, were to be placed in the Joyceville, Ont., penitentiary, near Kingston.

“Mothers with babies at breast will be accommodated in the Joyceville Institution hospital area and… their children must in the first instance be placed with relatives or with Children’s Aid Societies,” says one 1969 document.

The existing prison population across the country would be thinned out by freeing non-violent inmates with less than a year left in their sentences. By shuffling the remaining prisoners, the three Alberta and Ontario prisons could be vacated within 10 days to become internment camps.

The Mounties had approval to lock up 762 people in 1970 but argued they would likely add more after cabinet invoked its extraordinary powers under the War Measures Act.

“There are approximately another 300, although not approved at present, they would no doubt be approved in time of war.”

Rules for the camps were detailed in an RCMP manual that outlined procedures for everything from mail censorship to punishment.

“Punishment Diet Number One shall consist of water as required and one pound of bread per day,” says an edition of the manual from the 1960s.

“Punishment Diet Number Two shall consist of water as required and, for each day, eight ounces of bread for breakfast… four ounces of oatmeal, eight ounces of potatoes and salt, for dinner and eight ounces of bread for supper.”

A separate arrest document was written up for each potential internee. These C-215 forms were updated regularly, including descriptions, photographs, vehicle data, and other information.

Even “escape routes” from the personal residences of those on the list were noted.

“Mobilization Day” (M-Day) was designated as the day to arrest and transport people on the PROFUNC list to temporary detainment centres across Canada, including Casa Loma in Toronto, a country club in Port Arthur, and Regina Exhibition Park.

From these centres, male detainees would then be transferred to penitentiaries across Canada, while women would be interned at facilities in the Niagara Peninsula or Kelowna. Their children would be sent to relatives or interned with their parents.

Internees who broke prison rules could be held indefinitely, or shot while attempting to escape.

More Than Just Reds

In 2010, the CBC’s Fifth Estate and Radio Canada’s Enquête programme exposed in chilling detail more information about these internment preparations.

They blacklist grew to include some 16,000 “suspected communists” and 50,000 “communist sympathizers” to be observed and potentially interned during a state of emergency such as war against the USSR. The identities were kept in sealed envelopes filed at Mountie detachments across the country.

Some people have expressed shock that prominent non-communists were included in the PROFUNC list, such as Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, whose ‘crime’ was apparently his association with Communists in the fight to win universal Medicare in Canada.

The point, however, is that any attack on democracy and freedom inevitably expands to target all those who might speak out in opposition.

This was shown during the 1970 October Crisis, when PROFUNC was used to help detain hundreds of so-called Front de libération du Québec suspects, most of whom had no affiliation with the FLQ.

Almost all of these “suspects” were eventually released without charge, but the goal was to terrorize a wide range of progressive activists, just as the Cold War accusations aimed at undermining the militant labour and people’s movements of the 1940s and ‘50s.

The PROFUNC list remained in force during the 1970s; in fact, the Canadian Penitentiary Service received updated PROFUNC lists to make them aware of the number of potential internees.

It was not until the 1980s that Solicitor General Robert Kaplan introduced administrative changes to remove the barriers which Communists and others faced in trying to cross the Canada-U.S. border.

Around the same time the internment plan was abandoned at the order of the justice minister in 1983, the documents show.

The reasons are not specified, though it may have been linked to the creation in 1984 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service which took over many RCMP Security Service functions.

These changes effectively ended PROFUNC by forcing the RCMP to scrap the list.

Creating CSIS

The wrongful and illegal activities of the RCMP were well documented by the MacDonald Royal Commission back in the early 1980s.

‘Dirty tricks’ included unlawful spying and wiretapping, theft of documents, destruction of property, the use of `agent-provocateurs,’ etc. The revelations about the RCMP’s scandalous role in subverting and attacking a wide range of democratic movements compelled the federal government to turn over authority for domestic espionage to the newly-created CSIS.

When this sinister and illegal spying on the CPC – a registered political party in Canada – was exposed, the RCMP arrogantly responded by demanding that their “property” be returned!

The findings of the MacDonald Commission forced the government to transfer security and intelligence operations from the RCMP to the newly-formed Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS).

However, CSIS has continued to employ surveillance practices and other assorted ‘dirty tricks’ against the CPC and many other lawful organizations and individuals ever since.

But this move did not eliminate the menace to civil rights and democratic freedoms; it merely made CSIS the main perpetrator.

This threat remains very real today, especially given the consistent efforts by the federal government to crush, silence and jail opposition voices, and to create scapegoats to divert public anger from the impact of the capitalist crisis and anti-working class policies.

The so-called “war on terror” is used to justify wide-ranging surveillance and infiltrating of people’s opposition movements, to portray racialized communities as potential “enemies” which must be closely watched by CSIS, and to bar anti-war activists from entering Canada.

The vast expenditure of taxpayers’ dollars on “security” for the Winter Olympics and the G8/G20 Summits was not intended to block non-existent or wildly inflated “security threats,” but rather to intimidate Canadians from expressing public opposition against the policies of the federal and provincial governments.

The mass arrest of over 1,100 protesters during the G20 Summit in Toronto is powerful evidence that plans to suppress dissent remain very much alive at the highest levels of the Canadian state.

Recently we note many more recent attacks on civil liberties and democratic rights via the target of Bill C-51, not least on indigenous activists.

We reiterate our long-standing call for the abolition of the RCMP (which prepared the PROFUNC lists), and for the disbanding of CSIS, which conducts surveillance of present-day critics of government policies.

We urge the entire labour and democratic movement – the main target of the drive to criminalize dissent in Canada – to demand a complete and final end to the policy of drawing up plans for the mass crushing of opposition forces.