Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Manchukuo 1987: High quality post-colonial SF detective noir

    Chekov’s battle-suit

    I recently finished reading Manchukuo 1987, by a person known by the pseudonym Yoshimi Red on Twitter who blogs at lateral thinking. It’s in the Sci-Fi section in Amazon, and presented as an alternative history military sci-fi detective novel by Yoshimi themself, which I think is a good description. I think it’s self-published (sorry Yoshimi Red if I’m wrong!), which means it’s quite cheap, and I recommend it strongly. This is my review, the first half of which will be spoiler-free and the second half of which will have some very mild spoilers.

    The Setting

    The novel is set in an alternative history where world war 2 kind of staggered to a stalemate, leaving Japan in possession of some of its colonies, un-nuked and essentially undefeated, with the Soviets and Nazis similarly surviving the war with some kind of territorial integrity. It’s 1987, the fag-end of the Showa era, and the Japanese empire is crumbling, Korea and Taiwan already independent and Japan’s final colony, Manchukuo, about to achieve independence in a negotiated agreement that will see the nation become independent from both the rest of mainland China (ruled by the KMT – there is no communist China in this alternative history) and Japan, under its frail and ageing emperor Puyi[1]. The Japanese empire doesn’t want to give up its territories but has been forced to by age, circumstance and general failure, but in the process of hanging onto its final territory it committed various terrible crimes, especially in past military campaigns against communist insurgents outside the cities. There is a general air of fascism everywhere in this setting, with much talk of racial purity laws, government slogans and propaganda and police everywhere, and a clear dual class system with the Manchurian people on the bottom, Japanese settlers in the middle, and Japanese from the original Island at the top. It’s a disastrous society waiting to explode. The story is set in Ryujin, a small city on the Manchurian coast.

    The story

    The main character, Munekata, is an aging member of the Kempeitai, Japan’s military police, with nothing to do while he waits for the end of the empire. He does a side hustle in private investigations and he has a bad history as a soldier in an infamous unit known for war crimes, and he spends his days burdened under the sense of his own decline, the collapse of the empire he gave his life to, and the growing decadence and seediness of the society he is in. He has a dodgy relationship with a woman called Hana, has a string of bad past relationships and bad decisions, and is generally not in a good frame of mind.

    Munekata gets tasked with investigating a crime that was committed against a young Japanese settler girl called Sachiko, and with nothing else to do he decides to take the quest for justice for Sachiko seriously. He is helped by Hana, and in the process gets entangled with various elements of the Chinese society of Ryujin – a rich author who collaborates with Japanese occupiers, a criminal gang, an extremely racist Japanese settler schoolgirl, and various representatives of the military. Of course he slowly uncovers a terrible secret behind the crime, and as colonial society begins to unravel under the pressure of the looming independence agreement he, too, begins to fall apart, driven to violent extremes in his quest to solve the crime and find justice for Sachiko.

    The Verdict

    This is a really good book. It is well-written, with an excellent pace and a simple, believable but engaging plot line that keeps you involved in the story without confusion, stupid twists, or sudden loss of coherence. As I read it I got a strong sense of hints of Mishima[2], which to me is good (I like all the Mishima I’ve read), along with hints of Richard Morgan and William Gibson. It’s difficult to pin down exactly the genre and style because it blends so many elements of alternative history, detective fiction, film noir, science fiction and political thriller, but I think it merges them really well.

    The setting is a brilliant attempt at describing life in the Asian Co-prosperity Sphere as it falls apart, which blends elements of Japanese and Chinese culture really well, lays out a convincing and believable alternative history, and describes the politics of colonial power really well. This is why I describe it as post-colonial detective noir, because Yoshimi balances the differing forces at play in an imperial colony in a way that makes them both believable and powerful parts of the story. The tension between collaborators and criminals, the compromises ordinary Chinese have to make, the confused racism of the settlers and the spiteful nature of their dependent relationship with the locals, are all very well laid out so that the many terrible and complicated decisions people have to make – and the social pressures that drive those decisions – make perfect sense. In truth except for The Man in the High Castle I haven’t read any attempts at alternative history of the Japanese empire, so I guess I can’t compare, but this is a great description that works really well.

    The characters are also very well developed and believable, and I did not at any point finding myself giving up in frustration because their flaws were too great, nor did I ever find myself finding their decisions or actions unbelievable or stupid or inconceivable. In the circumstances, they really made sense and their actions were coherent and consistent. The author’s voice focuses primarily on Munekata and his inner life, but regularly switches to give insights into the feelings and thoughts of the other characters, especially Hana and the racist schoolgirl Mizuki. There are a lot of secrets and dirty motivations in these three people’s hidden lives, and seeing them try to figure themselves out and deal with their pasts, their prejudices and their beliefs is a lot of fun.

    Also the ending is great. Read this book!

    Don’t read this book if …

    Every book has stylistic elements that some people won’t like, no matter how good it is, and this book is no exception. I think it will help to read this book if you know a little about Japanese and Chinese culture, since there is occasionally slang and reference to specific elements of e.g. Buddhism and Chinese history, and there are some elements of the setting that will make more sense if you have some familiarity with these cultures. If you aren’t into Asian culture at all, then don’t bother with this book!

    A particular issue some readers might have with this book is the rather unpleasant nature of the main characters. Munekata is basically a reformed killer, a war criminal, listless and aimless and very cynical, and although I enjoyed reading about his struggles I can understand that some people might find him too unsympathetic. His relationship with Hana is quite awful, and she’s very mean to him. Hana herself is a very compromised and confused character, as is Mizuki, and and these kinds of characters don’t appeal to everyone. Their personalities are at times quite bleak, and I understand that doesn’t appeal to everyone. But as a counterpoint, I’m actually the kind of reader who usually gives up on a story if there aren’t any redeeming or sympathetic characters, and I really enjoyed reading about these guys, so it’s probably worth challenging yourself even if you don’t normally like these types of characters.

    Finally, I guess I should say that (to me at least) this book seems quite explicitly post-colonial, in that it is describing a colonial society with an obviously critical voice – I don’t think anyone could make the mistake of thinking that Japan’s 1987 Manchurian colony is meant to be a positive place or a force for good on the Chinese mainland. If you’re not into post-colonial literature, you might want to give this a pass – but in that case you’d be missing out, and I recommend you reform your reading habits.

    Finally there are a few editing errors that occasionally jar, but for a self-published book who cares? Yoshimi, don’t waste your money on an editor!

    About the setting

    [Possible mild spoilers ahead]

    The setting is very well described. In addition to the sense of a crumbling empire, lethargic under its own weight and obviously being abandoned by the imperial core, there is also a very vividly described sense of late-Showa indecision and staleness. Everyone I speak to in Japan has this criticism of the late Show period, that nobody was making decisions and everyone was just fumbling along, not sure what to do or how to get along. In real history at this time Japan was hurtling towards a bubble, with the young people of the era living hedonistic lives of great wealth and consumption while the nation’s leaders – largely born in early Showa, who Japanese people sometimes refer to with disdain as Showa shoki danshi – fiddled and refused to take the actions they needed to turn the economy away from its disastrous path. In this alternative history there is no mention of the bubble economy in the main islands, but it is very clear that the colony of Manchuria is falling apart and no one in the leadership has any ideas about what to do. Stubborn, narrow-minded, inflexible and incurious, the leadership are classic Showa leaders and the sense of everything crumbling while they fiddle around and faff is great.

    The story also features another classic of Japanese literature, especially manga: the secret machinations and conflicts between branches of government. Munekata is in the military police, but formerly he was in a special army of super-powered combat-suit wearing mass murderers called the Survey Unit, who spent their time raiding villages and burning them and killing everyone to save them from themselves. Then they were just kind of disbanded in disgrace and Munekata was moved to the military police, where he is kind of not on good terms with other elements of his own police force and the broader military. Everyone is spying on everyone, and of course the plot Munekata uncovers involves different branches of the military and civil society playing off against each other for their own stupid ends that they all pretend are for the good of the emperor. This is a super common element of Japanese fiction, representing in my opinion unresolved social trauma and political memories from the war (which was famously undermined by the conflict between the Navy and the Army), and it’s good to see it reproduced in brutal form here.

    As part of the setting we regularly have memories of Munekata’s period in the Survey Unit, which was a nasty organization that really helps us to understand that this imperial venture in Manchukuo was evil. During those flashbacks we learn slowly about “the vast plains”, the areas outside the cities that are essentially breeding grounds for a communist insurgency[3]. They play a role similar to “the bush” in an Australian novel, or the hinterlands in a typical post-apocalyptic story, and lurk on the edge of the story like a threat. Meanwhile in the city there is a criminal underground and a teeming underclass of desperate Chinese, held in subjection by the Japanese colonial overlords and constantly ready to erupt in violence. Nobody in settler society is willing to confront the reality of this underclass and what they’re going to do when imperial oversight ends. It’s great, the lurking threat of communists on “the vast plains” and rage-filled colonial subjects in the city, all slowly heating to boiling point …

    Finally, there is a lot of effort in this story to imagine how society would have developed in this imperial setting, where two historically very closely linked societies are trapped in an unequal struggle based on violence and possession. The characters describe two new forms of Japanese: Kyowa-go, which is a mixture of Chinese and Japanese used to communicate with the many colonial subjects who work alongside the Japanese settlers (like civil police, servants and so on); and Armee Japanisch, a German loan-word, which describes a kind of authoritarian and bullying version of Japanese used to threaten and cower colonial subjects. Although this is mostly used by Munekata, other characters occasionally use it mockingly or in defense. Alongside this we see other aspects of the merging of colonial and settler classes on the fringe of the society, and we also hear rumours about colonial families that have come undone through sexual interaction with colonial society, or through crime and entanglements. In some ways like Burmese Days, we see this primarily through the viewpoints and antagonisms of the settler Japanese (Munekata and Mizuki), which also means we don’t fully understand their nuance or their depth. This is a really engrossing and engaging construction of an alternative history society.

    Finally, there is a constant overlay of fascism on all of this. Settler characters refer constantly to the racial purity laws (when they were in place, when they were removed, how they need to be navigated), Munekata is familiar with and occasionally references the extensive secret police files on everyone in the city, and the settlers themselves live in a walled-off, separate area of the city that is heavily guarded. At the same time there are attempts to build a long-term functioning society from this unequal division of racial rights, so we regularly see references to pictures and slogans that depict Manchurians and Japanese working side by side to build the nation or to fight of communists. I imagine that living in Rhodesia near the end would have been quite similar to many of the social systems in place in Manchukuo in 1987, and they are brought vividly to life by the excellent writing.

    Final notes

    This is a great book, really well written and set in a carefully crafted and very complete alternative history, an imagined past where Japan got to implement its vision of the racial order of the Asia-Pacific. Its political and social themes are nuanced and carefully described, its characters are deep and engaging, the physical setting is very well described and feels vividly real, and the story is gripping and engaging. I strongly recommend this book!

    fn1: Yes, the Puyi from the Last Emperor, still hanging onto life and established as a “co-equal” emperor (in name if not formally) with the Japanese emperor.

    fn2: I know Mishima is a weirdo gay fascist, so sorry Yoshimi if that comparison annoys you, but I think he was a great writer, a kind of Japanese DH Lawrence.

    fn3: Mao is dead, executed by the army, but the insurgency lives on, trying to take over both Manchukuo and Kuomintang China, opposed by the Japanese in the former and the “liberal” Chinese government in the latter.

  • The Substance: Misogynist Trash, Badly Done

    The other day I aimlessly chose a movie to watch at the local cinema, and settled on The Substance, which I somehow mistakenly thought was a psychological thriller with a fantastic or horror element. I don’t know where I got that idea from, but the poster certainly did not give away that it is a body horror. I also had a vague impression that this movie is a reflection on the politics of female aesthetics in Hollywood, possibly even that it was a feminist critique of Hollywood’s double standards, so I imagined it would have some kind of feminist ending possibly working a revenge/thriller angle into the feminist critique. Since I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, I thought I’d give it a go.

    Unfortunately, it’s a body horror, which is a terrible kind of movie to watch without proper preparation, it’s not feminist at all – quite the opposite! – and it has a really, really bad ending that is both thematically and aesthetically ridiculous, and an insult to both the artistic and intellectual capacity of its audience. The Substance is, in essence, one of those increasingly common movies that insults its audience’s intelligence, carrying a deeply misogynist message while missing all the best possibilities of the genre, and being gross besides.

    I do not recommend you watch this movie for any reason, and I’m going to explain why now. Warning: extensive spoilers ahead, but you’ll thank me for it when you get to the end and realize what an awful shitshow you avoided by reading this.

    The premise

    The basic premise is actually cool. Elizabeth Sparkle is a famous showbiz star (even has her own star! on that godawful street in LA that isn’t worth visiting) who gets sacked from the show she headlines on her 50th birthday because she’s no longer young and sexy. By coincidence she is offered a chance to trial a new “experience”, which will make a new and better version of herself. She stupidly agrees to do this, and goes through an obviously shady and extremely dodgy process of acquiring a package of medical tools that will change her.

    The basic process is: she injects a substance that makes a new, young, sexy version of herself crawl out of her own body. Her body remains alive but comatose, and the new version of herself (called Sue) needs to use a horrible need to drain spinal fluid from comatose Elizabeth, and inject it into herself every day as a stabilizer. Then, after 7 days they switch: Sue plugs a two-way catheter into Elizabeth, they exchange fluids and then Elizabeth wakes up and Sue sleeps. During each seven day period either Elizabeth or Sue (whoever is sleeping) receives IV nutrition, and the rules are strict: they must switch every 7 days *without exception*, and they must remember that the two bodies are actually one.

    The important point here is that Sue is young and beautiful and sexy and luscious, while Elizabeth is old and gross and fading. I like the process, it’s very body horror and gross and it leaves this kind of Dorian Gray-like body in the apartment while the other woman lives her life. It seems that each woman doesn’t know what the other one did, so when Elizabeth wakes up she doesn’t know that Sue has taken her old job, or who Sue is fucking, or what plans she is making. Everything each woman needs to know about the other woman’s life is learnt from clues left around their (awful) apartment.

    The story

    From here of course it all goes wrong in the expected ways. Sue, young and sexy and reckless, starts extending the time to the Switch, taking extra spinal fluid from Elizabeth and having fun until things go wrong, and every time Elizabeth wakes up a part of her has been ruined by Sue’s excesses. For example, the first time Sue goes over, one of Elizabeth’s fingers is a mess. Elizabeth has no way of knowing what Sue is doing and both of them are too stupid and self-absorbed to write each other notes, so they just kind of try to figure it out.

    Elizabeth starts to resent Sue, and Sue becomes very successful very quickly, with many reasons to put the Switch on hold. Finally, Sue is offered the chance to host the New Year show (which doesn’t make any sense, for reasons we’ll explore below), delays the Switch for weeks, and finally has to Switch when Elizabeth runs out of spinal fluid. But this happens the evening of the New Year show, of course, so Sue makes a reckless gamble. She digs up the unused portion of the original injection material and injects it into herself, thinking she can birth a prettier version of herself to do the show. Unfortunately the self that is born is a hideous monster, composed of horrible parts of Sue and Elizabeth, which goes to the theatre, intrudes on the show, and at the highlight of the show starts exploding with blood all over the audience. This last 30 minutes goes from Body Horror to David Lynch style stupidity, with the horrible Sue/Elizabeth creature spurting blood like a fountain across the stage and the crowd, stupid music playing, overdone and overdramatic scenes from the crowd as they panic and run, etc. It’s like a terrible, blood-soaked, juvenile version of the mall scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, if that scene was awful in every way.

    Why it sucked

    There are multiple reasons it sucked: the background of the star and the reasons she was replaced, the nature of her replacement, the complete failure to explore the sinister organization providing “the Experience”, the deeply misogynist message, and the absolutely trashy, shitty ending. Let’s go through them.

    Nobody cares about your aerobics

    The problems start with the source of Elizabeth Sparkle’s “fame” and why she lost her job. Although the movie hints that Elizabeth was once a famous movie star, when it opens Elizabeth is the star of a morning aerobics show for middle-aged women, in which Elizabeth and all her co-stars are mature women who are leading their audience (the viewers at home) through a high-energy aerobics set. This is cool and everything, but it is absolutely the stony end of fame, and anyone who has sunk to fronting an aerobics show knows their star has long since flamed out. Not only should they have long ago come to terms with their fading glory, but they also would be well aware that their job is entirely dependent on their fitness and looks. Being sacked because you’re too old and ugly is the most ordinary thing about such a show!

    Also, it’s completely normal, realistic and to be expected that a 50 year old woman is too old for an aerobics show. It’s high energy! They have to speak while they bounce! They have to look young and energetic! These shows are never fronted by women over 50. If I was turning 50 as the host of an aerobics show I’d probably resign! That’s hard work.

    Of course it didn’t have to be this way: the show could have started off with Elizabeth working in a role she does not need to be attractive for. She could have been a newscaster, a daytime interview host like Oprah, a weather presenter, the host of a kids’ show. In these cases, sacking her because she’s too old and ugly and replacing her with some floozy is an insult to her and to women everywhere, and it provides a really good starting point for her rage. Why did you sack me from a talking job because my tits are sagging? I’m going to fix this by making a new me!

    That works! But the aerobics show thing just doesn’t. No one who does that is actually successful, and nobody who does that expects to last in the role past 50.

    But there’s another problem here: the actor playing this woman is Demi Moore, famous sex symbol from the 1990s. We see her naked early on and she’s still got it! No 50 year old woman, looking in the mirror and seeing Demi Moore’s body looking back at her, is going to be especially exercised about making a younger, hotter version of themselves. It just doesn’t work!

    The failure of the replacement

    So, to fix this Elizabeth goes through this insane and horrible transformation, where her back splits open and a new version of herself crawls out of the wound, then for the rest of her life she has to be stabbed with a needle once a day by her alter-ego Sue, be asleep for 7 days in every 14, etc. It’s an enormous price to pay! And what does she get for this enormous price? A mediocre-looking Sue, who simply restarts working in the same job. Doesn’t become a movie star or bed the richest man on the planet or anything like that – just goes to the casting for the role Elizabeth just lost, gets it, and starts working as the next aerobics show host. Birthed from Elizabeth’s spine, she crawls bloody and mediocre straight to the equivalent of showbiz failure. Why?

    Sue is not especially beautiful or sexy, within the rules of Hollywood. There is one scene where she is walking towards the camera in her leotard and her thighs are rubbing together – this “super hot” aerobics instructor doesn’t even have a thigh-gap. Do you think a modern Hollywood production studio would cast a woman without a thigh gap in an aerobics show? I don’t think so. Of course, by the standards of us mortals she’s hot and pretty, but she’s inferior in every way to her backing dancers, and she’s not that pretty by the standards of the industry she’s in. This is what Elizabeth sacrificed half her waking life for?

    If you go to the casting list for the show you’ll see why Sue is not especially attractive, though. It’s not because she’s meant to look this way. It’s because the actor is Andie McDowell’s daughter, and all the major roles in modern cinema have been reserved for the children of famous actors. Whenever Sue has to look hot, a team of body doubles do her job for her.

    They could of course have made a play out of this in the movie: Elizabeth could have told the studio her daughter was going to apply for the job, and then Sue turns up for the audition. Cue scenes of all the hopeful nobodies being disappointed because the actor’s daughter got the part. Fun, right?

    Wrong. No fun is allowed in this movie.

    About the Experience

    It’s really unclear who is behind the treatment Elizabeth receives. She never meets anyone who dispenses it, speaks to them only on the phone, picks up her supplies from a dodgy postbox, has no company name, nothing. Who are they? Is she paying? Is she an experiment? What is the purpose? Where is this tech from? We don’t learn anything, even though they’re obviously dodgy. If the whole movie were not completely tied up in the personal drama between Elizabeth and Sue, they could have perhaps joined forces to take on this organization and reveal the truth, maybe find some serum that frees both of them to live their lives. And this is the most interesting thing about this movie! Why would anyone come up with this weird treatment, why do they call it the Experience, why are they giving it away?

    We find out nothing, and instead everything remains locked in this personal drama between two women, which is instigated and fueled by an organization that seems to be staffed entirely by men …

    The misogynist message

    The first half of the movie is interesting, as Elizabeth begins to become jealous of Sue and Sue’s selfish activities begin to affect Elizabeth. Elizabeth calls the organization and complains about Sue but they remind her of the fundamental principle that the two bodies are one, implying that anything Sue is doing is somehow under the control of Elizabeth. But Sue is a reckless, shallow party animal, and her selfishness is slowly draining Elizabeth’s life blood. Elizabeth becomes increasingly angry with Sue, expressing her anger in the most ridiculous ways (none of which are a note to Sue!) This conflict finally ends with the two confronting each other (due to Sue’s recklessness) and Sue killing Elizabeth, which incidentally is ridiculous since Sue cannot live without Elizabeth.

    So basically the entire plot revolves around a conflict between two women, somewhat akin to a mother-daughter conflict, in which the mother is jealous of the daughter’s beauty and the daughter refuses to respect her progenitor or to treat her own body with the respect it needs, and this brooding resentment grows until they have a conflict where one woman kills the other. All of which was brought about by the elder woman’s shallow desire to stay pretty, and the younger woman’s inability to respect an older, uglier woman. And the quintessential cause of all this was a series of injections provided to the older woman by a man.

    It’s all a bit shit, isn’t it? It’s just the same old misogynist story, repackaged with body horror. This misogyny is reinforced by the constant stream of tits, arse and cunt throughout the movie. Sue’s reimagined aerobics show is a twerkfest, and every time we see her on the show we get the typical crotch-shot, the classic semi-pornographic promise that the leotard/bikini is going to slide enough for you to get a glimpse. We routinely get full-body shots in the shower of both women, and in the ridiculous climax all the backup dancers are bare-chested, tits out for all to see. When the hideous Sue/Elizabeth monster has its on-stage meltdown a breast even slowly bulges out of one eye, and falls to the stage like one of those weird gross flying sperms in Eraserhead[1]. It’s a grotesque manipulation of the female body, intended to humiliate and disgrace women as a gender. Sure, there are gross men depicted grossly, who pray on these women and are in charge, but we never ever see them naked or in compromising, humiliating positions related to their bodies. Only the women in this show are embodied, and their bodies are grotesque, sexual or treacherous but never valued.

    It’s classic misogyny!

    The trashy ending

    The ending makes no sense and is no fun, just 30 minutes of cringe. You sit there hiding your eyes as this badly-done monstrosity pumps impossible amounts of blood in spurts onto an over-acting, cartoon-like crowd to the backing of bad music. It’s really obvious that after establishing the complex psychology and body horror of the relationship between Elizabeth and Sue the writers are completely out of ideas. They don’t know how to end the story, so they just plunge it into bloody farce.

    This ending also betrays the body horror of the first half of the movie, which while gross is also carefully done with a specific tacky /trashy theme. The way the male producer eats, the way he pisses, the grotesque birthing of Sue from Elizabeth, the specific aesthetic of the medical implements used, the sounds of Sue sewing up Elizabeth’s back, the colours of the spinal fluid as it degrades to snot, the horrible puncture wound in Elizabeth’s spine, everything is carefully designed to disgust, disturb and horrify in a particular way. Then in the last 30 minutes it’s just fountains of blood and squealing women, all the nuance and care and attention to detail replaced with this dumb-arsed fountain of blood. It’s one of the lamest, most inconsistent thematic turns I’ve ever seen in cinema, as well as the stupidest non-ending you can imagine. It really smells like the writers had a different ending in mind but the producers shit-canned it – probably because it was feminist – and forced the director to retcon this broadway shitshow onto the end.

    I really wish I had walked out at the point where the final scene obviously turned dumb, but the cinema was dark and it was too much effort and I wanted to know just how stupid the directors were, so I had to sit through the worst 30 minutes of lame-arsed bloodspurts you’ve ever seen. It was gross, dumb, boring and cringey.

    If you do watch this movie, walk out 30 minutes before the end. In fact, walk out when Sue kills Elizabeth. Everything after that is a waste of your time.

    Why do they do this to us?

    The first half of this movie was hard going but interesting. Demi Moore and Denis Quaid did well, and the plot was intriguing at this point, buoyed up by the weirdness of the Experience. Also, the music was okay. But as soon as they had to come to a resolution of the tension between Elizabeth and Sue they failed, and turned the show into a misogynist shitshow that was an insult to its audience. Why?

    There were alternative stories they could have told. Elizabeth could have been a news announcer rather than an aerobics presenter, with no reason to be fired and an abiding rage. Sue could have got her job through sexual favours, knowing from Elizabeth’s experience that this is how it is done, and carrying an abiding rage. They could have written notes to each other, or left videos on their phone, and slowly built a rapport, then in their separate 7 day periods of activity prepared a terrible revenge. The movie manoeuvres so that they wake up together – they could have done this but then united as a team, rather than fighting out of jealousy, raided the location of the lab that produced the material and sought answers. They could have done a Thelma and Louise style flameout, taking down everyone who ever wronged Elizabeth when they realized that the Experience could only end badly. There were so many opportunities to make an interesting ending, but instead they just had this tortured Elizabeth/Sue body, this weird progeny of both of them, explode in blood onstage and then die.

    The ending – the entire second half of the movie – was obviously shit. It was transparently bad. Why is it that movie producers routinely do this to us? It’s an insult to us as consumers, as adults, as rational people, as consumers of art. Do these producers even think of what they do as art, or just see it as a very roundabout way of delivering investment profits? Do they care about their audience at all? Or is Hollywood now so inbred, inward-looking and cloistered that they look at a plot like this and think it’s smart, incisive, politically insightful? Did they think this misogynist trash was a feminist movie? Or do they think that if they tell a story about two women we’re all so stupid we’ll immediately interpret it as feminist? Do they think we think at all?

    I’m so sick of the movie industry doing this to us. It happened with Star Wars, which was an absolutely epic six episodes of treating us like shit, and of course they do it with so many of their action movies with their daddy issues and their completely superficial attempts to engage with social issues. They did it in spades with Game of Thrones, which was a slap in the face to everyone who had watched it for so many years. And they somehow here found a way to do the same insulting failure with body horror, which you would think would be immune to stupidity and condescension. It’s so common, so disappointing, and such an indictment of the modern movie industry.

    So, don’t be like me: Don’t give these fuckwits your money to watch this trashy, patronizing, misogynist crap!

    —

    fn1: One of the shittest movies ever made

  • Skulltide, Grave Orc Cleric

    We carry in our hearts the true country
    And that cannot be stolen
    We follow in the steps of our ancestry
    And that cannot be broken

    We Orcs do not have “names”, because every one of us is a verse in the ongoing Saga of our Clan. Were you to simplify the verses of my story so far into a phrase suitable for your frail, Embodied[1] language, then you may call me Skulltide, Blade of Memory.

    I grew up among the Clan known as the Wardens of Memory, in the Valley of the Pylons. You have surely heard of it? The wide, silent valley where no bird sings and strange towers of obsidian rise at inscrutable angles from thick, wild forests. Those towers, formed of alien magic of impossible age, draw to them the lost and wandering essence of the restless dead from great distance. They drift down the valley’s central river, The Lacrima, visible in the quiet darkness as werelights and eerie will-o-wisps, fickle and deadly to those who have not learned the Songs of my Clan. Each of those balls of baleful essence-memory eventually drifts away from the river into the enclosing forest, to be drawn to one of the Pylons, where its essence and memories are drawn into the arcane stone. We, the Wardens of Memory, tend to the valley and bear witness to the torments and longings of the lost essence. All of us serve some purpose in the Clan’s function – but the Clan is dying, being slowly consumed by the Pylons it serves. Many of us simply disappear, wandering into the Forest of Memory and succumbing to the eerie spiritual call of the Pylons. Their souls leave their bodies, which they abandon to the scavengers among the trees, and are drawn into the Pylons themselves, lost to us and to time.

    There is much debate in our clan as to why this is. Some say our Clan was bound here as punishment for an ancient sin, to be slowly consumed in service to the Pylons. Many speculate as to our ancient sin – did our ancestors build the Pylons? Did they harvest essence from the Embodied for some evil goal, that now we must all pay for until our Clan disappears? Were we trapped in the Valley by a curse? Did the Pylons curse us? Some argue the Pylons need souls as fuel, that they were built long ago by some evil empire to store the memories of all its people, and from the outset were designed to sustain their sinister magic through the harvesting of the souls of the True People[4]. Because the Saga of our clan is so old and so long, and the language of our people has changed so much in the aeons that the saga was written, we cannot easily interpret those early stanzas – indeed, few of us even know them – and so we cannot know the truth of our circumstances, except that which we know in this the present moment of our Saga: that our task consumes us, and within a few generations our Clan will disappear, our Saga be lost to time, if we cannot learn the truth of this affliction.

    I, being one of the Subtle, was selected from an early age to study the divine, and to fulfill a role among the lost essences. But as our Clan’s numbers dwindled and our situation became more desperate, a faction among us decided that it was time to seek outside for knowledge. I was trained as a Warden of Memory, drawing my divine power from the knowledge and essence of the Pylons, but one day I was sent away from the Valley. Our people learned of the existence of a great and learned Necromancer on an island far from our land, and discovered that refugees from one of your pitiful internecine conflicts were fleeing there. I was sent down the Lacrima on a raft, to join one of those ships and travel to the Island, there to find my way to the Necromancer to learn more about the secrets of the Pylons. If the Necromancer has no knowledge well, we Subtle live long and vigorous lives – I will simply continue traveling until I learn the truth of the Pylons, and save my Clan.

    I will cut the ties of Memory that bind us to the Pylons, that we may forever live in the Valley and fulfill the role our Clan is destined for. And until I do, you may call me Skulltide, Blade of Memory.

    fn1: Orcs do not believe that non-Orcs have souls. Rather, they see non-Orc humanoids as a heightened form of animal, which over its lifetime imprints its memories and impressions onto the essence that flows through it. When some of those non-Orcs die, their essence lingers as a ghost[2], though most of this essence flows back into the mortal realm and returns to the power spots from whence these heightened form of animals drew it with the power of their will. Thus, non-Orcs are referred to as “Embodied” in the (higher) language of Orcs.

    fn2: Have you ever seen an Orcish ghost or revenant? No, because souls require exceptional circumstances to be tricked into remaining in the mortal realm after their death. Such depravity is primarily the consequence of the unknowing, spiritually uninformed characteristics of essence

    fn3: Orcs have three genders, though to the outsider they may appear to only resemble the two genders that characterise the limited spiritual and physical condition of the Embodied. Those we call the Primal are the largest among our kind, lean-bodied and muscular, giants compared to most of the Embodied. They are most likely to physically resemble those you call “men”, and so when we (lower ourselves to) speak with your kind, we refer to them as such. Those we call the Inchoate are usually the smallest of our kind, slightly shorter-lived and more likely in their passionate nature to take on the form you Embodied call “women”, and so we assign them that gender in our dealings with you Embodied. The remainder, those we call the Subtle, are between these two kinds in size and strength, equally likely to take either physical appearance as they grow – and sometimes both – and do not easily fit into your restrictive and arbitrary categories. Of course usually, given the lack of subtlety in the minds of the Embodied, you will confuse our form with one of your two genders, and who are we to correct you? But strictly speaking, I am a third.

    fn4: The Orcs are the True People.

    Image credit: Kikicianjur on DeviantArt:

  • Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

    I have been playing Star Wars recently with my regular group, first using the Genesys rules and (since yesterday) using a port of the Coriolis rules, because we’re all sick of Genesys. The Star Wars universe is fun and, like D&D or Lord of the Rings, has that particular positive quality that you can settle into it without knowing anything about it – it just feels familiar. Plus, running around on missions for the Hutts is fun, what could go wrong? However, it is beginning to feel like the Star Wars universe suffers the same problem I have identified with the Harry Potter universe – it is fine so long as it is kept within a very specific and narrow narrative framework but once you try exploring it freely as an adult outside its original confines it falls apart fast. I want to try examining how in particular the Star Wars universe is weird, first from the perspective of the weird inconsistencies in the amount of energy available to its denizens, then through a discussion of how we should interpret the inequality of the rim relative to the core in light of these calculations and what we know of its history, and then through some specific examples of how this affects e.g. energy weapons and the existence and behavior of Hutt space.

    How Many Dyson Spheres do You Need?

    First let’s do some energy and energy density calculations, and introduce some reference values, by way of setting the context[1]. First, from this Forbes article (?) we can establish that the amount of energy required to destroy a planet like Alderaan is about 2e32 Joules[2]. That is, 2×10^32 Joules. Some quick online searches tell me that the sun outputs 4×10^26 Joules. So the Death Star is, to all intents and purposes, a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificially-created star, and because we know from the three original movies what the time frames are, it takes the Empire about 3 years to build one.

    From a random and quite wild blog post we can estimate the death star to have a mass of about 2e18 kg, meaning that it has an energy density of an astounding 10^14 Joules per kg, if the whole thing was a giant battery. We will return to this information a little later. Here are some other random bits of information about energy:

    • The population of the earth consumes about 2×10^20 Joules of energy per year, meaning that if we assume most of that energy is consumed by 100 million rich people, the average energy consumption of the richest societies on earth is about 10^12 Joules in one year
    • If we assume an X-wing fighter weighs about 20tons, the energy required to accelerate this thing to 10000 x the speed of light (10k C) in one second would be about 10^4x3x10^8x2x10^4 (using energy required as mass times the final speed obtained, i.e. the change in momentum) which is, essentially 6×10^16, let’s say 10^17 Joules
    • Apparently a star destroyer weighs 40 million tons, which means it would take 10^20 Joules to get to the same speed[3]
    • A typical nuclear reactor produces a GW of power, which is 10^9 Joules
    • The original steam engine, the Watt engine, invented 250 years ago, generates 6 horsepower or about 4200 Joules, 4×10^3 Joules. So over 250 years we have improved our energy generation capacity by a factor of a million. But note that nobody in the modern world uses a Watt Engine to do anything!
    • A modern LIthium-ion battery has an energy density of about 750000 Joules, that is 7.5×10^5 Joules.
    • A lead-acid car battery has an energy density of about 150000 Joules, which is 1.5×10^5 Joules. I think this means that energy technology has developed much more slowly than energy generation – let’s say at the ln() of the rate of energy generation[4]
    • The Star Wars galaxy has a population of one hundred quadrillion sentient beings (10^17 people) over 1 billion (10^9) planets. I call bullshit on the latter number, since I’ve seen the map, but let’s go with it
    • A typical nuclear reactor has a 30-70% energy efficiency, with the rest of the power escaping as waste heat. If this profile applied to the Death Star it would be as hot as the sun, so we have to assume that it has almost perfect efficiency in power generation

    So let’s look at how some of those numbers work out. Dividing the energy in the Death Star by the population of the galaxy, we find that every time the Death Star is fired it generates enough energy to enable everyone in the galaxy to have a standard of living 1000 times better than the richest people on earth. During the battle of Yavin the Death Star was fired multiple times. Just to be clear I’m going to put this in quotes:

    Every time the Death Star is fired it uses enough energy to maintain the entire sentient population of the galaxy at the standard of living of the richest people on earth for a millenium

    So over the 3 years of the original 3 movies the Empire generated and wasted enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy for about five aeons. By way of contrast, the Republic presided over an era of peace for a thousand years.

    That’s a lot of energy! Another way to think of this is to imagine that the Death Star has an energy system that is 99.9999999% efficient, that is only 0.0000001% of the energy generated is lost during the firing process. This is obviously necessary, to ensure that the waste heat generated is orders of magnitude less than the temperature of the sun. That number is 10^-8%, or as a decimal, 10^-10. If an enterprising engineer on the Death Star noted this waste, they might be able to tap it, and would thus be able to drain off 10^22 Joules of energy – enough energy to maintain their home planet’s population for 100 years if their planet was as populous as earth. This is very similar to the situation in Harry Potter, where the magical world’s rubbish is valuable enough to muggles that they can use that rubbish to change their entire lives.

    Another way to think about the energy differentials involved here is to contemplate the scale of energy required from an X-wing to a star destroyer to the Death Star: we go from 10^16 J for the X-Wing through 10^20 J for the Star Destroyer to 10^32 J for the Death Star, a factor of 10^16. Compare with the ratio of energy generation from the nuclear reactor to the Watt Engine, of 10^6. We are seeing people living in and working with devices with energy density that is so far below that of the peak technology that it is as if people living on earth were using windmills to power every aspect of their lives, as if every day we saw Watt Engines alongside nuclear reactors – but three orders of magnitude greater in difference. More like if there were people living in urban Tokyo who could barely produce fire, while the rest of us cruise by in nuclear-powered cars.

    Post-poverty Science Fiction

    The implication of this is first and foremost that the Star Wars galaxy has levels of inequality that are staggering by even the worst standards of earth. Every three years the society of Star Wars is able to build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial sun, and fly it almost instantly to anywhere in the galaxy, where they can casually blow off enough energy to maintain the entire population of the galaxy at elite standards of living for a millenium, but Luke’s Uncle Owen is struggling to get by on Tatooine as a moisture farmer, pawning broken-down droids off of passing Jawa who live in conditions little better than those of a 19th-century gypsy. Tatooine isn’t the only planet where we see this poverty: the forest-moon of Endor, the planet where we first meet Rei, Jah-Jah Binks’s planet, and pretty much every planet we see in Star Wars is living in conditions little better than or a lot worse than a typical rural area in 1970s earth. In a sense this is similar to how there are people in rural Nigeria who have modern smartphones and a TV but no access to modern health care and unreliable electricity. But the difference is that those of us in the Imperial core on earth do not have access to energy sources 10^16 times better than those people living in Nigeria. In fact the World Population Review suggests a maximum of eight-fold difference in energy use between poorest and richest regions (though it has limited data on Africa). The inequality in the Star Wars universe is staggering, so great that is essentially unmeasurable with any meaningful metric.

    And it’s not like this is the fault of the Empire, either. We don’t see any evidence anywhere in the first movie that Tatooine is a once-great, super-rich society reduced to poverty by Imperial neglect or mistreatment – in fact in that movie the Empire has only been around a couple of years (a decade?) and the Republic “presided over a thousand years of peace.” All that inequality and ruin on the edge of the empire is the fault of the Republic, and nothing is presented anywhere to suggest otherwise. Now it could be argued that the Empire has been wastefully using resources on building mobile Dyson Spheres for war, which fair enough, but why wasn’t the Republic investing in these backwaters?

    They deserved to be overthrown, didn’t they?

    How small can a blaster be?

    This also has consequences for in-game mechanics, which could be interesting or alarming depending on how you approach the fantastic scale of energy generation in the galaxy. While converting our system to Coriolis rules we have been discussing the damage blasters do, and trying to distinguish between blaster pistols and blaster rifles – Coriolis and Genesys both have low damage settings, which makes it difficult to easily distinguish weapons from one another since a sword might do 2 damage and a dagger 1. But I noticed, based on the scale of these energy values, that the ridiculous energy densities of the machines in the universe suggest that any blaster of any size would contain so much energy that it could effectively disintegrate a human being with a single shot, and the form and function of any blaster pistol or rifle in the universe is essentially aesthetic. Consider the X-wing, which weighs 20,000 kg and can generate 10^16J of energy. That’s 10^12J per kg, and much higher if you look at just the engines. Or a light saber, which can run forever on a battery the size of the palm of your hand with enough energy to cut through steel or humans. There’s no reason to suppose that a blaster pistol and a blaster rifle would have any noticeable difference in damage from each other. The battery required to provide essentially infinite shots of plasma capable of eviscerating a human would probably weigh a gram in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s entirely possible that a blaster rifle that actually had the Cumbersome-3 quality would have enough energy to collapse skyscrapers. I suggested we price blaster pistols and blaster rifles only by damage done, and that the difference between them was that the greater stability of a rifle configuration allows it to fire at longer range and to use the aim action. If we don’t do that then we are essentially working in a setting where our weapons are the equivalent of police in our own world carrying nothing more effective than pebbles, to fight gangsters driving tanks. If you look even superficially at the energies involved in the Star Wars universe you start to notice a lot of things are wrong!

    How much effort is too little?

    This stupendous inequality also has implications for the entire concept of Hutt space. In the original movies we don’t see any background information about the Hutts, except to know that Jabba is a notorious gangster lording it over at least one section of a backwater desert planet. But in the games (and I assume the broader canon) Hutt space is a sprawling zone of the galaxy that covers a pretty big wedge of the galaxy and spills over onto at least one major trade route (the Corellan route). This is an area that is supposedly only nominally under Imperial control, a situation that existed before the Empire, and is controlled by competing clans of Hutts who are essentially gangsters, who the Empire attempts to cooperate with but has been “unable” or “unwilling” to completely dominate.

    But why? Why would an empire that can build two Dyson spheres in three years give a flying fuck what the Hutts think? Why would an empire that can mobilize soldiers from a population of a hundred quadrillion people, deliver them anywhere in the blink of an eye with spaceships that can generate more energy than most planetary economies, let this happen? One of my fellow players suggested that this is because controlling the Hutts is “too much effort”. But what is “too much effort” to a society that can fire off a millenium of luxury energy in a second, an economy so powerful that the waste energy from one of its flagships could fuel the industrial revolutions of a thousand planets? What, they get tired? It would take them a week to invest every planetary HQ of every Hutt clan, and when the leaders had all fled to Nal Shaddaa it would be the work of a couple of minutes to rock up and vapourize all of them. Or, if your Death Star is out of commission, you blockade that planet and wait 3 years to build another one, then rock up and vapourize them.

    The mere thought or conception of rebellion is not even possible in a galaxy where your leaders can rock up with a Death Star on a moment’s notice. It’s not like ancient Rome where you get warning that the bastards are coming months ahead, as they cross rivers and ride over mountains. They just turn up, a couple of minutes or hours or days after they left their last system, riding on a Dyson Sphere wrapped around a star that they built, and you have precisely five seconds to pledge your allegiance, hand over the traitors or get turned to cosmic dust. And all you have in reply is the galactic equivalent of a pen knife.

    Another argument for the Hutts is that the resources they ship to the empire in exchange for their nominal independence are a reward in and of themselves, but this makes no sense in a galaxy where you can build a Dyson Sphere wrapped around an artificial star, that is a weapon. Who is going to deny you anything? And what could you possibly need? The answer of course is Kyber crystals (which are apparently needed for your artificial stars) but what is an easier way to get them? Collaborating with a large criminal network, or rolling out so much energy and luxury goods that the entire galaxy is 100 million times better off than it was just 3 years ago, and everyone is happy to go along with your plans? If they stopped building star destroyers and Death Stars for just one year they would have so much energy that everyone in the galaxy could live in luxury like the Hutts. Who would be a gangster then? It’s inconceivable that the Hutts have anything the Empire would want that they cannot buy or take.

    SF’s imaginary failures

    It’s very easy when you are developing visions for new worlds to have them be incoherent and inconsistent on closer inspection. Almost all of them are. But it’s very interesting to me when they are incoherent in a way that suggests either that the fundamental social structure of the world is evil, as in Harry Potter, or the game designers really didn’t know much about how the real world works, as in Feng Shui. In this case the broader Star Wars universe seems to reflect both of these properties – I feel like people who understood how the real world works might have noticed the massive inequalities in their imagined world, and I also think they should have noticed that almost all of the social problems we see in the Star Wars galaxy are the Republic’s fault. Apparently George Lucas envisioned the rebellion as the Vietnamese and the Empire as the USA, but I think that’s a flawed vision since the rebellion is happening within the Empire, while the Vietnam war happened outside it (say what you want about the USA’s many bad geo-political practices, but Vietnam was not part of US territory before they started the war). And the inequality between the USA and Vietnam in the 1960s was not in the same order as the inequality between, say, Tatooine (not part of the rebellion!) and Coruscant in the Star Wars galaxy. In fact I would guess that the inequality between the life of a Roman Patrician and the poorest heathen resident of Britannia just by Hadrian’s Wall would have been smaller than the gap between Admiral Ozzel and Luke Skywalker. George Lucas didn’t have to think about this much, just as he didn’t have to waste much time on the structure of Hutt space, because we just got glimpses of all this stuff, fragmentary visions of a world of good and evil laid out before us as we romped through it. Was Jabba the Hutt even a planetary-level gang boss? Who knows! But once you develop the extended universe you have to figure this out, you have to systematize these ideas. I personally think it would have been much better to have the Hutts not be gangsters overall, not have a concept of Hutt space, and have Jabba the Hutt be a unique gangster in command of a single planet’s underworld, as others of other races are in other isolated parts of the edge of the empire. But no amount of careful world-building can overcome the enormous, staggering inequality at the heart of the galaxy, because it’s there in the original canon.

    Better examples of how to handle these problems are shown by Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, or in Firefly. In the Culture series we see a society that might be capable of building a Dyson Sphere (they probably would consider it too trashy a thing to bother with), but they don’t hoard the tech – they distribute all energy and wealth freely to whoever wants it, and nobody lacks for anything except by choice. This is the only logical endpoint for a society that has so much spare energy floating around that it can build its own stars and wrap a Dyson Sphere around them every 3 years[5]. There’s no rebellion from within the Culture because nobody needs anything from anyone, there is no inequality or even money. It’s luxury space communism!

    In contrast, Firefly also takes place on the edge of the empire, in outlying colonies living in grinding poverty, lawless planets and systems where gangsters control the lives of poor and desperate people while the elites in the centre look the other way or send punitive expeditions to meddle in the lives of these people on the edge who they see as trouble-makers and scoundrels. But the society of Firefly doesn’t have infinite resources, can’t build Dyson Spheres, doesn’t have the power to blow up planets, in fact can’t even properly run a randomized clinical trial of a happiness drug. There is still inequality but it is believable in its magnitude, exists for explicitly social reasons and is the central friction driving the plot. In contrast, in Star Wars we never really find out why there is a rebellion. They don’t like the Empire, something about freedom etc, but we don’t see anything about the material or political structures underlying this rebellion. All we know is that the location of the secret rebel base is in the hands of a Princess. It kind of stands to reason that there would be staggering inequality in a Republic run by Princesses, doesn’t it? But we don’t get to ask any of those questions.

    To be clear, it’s fine to me that this happens in the original three movies, I’m down with the Rebellion as soon as the show starts and I don’t need any motivation to be on Luke’s side, I know how to watch a movie. Blowing up Alderaan confirms for me that the Empire are the bad guys, even though I don’t know what the Republic did to people. That’s okay in the movies, but now my character Dita Voss is doing these jobs for the Hutts and I’m having to figure out why in this galaxy we even have Hutts and gangsters and human trafficking and poverty and contract workers in the shadow of a Dyson Sphere. Once I start exploring the broader galaxy of the expanded universe, and thinking about things like how smuggling works, why the Hutts run this system, why these planets are so poor, who I should really be trying to kill, I begin to run into big inconsistencies in the way it’s all laid out. And given the recency of the Empire, and the obvious persistence of these problems, I am starting to think I need to look further back in time to find someone to blame. And Dita Voss is starting to wonder if there is a Quelchrist Falconer she can turn to, who might have a better plan for the future, in which the Death Stars get turned on all the ruling houses, then melted down into ploughshares.

    We will need something, after all, to plough all that blood and bone into the soil of our new utopia, once those distant star lords have been dragged out of their towers of infinite energy and down into the dust beside us.

    fn1: A word of warning, it has been 30 years since I studied thermodynamics and electromagnetism so I may confuse some measures of total energy and flow of energy. Be patient with me!

    fn2: I think that article suggests we can lower the amount if we assume it uses the planets gravitational dynamics against it, but this is inconsistent with the use of the Death Star’s main weapon in Return of the Jedi to blow up spaceships, which have no meaningful gravitational effects.

    fn3: Here I’m assuming no special amount of energy required to break the light barrier or do the weird physics of hyperspeed, and assuming that the punch to light speed takes about a second. I chose 10,000 so that an X-wing can travel about 10 light years in half a day, which is consistent with the amount of time it took the pilots in Episode IV to get to the Death Star from their rebel base. An alternative method is to imagine that the hyperdrive converts their mass to energy and then transfers it, in which case the formula would be mass x 10^16 (E=mc^2, a formula originally identified by Chewbacca); in that case an X-wing requires 10^20 J and a star destroyer 10^24. But note if this is the case that the Death Star would require ~10^34 Joules to enter hyperspeed, which is more than is required to blow up Alderaan and is the energy of 100 million suns. I can’t abide those numbers! But feel free to update the wildness of this post with higher figures for hyperspeed if you want.

    fn4: You could argue that this is unreasonable since batteries didn’t exist when the Watt Engine was invented, and that in a galaxy a long way away and a long time ago they just have different battery tech. The light saber certainly seems to suggest so

    fn5: And remember, once you’ve built one of these bastards the next one is easier. You now have the energy of a million suns at your disposal in one mobile platform that moves faster than the speed of light, you can do anything, build anything. Need resources? Rock up to an uninhabitable planet and turn it to rocks, then send in the mining drones …

  • Re-reading the Mists of Avalon: When No Means No

    I am writing a series of posts about my attempt to re-read The Mists of Avalon in light of the terrible things we know about the author Marion Zimmer Bradley (MZB). The story has now advanced considerably and although it wasn’t my original intention in this re-reading, I feel I am able to glean a little bit of insight into why MZB was able to write a strongly “feminist” story with huge influence, while also being a seemingly deeply committed paedophile. Here i will discuss a little about what I think her story tells us. Past posts in the series:

    I hope to follow up with a discussion of why we liked this story when we were young, a brief discussion of MZB’s intense homophobia, and an assessment of the difference between male and female characters in the story. But for now I will briefly discuss what I think we can learn about MZB’s philosophy on child abuse from between the lines of this story.

    Trigger warning: This post is going to discuss the politics, sociology and history of rape, and is necessarily going to have to involve detailed discussion of the topic. I’ll try to keep it dry, but if this seems like it might be a bit much for you, you might want to stop here. For those not reading onward, I give my conclusion first, and then explain the reasoning.

    Summary

    This is the tl;dr for those who don’t want to read an extended discussion of the history and sociology of sexual abuse. Basically, I think that MZB understands and is fully cognizant of the principle of consent, and thinks that sex without consent is wrong. But in circumstances where the victim either is not capable of understanding consent, or due to social and cultural forces is not able to give consent, she reverses our understanding of the concept. In these circumstances, where consent cannot be given, she believes rape cannot occur. To MZB, for a person to be a victim of rape they have to be capable of resisting or saying no to sex. If they don’t understand sex and consent or society is structured in such a way that consent is not possible, they have not been raped. MZB does not see children as capable of consent – in fact I think she sees them as a kind of animal, under the control of an adult master, and it’s possible she doesn’t think children are even sentient – and so she thinks the sexual abuse of children is a natural consequence of adult desire, which cannot harm children. This explains her long-standing support for her husband’s child abuse, and her victimization of her own children, in which she very much treated them as objects under her control rather than independent living people. Below, I explore the reasons I developed this theory.

    Three powerful moments in the story

    There are a couple of scenes in the books which either serve to drive the plot forward or give an insight into the sexual politics of the story. Three crucial scenes are:

    • Arthur’s pagan king-making ritual, in which he and his sister Morgaine are tricked into having sex with each other (even though they’re basically children), and Morgaine becomes pregnant with his child. Neither Arthur nor Morgaine consider this to be rape, and the entire narrative thrust and tone of the story is that the only bad part of this was the fact that they were brother and sister
    • Gwenhwyfar is married to Arthur in an arranged marriage, after which she spends her life being fucked by him to try and produce heirs, even though her true love is Lancelet. At no point in the story does she or anyone else consider this to be institutionalized or organized rape and her only complaint about it is that maybe Arthur doesn’t love her because she was delivered to him as a secondary consideration to his primary coronation present, which was a hundred horsemen
    • Gwenhwyfar is raped by her “brother” Meleagrant, who claims rulership of her inherited lands after her father Leodegranz dies, and plans to make her his consort and thus claim the right of kingship. This is physically violent altercation in which he beats her and forces her, everyone in the story considers this to be rape and Morgaine additionally thinks Gwenhwyfar considers it to be her fault because in her christian religious viewpoint women always deserve to be mistreated

    I also reported earlier that in the first part of the story there are many scenes in which children are depicted as sexually active and curious, and the basic assumption of the story is that having sex with these children is natural and while lascivious and possibly unsavoury there is nothing about the process which is bad for the children.

    From the various accounts of the relationships in the story we can establish some themes of sexual and personal agency in the story. First let’s consider the case of Gwenhwyfar, in the context of how fantasy writers and readers typically interpret the institution of arranged marriage in their medieval worlds.

    Arranged marriage and consent in fantasy literature

    Most fantasy literature that is set in identifiably medieval settings that are both culturally and technologically medieval establishes a cultural milieu in which, at least among wealthy and noble families, arranged marriage is the norm and women are married into families for political reasons with the sole goal of producing heirs, usually male. Of course there are stories that subvert this fundamental process, and fantasy tales that reject it or – as I think is the case with Game of Thrones, critique it – but this process is common to fantasy stories and I think is put there because it reflects the understanding that a modern liberal audience has of the sexual politics of that period. MZB’s book is no different, and it is very explicit throughout the story that young women are to be married off in politically convenient ways, and their primary role in their new families is to breed. Arthur even expresses this openly in an argument with Gwenhwyfar when, to try and reassure her that he genuinely does love her and doesn’t see her as just some baggage that came with his horsemen, he points out to her that if he really didn’t love her he would put her aside for a “brood mare”. Much of the complexity of the relationship between Arthur, Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet revolves around the fact that Arthur isn’t willing to give up on his wife even though she is not discharging the single purpose of her marriage to him, which is not to love him, or even to give him sexual pleasure, but to give him an heir.

    The modern feminist understanding of this system is that it is one of organized, systematic rape, sexual slavery and human trafficking, in which women have no agency or freedom and are essentially chattel to be traded for political gain. At the time MZB was writing the second wave of feminists were critically reassessing the history of marriage, with feminists like Betty Friedan describing modern marriage as a kind of prison or trap for women, and feminists like Kate Millett and some thinkers in anarchist and Marxist feminism linking the institution of marriage to prostitution. While the ordinary, every day lives of women in these medieval marriages were, obviously, characterized by small acts of resistance, the kindness of the men they were married to and various forms of accommodation and acceptance, these human nuances should not be allowed to distract us from the fundamental structure of the medieval institution, at least as it is envisaged in popular fiction and fantasy. It was an organized and systematized form of human trafficking, in which women were sold – often as children – to be used sexually and biologically and discarded if they did not provide at least one of these two services.

    I don’t know if MZB was aware of the feminist critique of the modern or primitive institutions of marriage that was becoming widespread and controversial at the time of her writing, but there is no sign in her writing that she has any understanding or concern for this critique. There is no character in her story who speaks the way Cersei does in Game of Thrones[1], for example, who openly criticizes the institution into which she was forced in explicitly feminist terms, and contrasts the agency and freewill of her affair with her brother with the brutality and inhumanity of her marriage to Robert. The primary complaint or concern that any woman in the novels has about her marriage is that she might get a coarse or ugly man, or that she hasn’t got the man she wants. For example when Morgaine conspires with Elaine (young, pretty, ready to marry) to seduce Lancelet, she warns her that marriage isn’t a bed of roses, especially if married to a man who really loves someone else, and Elaine replies that at least if she marries Lancelet she’ll be getting a handsome man. She doesn’t offer any implicit or explicit critique of the institution overall[2], or express any desire not to marry – she just accepts that she must, and since she has access to a witch she decides to make sure her husband is handsome. Morgaine – the primary voice of the author and one of the two main representatives of modernity in this story – also offers no criticism of the institution, only strategies to bend the rules. Gwenhwyfar, who is in love with Lancelet, never complains that she had her agency or sexual consent taken by the decision of her dad to give her away like a horse to Arthur – her only concern is that Arthur doesn’t want her. Morgaine, reflecting on the marriage, observes that Gwenhwyfar has spent her life being ploughed by the man she doesn’t truly love, but just accepts this aspect of the institutions of the time.

    Children and consent

    There are many instances in the first half of this story of children having sex, either with each other or with adults, and the difference in tone and attitude towards this is noticeable. Children are presented as having just appetites, not really feelings, though these appetites may persist into adulthood and become strong desires (as with Morgaine and Lancelet, for example, or Gwenhwyfar and Lancelet). When children have sex or seek sex they – especially the girls – are the instigators rather than the recipients of the attention, and are presented as voracious and persistent in their appetites. The description of their behaviour makes them seem more like animals than people, and their appetites like fundamental, simple biological urges rather than complex emotional processes. Even when sex happens to the main characters when they’re children – as in when Morgaine and Arthur have sex in the king-making – it is essentially natural and unfettered by emotion or guilt or morality. At the end of the scene, in the morning after their second bout of sex when Arthur realizes he has fucked his own sister there is no concern or anger about the fact that a child was forced to have sex – just despair at having broken the taboo on having sex with a family member. The act of this child losing his virginity is even praised, as he says:

    I do not suppose I will ever meet you again … for you are a priestess and dedicated to the Goddess. But I want to say thsi to you – … you were the very first. No matter how many women I may have, for all my life I will always remember you and love you and bless you. I promise you that.

    This is not how a modern writer would summarize an act in which a child was tricked into fucking his sister.

    I think the way that MZB writes about sex with children expresses that she does not believe children are able to understand consent, and that to them sex is as natural and normal as any body function, that their desire to express it and enjoy it is natural, and that there is no reason adults should not take advantage of this. In the case of King Lot, he takes advantage of it by fucking any girl he can get his hands on; but he insists on controlling his own children’s natural expression of their sexuality in case they should devalue their virginity or embarrass him in so doing. Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, treats Arthur’s natural sexual expressiveness as an opportunity to bind the two Englands together, and for some cruel adult reason (never properly explained) takes pleasure in making him do this to his own sister – but the only form of cruelty possible in this act is the cruelty of incest, since the idea of an adult having sex with a child or two children having sex with each other is natural and simple. Since they have no independence or adult sentience, they are simply bodies to be played with, and since they are free – as children – of guilt and morality, nothing that they do or that is done to them sexually can be wrong unless it breaks some taboo of the adult world. And the only taboos in the adult world surrounding sex are homosexuality and incest.

    The rape of Gwenhwyfar

    In contrast, when Gwenhwyfar visits her “brother” Meleagrant, her rape is clearly described as a breach of consent, a violent imposition of one man’s will and body on a woman. He beats her, tears her clothes, and then rapes her, and plans to do it again and again until she is pregnant. She expresses clearly that she does not want it, and when she is rescued by Lancelet he does not doubt that she did not want it and resisted it. No one else who learns about it doubts this either – her ability to consent to any man except her husband is crystal clear, widely understood by men and women alike. The only complication – observed only by Morgaine – is that, since she is a devout christian she believes women are the source of all evil and sin, and that she somehow deserved the rape or brought it upon herself and the only way she could be truly free of blame is if she died resisting it. But this is a side point, a mere detail in the unfolding tragedy of Gwenhwyfar’s rape.

    It’s clear, then, that MZB understands and respects the notion of consent, and she extends this even to the adult female villains of her story (as I will describe in another post, I think Gwenhwyfar is the primary villain of this novel). Gwenhwyfar, as an adult, has clear sexual agency, desires and limits – provided she is expressing them with anyone except the man she was sold to, who retains ultimate rights over her body. I think this clear description of adult consent, and the clear excision of that right of consent within the framework of marriage, establishes an important principle underlying MZB’s work: if the social and cultural context strips you completely of the ability to consent, then it is no longer rape, because rape requires the ability to consent. I think this is the clue as to MZB’s paedophilia: a perverse inversion of the modern understanding of consent.

    Conclusion: How MZB inverts the concept of consent

    I think what this means in total is that for MZB if you are intellectually unable to consent because you are a child; or if the socio-political context has stripped away your right to consent so that from birth you have no right to consent, then you cannot be raped. It is a kind of inversion of how we understand consent – especially as it applies to children – in the modern world. Thanks primarily to the work of feminists, sex workers, the gay rights movement and children’s rights activists, we now understand that if someone is unable to consent because they aren’t old enough to make moral judgements (children) or they have no power over their own circumstances (prisoners, slaves, women in medieval Europe as envisaged in fantasy stories) then any sex with these people must be rape. But MZB flips this: if you cannot understand consent, your ability to consent cannot be taken away from you, and so rape cannot happen. A child cannot be raped, because they don’t understand the morality of sex and they don’t have the ability to say yes or no. If they express an animal desire to explore their body with you, or you can trick them into playing with you, you’ve done nothing wrong because they couldn’t understand their right to say yes or no, and they don’t understand morality. The same is true for a wife in Arthur’s England – since the entire social and political milieu strips away her power to say no to marriage, rape cannot happen in marriage. Rape is only possible when choice can be exercised.

    This may sound sick and disturbing to the modern reader but it was actually a pretty common theme running through much of western culture in the 1960s – 1990s. In my post on my experience growing up in Jimmy Savile’s England I describe some of the ways in which British people viewed children and sex, and I think some of this is reflected in MZB’s work. Of course there must be some additional, depraved element to it, since her husband was a voracious, open serial paedophile and she supported him and was to some extent involved in pro-paedophilia activism. But I think at the heart of it must be this principle that where consent is impossible, rape is impossible. You can’t rape animals, children or your wife, because biology, intellectual development, or cultural norms have removed their ability to consent, and rape can only exist when there is a right to consent that can be taken away.

    I wonder to what extent this attitude permeated the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution in the USA; I also wonder to what extent it is an exclusively US/UK principle, somehow related to the way that US libertarians cannot conceive of coercion in the absence of violence. A lot of work was done by feminists in the 1960s – 1990s to establish the principle that sexual coercion wasn’t just physical violence: the concept of “date rape” was invented in the 1980s to extend this principle, and activism on marital rape and intimate partner violence was also intended to ensure that people could defend themselves against coercive structures other than those based on outright violence. Now the concept of coercive control and financial abuse arises naturally from this earlier work. A lot of this material was still in its infancy or undeveloped when MZB wrote these novels, but that doesn’t excuse her: lots of people thought sex with children was wrong when she wrote this book and she knew it because they ostracized her and her husband from Californian SF society because her husband insisted on fucking every kid he met. So she must have been committed to these principles beyond just a casual, negligent kind of disrespect for other people’s rights and she must have known roughly what principles she was expressing when she wrote this book.

    To be fair to MZB[3], other than these subtle hints I cannot read into this novel any special attempt to describe or defend a principle or morality of paedophilia. But it is clear that she thinks that children are sexual creatures whose sexual desires and interests are the right of adults to exploit, and it is also clear that she only believes adults have the ability to consent within narrower confines than we would think of as normal today. A key difference from modern morality is this implicit principle that if you can’t consent you can’t be raped, and I think part of the reason that so many of us didn’t notice how awful that was when we were reading these books decades ago is that this principle was much more normal in our culture then than it was now. For example, when I read these books as a child my father would openly advocate for the right of men to beat and rape their wives, my mother openly believed children who got raped deserved it (she told me so!) and there was a general sense that girls had a precarious virginity that was precious, difficult to defend to adulthood, and in a sense every adult man’s right to take early if the girl “led him on.” So I think we who read these books as kids then, growing up steeped in that culture, would probably not have noticed how awful it is. But now, having grown up and having worked to change that about our own culture, when we look back on these books and re-read them in the light of all the changes we have worked on the society we were raised in, we are shocked by their callousness. At the time though the principles in this book were in many senses just the water we were swimming in.

    I guess the key difference, and the reason that I am re-reading this book, is that MZB and her husband were committed, principled paedophiles, and so she made some effort in the early parts of this book, when the main characters were children or very young adults, to express these principles more explicitly and more openly than many authors steeped in the same culture might have; and at the same time the careful, quite beautiful way she has told the entire story of the Arthurian court from a women’s perspective – coupled with the way the SF community were able to bury her and her husband’s obvious crimes – misled us into thinking these books were a genuinely ground-breaking feminist work.

    In retrospect, it’s a mish-mash of conservative and backward-looking morality tales, centred around the value of virginity, the right of men in a world of men to take what they want, and the power of social norms to so completely obliterate some people’s rights to bodily autonomy that it is not even possible to conceive that they have been violated. That’s not feminism – it’s a morality of violence and power, perfumed and wrapped in lace, adorned with a few baubles of paganism but, at its heart, the same old story of lust, power and the right of kings and men to take what they want.

    Addendum

    If you appreciate my views on science fiction and fantasy writing, please consider reading my fiction at Royal Road.

    Image note: This picture of Gwenhywfar is by Zooombie Grrl on Deviant Art, check her out!

    fn1: Please understand that whenever I reference Game of Thrones I am referencing the tv show, since I haven’t read the book, but assuming that for at least the majority of the show characters like Cersei speak with the voice of the novel, since George RR Martin was involved in writing the show.

    fn2: As an aside, it’s interesting to me that this book was so often described as a “feminist retelling of Arthurian legend” when it so consistently failed to offer any feminist critique of the central medieval institution in the story. There are really only two institutions in this story: the church and the family, expressed through christian marriage, and although she offers some relatively stringent critiques of the former, she never makes any effort to identify the terrible sexism of the institution of marriage that creates the legal, political and social context driving all the primary conflicts in this story! I don’t think it can be considered a feminist retelling of the legend if it doesn’t try to grapple with this part of the story!

    fn3: This woman was one of the greatest and most influential science fiction/fantasy writers of my youth, but now just to write these few words seems foul and grotesque!

  • Abasement and self-respect in the liberal worldview

    An interesting thing is happening this week as Israel enacts its Hannibal Directive on the hostages taken by Hamas, and behaves against all understanding of common decency or the basic principles of international law. Representatives of powerful nations, in some cases the most powerful nation on earth, have been lining up to very loudly declare that there is nothing they can do, and to reaffirm in the blandest possible terms their complete inability to do anything to stop Israel. The most striking example of this is Joe Biden himself, who came away from a meeting with Netanyahu and, with a shrug, said that there was nothing he could do to stop Israel from killing the 10 Americans taken hostage, and it’s all very sad but there’s nothing else he can do.

    In 2011 Joe Biden was Vice President when Barack Obama started a three month bombing campaign of Libya, estimated to have killed about 10,000 people, which fragmented the country and reduced it from one of the richest nations in Africa to a bombed out shell with an ongoing civil war where open-air slave markets are held in once-proud cities. This was done simply to support Libyan rebels against Gaddafi. But somehow there is nothing Obama can do to rein in his client state, whose prime minister is a US citizen and which receives about 15% of its annual defense funding from the USA.

    It’s not credible, is it? It’s not that he can’t rein in Israel – he doesn’t want to. But he can’t say that, since the last 20 years of liberal interventionism have been built on a dishonest foundation of protecting human rights, and human rights concerns are now fundamental to how many Americans – especially young Biden voters – see America and its role abroad.

    This puts states and significant public figures in a bind. Israel plays an essential role in the criminal extractive world order that maintains US dollar hegemony and the stolen wealth of the western European states, but in a modern liberal electorate they can’t admit that, so they need some other way to appease the very real – and good! – conscience of their electorate, while maintaining Israel’s freedom to brutally destroy the lives of its poorest residents. So they fall back on a public spectacle in which they replace their very real power with a performative self-abasement.

    I mean, what country with self-respect allows a nation 3% its size, heavily dependent on foreign aid, surrounded by enemies, indebted to a colonial nation’s gift for its very existence, to tell it no, you have no say in the fate of 10 of your citizens who were abducted by criminals within our borders? No self-respecting leader would allow that to happen. The same is true of the shameful death of Rachel Corrie, an American citizen who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer when she was trying to protect a Palestinian home, whose death is occasionally celebrated by Israeli soldiers who make pancakes with her face on them. If anything like this happened in one of the “shithole countries” that the US likes to “throw against the wall” every decade or so, there would be an immediate violent response. But when Israel does it suddenly there’s nothing that can be done! Suddenly America’s leaders, politicians, journalists and public figures hang their heads in shame and admit that they’re just weak little nobodies who have to let the Israeli Chads kick sand in their face.

    Of course it is not only Israel and not only in times of crisis that this strange ritual abasement has to take place, and it isn’t just politicians who have to sometimes display a complete lack of self-respect. The most classic case is the decision by the British media to turn the UK’s most principled anti-racist politician, Jeremy Corbyn, into a nasty anti-semite who was going to cause Jews to “flee the country” if elected. Journalists across the country, political leaders, community figures, all spent a year penning columns and making speeches about this ridiculous idea, all in lock step with the idea that he was an anti-semite, without ever producing any evidence or addressing any of the many very clearly anti-semitic views of his opposite number in the Tory party. Isn’t it the job of journalists to report facts, or truth? Suddenly they lost this ability, and all of them together had to give up their professional self-respect and report complete drivel for a year. So too with the Uyghur genocide nonsense, which was made up out of whole cloth by a born-again christian who fantasizes about New York being destroyed in the rapture because it’s full of “bankers” (nudge-nudge wink-wink) and gays. Anyone who knows anything about China and has even a fragment of self-respect, integrity or honour knows this is a completely made-up lie, but for years now it has been repeated in every major media outlet without ever a single shred of evidence. The same thing happened with the Iraq war, compounded by the god-awful scenes of journalists and “pundits” and “public intellectuals” recanting and apologizing for their misleading coverage after the fact and giving us ridiculous “how was I supposed to know?” sob stories about Colin Powell’s transparently dishonest presentation at the UN (but he had powerpoint!) or the dumb 45 minutes story. These people didn’t even have the minimum level of self-respect to acknowledge their role as proxies for empire, and stand up for themselves as honest hacks. No, they abased themselves after the WMDs disappeared (remember “Friedman units”? But that loser is still out there peddling his poison!) and through this “difficult self-reflection” managed to keep their jobs and pretend they’d learnt lessons, just to repeat the same lies from the same liars about Chinese spy balloons or Uyghur genocide or how no, Nazis aren’t really Nazis if they’re Ukrainian.

    This guy is the author of a book called “Jewish pride”?

    Can you imagine having to degrade yourself like this every day? What a strange fetish to have. It could be described as a kind of Orwellian doublespeak I suppose, but doublespeak is primarily an intellectual dissonance, while this is also emotional. Consider the chorus of people reacting in horror and fear to protests in support of Palestine, or people chanting “from the river to the sea!” These people aren’t just abasing themselves in the world of ideas, such as when they repeat unquestioningly the claim that 40 babies were beheaded; they’re also abasing themselves emotionally, suggesting to the world that they are terrified of peaceful protesters, wetting their pants at the thought of ordinary people in the nations that brought us the Iraq war and the Libya shambles maybe not wanting this stuff done in their name anymore. Everyone who has been on an anti-war march knows exactly how peaceful they are; in fact there were large contingents of Jewish peace activists marching as Jews at these demonstrations, and nothing happened. Yet these smol beans have to pretend that they’re so terrified. Imagine being an adult man in the UK in 2023, scared of a peace march? Either you’re a brazen liar, or you have the self-respect of a particularly coddled house cat. This is doublefeel as well as doublespeak, the same abasement that has “gender critical” “feminists” (i.e. women who hate transgender women) being terrified of public bathrooms, and rushing to get men to protect them from anything that might look faintly like a man in a dress – probably leading to the harassment of other women. Somewhere in their dark hearts they know it’s not true, that men don’t need to pretend to be women to harass women, that the greatest danger to women is men they know, etc, but this honest assessment of the world isn’t going to help them destroy a hated minority, so they have to market it with fear instead, a fear so pathetic and unbelievable that the only way to sell it is to publicly abase yourself, to admit to a complete absence of self-respect.

    This was a big thing in the aftermath of 9/11 as well, of course, with crazy reports of non-white people getting kicked off planes because their mathematics looked terroristy, or being racially profiled in their own neighbourhoods because of scared neighbours. This has, of course, always been the go-to US strategy for dealing with black people, but since the turn of the century this doublefeel has become a common part of public discourse. I’m scared; I’m feeling threatened; there are (to use the favourite phrase of “gender critical” “feminists”) “safeguarding issues”. Yes we really do think that homeless people need somewhere to shelter, but the children here will be scared – they should be put somewhere else (where? are you really scared of the poor, hungry and desperate?) Watch as journalists and politicians fall over themselves to criminalize and dehumanize asylum seekers, who could be “terrorists” or “Chinese spies” and who “just don’t fit in.” Remember when France had to ban 14 year old girls at school from wearing Hijab, because the revolutionary state that had survived 200 years and 2000 guillotines could be brought tumbling down by a teenage girl with covered hair?

    This performative abasement is necessary because of the increasingly obvious contradictions in the structure of the liberal worldview. The fundamentals of what the liberal order demands of us – submission to the market, constant social competitiveness, social mobility instead of genuine equality, and the existence of winners and losers in every aspect of our social life – isn’t wanted by anyone except the people already at the top and benefiting from it. So the liberal democracies have attached genuine, important principles – like but not limited to sexual and gender equality, freedom of movement, an end to racial discrimination, freedom of association and expression – to their ideology as if these principles did not exist in any other worldview, and then beaten us relentlessly over the head with these principles at every turn, to distract us from the fundamentals, or – in their more honest moments – to try and convince us we can only have these valued social ideals as part of a package that includes exploitation and greed. But as the exploitation and greed becomes clearer, and the crises that our liberal order cannot fix become ever deeper and more obvious, and as concepts from outside the liberal viewpoint begin to be heard more clearly in our increasingly diverse media landscape, it becomes harder for liberal spokespeople to hide these contradictions. This is why congress people attacked Facebook after the 2016 election, and even more so have tried to ban Tiktok – Tiktok enables western young people to see life in countries outside the imperial core, which means they might see alternatives to the way their own social systems are structured and (worse still!) might begin to see those people as fully human, which would be a disaster for the exploitative international system that holds up the western countries and the in particular the wealth of their elites. These new forms of interaction and exchange of knowledge have enabled concepts like decolonization to enter mainstream social discussion – where in the 1990s you would see Che Guevara’s face on a t-shirt, now you can see his face in a Tiktok video with a quote, or some young woman doing her make-up while she explains why he was right. Words, ideas, alternative principles, information from outside the bubble, unfiltered by the guardians of the liberal order, being viewed by ordinary people at the same time as the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the banking crisis, the automation crisis and the covid crisis constantly show up how badly our masters are handling everything.

    The answer then is denial, and as the contradictions grow the denial becomes more difficult, more pathetic and more transparently self-serving. The only solution, then, is this performative abasement. And on a deeper level, how can you have self-respect if you defend these things? When you go onto the media and have to repeat your condemnation of Hamas for something they did three weeks ago before you hem and haw about how stopping the things Israel is doing right now is complicated, you know deep in your dark heart that you’re doing dark deeds. Why aren’t you speaking up? People lose their jobs for that! Why is it left to people like Lowkey to speak the truth that we all know, and how embarassing is it for a journalist to be schooled publicly on these things by a rapper? What kind of man must Piers Morgan be, that he was willing to lose his job on morning tv rather than stop condemning Megan Markle for imagined crimes, but he can’t bring himself to condemn Israeli slaughter? Someone like that doesn’t have any self-respect, does he? If he did, he’d get a real job.

    It’s sad of course when you see people you had hopes for, like Australia’s new PM Anthony Albanese or reasonably direct and honest journalists like Owen Jones have to humiliate themselves once they get within a sniff of any influence because the gatekeepers of power demand it. It’s depressing when the people we are depending on to actually fix things – people like Biden or Schultz, who we knew were never going to amount to much but who are the only people in place now to fix things now – fail to do anything, and fall back onto the same mantras of both-sides and it’s-complicated and but-the-economy. But it’s inevitable, because there is no reconciling the crises liberalism has to face with the fact that so many of them are a direct and immediate consequence of its underlying mechanics. In the face of that, you either tear the whole thing down – or the weight of the whole edifice will force you to your knees, begging and pleading and desperately trying to get people to understand these pathetic feelings that everyone knows aren’t real.

    Liberalism is incompatible with self-respect and dignity, neither individually nor collectively. Its final vision is a sniveling journalist abasing themselves before the public over and over as they tell you that nothing can ever get better, and you’re just gonna have to stand there and bear witness to horror as the people they installed and they supported and they propagandized for destroy everything that is good and right in the world – and bursting into tears at how mean you are when you tell them it’s their fault.

  • Liberal Democracies Finally Let the Mask Slip

    Have you noticed things seem to be getting a little worse in the developed world? Australia voting a resounding No on the weakest, most milquetoast concession to acknowledging and amending its colonial crimes, the Middle East’s Only Democracy(TM) going on a wild killing spree, unprecedented global heat at the same time as governments of the world’s richest nations are canceling basic infrastructure plans, reneging on carbon reduction commitments, and getting into weird culture war battles about how to define a woman? Things seeming a little desperate? It appears we have reached the stage just after the “and” in the famous phrase “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds”.

    Canada’s Liberals Applaud a Nazi

    The mask really slipped a few weeks ago when Ukraine’s president Zelensky visited Canada to beg for weapons. The war in Ukraine isn’t going well, and the much-vaunted wunderwaffen donated by the west – German tanks rolling into Eastern Europe for the first time in 80 years – have failed to advance the promised counter-offensive, though Ukraine’s leadership has made sure that the offensive achieves the US’s goal of fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian. With video of NATO’s supposedly superior “kit” (ugh) getting wasted on the battlefield proliferating, no progress in the war, and the US house getting skittish about signing more blank checks, Zelensky needed to shore up his support among his allies. After Zelensky’s speech to the Canadian parliament, an apparently well-meaning Canadian speaker introduced a 98 year old man who he told everyone “had fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviet Union in world war 2”, with Liberal PM Trudeau leading Zelensky and the parliament in two rounds of standing ovations for this stalwart of freedom.

    Apparently nobody bothered to think what kind of man might have “fought against the Soviet Union” for Ukraine in world war 2, and of course it turned out very quickly that the man in question was a member of the Waffen SS. Canada’s parliament somehow tricked a Jewish head of state (Zelensky is Jewish) into giving a standing ovation for an Actual Nazi, just because he fought the Soviet Union.

    This is a kind of treason, of course: the Soviet Union were Canada’s allies in world war 2, fighting the Nazis, and suffered horrifying losses during their retreat from and recapture of Ukraine. Applauding someone who fought them makes a mockery of their sacrifice, shows the ignorance of all assembled towards their own history, conflates modern Russia with the Soviet Union (a common mistake among liberal apologists for our ridiculous support of Ukraine), and – most importantly – means applauding a nazi.

    The 14th Waffen SS division of which Hunka was a member wasn’t an innocent bystander in the war either. They did partisan suppression duties in Poland and Ukraine, freeing up regular SS and Wehrmacht units to kill Soviet soldiers, and in some instances destroyed whole villages. They probably helped with round-ups of Jews, and of course by providing support services they freed up regular units of the SS in Ukraine to speed up their activities in the Holocaust. Himmler himself visited the unit, and said some pretty horrifying things indicating he knew full well where their racial solidarity lay. The knowledge of this unit’s activities isn’t dead in Ukraine, either, far from it – you might recognize their symbol on the Wikipedia page as a common symbol on Ukrainian soldiers uniforms, and in the year before the war started the unit was celebrated in Kyiv. It’s likely that in that horrific display of Nazi solidarity in the Canadian parliament Zelensky, at least, knew about the unit’s history, since it’s a matter of public celebration in certain sectors of Ukraine’s political class, including the people who surround Zelensky.

    When Nazis aren’t Nazis

    There’s a joke going around the internet that since the Ukraine war began western media have slid through stages of Nazi-denialism, from “there are no Nazis in Ukraine” to “Oh, there’s just a few” to “they aren’t so bad” to, finally “Being a Nazi isn’t always wrong anyway”. It appears we’ve reached stage 4, because within a few days Politico EU published an article arguing that being in the SS didn’t make you a Nazi. Now there’s a reversal on the Nuremberg Trials, eh! Then there was a lot of talk about well how could they have known that these guys fighting in Ukraine against the Soviet Union were Nazis, and he probably wasn’t a volunteer anyway (he was). Then it began to become clear that the Canadian government had courted these Nazis after the war, and a whole bunch of horror stories began to emerge about monuments to the Nazis in Edmonton, an endowment in this Nazi’s name to a Canadian university, and, well, a generally sordid past of encouraging these treacherous villains to contribute to culture and history in Ukraine.

    It should be noted that Canadian scholarship on Ukraine was an important contributor to the development of the contested theory of the Holodomor, the idea that Stalin deliberately starved Ukraine. This idea was not new in Ukraine, but the word itself appears to date from the 1980s or 1990s, and it’s likely a fabrication of these Canadian Ukrainian scholars, many of whom were former Nazis. One person who has contributed to the popularization of this claim is Anne Applebaum, who is a regular contributor to liberal publications like the Atlantic and has been a vociferous proponent of the idea that Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine. Her book Red Famine, which contributed to the popularization of this genocide myth, is no doubt heavily influenced by these Canadian-Ukrainian scholars, but she has been perfectly silent about the revelation that they were all Nazis. This body of recent work on the Holodomor feeds into a wider anti-semitic current, known as “double-genocide theory“, which holds that Stalin was as bad as Hitler and is often implicitly or explicitly cited as a justification for Ukrainian (and other countries’) support for the Nazis. This dangerous elevation of a high-school debate bro fetish to the level of serious legal and scholarly work is dangerous, particularly for anti-fascists in Eastern Europe, but it’s a surprise to see it bubbling to the surface in such a grotesque way in Canada.

    Russians, of course, have no illusions about this double-genocide nonsense, the evils of Nazis or the nature and persistence of Ukrainian Nazism. Here is what Vassily Grossman had to say about the looming threat of Nazi collaboration in Ukraine in his famous book Stalingrad:

    This is the background to the growth of Red Sector, the Azov battalion and the neo-Nazis who humiliated Zelensky in 2019 and forced Ukraine down the road to the war. This is the reason that to get to Baby Yar – the site of the infamous 1941 massacre – and the memorial erected there by the Soviet government, traveling from the Eastern side of Kyiv your quickest route will be along Stepan Bandera avenue. But all this history has been wiped from liberal memory in the west, in the post-war scramble to redefine the Soviet Union as the Enemy, and to rewrite the history of the war so that the allies’ relatively small contribution – and much smaller sacrifice – could be raised above the great and catastrophic suffering of the Soviet Union, obscure the allies’ failure to rescue the Jews, and airbrush the Soviet Union’s central role in saving Jews from the Holocaust out of our history. And how is that working out, now?

    The West’s guilty conscience lashes out

    Some simple facts about the West’s culpability for the Holocaust should be well known but are relatively underplayed in Western history lessons. From 1939 when the Nazis started the war to the middle of 1944 there is almost no evidence of significant resistance against the Nazis west of the Danube. In Poland and Ukraine yes, there is a well-known history of both collaboration and resistance, but go west and you see a bunch of complacent nations that were largely happy to be pinned under the Nazi boot, with the sacrifice of their Jewish populations considered a small price to pay for their relative peace after they were conquered. The Western nations also resisted refugees, taking only a small number of rich Jewish emigrees and even, famously, turning away shiploads of children. In contrast Jews fleeing east were welcomed into the Soviet Union, and it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz, discovered Treblinka, and rescued the Jews of Poland from Nazi violence. The West stood by and waited, taking far more interest in the recovery of their colonial possessions in Africa than in helping the desperate Jews of western Europe, and it was only when the Soviet Union began to roll over Europe itself that they suddenly conceived an urgent need to fight back against the Nazis. If Hitler had cut a deal with Poland to march his armies through for a direct attack on the Soviet Union in 1939, would the west even have bothered going to war with him? I suspect that they would not, and would have stood by while the fate of the Soviet Union’s Jewish population was determined.

    This is a stain on Europe’s post-war liberal conscience, so how did they endeavour to wash out this stain? They handed one of their stolen colonial lands to the Zionist project, which immediately unleashed the Nakba on the people of Palestine and established an apartheid state on the shores of the mediterranean. Every time the people of Palestine attempted to peacefully resolve this conflict the Israeli state responded with violence and destruction, and so we find ourselves at the present state, where 2 million Palestinians languish in an open-air prison camp constructed with western money. When Hamas finally respond with a successful attack on Israel’s military, that blood-drenched state unleashes a wave of violence – first indiscriminately killing their own hostages, making up a 21st century blood-libel about beheaded babies, and then attempting to starve and bomb the population of Gaza into oblivion.

    In response to this savagery the same liberal democracies and media outlets that were just two weeks ago giving a standing ovation to a confirmed Nazi, or defending that same action, or steadfastly looking away, suddenly rushed to condemn every unsubstantiated lie put out by the Israeli Defence Forces, and publicly announced their unconditional support for “the World’s Most Moral Army” as it enacts the first mass murder of the 21st century. They have nothing to say except “more!” as the IDF slaughters thousands of children, cuts off electricity from hospitals, and forces civilians to drinking from puddles. None of this is kept secret either – in contrast to the “genocide” of Uyghurs that the western media and intelligence agencies invented from whole cloth, and have presented to us constantly over the last 3 years without a shred of evidence, within minutes of the unfolding bombardment of Gaza our social media feeds are flooded with videos of dying children, bombed ambulances, buildings collapsed on civilians, reports of entire families wiped out. The Palestinian ambassador to the UK reports 6 of his own family killed; the Scottish first minister’s own mother-in-law is trapped in Gaza and he cannot even get a response to inquiries from the foreign office, while the media drill him on whether he has sufficiently condemned Hamas. Meanwhile France bans rallies in support of the Palestinian people, MSNBC bars its muslim anchors from reporting, a Muslim child is stabbed to death in the USA, and Germany stops a protest by Jewish opponents of the slaughter on the grounds it might be anti-Semitic.

    This is the “liberal” response to the mass murder by starvation and bombing of 2 million muslims. Meanwhile liberal blogs – those bastions of interventionism back in the Iraq war days – remain stunningly silent. Balloon Juice, which has run a daily post on the invasion of Ukraine, headed with a graphic accusing “Ruzzians” of genocide, declared “there’s no there there” about the shameful Canadian ovation of a Nazi, and is in full support of the Israeli military. Lawyers, Guns and Money have barely mentioned it, and Crooked Timber have put up a single, weak post about how they don’t know what to say, which has degenerated into a condemnathon and some complaints about Jeremy Corbyn – the only politician of any note in the UK who was willing to publicly support the Palestinian people.

    It’s often said that the single defining feature of liberalism is that liberals never, ever learn. They constantly watch the same things happening, hear the same lies from the same criminal gang, absorb the same excuses from the same people, and respond in the same way without any adaptation to the circumstances. We know that the Israeli Defence Forces lie – they lied about Shireen Abu Akleh, they lied about the Gaza Flotilla Raid, they lied about Rachel Corrie – but of course every person in the western media, political and public elite accepts everything they say without question, knowing it’s all a lie and knowing their history of killing children. Journalists, of course, don’t even have object permanence, but this singular property of liberal politicians and political commentators generally is that they cannot, under any circumstances, learn from what constantly surprises them, because if they developed any theory of the structural underpinnings of the social forces at work it would become simply impossible to remain a part of the liberal establishment.

    Our failing economy

    The last part of this collapse in the coherence of the western social order is our failing economy. We are constantly told – by political leadership, by economists, by journalists and by pundits and “think” tankers – that capitalism is the best system available to us, that capitalism has made us the richest people in the history of the world, that any other system would leave us impoverished and embittered. Yet at the same time they tell us that they have to cancel even the shortest high speed rail line because they can’t afford it; that university fees must remain too expensive for most people to attend without going into a lifetime of debt; that it is simply impossible for people to have affordable housing; and that paying you more than $7.25 an hour is beyond their power. You must remain poor, squatting in sub-standard housing surrounded by decaying infrastructure and scrabbling to get together enough money just to stay housed and pay off the exorbitant price of your university loans – all in the richest countries in the history of the world. Whose wealth? Whose benefit? They couldn’t even control a simple respiratory disease, you had to go back to work as soon as possible or the best, most efficient system of allocation of resources in the history of the universe would collapse around you; and they absolutely cannot afford to pay for you to get a booster vaccine if you’re under 50, because … well, because how could the 6th richest country in the world afford it?

    And where did this money go? The USA spends a huge percentage of its income on weapons, is a thoroughly militarized society; the UK and France are nuclear powers. But together the entire economy of the NATO countries – some 500 million people, including most of the top 10 richest countries in the world – ran out of ammunition and weapons to give to Ukraine after just 600 days of war with a country having not even a third of their population. Where did all that money they took from you go? What were they spending it on, while they were telling you they can’t afford high speed rail, schools that don’t collapse, COVID protections, universal health coverage, gun control or a raise in the minimum wage? After 600 days they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, right down to munitions they promised they wouldn’t use because they’re borderline illegal (and won’t work in Ukraine anyway). And worse still the wonder-weapons they sent have all failed, proven to be worse than the cheapest material the Russians can throw at them. All the Leopard tanks are burnt out husks, the Challengers – “never defeated in battle” – abandoned on the side of the road next to ditches filled with the corpses of Ukrainian men, the Bradleys and Bushmasters and Marders all toast and the troops they were slated to carry forced to slog through the long grass where mines and drones are slaughtering them. That’s what your money was spent on, while you were being told 10% annual inflation was inevitable and no you can’t have a pay rise, and if you try striking we’ll make it illegal because the best system of allocating resources ever invented – the only one that works – can’t make food affordable and can’t produce enough ammunition to fight a small war in a distant country.

    So, this is the promise of liberalism as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. No freedom of speech, no money for you and no investment in public services, and if you dare to speak up while we throw money into the mass murder of civilians living in the poorest place on earth we will throw you in jail. In America we’ll throw you in jail anyway, but not until we’ve stripped you of your assets without trial and only if you’re lucky enough not to get shot on arrest. In defense of this you need to stand by and watch – you must not speak, or you’ll lose your job! – as we commit warcrimes and cheer the bombing of hospitals and the starving of citizens and throw all our resources into defending a criminal, corrupt gang of Nazis as they grind an entire generation of men into meat, only to find those resources aren’t enough because our economies are running on empty.

    But if you talk about any of this you’re a wild-eyed idealist, a “tankie” (who paradoxically doesn’t want to send German tanks into Eastern Europe!), an anti-semite, and – worst of all – naive, unable to understand that this is the only way things can be. Nothing can ever ever be better, and anyone who tries to make it better is a fool and a trouble-maker.

    This is liberalism in the 21st century.

  • Comments Censored at Crooked Timber: Gaza Edition

    Crooked Timber has a typically weak post up about the new horrors in Gaza, which has descended into a debate about whether (I kid you not) Corbyn has condemned Hamas enough, the DSA (some tiny fringe group in the USA) has condemned Hamas enough, and how hard it is to have an opinion about a war where everyone is a barbarian. I posted the following comment, because I think the minimum standard for an academic, liberal blog should be that they care about facts. The comment did not pass moderation, of course:

    Perhaps before rushing to condemn fringe left groups for failing to condemn what Hamas did to civilians some of you should have waited to see what Hamas actually did. It turns out the babies weren’t beheaded (did you guys believe a community of 700 had 40 babies?), that Hamas militants called the police to negotiate with them, the IDF came in firing indiscriminately and killed all the hostages, fired mortars and tanks at the kibbutz buildings, and fired tanks into the buildings after the fighters were dead (did you think the damage in the pictures was done by Molotovs?) The idf announced it was doing air strikes in the area, info available on the cnn website but strangely not mentioned, most of the dead publicly announced are soldiers, and Hamas’s account of the events says that the IDF panicked, retreated and fought in urban areas. The IDF are the most dishonest organization in the world, who killed 500 children in the 2014 war, deliberately shot demonstrators in the 2018 match of return, and have been confirmed over and over again to lie, murder civilians, and commit horrible war crimes. You all know this but you just immediately rushed to believe everything they told you. What does it say about you that, for example, Chris Bertram immediately assumed they were capable of “breivik-like” attitudes? It’s racism, plain and simple. Try and engage just once with the reality fo the forces at play here, and stop treating the IDF as any th Inc. except a dishonest gang of mass murderers and criminals!

    [I wrote that on my phone on the train, so apologies for typos or small errors]

    We really are reaching the bitter end of things in western society, aren’t we? In light of this I’m planning an occasional series of posts on the collapse of the liberal order and the intellectual underpinnings of our present system of capitalist liberal democracies. As part of this I’ll be grappling with the failure of the 2000s-era liberal bloggers – CT, LGM, and spin-offs from the usenet era like Yglesias and others – to deal with the failure of their world view. This is necessarily going to involve some snark about the kind of things that go on their blogs, substacks and media appearances.

    I hope amongst it there will be some more serious material assessing where the liberal academic worldview went so wrong, but don’t hold out too much hope – I’m angry about the horrors being done by our governments, and if you’re not angry too (or if you’re angry at the wrong targets) you need to be reassessing your humanity.

  • Star Wars Character: Dita Voss, Sole Survivor of the Numenorean Argosy

    Dita Voss was born and raised in the Numenorean Argosy, a large fleet of ships that moved through the galaxy as a caravan, centred around the ancient behemoth called the Numenor. The Argosy was composed of thousands of ships, ranging in size from single-family yachts to kilometre-long hospital ships and resource barges. They traveled approximately together, though at any time a small portion of their number would be away on trade missions separate from the main body of the fleet. The Argosy was in part a self-contained economic entity, its member ships providing services to and producing goods for each other, but its primary means of external trade was the provision of mechanical and computer services to the myriad small, independent starbases, mining colonies and space stations of the galaxy. The Argosy had accreted slowly over thousands of years, and amongst the crumbling engine rooms and cockpits of its ancient ships the fleet held knowledge and expertise on almost every technical system that had ever been used in the galaxy, as well as starmaps detailing the location and complement of mining stations, gas harvesters, deep space research bases and colonies that had been established so long ago that knowledge of their construction methods, components and sometimes even coordinates had been long lost to the majority of the galaxy’s settled societies. The arrival of the Argosy at one of these legacy structures led to an orgy of trade and renewal, as technicians on the bases seized the opportunity to gain access to old blueprints, fashion spare parts for systems that had been held together by jury-rigged components for generations, and restart auxiliary (or sometimes essential) computer and life support systems that had long since been given up for dead. Sometimes they would pay the Argosy to take one of their young onboard as an apprentice, who would travel the galaxy for a decade training in mechanics or computing or electronics, to return to their home base years later with a deep and enduring knowledge of everything that could go wrong in even the most obscure of systems. Droids that had been shutdown for centuries would be repaired and restarted, their long lost knowledge returned to colonies and mining stations, and data storage systems whose access mechanisms had long since ceased working would be turned over to the Argosy, passed from hand to hand through ever-older ships until somewhere someone found a lovingly-maintained device that could read the lost data and return it to its owners. Sometimes a colony that had regressed to almost stone-age technology would have a memory of the last visit of the Argosy, centuries or millenia earlier, a cave painting or a religious fresco, and its return would be the opportunity for the renewal of a society, the overthrow of tyrants, the start of a new renaissance.

    Such was the vital role of the Numenorean Argosy at the Edge of the Empire, until the Empire realized its value and completely eradicated every single living member of its polity.

    Everyone, that is, except Dita Voss.

    Dita Voss

    Dita Voss was planetside when the Empire struck the only home she had ever known, helping an obscure religious order to retrieve data from a servitor droid that had crashed an eon earlier, taking with it precious fragments of their religious knowledge. Above her the Imperial SPIDER Unit tore through the myriad ships of the Argosy, destroying any who opposed it and rooting out every byte of information they could, while she worked quietly and earnestly in the chilly crypt of the ancient order’s long-abandoned hilltop shrine, patching together systems that were so old even the language of their manuals was a barely-remembered legend. In galactic terminology Dita is a slicer, someone who can work with computer systems – programming them, breaking into them, subverting them and hacking them to make them do her bidding. She had been trained for years in the manifold computer networks of the relic sites on the empire’s rim, helping to disable rogue defense systems for their owners, reworking neglected mainframes for a new era of information, and sometimes helping mining communities to establish secure uplinks that were protected from spying by big corporations or imperial agents. But she had never been trained in anything except the rudiments of combat, and so when she emerged from the dusty cold of the underground chambers to witness the remains of her ancestral home tumbling flaming from the sky, there was nothing she could do to help. She could only watch in stunned disbelief as the Empire destroyed what, for slicers and mechanics across the galaxy, was the greatest library of knowledge that had ever existed.

    The order hid her in their crypts, and kept her identity and location secret when imperial troops came looking for any survivors of the carnage. Fortunately for Dita, her contracted task had been entirely communicated by word of mouth between herself, her grandmother and the order, and there was no record of her presence on the planet. Her grandmother had died in the first assault, the secret of Dita’s mission dying with her, and so she was able to hide and emerge safe from the destruction of the Argosy. The order gave her a little money, an ancient slugthrower, some stun grenades the imperial agents “misplaced”, and some basic survival gear, and helped her to hide until the SPIDER unit was gone. In exchange she promised them that she would exact her revenge, and somehow recover all the knowledge she could that had been taken from the Argosy.

    With just this obligation – this oath of revenge – to sustain her, carrying everything she owned on her back, Dita Voss set out into the world, determined to right a great wrong, and to restore the legacy of the Argosy. Dita is young though, and inexperienced in the ways of the world – she will need a team to join if she is to make her way. Once carefree and lighthearted, she is now burdened with the loss of her family and community, and carries this great tragedy with her. Nonetheless she is young, and she remains cheerful and optimistic in the pursuit of her ordinary daily life. She loves all things technical, and never backs down from a challenge, believing she has never met a computer she could not overcome. Now, though, what was once an aimless and joyous pursuit of technological skill for its own sake has become a finely-honed weapon against the Empire, a mission to find and restore the lost knowledge of the Argosy, and to wreak revenge on everyone who was involved in its destruction. Give her a ship, a team and a chance, and she will change the galaxy!

    Illustrator note: The top image is by The UncannyKen on DeviantArt. The second picture is from the Coriolis Last Cyclade book

  • Do Journalists Understand Object Permanence? A case-study with a balloon

    If you haven’t been living under a rock since the beginning of February you’ll be aware that a Chinese “surveillance” balloon has drifted over the continental USA and even hovered over some dustbowl in the centre where the USA keeps its missiles. This has led to that weird kind of 24 hour cable news coverage that gets Americans hysterical, in which they cover a perfectly normal event as if it were a catastrophe, and get terrified of shadows. In this case the media were tracking the balloon across its entire path, defense experts were being interviewed, and every armchair expert on twitter was weighing in with their opinion of the real significance of the thing. An entire country sent into a state of unhinged uncertainty by a balloon. Ultimately Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, canceled a visit to the USA which the Americans (but not the Chinese) claimed was going to lead to high-level meetings.

    Of course this is transparent nonsense. Nobody can control the path of a balloon, though some people tried to speculate that some moderate degree of control could be achieved by changing heights, and the balloon covered a track across the USA that is already widely covered by military and commercial satellites. Why would the country that has its own fancy-shmancy space station, a cloud of satellites powering its own mapping service, the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and a lander on the dark side of the moon, need to use a balloon to spy on the continental USA? And why would it particularly want to hover over a missile site that has been so extensively mapped by the USA’s “adversaries” that all activity there has to be done underground? And why would they risk this provocation on the eve of a supposedly historic visit by a senior US diplomat?

    The balloon took its strange path just after the USA experienced a huge cold snap across much of the contiguous states, and just as the north east of the USA and Canada were expecting a secondary cold snap. These cold snaps are caused by the jet stream slowing and weakening, so that its path sags southward and cold air from the pole is allowed to escape across the continental USA. These jet-streams flow from west to east, and are the reason for example that a Canadian weather balloon ended up over Russia in 1998. Indeed, after the Chinese government finally noticed US panic they issued a statement that it was a weather balloon gone wild, which is completely consistent with its strange looping pathway. It drifted north east until it hit the jet stream, diverted eastward, and then was dragged down over the continental USA by the sagging jet stream that was simultaneously producing the coldest ever recorded temperatures in New Hampshire.

    None of this obvious counter-evidence led the US media or various twitter commentators to question the Pentagon’s claims, which is unsurprising but depressing, because these claims were being aired by not just the same institution that brought us the invasion of Iraq, but the very same people. The current Pentagon press spokesman, Brig Gen Pat Ryder, who gave press conferences about the balloon, has a storied history of propaganda for the US military, and in particular was in charge of “strategic communications” for the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004. He was the chief of propaganda for the most corrupt military occupation in history, and in particular he was in charge of “strategic communications” when the Abu Ghraib scandal happened. He was also in charge of public affairs for an air force wing during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, when one US airplane (not from his wing) blew up the Chinese embassy – something that required a bit of spin at the time! The guy currently providing information about this balloon to the press never saw a truth he wasn’t willing to hood and electric-shock to death. If this guy said the sky was blue you would need stick your head out the window and check. If he asked for the salt at dinner you’d best pass him the pepper, and if he claimed he wasn’t the father you wouldn’t need to waste money on a paternity test – you could be sure it was him. This man is a liar, he is paid to lie for his government, and he has spent at least some of his life lying to cover up some of the most corrupt and incompetent mistakes and crimes of the US military.

    Why would you believe this man when he tells you that a balloon is being used for spying?

    It gets worse, of course. On February 4th the US department of defense released a statement about the shooting down of the balloon (which cost at least $1 million, but finally gave the F-22 jet a confirmed air-to-air kill). In the statement they noted that

    Chinese balloons briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration

    and of course the media and various idiots in the commentariat went wild about how “spy balloons” had been regularly sent over the USA. Media reported this as spy balloons entering US airspace, dropping all ambiguity, as did the usual talking heads on the internet. But note that the DoD statement nowhere says that they’re spy balloons – it leaves that for the media to do. It also states they “briefly transited” the USA. It is not physically possible for a balloon to “briefly transit” the continental USA from China unless it passes over the tip of Alaska – standard behavior for a weather balloon launched from China and blown out to sea, on occasions when the jetstream is functioning properly. But all of this nuance and the obvious implications were left out by commentators, who went off the deep end at the suggestion that balloons might have been used for spying and Trump just let them.

    This is particularly ridiculous posturing, because it is also attempting to rewrite history to suggest that Trump – who led a trade war against China and sparked a wave of both official and unofficial retaliation against Chinese living in the USA – was somehow soft on China during his time in office. And it is also trying to conjure up some grand conspiracy in which the country that controls satellites, a space station, and half the marketshare of the world’s cellphones, is sending balloons it can’t control across the Pacific in the hope that one day one of them will just randomly luck onto a top secret site that they couldn’t photograph better from orbit. This is thoroughgoing nonsense. But it has the entire press pack and liberal intelligentsia doing the Pentagon’s propaganda work for it, and baying for blood. These people aren’t even paid, and they’re taking subtly misleading information from the most dishonest organization on earth – straight from the mouth of the man who was in charge of “strategic communications” during the Abu Ghraib scandal – and adding the extra panic the Pentagon wants, without even being directed to.

    This is how we got the invasion of Iraq, the murder of a million Iraqis, the displacement of four million more, and the creation of ISIS: because the Pentagon lied to journalists, and journalists just repeated everything they were told as if it were god’s own truth. Josh Marshall (whose tweet is pictured above) wrote lots of essays about the Iraq war that he has scrubbed from his blog, so I can’t tell if he supported it or not, but it is clear he wrote extensively about it at the time, so if he has any sense he would be aware that the Pentagon lied us all into that atrocity. Is he aware that the people he is quoting now were lying to him then? Do other journalists reporting on this ever stop to think that maybe they shouldn’t listen to people who lie to them consistently?

    No, they don’t. Journalists are like a baby playing peekaboo, or like Bart Simpson in Lisa’s cupcake experiment – they just can’t think that the same thing would happen twice, because they cannot, under any circumstances, analyze the structural factors driving the news they report on. They just keep reporting the things they are told and even if they are being told the same lies with the country name changed, by the same people, working for the same institution, they are unable or unwilling to question whether there is any level of trust they should assign to that person. Even if they know that the last time around these were shown to be lies, and they know who spouted those lies.

    They just don’t have object permanence. And these babies are going to help the Pentagon lie us into a war with China.