idnUstrial

 

Passionate

 “How’s it going? I haven’t seen you in a while. Anything new?”

“Well, I’m after growing very much committed to left-wing politics and values, maybe since I saw you last.”

“Interesting. And what does it actually mean in terms of your day-to-day life?”

“Well, the biggest impact on my being, so to speak, is the realisation that, to have any kind of ethical and revolutionary integrity, I must have absolute trust in the massive drugs corporations like Pfizer, and be willing to lay down my life in their defence.”

“So it’s total commitment to the cause?”

“Oh yeah. We’re passionate people.”

Fire in the Mind - Revolutionary Thoughts

I read Fire in the Minds of Men by James Billington a while back, which is focused on the history of the revolutionary movements, its key participants and ideologies, covering roughly the period of the French Revolution in the late 18th century to the Russian Revolution in the early 20th. In the words of its blurb, “Billington claims with considerable evidence that revolutionary ideologies were not shaped so much by the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment as by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany” - relating to for instance the influence of Adam Weishaupt’s infamous Illuminati secret society of the late 18th century. 

This however, in its desire to entice would-be readers, probably suggests a more colourful notion of this very detailed and dense book than many of its readers might have hoped for, especially as the book moves on beyond that more humanly intimate level of the pre-industrial era and extends onwards through the increasingly mechanised and materialistic 19th century.

In terms of future impact the French Revolution tended to have far greater appeal and impact on the revolutionary spirit than the American one which, very untypically in such scenarios, rather than simply focus on overthrowing present tyranny and gaining power, put great thought into checking the inevitable future impulses towards tyranny, even if seemingly from within this own movement. The French Revolution by contrast, despite its seeming emphasis on external slogans such as Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, in practice was broadly of a spirit of crude simplicity: revolution and revolutionaries good, all opposition bad and to be eliminated or annihilated without remorse. And thus in Paris, the Revolution very quickly produced the Reign of Terror and the guillotine era, and attendant theories justifying dictatorship by a revolutionary elite which would educate the ignorant and the use of terror as a purifying tool on society.

That Freemasonry was a breeding ground for the revolutionary impetus and the relevant conspiracy movements is pretty common knowledge, but beyond the convenience of the aspiring revolutionaries being able to tap into these already existent societies and the secretive structures they offered, the actual occult ‘spiritual’ aspect of these movements, or elements within them, may be more surprising. (To add though, these revolutionary movements and impulses encompassed far too many peoples and varying backgrounds and desires to pretend everyone involved were anything like united in one uniform mindset.)

So, for instance, in terms of this occult influence, in the aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, basically pagan or Nature worship festivals, such as the Feast of Unity and Indivisibility were held in Paris and on a massive scale, while the Feast of the Supreme Being festival in 1794 apparently had an astonishing, in terms of populations of the time, 500,000 participants. These celebrations served as ritual spectacles designed to unite and deepen the bond of the citizens within this new regime, just as, leaping forward, the mass spectacles of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s were designed to overwhelm the individual consciousnesses, and so society in the secular modern western era, instead of a chaos of self-willed individuals, is intended to be fused in some great and easily directed group mind. 

As an indication of this messianic/secular sense attendant to the French Revolution there was even a new though short-lived calendar conceived to mark this declared new age. So just as the time had been a Before and After Christ, now there was literally a New Age of glorification of man on earth, where darkness was now in the past, and utopia was to be achieved and experienced here and now. This, to emphasise, is the dawning of the modern New Age movement, or at least it’s emerging from the shadows of the occult secret societies into the mainstreams of life.

So, particularly amongst the intellectual elites directing things, there was a dual spirit of both Nature worship - thus typically the stress on ‘the Universe’ rather than God in New Age thinking - but also of atheistic materialism, with particularly God in a Christian sense regarded extremely negatively. 

And meanwhile in Paris, during these same days of mass ritualistic celebrations marking this new glorious era, great numbers of people were being publicly executed using the newly invented guillotine. And this new instrument of murder, rather than considered as an unfortunate if necessary contradiction to the new spirit of freedom, was instead hailed as a symbol of the new democratic spirit of liberty. The genuine hype was that the guillotine was a mark of the revolutionaries’ humanity that they were killing without causing unnecessary pain, and so, rather than carried out behind closed doors, as it were, instead these executions were enacted as public ritualistic spectacles to be savoured daily by the public. The intensity of partaking in these adrenaline-rich rituals would again serve to deepen the communal bonds of this new society - in modern parlance, along the lines of the trauma bond. And in terms of what quickly became revolutionary ideology and methdology, through these executions society was supposedly being removed of human ‘impurities’, and hence speedily distilled to a greater, utopian state of truth. By a simple process of subtraction, you eliminate the bad and then you’re left with the good. 

To bring this thinking a little more starkly into the light: imagine various people sharing life in a house, and there is one person the rest aren’t getting on well with. The solution:

 “Why don’t we just kill him?!  Think how great things then will be!”

 “Oh yes! Although . . .”

“Although what?”

“You don’t think we might be changed by the experience of killing someone?”

“What do you mean? Changed for the worse?”

“Yes, mightn’t we become darkened, and the atmosphere of the house actually ending up far worse. We might be united in some deeper sense by the act, but in a very messed up way.”

“Oh no! You’re making things far too complex. All that will happen is this annoying person will be gone and we’ll be left. If anything we’ll be purified by this act, where we’ve courageously committed ourselves to making a better world. Annoyingly or bad person gone, good people left.”

It might also be worth regarding the two ritualistic phenomena of the early 1790s, spiritual celebration on the one hand and spectacles of murderous repression on the other, not as uneasy, contradictory bedfellows but actually as of one deeper essence. And treating the phenomenon spiritually, just as with ancient pagan ‘deities’ like Baal, who were fed a diet of human sacrifices, especially children, then one could regard the guillotined as sacrifices to whatever or whoever this ‘Supreme Being’ really was. And as a bit of an aside, it might not be too far off to regard a certain sacred cause of the modern progressive era very much in the light of this ancient practice of child sacrifice.

So almost as soon as the French Revolution succeeded in attaining power, factions started to divide, and the new regime of liberty, equality and brotherhood turned very quickly to the form of totalitarian dictatorship, with former friends and allies now felt as threats to be eliminated, declared enemies of the State, and perhaps swiftly executed. So the extremely crude ‘revolutionary logic’ here is that the Revolution equates to Good, any impediments to Bad, and so execution is an extremely quick way of ‘cancelling’ the Bad, and purifying reality.  Thus, of course, ‘cancel culture’ where all opposition to the revolutionary elite are demonised as, for example, ‘far right’. There are no grey areas.

And so in the interests of the success of the Revolution the intentional use of Terror was quickly exalted as a purifying tool, and this was particularly enacted by the Jacobins under Robespierre and his Reign of Terror, even and especially against former revolutionary allies, until Robespierre and his key and even more extremist colleague, Louis de Saint-Just, were themselves in turn seized and executed. 

[This became much longer than intended, and because so hasn’t got to where was intended, and has ended very abruptly for now above. Ideally I’ll add to it later, but we’ll see.)

in the midst

One two

A few very quick throwaway pieces

 

groUp

 

Free-Will & the Independent Seer

Consider a video recording of a football match. As the game was actually played the players have absolute freedom to act of their own volition. However, watching this later their actions obviously will not change, which is not to say that they were deprived of free will as they acted. Similarly we could talk of God as an observer of life existing free of our notion of time, knowing exactly what happens within our time, but this not contradicting the freedom of movement of people within time and earthly life.

To add, a supposed branch of Christianity like Calvinism seems to make exactly this dry ‘rational’ error of confusing knowledge of what happens in time with determining what happens. That knowing how the match turns out means the players have no free will when in the act of playing.

And to also add, I wrote and posted this ages ago, but have changed the title from External Seer to Independent Seer, as “External” here again pushes one towards a sense of materialistic divide that isn’t really desirable here. To be honest, “Independent” isn’t that great either, but anyway!

whatever and however

 

Whatever this is and however it ends up, this is this when I photographed it.

swans again

at sea 2

 

It’s not quite finished, but a more recent state of something I posted recently.

No Limits 2, Disorder

 I came upon this from the New York Times, through a video piece by someone, and I thought it reflects exactly on a couple of recent posts here, No Limits and Success of Temptation.

Within that I wrote on the implications of there being no sin and no limits. Well, within that materialistic ethos, as of course reflected by exactly the types of ‘intellectual’ people who populate environs like The New York Times, as its pathways extend or progress - and it’s a ‘progressive’ ethos, i.e. it keeps progressing, well there are no virtuous or evil acts, all are simply materialistic events, including acts of paedophilia. 

And thus the progressive New York Times, in doing its dutifully pushing the ideological propaganda, is downgrading paedophilia to a disorder rather than a crime. And as the post on temptation showed, temptation doesn’t aim to get the tempted to some horrific end-point all at once. Instead it patiently progresses, step by step. And as things continue to progress,very soon, the ideology would no longer be forced to bow to ‘prejudice’ in calling paedophilia a disorder, but would be celebrating it as the latest member of the family of all-embracing inclusivity.

Sumi-e figure

 

swans

 

Seaside Town, Evening, Blurr

 The blur was unintentional.

Success of Temptation

“Why is temptation so successful? Like why do we keep falling for these things which are clearly so toxic to our well-being - even to the point of our ruination?”

“Well temptation, in whatever direction, is very patient and modest in its aspirations. So, let’s say an alcoholic, struggling to break free, isn’t being tempted to take ten or twenty drinks all at once. No, he or she is just being tempted to take one drink.”

Vietnam, Laurel Canyon, Hippie Dream

I’ve just read a very interesting book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops and the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, by Dave McGowan, about the music scene that came out of Laurel Canyon in the mid to late 1960s. This tends to be a very romanticised era and scene, but McGowan’s book sheds a very different light on much of what went on - and why it may have gone on in the first place. One  random little detail regarding this idyllic scene and community: Neil Young, according to himself, gave Charles Manson the gift of a motorbike - presumably because he really liked Manson’s vibe. 

Anyway, to go to one little detail of the book. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident is where a US battleship was alleged to be attacked by the North Vietnamese communists, and thus as an enforced matter of self-defence, slightly off the US coastline way over in Vietnam, the US entered or began the Vietnam War. The truth is though that the US was clearly seeking to provoke an incident as a pretext for kickstarting full military engagement, and now it is accepted that while there may have been some genuine confusion initially due to climactic conditions as to whether any aggressive incident occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin, it is now accepted that there was no incident, and the pretext was an opportunistic fabrication. The Vietnam War was going to happen, and if not this ‘incident’, some other pretext would have been found or created.

The head of the American fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin waters was US Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, whose particular command there, besides the fleet as a whole, was the USS Bon Homme. And here he is below on that very ship in January 1964 with his son, James Douglas Morrison, better known as Jim Morrison of The Doors. 

dancers

 

girl 2

 

That last picture again, very slightly different and now with the ink dry.

Cartoon Consciousness

 [Reluctantly inspired by having my poor defenceless soul pummelled with national radio and its ‘news’ pumping out at considerable volume in some store the other day]

The newest upcoming series from the beloved Corporate Whore franchise has just been announced: Corporate Whores Attain Cartoon Consciousness.

A spokesperson for the franchise, in explaining the newest emanation, told us that: “The goal and aspiration of any loyal citizen is the attainment of cartoon consciousness - the seamless fusing of self with the Global Self - and if we can help celebrities to both achieve this state of self-realisation and also inspire others to do likewise, well, what more can someone working within the entertainment industrial complex hope to do?”

girl

 

fIgures

 

Whether this has been something worth trying to get somewhere I don’t really know, but, not that it’s finished, here it is for now.

creature

 

Bienheureux l’homme, air de Valaam

 

The unadorned purity of this is incredible.

No Limits

 “You know why I hate God so much . . . I mean the idea of God?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the idea of a dictator imposing limits on us. There are no limits!”

“There’s no sin?”

“Of course not! Don’t you see how sick the idea of sin is?!”

“What about Auschwitz?”

“What about it?”

“Was that sinful?”

“Well no, cos there’s no sin.”

“So the Nazis were right?”

“What do you mean, right?”

“Well, if there’s no sin, then anyone can do what they want. So Hitler and the gang were right in just doing what they wanted. And in a sense the psychopath is demonstrating this idea of there being no sin far more than ‘ordinary’ people, as their actions are statements of there being no limits.”

“Well you’re going to extremes here.”

“I hate to tell you, but the very nature of sin and evil does go to extremes. How could anyone possibly not know that? And anyway, a minute ago you were ecstatic about there being no limits. You should also be grateful I went straight to the bogeyman of the Nazis. I could have gone in all kinds of alternative and graphic routes in, let’s say, illustrating your position.”

tWo

 

Two things I’m trying to get somewhere.

U Make Me Feel So Good

 By The Drum Club from 1992.

at sea