Don’t cheer on the Bolivian coup

You have probably heard by now that Evo Morales, the recently re-elected president of Bolivia, was forced to resign just three weeks after winning the general election on October 20th, by order of the Bolivian army. As you could guess from both the title of this post and my generally left-wing and anti-imperialist position, I am thoroughly opposed to this development. But the reason I’m here to talk about the coup (and that’s what it is no matter how many liberals will tell you otherwise) is a little different from the usual theme of how the coup is discussed. I could go on about how there’s no evidence of vote rigging or other electoral fraud on the part of Morales’ side, or how the mere fact that an elected leader could be forced to resign by the military is decidedly anti-democratic in and of itself, or how all of this seems to be related to Morales’ attempts to nationalize lithium mining assets in his country, or how Morales’ supporters are effectively being violently suppressed by the Bolivian army and police as part of the opposition’s takeover of the country, or not to mention the ethnic tensions between indigenous and non-indigenous Bolivians that appear to be involved in this whole thing, or how the opposition and their supporters act in clear opposition to the will of the Bolivian people, but I believe that all of this has been covered very abundantly by left-wing voices already. What I’m here to talk about is a theme more familiar to the kind of stuff I like to talk about on this blog – namely, religion. What do I mean by this exactly? Well, you see, the new unelected interim president of Bolivia, Jeanine Anez Chavez (no relation to the late Hugo Chavez), is a fanatical Christian conservative.

To start with, her illegimitmate declaration of herself as intermin president of Bolivia involved her wielding a large Bible in her hand and raising a ridiculously oversized copy of the Four Gospels into the air. This is a very clear indication that she’ll be using the Christian religion as a way to legitimize and solidify her power, and we can guess that it may have some influence on her policies. Now, take stock of this for a moment. If you saw this in the United States or in Europe, you would think that this would be unacceptable. If you saw a hardened right-wing ideologue seize power by proclaiming himself your ruler while wielding a Bible in his hands, you would think that your country was being taken over by a clerical fascist regime. Indeed, I remember when liberals were somewhat aghast at the fact that Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony was much more religious in tone than Obama’s previous inauguration ceremony, which to them must have suggested the resurgence of an authoritarian religious right. But apparently, in the case of Bolivia, the liberals have no problem with this, or at least I’ve not seen a single one express any concerns about this whatsoever because by god she’ll be Bolivia’s second woman president and that’s more important to them. What disgusting hypocrisy.

Then there’s the way her religious fundamentalism plays into what seems to be a hatred of indigenous Bolivians. Now before we go on there’s something I have to explain. A sizeable chunk of Bolivia’s population consists of a wide variety of indigenous or native peoples collectively referred to as Indigneous Bolivians, Native Bolivians, or Ethnic Bolivians. These include the Aymara and Quechua peoples, the largest of these native groups. There’s also a religious dynamic at play here. While Roman Catholicism is the dominant religion in Bolivia, much as it is throughout Latin America, many indigenous Bolivians retain a pre-Christian belief system, frequently centering around the goddess Pachamama, a fertility goddess worshipped throughout the Andes region. This detail is now rather important for Bolivian politics because the Christian opposition has brought that goddess to the fore by publicly condemning it. Evo Morales himself has even been accused by Catholics of being a pagan who worshipped Pachamama (needless to say I have a feeling this has something to do with his indigenous background). In fact, the goddess was also associated with a bit of a scandal for the Roman Catholic Church more broadly. During this year’s Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region, Pope Francis apparently participated in a rite that involved the worshipped Pachamama, or at least he didn’t seem to object to it, leading his critics to accuse him (perhaps with some justification) of idolatry.

Anyways, Jeanine has constantly used her platform to rail against indigenous Bolivians and accuse them of being devil worshippers over their attachment to Pachamama. In April 2013, she posted a tweet which translates as “I dream of a Bolivia free of indigenous satanic rituals, the city is not for the indians send them to the high plains or to the Chaco!”. “The Chaco”, for those who may be wondering, refers to the Chaco Basin, which is a large and barren stretch of land that extends over the border to Argentina and was considered to be something of a wasteland until the discovery of oil in the region. Yeah, basically she’s telling the indigenous people that, if they don’t convert to Christianity, they don’t belong in the city and should go live in a barely hospitable wasteland. Just one of many details you won’t hear about from the throngs of pro-opposition psyop accounts (by which I mean the “Bolivians” who aren’t really Bolivians). In June of the same year she also tweeted “”What a new year Aymara people, a.k.a. Lucifer! Satan, no one can replace God!” (or perhaps it’s “What a new year Aymara or morning star! Satanic, no one replaces God.”), which is another clear attempt to link indigenous Bolivians with Satanism for some reason. That tweet has apparently been deleted, but the internet never forgets. And the thing is, this sort of sentiment appears to be tied to a certain racist sentiment against indigenous Bolivians. She in yet another now-deleted tweet once accused indigenous Bolivians of being actors because they wore shoes. In 2015 she also accused the indigenous peoples of being basically foreign rulers in a tweet that translates as “Very clear President, in Bolivia the indians lead…but from where? From Venezuela, from Cuba???”, which sounds very familiar enough to American right-wing tropes about left-wing governments from Latin American countries sending immigrants to the US in order add to the voter base of the Democratic Party. Many of these takes have been purged from Jeanine’s account in an attempt to make her seem like a clean, liberal-friendly enough voice of opposition against Morales, but to no avail. So in summary she’s not only a Christian conservative, she also seems to be racist towards indigenous Bolivians, possibly for religious reasons mind you.

What’s more, Jeanine Anez Chavez is not the only opposition figure we can talk about here. There’s also Luis Fernando Camacho, an evangelical lawyer widely identified as the leader of the opposition and who’s also been dubbed “the Bolsonaro of Bolivia” (referring of course to Jair Bolsonaro, the insane right-wing president of Brazil). Why is he called “the Bolsonaro of Bolivia” you might ask? He seems to have been part of a fascist paramilitary organization known as the Santa Cruz Youth Union, which apparently sought to form a Christian separatist nation after Evo Morales was elected (believing that his election brought the country under the spell of a “satanic indigenous mass”) and is also noted to be responsible for violent attacks on indigenous people and even assassination attempts on Evo Morales – you should also take note that its main symbol is a green equilateral cross, similar to other fascist symbols such as the cross of the Austrofascist movement. Their followers even give Nazi salutes for fuck’s sake! After Morales was deposed, Camacho and his followers burned Wiphala flags, which represented the indigenous peoples of Bolivia. Connecting all this to the theme of Christianity is Camacho’s proclamation that “Pachamama will never return to the palace” and that “Bolivia belongs to Christ”. So, yeah, these are people who want to bring about a kind of theocratic rule at the expense of the indigenous population and religious freedom. Oh and to top it all off this Christian fascist theocrat also happens to be one of the millionnaires named in the Panama Papers. So in that sense, he is Bolivia’s answer to Bolsonaro: a rich, xenophobic authoritarian who wields the banner of Christ to suppress indigenous people, non-Christians and leftists. Furthermore he’s also friends with a reactionary Croatian oligarch named Branko Marinkovic, an avid supporter of far-right movements throughout Latin America who believes that Camacho’s movement is in “a crusade for truth” and has “God on his side”, and whose family may or may not have been involved with the fascist Ustase movement.

So yes, Bolivia appears to be having its democratically elected leadership replaced by a reactionary authoritarian Christian movement powered by people who are practically or at least potentially neo-Nazis. Those who supported the coup probably thought that they were going to get a regime of liberals like Carlos Mesa, but those hopes are quickly proving to be misplaced. If you support this coup, you’re not just opposing democracy, you’re supporting the triumph of clerical fascism in the world.

An example of a wiphala flag

Blog that fought Satanic Hoaxes comes to an end

Well, it was good while it lasted.

satanicviews

After bursting the bubble of a major fraud alleging Satanic baby killing in Hampstead London, the hoax busters behind Hoaxtead brought their blog to an end.

Hoaxtead decided that it was finally time to bring their blog to an end to move on to other things in life.  Hoaxtead was started in 2014 at the peak of a Satanic hoax alleging that the people of Hampstead in London was raping, murdering and eating babies as part of a major Satanic cult.  The slow and rather clumsy handling of the hoax in the early stages by the police and their lawyers allowed the hoax to become an international soap opera that drew hundreds of people in for over five years.  It was only due to the jailing of Sabine McNeill one of the primary masterminds behind the hoax for nine years that it was finally brought to an end.

During the…

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We’re having a new election in December

So, after all the parliamentary kabuki theatre surrounding Brexit, which has continued to intensify under Boris Johnson’s tenure, we now have a new snap election set to take place on December 12th. This comes after a motion for an early pre-Christmas election passed by a majority of 438 to 20, making for an overwhelming and unanimous parliamentary majority if you ever needed to be sure of one. It also comes more than two years after Theresa May called a snap election in June 2017, in an attempt to consolidate an absolute Conservative Party majority in parliament that would allow her to do almost whatever she wanted. And to be quite honest, that might not be a good sign for Boris Johnson.

You might think that the Conservatives are going to be on track to victory in the coming election given that, despite the uniformly awful performance of the Conservative Party within the last year, under both Theresay May and Boris Johnson, the Conservatives have managed to keep a steady lead in the polls – I believe last time I checked it was somewhere around 40%. But consider the fact that, before the 2017 election, opinion polls showed the Conservatives at a similar or often even higher lead, even as Theresa May’s campaign proved to be exceptionally poor (her unwillingness to attend the debates being easily the worst thing about it). In addition, Boris’ thus far short term as Prime Minister has already yielded a spectacular record of failure, with numerous defeats in parliament and most notably including him being forced to break his key promises: that he would not delay Brexit and that we would leave the European Union by October 31st. So although right now the opinion polls still have the Conservatives in the lead, I honestly have a hard time imagining that . This does not guarantee a Labour victory, however, and I think Jeremy Corbyn is going to need to work his ass off in order to get Labour the most votes. I think what will most likely happen is that the Tories will somehow manage to get the most votes but we’ll have a hung parliament again, and it is going to be really wild time finding out what sort of coalition he has to form in order to retain power. Will it be with the Lib Dems of all people, despite their ostensible commitment to opposing a No Deal Brexit? Will the Tories and the DUP have enough MPs to somehow restore the status quo? Will the impossible happen and Labour enters government again? Only time will tell.

In either case, I think it’s clear that this new election is the only way at present to resolve the parliamentary impasse that has been characterizing the Brexit negotiations for the last two years, and it was inevitable. Now, I remarked last month that the Labour Party were deeply afraid of this prospect because they kept opposing the idea of a new election on the grounds that they fear getting roundly defeated and a No Deal Brexit would be all but assured. But it seems that they’ve changed their mind. Confident that a No Deal Brexit will be off the table, Labour have decided that now they’re all for a new election, and they’re prepared to contest the Tories for power. I’m not confident about supporting them, in fact I’m not confident about supporting any party at all, but who knows, maybe the new campaigns and manifestos will wow me this time, or maybe they won’t. Either way, for me it’s just a matter of sitting back and seeing whether or not someone actually manages to defeat the Tories. It’s a long shot, but I feel like it’s so hard to predict what’s coming that almost anything can happen, except of course for the return of UKIP.

On the death of al Baghdadi

So recently the terrorist leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the man widely credited as the leader of ISIS, has apparently killed himself after being cornered in a raid by US forces carried out in Barisha. His death has been the subject of several hoaxes and false alarms, with him having been pronounced dead by various sources many times over the years only for him to still be alive, but it appears possible that this time he may be dead for real. Obviously this is a good thing, the world is better off for having lost him. That said, there are some things on my mind relating to this event that I’d like to talk about.

First of all, don’t look at this event and think that the US just ended ISIS by killing al Baghdadi, because that is not the case. The reality is that ISIS had already been defeated by a combination of US intervention, the Iraqi Army, Hezbollah and other Iran-backed militias, regional Sunni tribes, and the Kurdish fighters. You wouldn’t know it from the concern-trolling about ISIS you hear from the media whenever they talk about the Middle East, but ISIS has already been at least effectively dead for a good while before al Baghdadi died. All that’s left of ISIS are a handful of affiliated forces and leaders that aren’t part of an organized military force. There’s a lot of hype about some ISIS leaders who may or may not have escaped from a Kurdish prison complex in Syria during Turkey’s invasion of Rojava, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.

Second, do not trust the US war machine to be satisfied with the death of al Baghdadi. Just the fact that the US is still trying to use ISIS as a pretext for further excursions in the Middle East after ISIS was already defeated tells me that the US will continue to look for reasons to spread imperial chaos across the region for profit. Remember, the US ostensibly invaded Iraq years ago for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power, but after they succeeded in removing him the US didn’t stop there. They remained in Iraq until 2011 so that the US can keep occupying the country, supposedly to protect the country from insurgents (meanwhile their private contractors ended up slaughtering innocents). This background in conjunction with the fact that the dead ISIS is still held up as a shibboleth to justify regime change, not to mention the fact that the US announced that they would remain in Syria for the express purpose of guarding oilfields mere days after Trump announced for the second time that US forces would leave Syria, tells me that the US will still be chasing phantoms and killing whoever they like for profit under the guise of fighting ISIS.

Third, and finally, the reaction to al Baghdadi’s death has been rather enlightening, but for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been seeing the right accuse the left of being unhappy with the death of al Baghdadi, with the unstated premise being of course that the left defends and celebrates radical Islamic terrorism. The general premise is, of course, complete nonsense, and I’m gonna demonstrate how facile it is with an example that I saw today in relation to Ilhan Omar – although I do not consider her to be a serious leftist, really she’s just a progressive liberal in practice, but she’s useful enough for the purposes of the point I’m making because the right tends to attack her frequently. Upon hearing of the news of al Baghdadi’s death, Ilhan Omar took to Twitter to say the following:

Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was an evil man and a terrorist, who terrorized the world with violence and a message of hate. The world is a safer place without him. We have deep gratitude for the brave men and women who carried out this dangerous operation.

Now that’s just the sort of unambiguous condemnation of terrorism with a bit of “support our troops” for good measure that you’d expect would be accepted by conservatives. Instead, however, her tweet was piled on by conservatives anyway, many of whom accused her of being saddened by the loss. Why would she be sad to see the death of an Islamic terrorist exactly according to these guys? Well, I think we all know the answer to that – it’s just because she’s a Muslim immigrant. And of course many were simply negging her to praise Donald Trump because he happened to be President under this operation. Of course it never occurs to these idiots that Baghdadi would have died under any President because the US military was going to hunt him down anyway, but these people have some kind of hero worship going on with Trump so it doesn’t get to them. But the point I’m trying to make is simple: if you’re either left-wing or just liberal, or more broadly you just oppose conservative attitudes towards Islam or the refugee crisis, or if you happen to be a Muslim, the right will think of you as a supporter of Islamic terrorism no matter what you do. Nothing you say to them will make them change their mind on that, they’ve already decided that you’re a threat to America for patently insane, paranoid and sometimes outright xenophobic or bigoted reasons. In much the same way that you will never satisfy American imperialism no matter how many terrorists are killed, you’ll never get anywhere trying to appease the right because you’ll never satisfy them.

What do I think of Extinction Rebellion?

There’s been a series of protests going on in London for the few weeks or so, headed by a movement known as Extinction Rebellion, a group that has been gaining its fair share of fame and notoriety in the last year or so. The movement can best be described as environmentalism-without-adjectives in that, ostensibly, it has very little in the way of central, cogent, defining ideology other than a small set of demands. They’re not communists, they’re not socialists (god I wish they were either of those things), they’re not anarchists, they’re not fascists, they probably aren’t even social democrats as far as I know, and indeed they don’t like to consider themselves on the left or the right and consider the traditional political spectrum to be divisive. Honestly, that’s good for my sake because it means I don’t have to treat them as serious leftists, even though unfortunately a lot of the right already do.

I have several issues with the movement, issues that extend far beyond their bizarre appropriation of Greek pagan aesthetics for shock value purposes (those red robed guys from a while back). One of the biggest issues I have with them is that they are fundamentally opposed to the working class. Think about it: if they’re serious about this climate emergency, why don’t they disrupt the lives of the wealthy elite rather than the average worker in London? Why can’t they try and shut down some fossil fuel-based power plant instead of the London Underground? And while we’re at it why not disrupt the actual meeting places and events of climate deniers rather than do this weird mass breastfeeding protest to whine about YouTube letting some asshole make videos on their platform? It is a fact that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the emissions that pollute the atmosphere, that’s the lion’s share of the emissions that the average joe isn’t responsible for. Instead of punishing ordinary people for the fact that their choices can’t possibly dislodge that, they should be actively disrupting the operations of those 100 companies. Instead of making the lives of the people more inconvenient, they should be making things more inconvenient for the rich. But of course they won’t do that, because they don’t actually care about the working class, and I might add they themselves are bankrolled by the rich and function as a capitalist operation. That honestly is why I find the right-wing criticism of them to be so laughable: if only they were anti-capitalist, if only they could be counted as part of the working class movement, if only they were genuine political radicals.

Then there’s their overall confused take on the way climate change is treated by the government and the media. Wales has declared a climate emergency, though admittedly the rest of Britain hasn’t, but they constantly whine about the government not saying enough about climate change. Now, granted, when Theresa May entered office, the government basically scrapped a department that was dedicated to tackling climate change: that was a major step in the wrong direction for us. But then they whine about how the BBC isn’t being honest about the scale of the climate change crisis. They never specify what they’re not covering.

But my biggest crticism of all is their image of rebellion (I know, strange for a Luciferian to criticize, but bear with me for a moment). Who or what are these guys rebelling against exactly? Certainly not the government, that’s for sure. Oh they’ll talk quite the game about the government not doing enough and that this why they need to rebel, but when it comes to the police, their primary praxis seems to consist of worshipping the ground that the cops walk on! They’ve celebrated somebody, possibly one of their own members, getting arrested for some unspecified reason, they shout about how much they love the police even as they’re busy arresting fellow protestors, and they even encourage protestors to hand themselves over to the police after graffitying hand prints. This is just the height of bootlicking scumfuckery from a supposedly radical movement. This is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. I can understand and even get behind the idea of the movement telling its members that they should just be prepared to face jail time in pursuit of their cause and be prepared to get into conflict with the authorities in that path – hell, if they were actually prepared to fight the powers that be in any form, they would be pretty interesting. But instead they’re kissing the asses of the police while they lock up their comrades for the high crime of peaceful protest. And the worst part about it is they justify their handing themselves over with some stupid selfish spiel about “moral responsibility”. Their turning themselves in is framed as an acting out a principle of holding themselves accountable for their own actions. I ask, accountable to whom? The people who are oppressing peaceful demonstration? The government you say is betraying the planet? The system that is killing our species? You disgust me!

In short, Extinction Rebellion is the worst protest movement I have ever seen. In the eleven years of my life in which I’ve considered myself politically conscious, I have never seen such an insufferable, pathetic, shameful movement, whatever the cause.

What it means to be a man

There are many ideas of masculinity in the world, many of them are contrived forms of hyper-masculinity, and many more are contrived forms of anti-masculinity. But there is one thing that encapsulates what it is to be a man more than anything else: that is, to be a guardian for those he cares about.

Nothing about being a man matters more than whether or not he’s able to look after the people he loves or cares about, and the main test of this is whether or not he can look after the woman he loves and, eventually, the children he fathers with her. It’s so vital to being a man that, although feminism has made such a point of how women can (and sometimes should) do anything that a man can do, not many women like the thought of doing the kind of looking after that they like to see men do. You might argue that this is something of an evolutionary echo that harkens back to the days where men were the primary if not sole providers in early human communities, but one must submit that just because culture changes does not mean that the evolutionary development of humans changes with it (or, if it does, it changes at the very slow pace) – and at any rate, to divorce morality and culture from nature is to either make them intangible or to submit that nature or the world is not the basis of human life, both of which are idealist positions. But to return to the main point, any male who is dedicated to providing for or generally taking care of someone they care for is fit to be considered a man.

This simple wisdom also helps to explain quite a few other aspects of life, including the difference between a man and a boy (or, perhaps, a manchild). The younger you are, the more naive about women you are, and the more carefree attitudes you have about relationships. There’s a reason for that. When you’re younger, you don’t deal with women properly. You deal with girls, sure, but that’s not really the same thing. You’re not going to be told that you need to be a man who can look after a woman at the age of 16 or 18, nobody expects that yet. In fact, when you’re between the ages of 16 and 20, odds are you’re going to be expected to have a rather loose and carefree life focused on fun, and that tends to play into how young people are often expected to take to sex. But all of this informs the attitudes of younger men towards women, and because of this they don’t yet realize what it is to be a man, and they’re not expected to reach that point yet. A manchild, in my opinion, is someone who is typically in their 30s or even 40s who, despite surely having reached adulthood and having garnered many years of experience to mold his worldview, still has an immature attitude towards women because he does not grasp what it is to be a man. He still thinks of himself and his woman as merely mutual sexual egoists, defining the relationship by how much pleasure they get from it, rather than by the pursuit of oneness between themselves.

But there is more to this simplicity than meets the eye, and in fact there is something about it that causes problems for Satanism, and indeed egoism more generally. The principal rammification of this insight is that a man does not really live for himself. In fact, when you’re in love or when you’re dedicating your life to the prosperity of a loved one, the very idea of simply living for yourself appears shallow, weak and dare I say even unnatural. You can’t maintain an outlook based on selfishness with that sort of experience in mind, or it’ll just pervert your worldview and the way you relate to people. Such a fate is even worse for autistic people when you consider our stunted manner of socialization and the impaired ability to express ourselves and interact with others – egoism becomes a way for us to justify and rationalize what is ultimately a poisonous life of isolation and alienation, when if anything we would benefit from the precise opposite of such a worldview. In any case, egoism proves very much untenable in a serious relationship, or at least one that doesn’t simply amount to what Erich Fromm might refer to as “egoism a deux”, because genuine love forces people to act against selfish desire. Some, like Michael W Ford, would probably retort that even love as a neurochemical feeling is selfish in that it “rewards” the brain, but just be honest for a moment: if your partner tells you that they’re not ready for go as far as you’d like in a relationship, the strictly selfish thing to do would be to stop caring about her, but if you love that person, you can’t bear to do that. You’ll still treat her as though you genuinely love her, regardless of the limitations, because the thing you seek in that relationship goes past selfish desire. Once you become attuned to this reality, selfishness ceases to be a salient value, let alone a virtuous one. And at that point, you’ve destroyed the vestiges of egoism not only as philosophically shallow, but also rather unmanly. If you’re living your life for the happiness of someone else, what use is it to pretend that that’s somehow a selfish act except to pervert your view of human relationships and corrupt the wisdom you’re supposed to gain from them?

And if you have a problem with this, take note of one thing: all I have told you thus far is what I have learned in the process of undergoing a new journey of love with a young woman who I consider to be my girlfriend. I have felt once again the love that I have sought, and that experience of love compels me to order my life and my way of thinking accordingly. I cannot deny what comes so naturally to me in my experience as a young man. Who in the right mind could deny such things themselves?

My opinion of Greta Thunberg

I’ll be honest, I go out of my way to ignore discussion of Greta Thunberg wherever possible. I find Greta, her supporters, and her detractors to be tiresome actors in the detestable business of bourgeois political theatre. Greta’s supporters will defend her because she’s a bold voice against our idolent response to man-made climate change, and her detractors scorn her for being a childlike voice of radicalism that threatens to warp the freedom of the individual, but for all of that, Greta herself is a pretty mediorce “radical” in my view, and truth be known I think she’s a disappointment.

Some may be expecting me to bash her for being a preacher on the climate change issue, but to tell the truth I don’t truly hate her over climate change. In theory, at least, it’s nice to get some agitation going on the subject of taking action on climate change. The only things that truly before me about that aspect of her activism is the fact that it’s petit-bourgeois in character. And I don’t mean that in the way right-wingers always whine about champagne socialists (although, to their credit, Aaron Bastani is a real person who embodies this trope), I mean in the sense that it only really amounts to the strategy of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois liberalism. It has nothing to do with any kind of mass movement aimed at tearing down the structures that are responsible for our Earth getting turned into an oven to begin with, and is only going to amount to another call for pallid ethical consumerism. And I never really see much in the way of policy substance, at least in terms of fighting climate change, other than perhaps restoring biospheres that are in danger of being destroyed by human activity, and her spiel is mostly just telling people to do something about climate change because we’ve stolen her childhood or something. Not much. Oh and her movement appears to be largely manufactured by capitalists, so there’s that too. But, despite the impression you might get from me saying all this, my primary issue with Greta Thunberg has nothing to do with climate change. Her activism on climate change is perhaps the most defining thing about her at the moment, yes, but I don’t care.

For me, the real problem is how she relates to having on Asperger’s syndrome, which is within the autistic spectrum. She talks about how it helps her think in black and white (as though that is somehow a good thing in itself), think outside the box and see through lies about climate change. She even claims that she would not have been interested in the climate if not for Aspergers syndrome, which is an absurd sentiment to have considering that there has been large scale and highly prolific public interest in the subject of dealing with climate change since before Greta was even born! What infuriates me about this is the damage that Greta’s stance will do to people like me. Being autistic is by and large an impairment, not a blessing. I know I’ve encountered people, both in and out of the autisitc spectrum, who treat it as just a matter of us being different, and that’s technically true but iut’s true for all the wrong reasons. Our ability to develop essential social skills is greatly hampered, our ability to relate to the world is undermined, our brains do not operate in the way that normal humans do, and more often that not it’s to our disadvantage more than it is to our advantage, and we end up being dependent upon others to a larger extent and for much longer than regular people are. We’re not superhumans, we’re not geniuses  if we were anything like the media keeps saying we are then all of us autistic people would be demigods, or more aptly we would not have the developmental problems that keep our true potential at bay.

Greta’s stance will allow people to think that having autism grants you some sort of above-average intellect, which to me is simple nonsense. They’re propping us up as natural-born geniuses because one of them is agrees with their homogenous brand of liberal politics. I’ve seen one goon from The Independent even trying to claim that Greta is being attacked with particular vitriol because of her Asperger’s, which is such an unfalsifiable premise that I must simply go with my gut and presume it to be a lie, and I never thought that I’d be accusing someone on the autistic spectrum of lying about autism. If I was as prolific as Greta Thunberg and given the time of day to spout my views on politics, they would never treat me the same way and they would not fantasize about autistic people being superhumans, because I despise a great deal of what the liberal elite stands for. And if anyone, say, advocated for there being a cure for autistic disorders, as I would like to see, such people would be slandered and demonized by those ghouls, even though the pro-cure position is, at least in my view, the most compassionate position you can think of. Ah but of course, I should have known by now, compassion is simple bigotry when it impedes the progress of liberal hegemony.

That in a nutshell is my opinion of Greta Thunberg: a thoroughly boring climate change activist who is uninterested in the idea of the mass movement undertaking collective action against capitalism but gets paraded around as the darling of the Earth, who also has this absurd belief that Asperger’s syndrome is her power source in all this and will probably serve as a rallying cry for people who value the fetish of neurological diversity over compassion and deceny. I dislike her, plain and simple.

Though, that being said, I don’t think she’s worthy of some of the nastier stuff I keep hearing her being subjected to, and I find the conservative scaremongering over her views to be ridiculous and absurd, and their memes against her seem to reflect that absurdity. But then I can’t say I trust them to talk about what really matters to me: from what I understand, they’ve been using her Asperger’s syndrome to cast her as mentally ill. What a class act these right-wingers are, aren’t they? And some of the conspiracy theories they’ve been peddling about her are ridiculuous. Many of them seem to believe that Greta is actually a victim of child abuse, and there’s even a Federalist article that claims that her movement is basically a revival of paganism. That kind of tells me all I need to know about how the right wants to approach this.

Other than that, there’s not much for me to say.

An update on the Global United Nightside Movement, or rather the lack of updates about it

In January 9th of last year, a YouTuber by the name of Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) announced that he was planning on starting a new political movement on the internet that he thought would eventually break into mainstream politics in the real world. He called it the Liberalist movement, and we call it Liberalistism because seriously what the fuck is wrong with that name. The rationale for that name was to distinguish himself from modern liberalism because, of course, modern liberalism is too politically correct for him (even though it stems from the same rationale as liberals like Karl Popper who he should be all rights be praising as one of his own). He started a website for the movement not long afterwards, and he would have livestreams talking about the principles of his Liberalist project, and would engage in debates with alt-right YouTubers defending his concept of Liberalistism. But after a few months, nothing ultimately came of it before Carl eventually decided to abandon the project in favour of joining UKIP, and the website had never been updated at any point during the Liberalist saga. There are still accounts that associate with the Liberalist movement, and they still post political content, but beyond that the movement has no bearing on politics, whether on the internet or in real life.

Now you might be wondering, why the hell am I talking about some fat English classical liberal YouTuber? Well, because I fear his failure is eerily echoed into another project: The Global United Nightside Movement.

Last month, I covered this project on this blog, expressing my hopes and fears for the project. I had expected that within a month, maybe we wouldn’t see a fully consolidated mass movement, but at least that the people behind the movement would be at least talking about it. Hell, I expected a website of some kind. But after well over a month, what happened? Nothing. There is no discussion of the Global United Nightside Movement project anywhere. I’ve gone through Thomas Karlsson’s Facebook for updates. No real updates were found, except for maybe a cryptic post about how this year the LHP’ers are supposed to take action, but in what way is not at all clear and still doesn’t really discuss the movement. The only time the movement is actually talked about is in a literal repeat of the same post from August 9th. I check out Don Webb? Nothing. Michael W. Ford? Nothing. Not even his YouTube channel has anything to say about it. Stephen Flowers? Nothing. There is not a single ounce of discussion of this project, despite there evidently being some credible interest in the project, and there is no website for it. In fact, as it stands now, when you type “Global United Nightside Movement” on Google to find out anything about it, you’ve probably discovered my blog as the first thing that pops up.

Now why does this matter exactly? Well a nascent movement of any type needs to have some presence for it to go anywhere. That means discussion of what the project means, or at the very least a website that signifies its existence as a real, potentially credible movement that people can go to and learn about, and possibly become a part of. But no such thing exists. Also, going back to the Liberalist movement, at least Carl Benjamin tried to start something credible with his shitty Liberalist movement. At least he started a website, some Facebook groups, and discussions of Liberalist ideas and strategies. But in the case of Thomas Karlsson’s Global United Nightside Project, there’s nothing, and it’s been well over a month. Carl and his Liberalists are more productive than Karlsson and his crew, and this is a source of grave concern to me given the state of the Left Hand Path movements today.

Think about it: the Church of Satan is doing nothing other than correcting people on Twitter and making money for Peter Gilmore and his wife. Jeremy Crow’s Luciferian Research Society website was doomed to irrelevance outside of the people who already use it due to its failure to change to a new hosting site. There is no news coming from the Assembly of Light Bearers, which leads me to believe that nothing is happening with them. Back in 2015, when they were called the Greater Church of Lucifer they actually came close to having an official church in Texas. But after a harrassment campaign from Christian zealots, their landlord refused to renew the lease that they acquired for the church premises and so the church disappeared. Was there a new church established after this? No. Did the Greater Church of Lucifer do anything after this? No. They got scammed by Jacob McKelvy, reformed into the Assembly of Light Bearers and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing other than reorganize their website. No one is actually doing anything there. Michael W. Ford is still publishing books and Jeremy Crow I think is still giving lectures, but that’s about it. The Temple of Set actually does have something going for it in that Michael A Aquino released a revision of The Satanic Bible, but, as I’ve explained, it represents a push towards some of the most idealist garbage I’ve ever seen outside of esoteric fascism. The Neo-Luciferian Church may as well be dead, because they’ve done absolutely nothing of note and haven’t been active online in a few years, and their websites are either outdated or gone. The Sect of the Horned God still appears to be somewhat active, their website and social pages still post pretty regularly, but other than that they aren’t producing literature and I haven’t seen them do anything outside of the internet. The only group that’s doing anything to affect anything in the real world is The Satanic Temple, and they’re an embarrassment to Satanism – not so much because of their actual activism, as some strive to suggest, but because of their ludicrous liberal identity politics and their serious organizational problems. Of course, the Order of the Nine Angles is doing something alright: they’ve been busy infiltrating neo-Nazi movements.

So, with a few exceptions, it seems to me that nothing is growing in the Left Hand Path movements, and what is growing in the Left Hand Path doesn’t seem to be going in a positive direction. This to me just puts the Global United Nightside Movement in a position of being wasted potential, and the Left Hand Path more broadly in a position of doom. No really. Nothing is growing for us, nothing is developing, no credible movement other than a handful of online actors is manifesting. That’s not to say nothing is happening, per se. Books are still being published, people are still talking about their beliefs and expressing them in some way, but nothing is coaslescing into an effective movement capable of leading the people away from Abrahamism. And why would we be in a position to do that. The major movements don’t even realize that Christianity is coming back and only The Satanic Temple seems to be attempting to do something about that. You’d think that the rise of someone like Jordan Peterson bringing people back to the Christian faith would be motivation for us to fight back and assert our values on a grand scale, to actually wage war with Christianity like we should, but not only has this not happened, but a lot of us ended up liking him and treating him as a subject of serious study, and to be honest I used to be one of those people until I found out about his Maxims for Men. It’s like we shit on The Satanic Temple for being liberals and sometimes rightly so but at the same time we’re not actually fighting for our values like they are.

And take note when I say what is presently growing is not going in a positive direction, because in a way I begin to wonder if this will apply to the Global United Nightside Movement. Although as I said the movement isn’t actually growing, nothing is happening for it, I’ve begun to grow concerned about the shape it will take. I base this primarily on the kind of ideas that Thomas Karlsson has been promoting since his announcement, which I came across on his Facebook while searching for updates. Here, you will find traces of what seems to amount to a reactionary philosophy with libertarian tendencies. There’s a video clip there about how there are eleven dimensions and that humans live in four of them and have to explore the rest – which, no, this is unscientific nonsense, and in fact kind of resembles string theory – and how the “Red Dragon” arrived in 2012 according to some unspecified ancient prophecy. There’s some Eurabia level stuff about how Sweden is submitting to radical Islam because they let in migrants and how he thinks that the Swedes should respond to this by forming militias to attack Muslim migrants.  There’s a post about how his organization, the Dragon Rouge, affirms authoritarian centralism and hierarchy as the “true” individualism of the Left Hand Path. There’s at least two posts where he appears to espouse a type of Ancient Aliens tier theology concerning Qlipthotic beings and fallen angels – and if you don’t believe me about how this shit sounds like Ancient Aliens, just watch this. There’s something about how music is proof of an extra-material layer of the cosmos that stands above the evolutionary cosmos. There are even boomer tier memes there, one of them about Ilhan Omar accompanied by neoconservative talking points, and another that’s just classic “hey let’s represent European women with a fantastical painting to dab on the muzzies“, which btw is reminiscent of some of the stuff I’ve seen on the volkisch pagan corners of Twitter and from the alt-right in general.

Yeah, all told, this looks like a hefty dose of reactionary and potentially even fascistic influence, possibly even hinting at a similar type of creationism as Michael Aquino, coming from the key figure behind the Global United Nightside Movement. So what’s the libertarian part exactly? Well he does talk quite a bit about sex and nudity in religious contexts, and opposes the censorship of adult nudity on Facebook, which (to be fair) I agree with him on for the most part, but let’s be honest I find it difficult to believe that he’s in this out of a consistent belief in freedom, if you catch my drift.

Most worrisome of all, and I’m sure this will support my worries about fascism further, is his endorsement of a book about the life and work of Guido von List. Called Wotan’s Awakening: The Life and Times of Guido von List, and forwarded by none other than Michael Moynihan (who, btw, is totally not a fascist), the book appears to be an examination of the legacy of the eponymous 19th-20th century volkisch occultist. But who is Guido von List? The short answer is: he’s the pretty much the grandfather of the type of racist volkisch paganism you find espoused by neo-Nazis and a major inspiration for the Nazi Party. The long answer: Guido von List is the creator of a gnostic racialist volkisch pagan sect that he referred to as Wotanism, which he also designed as the exoteric form of another religion called Armanism, also known as Ariosophy, which is basically a system of occultism centered around the “wisdom of the Aryan race”. Ariosophy is the esoteric core of his doctrine which was meant for the elites while Wotanism is the folk religion that he intended for the masses to believe in. His opposition to Christianity and the Catholic Church did not stem from the philosophical substance of Christianity and the church (or lack thereof), but instead from some racist dribble about Christianity being a foreign religion in contrast to what he believed to be the authentic ancestral Indo-European religion, despite the fact that Christianity as we know it was actually synthesized within the Western world through the transfusion of Hellenistic concepts into Jewish salvationism. Although the Armanists would eventually be purged by the Nazis, von List’s doctrine presaged, and some would say inspired, the spiritual ideology of Nazism through its racialist characteristics, specifically regarding the dominion of the Aryans. He believed in an ideal society that consisted of imperial pan-German rule under a rigid hierarchical society organized along the lines of feudalism and Qabbalistic occultism, with Aryans at the top of the hierarchy and the non-Aryans at the bottom, oppressed by their Aryan overlords. The Aryans would be free of the wage system, relieved of labour and entitled to a life of liberty and dignity (as far as von List would define those things anyway) while their non-Aryan counterparts would be subject to the wage system, robbed of freedom and dignity, and barred from certain jobs and positions and even real citizenship because of their lack of racial purity. In addition to this he believed that the new society should require families to keep detailed genealogical records to prove their racial purity and uphold an authoritarian patriarchal social structure based on the supreme authority of the father. So needless to say he was a fascist, and a proto-Nazi one at that, and apparently Thomas Karlsson thinks it’s a good idea to promote his beliefs within the Left Hand Path. Frankly, if this is the man that Thomas Karlsson thinks has some valuable spiritual insights for us, then I think he should probably not talk about “imperialist religions” anymore.

Now, of course, you might point out that Karlsson is one guy out of the four main people doing this project. Well OK, Don Webb doesn’t seem to have the same worldview as him at least from what I’ve seen, and Michael W Ford doesn’t say much, but the less said about Stephen Flowers, the better, given his belief in the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. Not to mention that Karlsson appears to be the main figure behind this movement. Thus it is not hard to connect the dots as far as where this movement might be going.

All of this, even at an early stage, makes me worry. I have a sense of foreboding at play. I complained before about how the Order of Nine Angles was pushing fascism, specifically actual neo-Nazism, into the Left Hand Path through subversion, but given that the O9A don’t seem to be involved here, it leads me to suspect that the slide towards esoteric fascism in this space will be the work of Thomas Karlsson’s influence by means of his promotion of Ariosophy and authoritarian hierarchical values. And if this is going to be the main push from our movement towards a united front, I’m left thinking that, perhaps, there is no way out of this one. Maybe esoteric fascism is not merely coming to the Left Hand Path, but in a sense it’s always been with these spaces, and that in this case they’re going to just either tolerate it or say nothing or do nothing to push back against such influences, and there’s nothing I can do about it. At which point, we’re fucked.

Scapegoat by Zach Brown

Iran is apparently ready for war

So it now appears that we may be getting closer to the day where there is war involving Iran. Yesterday Houthi insurgents attacked an oil field controlled by Saudi Arabia, causing oil prices to skyrocket. Anyone who remembers the Iraq War knows that nothing could can come of this, and sure enough there were calls for war with Iran in the US by both Republicans and establishment Democrats. The next day, it appeared as though Iran had taken credit for the attacks on the oil fields. It was likely not so much the Iranian government that took the credit and more like some figures within the Iranian government, but it doesn’t matter as such considering that the Houthi insurgents probably received aid from Iran. This makes sense given that they have probably received Iranian aid in the past and the fact that the Houthis would likely find common cause with Iran in their mutual contempt for Saudi Arabia. At any rate, Iran seems to have said that they are fully prepared to face the United States in a war. Conversely, US President Donald Trump has threatened Iran, saying that it is the most prepared country on Earth to engage in war. I must say this is once again quite divorced from his original “America First” vision.

All this worries deeply because it will inevitably mean the West will be thrown into a war that it doesn’t need to be involved with in order to preserve a system built upon greed and unjust violence. We have seen this song and dance before, and we know exactly where it ends. Israel will want to go to war with Iran, and the US will likely answer any calls for assistance just as they answered Netanyahu’s call to invade Iraq in 2002. The US will also likely be answering to Saudi Arabia due to the US’s interests there. It is almost inevitable that the US will fight a war with Iran, and the neoconservatives will finally get their maniacal dreams a new crusade fulfilled after years if not decades of patience. What worries me more, though, is the question of where this leaves the UK?

It might seem strange to think that the UK will be involved in some way, and definitely seem peripheral to the larger conflict, but on the other hand the UK is also tied to Saudi Arabian interests, given that our government sells arms to Saudi Arabia so that it can use them to inflict genocide of the Yemenis. I haven’t forgotten the day in January 2015 when the Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz died, and when our nation’s parliament lowered our flag to half mast to mourn him, as though that odious tyrant was somehow an international treasure. If the UK was willing to mourn the death of a Saudi king, I don’t see why they won’t be willing to support the Saudis in their war with Iran. Now I don’t anticipate that we’ll have to do any major fighting, but at the same time my passions on the subject are quiet but profound. If the day should come where the UK would be involved in fighting Iran, I refuse to support the UK’s involvement in that war. I refuse to endorse or fight for any war on behalf of Saudi Arabia. I would rather be labelled a coward and be treated with shame by those who question my patriotism than play any part in the defending the Saudis.

Are some Catholics coming around to paganism?

In December of last year, the New York Times arch-Catholic Ross Douthat wrote an article about what he believed was an ongoing pagan revival, entitled The Return of Paganism. Some time after this Robert Barron, an American Catholic bishop, uploaded a clip from his Word on Fire podcast to YouTube, in which he and a man named Brandon Vogt discuss the article and paganism in general. The video was originally uploaded on January 28th of this year, but I had only just discovered it, and I believe it is worth commenting on.

You would think that, being devout Christians and all, they would be very dismissive of paganism throughout the video. But upon watching the video, you may find yourself quite surprised to find that these Catholics are actually very open-minded and even positively curious about the subject of paganism, even if it’s quite clear that they have reservations about paganism for obvious reasons (their rejection of polytheism). Barron in particular offers a positive assessment of paganism despite his Christian faith, saying that there was something true, deep and noble about paganism. He at one point also refers to a man named Robert Sokolowski, a monsignor of the Roman Catholic Church who he considers his intellectual hero, who many years ago told Barron and others something to the effect of “if you want to stop being Christian, I’d recommend you become pagan”. He particular characterization of paganism is also deeply fascinating to me. He describes paganism as, in his words, “the great religion of the natural necessities”, meaning of course that it is the religion of nature, worldly life, and everything that makes it work. This is in stark contrast to the Christian faith, whose God is palpably supernatural in the sense that he exists outside of the natural universe (whereas the gods of paganism are part of and often, as per Hesiod, born out of the natural universe). In fact, when Vogt tries to understand paganism as another expression of the longing for a transcendent, supernatural realm, Barron counters this by saying that the gods and goddesses of paganism were believed to be realities within the framework of the natural universe, and that the Biblical framework distinguishes itself from paganism by its assertion of a God who is totally distinct from nature. Included in the pagan framework, some reason, is the concept of pantheism (which is essentially the belief that the universe itself is God), which Barron seems to believe positions God as being in his fullest sense and within the framework of paganism. He even describes pagan religiosity, in terms of the reverence of ancient natural forces albeit personified as gods, as a healty spiritual outlook. All told, this is quite high praise for paganism coming from a Catholic Christian. As a side-note, I find it interesting that he notes that the Catholic title Pontifex Maximus, used for the Pope, was originally a pagan term referring to the chief high priest of the College of Pontiffs as part of the pre-Christian Roman religion.

Barron’s altogether naturalistic assessment strikes at the heart of how I’ve very often related to paganism, as I presently do, and might be how I always sort of “go back” to it even though I’m not what you’d call a practicing pagan (I still consider myself a Luciferian for now). Although the historical form of paganism can’t be said to be without supernaturalism and certainly not without theism, at the center of the ethos of paganism is indeed the natural world, and mankind’s relationship to it. Although it would be very ahistorical to treat the old pagans as essentially the kind of hippies who were “above” manipulating their environment for the purpose of facilitating human civilization, they certainly did not see themselves as the masters and owners of the world in the way that the Biblical God told his foolish believers they were. There was, in a sense, a sacredness to the natural world, and within a natural world with forces within it represented by gods mankind was part of a whole in which his fate was connected to the natural forces that were represented and controlled by these gods – in this sense, the ancient belief was that man could feasibly attain some mastery of his environment, but not without the aid of the gods. It is the pagan centrality of the natural world that distinguishes it not only from Abrahamism, but also from the Dharmic religions. I once thought when I was younger that Hinduism could be seen as much like paganism, indeed the Indian equivalent of it, but thinking about it this comparison is remarkably shallow. Whereas classical paganism centers on the world and man’s role within it, post-Vedic Hinduism (that is, the Hinduism you know today) ultimately places man as part of a struggle to escape the world, or rather the cycle of reincarnation, in order to unite with a God that exists beyond the material universe.

Worth note also is their treatment of the idea of paganism as a civic religion, which is part of the argument of the Ross Douthat article that they initially addressed. They understand this too to be a part of the interweaving of the human social order with the natural order, although I find it very annoying that Vogt (and I suppose Douthat by proxy given his article) shoe-horns some spiel about “social justice theology” and transhumanism for no discernible reason. These two have nothing to do with paganism, and in fact whatever could be determined to be “social justice theology” is easily the product of Christianity, not paganism (the very term “social justice” originates from a Catholic intellectual).

Now all of this is not to be dismissed as something minor within Catholicism. Although I don’t know how just how prevalent the curiosity for paganism is within Catholicism, I do know that Robert Barron is a major and influential figure in the Catholic movement. He’s one of the most popular Catholic bishops in the world, and especially on the internet. His Word on Fire website and his YouTube videos reach tens of millions of people, and his following on social media is so great that he’s been dubbed “the bishop of social media” and “the bishop of internet”. He’s also a frequent contributor on the subject of religion within the old guard of mainstream media, having worked for NBC and made appearances of CNN and Fox News, and he’s even given talks on religion for major multinational corporations such as Amazon, Facebook and Google. So here we have one of the most influential Catholics in modern times seemingly giving praise to paganism. To me, that’s a gift that I never imagined I would receive, because it potentially might help rehabilitate the idea of paganism and enable it to evolve into a force for modern times.

And if his opinion reaches as many people as it does, it leads to the question: how many people listening to him might come around to a modern take on paganism? I suppose only time will tell. But, in the meantime, I invite you to take a look at the video at the end of this post.

The Pantheon in Rome, just one of many pagan temples that the Christians converted into one of their churches.

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