PODCAST · science
The Kingless Generation
by Fergal Schmudlach
A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
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China as #1 in Japanese Literature: Battles of Coxinga, pᵗ 2 [PREVIEW]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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China as #1 in Japanese Literature: Battles of Coxinga, pᵗ 1 (Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 1715)
In part one of this second installment of our series on China as a silk road great power in pre-modern Japanese literature, we read Japanese playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s puppet play “The Battles of Coxinga,” about the half-Japanese, half-Chinese hero Coxinga (Zheng Chenggong) who fought the...
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China as #1 in Japanese Literature: “Taishokan” [PREVIEW] (Kōwaka ballad, by 1553)
Next in our ongoing series ReOrient-ing early modern literature across Eurasia, we discuss the most widely visually represented of the sixteenth-century Japanese short-form ballads known as kōwaka, which arguably surpassed the noh theatre for patronage among the warrior elite of Japan’s age of...
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Dethrone the Dictaphone
A chatty hangout episode on recent events, the class politics of fashion in our post-cultural moment, and an American (...?) Broadway musical from the End of History as performed in Japanese in air-conditioned chambers surrounded by hordes of shrink-wrapped Teslas on reclaimed land developed Tel...
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An Infant ‘West’ meets a Middle-Aged ‘East’ [PREVIEW]: Galland’s retelling of Shams-al-Nahār & Ibn Bakkār (1704–1717)
In this final episode of our first series on the 1,001 Nights, we take up Frenchman Antoine Galland’s adaptation, where we see a Europe that has only begun to see its nearest Afro-Asiatic merchant-capitalist great power as a different , “eastern” civilization whose cultural products must be held…
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Oriental Despotism comes w/ Occidental Colonization: Ibn Bakkār & Shams-al-Nahār in the Calcutta Ⅱ Nights (1839–42)
In addition to filling in more background knowledge from a scholarly article that I did find on this tale by Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, as well as some musings on the formation of the discipline of Anglophone Japan studies under the influence of Francophone Arabology, we explore this same tale in…
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Truth and Testimony, Drugs and Attachment in Bourgeois-Revolutionary Baghdad [PREVIEW]: Re-Orienting Ibn Bakkār and Shams-al-Nahār in the Arabic manuscript of the 1,001 Nights
I dust off my Arabic for some weird scenes in Silk Road–era Baghdad: a story of drugs and ego death, deadly secrets and the workers who keep them. The only tragic love story in the Nights, the story of the Persian prince Ibn Bakkār and the courtesan Shams-al-Nahār also features, only in this...
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1,001 Nights: A murdered ancestor to European Romance
One symptom of the neglect in Anglo-Zionist historiography of Arabic literature and culture—despite its role as the main heir to axial-age Mediterranean and Persian cultures and, as the western representative of the Afro-Asiatic merchant capitalist world system, key progenitor of “the West”—would...
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Eranos 4 [PREVIEW]: It was us (all along)...
In anticipation of future outings on some of the more interesting figures we've met thus far, we bring our introductory series on the Eranos milieu to a close with a discussion of the final years, as one august old racket came to an end but was simultaneously demolitioned, flipped, spun off, and...
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Eranos 3: Mircea Eliade, Mellon Fellow of Death, w/ Scott Ryan of the Dustlight Archives
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Eranos pᵗ 2 w/ Scott [PREVIEW]: Furio Jesi vs the Satanic-Orientalists
More ideological and world-historical groundwork, as we introduce, for me, the real hero of this story, the Jewish Italian Communist mythologist Furio Jesi (1941–1980), a rival to many in the Eranos crowd who critiqued their Aryo-heroic, Christian-Kabbalist, and I would say satanic-orientalist...
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Aether Whores: Eranos and the 20th-c liberal-bourgeois vanguard, w/ Scott of the Dustlight Archives
From 1933 to 1988, the liberal spiritualist wing of the trans-Atlantic bourgeoisie had something of a think tank for spiritual and cult technology and grand strategy in the yearly gatherings of philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists like Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem,...
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(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England
We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually an endpoint for the subjectivity of the “Sons of the Silk Road” of Arabic literature, whose literary, religious…
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(15)90s Kids Know: Lizzie’s bois, overture
Building on our discussion of the Water Margin (the most important surviving versions dating to the 1590s), we go “back”—notice the scare quotes!—to what is usually at least passively assumed to be the source of the culture of capitalist modernity, merry aul England. What we will find, of course,...
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Casual chat, core content [PREVIEW]
I swore I wasn’t going to do a chatty one but rather a hard core cultural-historical content for the next premium episode, but I just gave myself podcaster’s block again as I have several irons in the fire none of which feels quite ready. But so much has been happening in the world that I just…
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Weebs of the Ages: Lafcadio Hearn, the “Brownie” who taught Japan to want whiteness
Living in Japan, the dominant image of Lafcadio Hearn is something like: he’s that white man who came to Japan and told us he believed in us—he knew we had it in us to become the honorary-white vassal of Anglo-America that we are today! A new TV drama on the national broadcaster NHK lavishes…
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Organizing Bourgeois Revolution in East Eurasia [PREVIEW]: The Water Margin (水浒传) w/ River
First externally attested in 1524, the Ming-dynasty Chinese novel Water Margin collects legends about a band of merry men of genius who love righteousness, and who fight to stop a corrupt imperial bureaucracy from exploiting the people. However, the leader of these social bandits, Song Jiang…
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Organizational Proprioception w/ River
Seasoned organizer and noided leftist River from River to Reality joins us to share their theoretical concept of organizational proprioception: just as our nervous systems need to communicate well with all parts of our bodies in order to experience all the parts of our bodies as our own and have...
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A Holiday Ramble in Hibiya Park [PREVIEW]
A quick, chatty, catch-up episode recorded in a park in central Tokyo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Left=Noided, Noided=Left: w/ River (featuring Fire in the Minds of Men)
On this podcast I have often argued against the “anti-conspiracy left”, but now that everyone and your mom can’t help but be noided, the relevant question is no longer, “If you’re on the left, can you be noided?” but rather, “Since you’re noided, should you be on the left or the right?” To argue...
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Britain is a Figment of the Crusader Imagination [PREVIEW]: King Arthur as Farang Mahdī
Much modern scholarship on King Arthur has revolved around the question of his historicity and origins, the recent greatest example being Higham’s magisterial 2018 survey of all the major theories—except the one that I advance here: Arthur was only one of many legendary chivalric heroes with whom...
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Sisterfucker: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, pt 3
In this final session, we put the proverbial big old boulder into the sweltering primordial pond with meditations on myths of brother-sister marriage and divorce from the Kojiki (712), the taboo on sibling incest in the mother-right kinship structures of Trobriand Islanders as seen in the...
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The Birth of the Comprador Chief and the Defeat of the Secret Society [PREVIEW]: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, part 2
This time we hit our stride, discussing the interplay of Indigenous state and deep state, chief and secret society, sometimes in resistance to colonization and sometimes in service of comprador opportunism—though as Nathan points out, which it might be in any given moment is worked out through a...
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A Yakuza Filmmaker Takes it Back to the Dawn of Time: Imamura Shōhei’s Profound Desire of the Gods, part 1
Nathan, AKA KUBARK Stare, @postcyborg on Twitter, an organizer of a film club in London which listeners should check out, joins me for a conversation about noided proletarian filmmaker Imamura Shōhei’s 1968 film Profound Desire of the Gods. Former Ozu disciple Imamura rejected the neat and clean...
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Japanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine) [PREVIEW]
I have several episodes in development, but each one I feel like I need to read at least one more book before it’s ready, so for now, some newsy musings on current events mostly in Japan, where this weekend’s election sees a far-right populist party set to pick up a dozen seats: Sanseitō, whose...
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Riffing in the Dark w/ Sina Rahmani
Sina Rahmani of The East is a Podcast and Red Media had planned to come on the show before this, and in light of the Zionist entity’s unprovoked attack on his ancestral country of Iran in violation of international law I offered him every chance to back out, but hardworking podcaster that he is…
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English for Compradors on the Eve of the Final Enclosure [PREVIEW]: A Journey into TED Talk Hell
It’s a pungent bouquet of TED Talks! A blast from the past! Some shots from the aughts! Put on your Pynchon goggles, your Mabeuf plague mask, and your Cuttlefish gloves, because we’re opening up this most dracular document of the moment before the long 2014. P.S. The episode art is from the…
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When Karate was a Weapon of the Colonized Working Class: The “China Hand Technique” in Japanese Proletarian Fiction
If you had a male-coded childhood at all recently in the Anglo-American world, you have felt the influence of the Soldier of Fortune culture of the 1980s, within which martial arts and other action films featuring Silvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal were prominent, and accompanied...
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Eat the Yellow Powder, Get in the Wara [PREVIEW]: The first king, the first collapse, and the first underground bunker society in the Avesta and the Ṛigveda
What is the difference between East and West? One helpful line to draw is that between Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures, as seen in the extremely ancient traditions of the Avesta and the Ṛigveda, respectively. Whereas the common Indo-European heritage of multiple generations of gods (ahuras/asuras...
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総論①階級格差社会には始まりがあった
人類30万年。その大半を占めるさまざまな平等・自由・創造性ある先「史」社会、そして穀物国家における階級闘争五千年のごく小さな誕生。 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Conversion of Kevin Gaijinson ケビン・ガイジンソンの転向 [PREVIEW]
To introduce Kevin Gaijinson, the show’s new Japanese language host, I share an old conversation with him from back when he was still a raging weeb spreading Anglo-American imperialism in blissful ignorance while speaking better Japanese than the Emperor, gambling with the yakuza, and teaching…
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Ritual Serial Murder and the Birth of a Ruling Class: Popol Vuh, Title of Totonicapán (Maya, 16th c.) [PREVIEW]
At the end of the ancient mythology section we discussed last time, the Popol Vuh (here paralleled by the Title of Totonicapán) depicts the restoration of militaristic class society in the K’iche’ corner of the Maya world in the 13th c. CE, after some centuries of relative freedom and equality...
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Roasting out the old year
Before the dawn of what I hope will be a much more productive year for the podcast, join me in a warm and toasty room for some green tea, guitar, and guileless meditations. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Fireside Chats on Turtle Island, take 1
I did it, folks: I returned to the burning bouncy castle that is the small town settler entity on Turtle Island. In between fulfilling various karmic obligations and reconnecting with fellow settlers, relatives and friends on both sides of the Trump/Kamala cultic divide, I managed to do some...
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The Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (K’iche’, 1550s)
The first half of the Popol Vuh as we have it from the Kʾicheʾ colonial tradition is a quintessentially Kingless epic, as the story revolves around pre-human gods, successive generations of hero twins, who must defeat a series of aggrandizer figures, including the lords of death in the…
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Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE) [PREVIEW]
In a series that I hope will include Martin Bernal’s classic Black Athena (about the modern British fabrication of “ancient Greece” and its true roots in ancient Egypt), we start with the East: in recent decades, great advances in Hittite studies have illuminated much of the mechanics of...
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Consuming the Samurai Self (“The Playboy Dialect,” 1770, Japan)
A close reading of “The Playboy Dialect,” a classic sharebon, or narrative of fashion and manners in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, where a consumer culture, to rival anything concocted by the capitalist dictatorships of the Century of the Self, was wielded as a weapon of class…
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The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees (Palestine, 3rd-2nd c. BCE) [PREVIEW]
The rise of ancient empires in the Eurasian continent ushered in the Axial Age, with its ideologies of absolute good and evil and the promise of revolutionary recompense for unheard-of oppression by the Occupiers of the Earth (שכני הארץ). The books of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, quoted by name in the…
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Return to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ Min
I thought I had a hot take in response to the Little Mermaid discourse last year, but predictably I’m not the first one to think of reading the Isle of Venus in Camões’ Lusiads against the Age of Exploration diary entries in which roving European savages discuss their adventures in more complex...
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ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State [PREVIEW]
The antisemitic, Nazi-adjacent ideology of Zionism says that members of the Jewish religion must be uprooted from their ancestral homelands and gathered into a white supremacist settler colony ruled by Jews native to Europe—a new kind of crusader state. And like the crusader states, at the behest...
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archive
In the final installment of the series, we cover all that is known about the mysterious death of this strangely GLADIO-brained scholar of classical Japanese literature and favorite translator of “aesthetic terrorist” Mishima Yukio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill [PREVIEW]
We explore the Windsor Free Festival, Sunday Head, Albion Free State milieu of hedonist, individualist, libertarian (and decidedly anti-communist) radicalism in 1970s Britain, led by figures like Ubi Dwyer, Sid Rawle, and Paul Pawlowski, as well as scions of elite families like Heathcote Williams...
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork Albion
From the semi-autobiographical novel of Ivan’s second Japanese wife, Nobuko Albery (née Uenishi), we have some very sardonic portraits of the Morrises and their upper-crust left-wing milieu in France, as well as a fascinating subplot involving a drug-trafficking, blue-blooded hippie cult leader...
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 5: Ogawa Ayako, ballet master of Cold War Japan [PREVIEW]
From 1956 through 1966, during which time he moved from London to Tokyo to New York, Ivan was married to the ballerina Ogawa Ayako, known in the society papers—by analogy with Jackie (Kennedy)—as Yakkie. In the realm of ballet, where other important Cold War battles were fought such as securing…
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 4: beasts in human guise
We finish our run through Ivan’s parents’ adventures, including their support for Kenyan Mao Mao revolutionaries and participation in the American-sponsored “Kenyan airlift” that also produced Barack Obama Sr, supporting Greek, Turkish, and Mexican communists in their way, but for one reason or...
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 3: in the shadow of HUAC [PREVIEW]
We follow Ivan’s parents, the peripatetic idle rich leftist novelist/journalists Ira and Edita Morris, from their wartime career “writing” in Haiti on the eve of the coup that brought the progressive President Estimé to power, then making “democratic” anti-fascist propaganda for the American…
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Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 2: communists in cashmere
I remain haunted by the ghost of a weeb, a shitlib superspy who, after cutting his chops as a naval intelligence officer in U.S.-occupied Hiroshima and Tokyo, wrote some of the first English-language scholarship of any depth on the Tale of Genji and the martial ballads, published geopolitical...
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The Last Crusade (inshAllah) [PREVIEW]
A chatty episode to break the hiatus. I discuss recent news of the new final solution being demoed by the Zionist entity in Gaza. These days I’m walking around with posture like a ballerina because I’ve been de-settlerising and un-domesticating my leg muscles by running in huaraches and doing...
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Doraemon’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Family movie day with the Schmudlachs in Tokyo usually results in a special episode of the Kingless Generation, as I dissect the petit bourgeois propaganda to which I’ve been subjected in an (arguably) more constructive forum than ranting to my kids—but this latest Doraemon film outdid even last...
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Landback in Eurasia, 622 CE [PREVIEW]
How does an Indigenous-led movement rebuild in the wake of imperial decline? With the spectacular collapse of both Sassanian Persia and Byzantime Rome in 622 CE, a certain revolutionary communal movement led by masses of nomadic herders, merchants, and farmers, provides us with one of the…
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Kingless Generation have?
The Kingless Generation currently has 97 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Kingless Generation about?
A podcast on the deep history of class struggle, paleo-parapolitics, and the demonology of capital. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How often does The Kingless Generation release new episodes?
The Kingless Generation has 97 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to The Kingless Generation on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Kingless Generation?
The Kingless Generation is created and hosted by Fergal Schmudlach.
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