Some reflections on the historical pessimism of Yukio Mishima

Guest #1: Sven André. Poet and translator (b. 1981 in Växjö, Sweden).
Graduate studies in modern Japanese literature at Ritsumeikan University 2006-2009.

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Some reflections on the historical pessimism of Yukio Mishima

By Sven André



I.

Yukio Mishima, pen-name for Kimitake Hiraoka. Born 1925 and raised in a troubled family treasuring its samurai roots. Novelist, playwright, critic, actor, martial artist and commander of his own private nationalist militia Tate-no-kai, the Shield Society. Dies on November 25, 1970, a quarter past noon, from a long, deep wound to his abdomen and the severing of his head with a sword by a young follower. The scene of this ritual of death and dedication is the office of General Kanetoshi Mashita at the Eastern Headquarters of the Japanese Self Defence Forces in Ichigaya, Tokyo. Ten minutes into the past Mishima and his second-in-command, the 25-year-old Masakatsu Morita, are shouting their message of  martial honour and national revival, while three other Tate-no-kai members are holding the general hostage in his office. For more than a year Mishima has been preparing himself meticulously for this day when he is to transcend time and existence as we know it. Three hours into the past he is placing a note, a farewell note on his writing desk: “Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever”. When Hiroyasu Koga, after Morita’s botched decapitation attempt, with one powerful stroke of the sword severs Mishima’s head from his body, the limit will be reached and the mystery of eternity revealed to the quickly dying brain. Meanwhile, history will continue to unfold. The universe will go on as if nothing happened. The river flows on, a tiny ripple in the white-foaming cascade of the waterfall is seen for a flicker of a moment and then closed again. Time has come to an end and yet it is neverending. What is the nature of this mighty stream, always in flux and still unchangeable? What was Mishima’s view of it, and of what we call “history”?


II.

As for the future, Mishima apparently regarded it as having little personal importance. His desire to live forever should be interpreted as a longing for a transcendent existence outside of what we call time, the pinnacle moment of beauty and purity stretched into eternity (understood as the atemporal rather than limitless time) and the void, rather than simply a wish for his body of work to survive him as timeless classics. Mishima deeply wanted his death to be that of a man of action, as demonstrated from the fact that he had planned to write the Chinese character signifying “sword” with his own blood after plunging the short sword into his abdomen (a gesture seemingly abandoned for practical reasons). It is also likely that Mishima, despite the support his ideas of a second “Shōwa Restoration” may have enjoyed in certain military circles, had little hope to actually spur a coup d’état with his final action at Ichigaya. The notion, spread by some careless or tendentious writers, that Mishima committed suicide out of disappointment when the Self-Defense Forces refused to rise together with him, is absolutely untrue. The ritual suicide, which in elder days often had served as an act of remonstration performed by the samurai before his master, was part of the plan from the beginning, and Mishima had anticipated the negative response of the soldiers at least two months prior to the event. On the other hand, it is most likely that Mishima would have carried out his rite of death even in the unlikely event that Self Defence Forces would have risen with the Tate-no-kai.
   Preparations for the ritual death had been made as prescribed by tradition. The final action was not a mean to serve an end, but a ritualized display of purity and defiance, an act carried out for its own sake. Nowhere is this made more explicitly clear than in the brief “Counterrevolutionary Manifesto” (Han-kakumei sengen) penned by Mishima in February 1969 to sum up the Shield Society’s positions. In this we read that the society, an “embodiment of Japanese beauty”, “the last ones” are to fight a battle which “must be fought once only and must be to the death”. Most significantly, the outcome of this battle is of no decisive importance to the Shield Society: “effectivity is not a concern”. This stance echoes an aristocratic-heroic tradition found not only in Japanese but also in European tradition, wherein the decision to fight from a lost position is met with praise (as Mishima put it in an interview, “Harakiri sometime makes you win”). The Old English poem The Battle of Maldon tells us that “will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder/spirit the greater as our strength lessens”, a sentiment also voiced a thousand years later by J.R.R. Tolkien, a historical pessimist if there ever was one, who poetically described his avatars of creativity and beauty, the dwindling elves, as having “fought the long defeat”. To Mishima, the future meant not the risk of defeat or the possibility of victory as much as the certainty of disillusionment and decay.

III.

An important hint as to Mishima’s view on the nature of time and history towards the end of his life can be found in the book Hagakure Nyūmon (“Introduction to Hagakure”, translated into English as The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure) which was published in August 1967. Hagakure, “Hidden among the leaves” is an early 18th spiritual and practical guide for the samurai written by Tsunetomo Yamamoto (also known as Jōchō Yamamoto, 1659-1719), a former retainer to Mitsushige Nabeshima (1632-1700), a feudal lord who outlawed the practice of junshi, the traditional suicide whereby a retainer followed his lord in death, thus ironically providing Jōchō, a staunch preserver of tradition, with the opportunity to write down his teachings in old age. During the period in question, the martial traditions of the samurai had led a dwindling existence for over a hundred years, due to the national peace brought by the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. In the view of Jōchō, Japan had become emasculated and dominated by the economistic and hedonistic values of the merchant class. His attitude towards his age was one of stoic pessimism: 

 The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that we have entered the last stage of the Law [Mappō, the end of the law, the era in Buddhist tradition corresponding to Kali Yuga or Ragnarok]. However, the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight forever. Therefore it is useless to try to make the present age like the good old days a hundred years ago. What is important is to make each era as good as it can be according to its nature. The error of people who are always nostalgic for the old ways lies in their failure to grasp this point. On the other hand, people who only value what is up to date and detest anything old-fashioned are superficial.

Mishima writes that Jōchō is “a realistic observer of the flow of time”, which must mean that he himself, at least to some degree, agreed on the notion that we are living in an age of progressive decline, and that time is cyclical, so that the dark age is followed by a new golden age, where a new, purified world is born out of the ashes of the previous one.
Mishima further remarks that Jōchō is “clearly inconsistent”, for while he declares the “climate of the age” to be “unalterable”, he also laments the decadence of his era. If this can truly be called a contradiction, then it is one which can be found also in the writings of Mishima, from early works such as the arch-romanticist historical fiction of Hanazakari no Mori (A Forest in Full Flower, 1944) to his final great novelistic work, the tetralogy Hōjō no Umi (The Sea of Fertility, 1965-1970), at whose very beginning we find the following description of a photograph taken at a military memorial service held during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905): 

 The figures of these soldiers, in both foreground and rear, were bathed in a strange half-light that outlined leggings and boots and picked out the curves of bent shoulders and the napes of necks. This light charged the entire picture with an indescribable sense of grief.

   From these men, there emanated a tangible emotion that broke in a wave against the small white altar, the flowers, the cenotaph in their midst. From this enormous mass stretching to the edge of the plain, a single thought, beyond all power of human expression, bore down like a great, heavy ring of iron on the center.

   Both its age and its sepia ink tinged the photograph with an atmosphere of infinite poignance.

Among the honoured fallen are the two paternal uncles of the protagonist of the first volume (Spring Snow), Kiyoaki Matsugae. Originally a samurai family, the Matsugaes has joined ranks with a partially westernized aristocracy, with the father of Kiyoaki bearing the title of marquise. The fate of the uncles mirrors that of Kiyoaki. While the latter is an aesthete who abhors the wild shouts of the kendō fencers at school, he too finds his death on the battlefield, although that of romantic love. With the last scion, the last fruit of the family tree fallen, the Matsugaes gradually spiral into ruin and dishonour, as revealed in the subsequent volumes of the tetralogy.


IV.

Did Mishima believe it possible to transcend not only the “climate of the age”, but the decaying nature of time? Certainly, he sought to defy many of the mores and ideals of the times he lived in (or at least, to heckle them). In the 1968 autobiographical essay Sun and Steel we read:

 Everything was not, as I had deluded myself, recoverable. Time was beyond recall after all. And yet, as I now realized, the attempt to fly in the face of the relentless march of time was perhaps the most characteristic feature of the way in which, since the war, I had sought to live by committing every possible heresy.

Judging by the same piece of “confessional criticism”, he was not merely opposed to the spirit of the present age, but set against it a – real or imagined – sacralized past: 

 For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.

It is easy to find in those words a correspondence with certain traditionalist notions. There is no indication that Mishima was aware of the writings of so-called perennialist or integral traditionalist thinkers such as René Guenon or Julius Evola, for whom the dichotomy between a superior, transcendent “world of being” and an inferior, immanent “world of becoming” is a central concept, but as an avid reader of German philosophic literature, it is likely that he had come into direct or indirect contact with the thought of the “conservative revolutionaries” of Weimar Germany, who harboured some similar ideas, and the works of Nietzsche always had a quintessential influence on Mishima. Further inspiration may have come from various nationalist-mystical ideas adopted by members of Nippon Rōman-ha, the Japanese Romanticist School, in which periphery Mishima spent early years as an apprentice teenage writer. Most importantly, Mishima was steeped in classic Japanese literature and philosophy. Traditional Japanese culture thinking, with its high regard of ritualized forms and stress on the Buddhist-influenced concepts of mono no aware (the pathos of things) and mujō (transience), naturally encourages the search for transcendent order behind the imperfect and impermanent shapes of the immanent world. Needless to say, those concepts are not wholly unique to Japanese or East Asia, for they have Western counterparts in the lacrimae rerum of Virgil and the mood expressed by the Anglo-Saxon elegies.
If Mishima believed in the possibility of a personal transcendence of time, it was most likely one following the path of ritualized death. At the moment of such a death, he writes (again in Sun and Steel), can the pinnacle of beauty be reached and art and action be united. A self-destructive display of fanatical dedication and “purity” would thus enable, in some inscrutable way, the unveiling of the numina.            
In the August 1969 article “A Problem of Culture”, Mishima remarks on the Shinpūren (League of the Divine Wind) incident of 1877, where two hundred fanatically traditionalist samurai, armed with swords only, rose against the modernized Japanese army in the name of the emperor:

 Their reckless action and inevitable defeat was necessary to show the existence of a certain essential spirit.

Elsewhere, in a dialogue with Marxist-turned-Nationalist Fusao Hayashi, Mishima noted that the rebellion was «bound to fail, but not before it revealed purity and orthodoxy and the substance, call it core, of what we mean when we speak of Japan and the Japanese».
It almost need not be mentioned that the few rebels that did not fall for the onslaught of bullets all committed seppuku. Clearly Mishima, in his final action, set out to emulate the purpose he ascribed to the Shinpūren. Armed with Japanese swords only – a token of “purity” – he and his Tate-no-kai cadets were to reveal “a certain essential spirit” to the soldiers of the Self Defence Forces, who, according to Mishima’s speech from the Ichigaya balcony, unless they rose with the Tate-no-kai, would end up as “a soulless arsenal”, “American mercenaries” in a Japan that had “no spiritual foundation”. With this action, Mishima would deal a final blow against the “relentless march of time” and at the same time disappear into the rift opened in it through the violent display of an atemporal, transcendent “purity”.

V.

In the August 1955 essay “Departure from a sense of finality” (Shūmatsukan kara no shuppatsu), Mishima claims that the end of World War II and the defeat of Japan to him “was not an especially sorrowful event”, and this may be true, especially when compared to the death of his beloved sister Mitsuko shortly after the war’s end, but there’s no escaping that it came to take on an increasing significance in his writing. Mishima’s American biographer John Nathan writes that the news of the defeat “seems to have struck him with the somehow unidentifiable force of a presentiment”, and goes on to quote from the 1945 short story “A Tale at the Cape” (Misaki nite no monogatari), in which an eleven-year-old boy become witness to the love suicide of a young couple and experiences an eerie feeling of abandonment. Nathan also quotes from “August 15, Before and After” (Hachigatsu jūgonichi zengo), a reminiscence written in August 1955, wherein Mishima relates his own impressions from the day of defeat ten years earlier:

 A summer meadow stretched in front of me. In the distance I could see the barracks. And above the woods sailed quite summer clouds. If the war had really ended, that scenery would suddenly have altered its significance. Perhaps I couldn’t have identified just how it had changed, but the meadow, those woods and those clouds must now have become part of a world we had never before experienced. In that instant, I felt I had glimpsed a world of a different sensuous dimension.

The inner sensation supposedly experienced by him in this moment was one of profound confusion and dislocation: “I had the strange feeling that I had suddenly fallen through the ground”. In Sun and Steel, we find the same reflection:

 The war ended, yet the deep green weeds were lit exactly as before by the merciless light of noon, a clearly perceived hallucination stirring in a slight breeze; brushing the tips of the leaves with my fingers, I was astonished that they did not vanish at my touch.

The world remains the same, yet something is different. An invisible, untouchable shroud of beautiful nothingness has been torn away, leaving the dry bones of mundane reality, oblivious to the heart and its dreams.
   In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), the war and its imminent threat of destruction permit the ugly, stuttering temple acolyte Mizoguchi to sense a metaphysical unity with the golden temple which to him is the apotheosis of beauty. When the war ends without the American B-52s showing up to rain fire and destruction over Kyoto, his co-existence with Beauty is torn asunder:

 The war ended. All I was thinking about, as I listened to the Imperial Rescript announcing the surrender, was the Golden Temple. The bond between the temple and myself had been severed. I thought, now I shall return (...) to a state in which I exist on one side and beauty on the other. A state which will never improve so long as the world endures.

This nihilistic division of history into a past where this apocalyptic threat brought into flower the sensation of pure existence, and a barren present, recalls one of the aphorisms from Cioran’s early work Tears and Saints:

 This world must once have lived in God. History divides itself in two: a former time when people felt pulled towards the vibrant nothingness of divinity and now, when the nothingness of the world is empty of the divine spirit.

To Mishima, “God“, or the Absolute was immanent in the transcendental quality of the emperor system, which to him was not only the heart of the Japanese culture, but a mystical absolute central value enabling the verification of love and existence. The Shōwa emperor’s “declaration of humanity” (ningen sengen) – the renouncement of the emperor’s divine nature – following the end of World War Two was therefore in his view something of a denunciation of the Absolute and an emptying of existence, which he lamented in particular in his 1966 short story cum essay Eirei no koe (Voices of the Heroic Dead). In this he lets the ghosts of Kamikaze pilots ask the living: nadote sumerogi wa hito to naritamaishi? (“Why did the Emperor have to become a human being?”). Yet, throughout Mishima’s writings, such as in the third volume of The Sea of Fertility (The Temple of Dawn) there are hints suggesting that all efforts in our day and age to return to a state of transcendence and tradition, pure or impure as they may be, are tragic, futile attempts to stall the inevitable. The world is set on a steady course away from the divine, and has been so since time immemorial.

VI.

What of beauty? Is it, too, subject to the ruin of time, or does it harbour some atemporal aspect? In the writings of Mishima, beauty tends to be either inescapably linked to the physical world, and in particular to the human body, which beauty is doomed to decay and can be saved only momentarily – yet, perhaps, in a moment outside of time – by being destroyed at its zenith of perfection, or else portrayed, like in the previous quote from Sun and Steel, as something “always retreating from one’s grasp”; a paradoxical, shining nothingness haunting the sensible human mind like some ghostly vessel of the divine void, the nada of the mystics. In Mishima’s foremost work dealing with the latter, ethereal variant of beauty, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the Kyoto temple of the title is described by the narrator, the obsessive, “evil” acolyte Mizoguchi as “a nihility that had been designed and constructed with the most exquisite care”. The Golden Temple’s “apparently indestructible beauty” towers before the protagonist “like some terrifying pause in a piece of music”, paralyzing his very sense of existence while at the same time constituting his raison d'être.
   At the end of the novel, however, Mizoguchi “sets free” the beauty of the temple by destroying the building with fire, and thereby also regain his will to live. His tortuous transition from passive to active nihilism also carries a tinge of nostalgia for a past “ruled by Buddhist law” where destruction by fire – and subsequent regeneration – was “the order of the day”. The unspoken irony of the novel is the fact that the temple just a few years later was rebuilt and its splendour resurrected, just like the phoenix portrayed on the top of its gleaming roof. The idea of beauty – and the human longing for it – endures the destruction of its visible forms.
   The inevitable decay of manifest beauty and the impossibility of “purity” in a world dominated by economistic and “humanistic” values are themes that recur throughout Mishima’s later novels, and especially in his major opus The Sea of Fertility. In the final volume of the tetralogy, The Decay of the Angel (Tennin Gosui, 1970), a masterpiece of subdued beauty and utter bleakness, time has run its course, life forces have come to their ends, a world has been lost. The idealism, dedication and romanticism displayed by the protagonists of the first two volumes have been replaced with vapidity, scheming calculation and narcissism. The book is filled with lyrical meditations on finality and decay, such as the passage wherein the observer-protagonist Honda describes one of the sceneries from the Kitano picture scroll in a haunting soliloquy on the subject of the death of angels:

The gold dust of all-powerful beauty and pleasure drifts down. Absolute freedom soaring in emptiness is torn away like a rending of flesh. The shadows gather. The light dies. Soft power drips and drips from the beautiful fingers. The fire flickers in the depths of flesh, the spirit is departing.
The brightly checkered floor of the pavilion, the vermillion balustrades, have faded not at all. Relics of grandeur, they will be there when the angels are gone.
Beneath shining hair beautiful nostrils are turned upward. The angels seem to be catching the first fore-scent of decay. Petals twisting beyond clouds, azure decay coloring the sky, all pleasures of sight and spirit, all the joyous vastness of the universe, gone.

The “angel” (tennin) of The Sea of Fertility is of course the repeatedly reincarnated (or apparently reincarnated) young protagonist of the four novels, but it is hard to escape the notion that their fate is supposed to mirror the history of modern Japan as Mishima perceived it (the third volume, The Temple of Dawn, appears to be an exception with its settings in Thailand and India, but the sensuousness and archetypically female traits of the protagonist Ying Chan may be linked to the notion of hedonism and “national emasculation” as characteristics of post-war Japan (trends actively promoted by the American occupational authorities, as shown by John Dower in his study Embracing Defeat), which crops up elsewhere in Mishima’s writings). Thus the pathos apparent in the photograph described at the beginning of Spring Snow has by the end of The Decay of the Angel been replaced with an air of pathetic dissolution, as in the sceneries of shallow affluence observed by the aged Honda on his way from Tokyo to Nara:

 Waiting with several women and children at a bus stop was a pregnant woman, warm in a bold Western print. The faces wore a certain stagnation, as of tea leaves floating on the torrents of life. Beyond was a dusty tomato patch.

The Daigo district was a clutter of all the dreary details of new construction, to be seen throughout Japan: raw building materials and blue-tiled roofs, television towers and power lines, Coca-Cola advertisements and drive-in snack bars.

The historical pessimism and the theme of decaying beauty are not specific to Mishima’s later period (usually considered to have begun with the publication of the short story “Patriotism” (Yūkoku) in the summer of 1960). In fact, it harks back to his very earliest works published during the war years, such as the already mentioned Hanazakari no Mori, wherein we encounter passages such as the following:

 Now Beauty is a gorgeous, runaway horse. But there was a time when it was reined in and stood quivering in its tracks and neighing shrilly at the misty morning sky. Only then was the horse clean and pure, graceful beyond compare. Now severity has let go the reins; the horse stumbles, regains its footing, plunges headlong. It is no longer immaculate, mud cakes its flank. Yet there are times even now when a man will see the phantom of an immaculate white horse.

It is likely of significance that the comparison of beauty to a white horse does not only relate to the concept of purity, but also brings to mind more specifically the horse of the emperor which, according to court traditions, has to be pure white. This imperial steed would reappear a quarter of a century later in Eirei no koe, bearing the “man who is a god”. Thus beauty is connected with purity, which in turn is linked to tradition and the perceived incarnation of the godhead, the numina now wrapped in the grey dusk of decay and disintegration, waiting for someone of sufficient “purity” to tear the dark clouds apart with a flashing sword.

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Sven André, visiting Mishima's grave, March 2004.

This essay is also available in Swedish here.
Sven André Det totalitära nuet here.

SRM Reviews (#67 December 2009)

Pulished in Sweden Rock Magazine #67 December 2009.

Urgehal
Ikonoklast - 4/10
Season of Mist (Sound Pollution)

Band, skivbolag och konsumenter måste inse att fullängdsformatet i många fall är överskattat. Att införliva slarv och trams bara för att fylla ut speltiden är inget annat än musikbyråkratisk idioti. Om norska Urgehal på sitt sjätte album hade anammat devisen kvalitet framför kvantitet hade vi sluppit bottennapp som Kniven rider dypt i natt (något slags ölstint punkrocktjosan) och i stället kunnat mässa i lugn och ro till Cut Their Tounge Shut Their Prayer. I sistnämnda spår är norrmännen som vassast; klassiskt norska black metal-slingor av det finstämda snittet, härligt antikristen lyrik och rejäla hooks. Men då och då försöker de sig på samhällskritik och metallisk punkrock. Man tar sig för pannan! Vem i bandet bör knivhuggas för dessa tilltag? Säg mig och jag anlitar närmaste torped. Jag kan inte ta bandet på allvar.
Urgehal påminner stundtals om tidiga Khold, men snabbare och brutalare. Mer thrash. Inget groove att tala om. Långtifrån lika skitigt. Det är dock deras bleka black metal jag vill åt. Den glimrar till emellanåt, men alldeles för sällan. En EP med de bästa svartmetallstyckena hade känts mer relevant än det här.

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V/A
Grind Madness at the BBC - The Earache Peel Sessions - 7/10
Earache (Sound Pollution)

I en tid när mp3-bloggar och YouTube var så mycket framtid att Saida inte ens kunde förvarna om det vanvettiga som är crabcore (googla, gubbe!) i sin kristallkula så förlitade sig ungdomen på radio. Lars Aldman var väl den svensk som presenterade alternativ musik på bästa sätt i sina Bommen-program. England hade John Peel, och till skillnad från Aldman var Peel en levande legend. Hans inflytande i underjorden går inte att ta miste på. Han spelade vad helst han ville, och struntade kraftigt i vad pöbeln krävde. Det är bland annat sådant som skapar en legend värd namnet.
The Peel Sessions-plattorna fångar magin som uppstår i replokalen och under konserten, men som är så svårfångad i studion. Detta för att John Peel tillät banden att vara sig själva. Här finns ingen studiokonstlad stelhet.
Denna samling handlar dock bara om ett enda band.

Om The Beatles lade grunden för popmusik och Black Sabbath för hårdrock, så lade Napalm Death definitivt grunden för extrem metal. I min värld finns inget brutalare än när Mick Harris går loss på skinnen i The Kill. Dagens Nasum-grindare har inte en chans och har inte fattat ett smack. Grindcore handlar om kaos, inte om perfektion. Grindcore handlar om punk, inte om metal.
Napalm Deaths debut i John Peels radioprogram är det bästa de någonsin spelat in. Det är också den bästa grindcore som någonsin framförts - och detta var 1987! Begrunda faktum i någon minut, tack.
Deras två första inspelningar definierade och definierar fortfarande vad som är grindcore i min värld. Antimusik när den är som mest råbarkad och meningsfull. Enkom dessa tjugo minuter gör denna samling värd sitt pris.
Som bonus får man ytterligare över tre timmars musik.

Men märk väl att det enbart är Napalm Death och i viss mån Unseen Terror som står för renrasig grindcore på den här samlingen.  Extreme Noise Terror är namnet till trots ganska variationsfattig crust. Snabbfotad sådan, men sällan i grindcoretempo. Carcass, även de pionjärer i sin goregrind-genre, är ganska såsiga och deras extremt vansinniga Reek of Putrefaction- och Symphonies of Sickness-låtar kommer inte riktigt till sin rätt här. Bolt Thrower bidrar med murken death metal och låter kanske inte som allra bäst – men definitivt råast. Unseen Terrors låtar är däremot att föredra framför deras enda knepigt producerade fullängdare Human Error. Heresy och Intense Degree definierar egensinnig hardcore. Och Godflesh är som alltid det svarta fåret med sin monotona industrimetal.
Men som ni märker är det Napalm Death som gäller här. Total dyrkan på alla plan.
Vi tackar John Peel för kulturgärningen och låter honom nu vila i frid.

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I also did an interview with Die Hard in this issue.

The Israel Lobby 2009 - Part Two

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

The Zionist cause becomes quite obvious when looking at this map. As I've stated here, the essence of Zionism is Jewish ethnic domination over Palestine, and by looking at this map you'll see that the future of a two-state solution is virtually non-existent. Israel keeps expanding its settlements, no matter what the rest of the world thinks about such criminal behaviour.
As a reminder of the ugliness and stupidity of religion (read more about that here, here, here and here), the Christian Zionists, who are a significant political force in America, oppose the two-state solution, because they believe total Israeli control over Palestine will make it easier for Christ's "Second Coming"... Holy fuck!

In short, there are three alternatives to a two-state solution. Each will be disastrous - for Israel, that is.

One: Abandon the Zionist vision of a Jewish state and let Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. This will never happen. There is no way that the Jewish people will agree to live as a minority in a state dominated by an Arab majority. Israel's supporters in America will have no interest in this outcome.

Two: Israel expels all Palestinians in an act of ethnic cleansing, pretty much like what they did in 1948. This might actually happen, considering the recent Gaza massacre. They are so concerned about the survival of this Jewish state they're capable of doing just such a sickening thing. However, the Palestinians will put up brutal resistance. There will be lots of blood. Will the West sit back once again? Probably so. This will be the absolute beginning of the end.

Three: Apartheid. This is the most likely outcome. The Arabs will be forced to live in small enclaves with limited autonomy, economically crippled and with no part in the political process. This is pretty much how things are right now.

Democracy in Israel won't be tolerated, since the Arabs, who are the majority, would dominate its politics.

John Mearsheimer:
Imagine if the roles were reversed and a powerful Palestinian state was taking land away from Jewish inhabitants and brutalizing them in the process. There would rightfully be a storm of protest in the US and across Europe and tremendous pressure would be brought to bear on that Palestinian state to immediately cease exploiting the Jews and permit them to have a state of their own. But when Israelis colonize the West Bank and effectively turn Gaza into a giant prison for the Palestinians who live there, the US government not only does not protest, it backs Israel to the hilt. And that includes Barack Obama.

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This article is based on John Mearsheimer's talk in Oslo, October 5th 2009. The personal rants are all mine, though. John doesn't seem to be a man of swear words...
Huge thanks to John for sending me the speech, both in English and in Norwegian.

Yesterday, Antiwar.com published the article The Israel Lobby, the Neocons, and the Iranian-American Community. It's well worth reading.

Art Crime: How to...

Some of Sweden's top writers demonstrate their style. Everything in this post is stolen without kind permission from the Highlights blog.

Erse, Bruce, Ance and Crack from The Pricks.


Abyss, Assma, Dire, Gauge, Ikaroz, Italy, Kaos, Polar, Pomac, Skil and Tiff2.

Abyss burning a black book.


More Erse stuff here.
Abyss and Bruce here.
Stay clean!

The Israel Lobby 2009

This article is based on John Mearsheimer's talk in Oslo, October 5th 2009. The personal rants are all mine, though. John doesn't seem to be a man of swear words...
Huge thanks to John for sending me the speech, both in English and in Norwegian.

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President Obama is a man of words, but is he a man of action? During his presidential campaign 2008 and since taking office, he made – and still makes – a lot of promises. Regarding U.S. policy in the Middle East he made it very clear that he was committed to settling the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. To do this he would get Israel to stop expanding its settlements in the occupied territories and – in the future – allow the Palestinians to have their own state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Also, he said that he – as opposed to George W. Bush – believed in diplomatic, serious negotiations with Iran, instead of military attacks and threats of economic sanctions.

However, this will probably never happen, since the Israel Lobby simply won't allow such humane behaviour.

The Netanyahu government in Israel is opposed to giving the Palestinians their own state, and it is also deeply committed to expanding the settlements. No president will be allowed to play the hardball game with Israel, because the goal is to control the whole West Bank and the Gaza Strip, leaving the Arabs with small enclaves inside Israel – pretty much like a white-ruled South Africa. Read more about zionism here.

As for Iran, it is looked upon as an existential threat to the Jewish state, and the Israel Lobby and its supporters have no interest in talking to a regime who, they believe, wants to ”wipe Israel off the map” (fact is, Ahmadinejad never said that, read more about that in the Propaganda for war article).
Note that Israel is the only country in the world advocating war against Iran. Inside the U.S., there are only pro-Israel individuals and dito organizations who support using force in this case. In fact, there would be little talk about attacking Iran if Israel and the Lobby were not bitching about war all the time. And again: who are the ones in possession of nuclear weapons? Also read this article in The Economist.

Even though Israel constantly do things that the U.S. opposes, they still get more foreign aid – billions of dollars each year – than any other country. Every goddamn American president since 1967 has – in theory, in meek words – opposed settlement-building in the occupied territories, still Israel continues to break the rules. And they're not being punished – they're constantly being rewarded. Why is that? The answer: the enormous power of the Israel Lobby. America is completely impotent when it comes to dealing with Israel. Serious criticism of Israel is never heard of from American officials. It's a joke, really.
Ok, Obama made it very clear that he would like to see a stop of any settlement activity, and that he'd like a Palestinian state. However, Netanyahu also made it very clear that he would not stop, and that he didn't like the idea of a two-state solution. Who won? Israel, of course. This tiny country in a distant region continue to rule the giant U.S. colossus. Isn't that strange?

John Mearsheimer:
Netanyahu not only refused to stop building 2500 housing units in the West Bank, but just to make it clear to Obama who was boss, in late June, he authorized the building of 300 new homes in the West Bank. Netanyahu refused to even countenance any limits on settlement building in East Jerusalem, which is supposed to be the capitol of a Palestinian state. In fact, Israel went ahead, despite American protests, and converted an old Arab hotel in East Jerusalem into a Jewish apartment building. The Israelis also expelled two Arab families from their homes that they had lived in for 50 years and issued tenders for 468 new apartments in East Jerusalem.

Obama meekly asked Israel to please ”restrain” itself while it continued colonizing the West Bank.

Talk is cheap.
Change?
Hope?
Yes we can?
No, you can't. Not when it comes to Israel and the lobby.

The Israel Lobby's influence is at its peak during the presidential campaigns. You won't ever witness such a campaign without the mentioning if this tiny but powerful country. 
After Obama had won the election he remained perfectly silent during the recent Gaza massacre. The whole world stood up and criticized Israel for its brutal assault, but Obama kept quiet. A few months later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize...
I still wonder about all you naïve Obama worshippers who cried during his inaugural speech: when are you going to wake the fuck up?

---

When reading this, and since it's such a sensitive subject just mentioning Jews, I think it's of great importance that you recognize this: the Lobby is defined by its political agenda, not by ethnicity or religion. The Israel Lobby is not necessarily synonymous with Jewish-Americans. The Christian Zionists, for example, that work on Israel's behalf, are not Jewish.
In other words: your shallow hate mongering about anti-Semitism does not compute.

To be continued...

EDIT:
Monday, 16 november 2009, The Independent publishes an interesting article entitled "Palestinian push for an independent state causes Israeli alarm". Pretty much says it all...

The Road - A neverending well of bliss

Since I like photos of endless, desolate roads and The Road so much, I once again give you a grim motherfucker of a Cormac McCarthy quote from hell. Or something like that.
I just got a hold of some of the songs from the soundtrack composed by the master duo Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, and I'll be damned if this film won't do it for me. The songs are close to perfection. The book is close to perfection. But the trailer is not that good, actually. Hopefully there'll be a lot more mysticism, ashes, darkness and melancholy involved. As for the mysticism aspect, one of the great things about the book is that you never know what really happened, what caused the apocalypse.
The horror! The horror!

 When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that will never be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you. 

[...]

Things will be better when everybody's gone.
They will?
Sure they will.
Better for who?
Everybody.
Everybody.
Sure. We'll all be better off. We'll all breathe easier.
That's good to know.
Yes it is. When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be be. What's wrong with that?

[...]

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

[...]
 
Everything was covered in ash.

The Road

I still return to The Road, now probably because the movie is just around the corner, but ever since I first read it in December 2006 (read more here) I've been reading bits and pieces over and over again. Just like one does with good poetry. The way that Cormac McCarthy deals with the love and the darkness of mankind just overwhelms me every time. There are many passages where the dialogue between the man and the boy is so sparse, yet so very tense. There is all the room in the world for long and intricate conversations, but there are none. Simply because they are getting ready to die in a world where everything is lost, where everything is ashes and darkness and hopelessness.
The mother of the boy chose suicide when she realized that this was the end, when she watched distant cities burn. This makes the tenderness and the love shared between father and son even more heartwrenching. The post apocalypse has never been better.

This excerpt, where the man and the boy meet up with a lone traveller, a very old and torn man, is a good example of how the atmosphere, the cold, wet, ashen landscape, slowly devours the human bodies, but cannot fully erase the human emotions. Mind over matter.

 How long have you been on the road?
 I was always on the road. You cant stay in one place.
 How do you live?
 I just keep going. I knew this was coming.
 You knew it was coming?
 Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it.
 Did you try to get ready for it?
 No. What would you do?
 I dont know.
 People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there.
 I guess not.
 Even if you knew what to do you wouldnt know what to do. You wouldnt know if you wanted to do it or not. Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?
 Do you wish you would die?
 No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you.
 Or you might wish you'd never been born.
 Well. Beggars cant be choosers.
 You think that would be asking too much.
 What's done is done. Anyway, it's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.
 I guess so.
 Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave. He lifted his head and looked across the fire at the boy. Then he looked at the man. The man could see his small eyes watching him in the firelight. God knows what those eyes saw. He got up to pile more wood on the fire and he raked the coals back from the dead leaves. The red sparks rose in a shudder and died in the blackness overhead. The old man drank the last of his coffee and set the bowl before him and leaned toward the heat with his hands out. The man watched him. How would you know if you were the last man on earth? he said.
 I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it.
 Nobody would know it.
 It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.
 I guess God would know it. Is that it?
 There is no God.
 No?
 There is no God and we are his prophets.

The Zoomquilt

Click here to zoooom away!

More info here.

Shane sings five octaves on the piano

Praise to Doom-Jon for spreading the gospel.

Lovecraft and Houellebecq

When reading Michel Houellebecq's fantastic discussion of H.P. Lovecraft in Against the World, Against Life, I browsed the web for further information and thus stumbled upon one of the best articles ever written about one of my favourite authors. Of course, it was written by Houellebecq...
The link.
The text:

 'Perhaps one needs to have suffered a great deal in order to appreciate Lovecraft ... '
Jacques Bergier

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined notations, situations, anecdotes ... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our "real life" days.

Now, here is Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937): "I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." We need a supreme antidote against all forms of realism.

   * * *

Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

As for Lovecraft, he was more than a little fed up. In 1908 at the age of 18, he suffered what has been described as a "nervous breakdown" and plummeted into a lethargy that lasted about 10 years. At the age when his old classmates were hurriedly turning their backs on childhood and diving into life as into some marvellous, uncensored adventure, he cloistered himself at home, speaking only to his mother, refusing to get up all day, wandering about in a dressing gown all night.

What's more, he wasn't even writing.

What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can't even be sure of this. In fact, his biographers have had to admit they don't know much at all, and that, judging from appearances - at least between the ages of 18 and 23 - he did absolutely nothing.

Then, between 1913 and 1918, very slowly, the situation improved. Gradually, he re-established contact with the human race. It was not easy. In May 1918 he wrote to Alfred Galpin: "I am only about half alive - a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me."

It is definitely pointless to embark on a dramatic or psychological reconstruction. Because Lovecraft is a lucid, intelligent and sincere man. A kind of lethargic terror descended upon him as he turned 18 and he knew the reason for it perfectly well. In a 1920 letter he revisits his childhood at length. The little railway set whose cars were made of packing-cases, the coach house where he had set up his puppet theatre. And later, the garden he had designed, laying out each of its paths. It was irrigated by a system of canals that were his own handiwork, its ledges enclosed a small lawn at the centre of which stood a sundial. It was, he said, "the paradise of my adolescent years".

Then comes this passage that concludes the letter: "Then I perceived with horror that I was growing too old for pleasure. Ruthless Time had set its fell claw upon me, and I was 17. Big boys do not play in toy houses and mock gardens, so I was obliged to turn over my world in sorrow to another and younger boy who dwelt across the lot from me. And since that time I have not delved in the earth or laid out paths and roads. There is too much wistful memory in such procedure, for the fleeting joy of childhood may never be recaptured. Adulthood is hell."

Adulthood is hell. In the face of such a trenchant position, "moralists" today will utter vague opprobrious grumblings while waiting for a chance to strike with their obscene intimations. Perhaps Lovecraft actually could not become an adult; what is certain is that he did not want to. And given the values that govern the adult world, how can you argue with him? The reality principle, the pleasure principle, competitiveness, permanent challenges, sex and status - hardly reasons to rejoice.

Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world. And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice. He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they might appear differently. He saw religions as so many sugar-coated illusions made obsolete by the progress of science. At times, when in an exceptionally good mood, he would speak of the enchanted circle of religious belief, but it was a circle from which he felt banished, anyway.

Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure "Victorian fictions". All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.

Lovecraft was well aware of the distinctly depressing nature of his conclusions. As he wrote in 1918, "all rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life, and to decrease the sum total of human happiness. In some cases the truth may cause suicidal or nearly suicidal depression."

He remained steadfast in his materialism and atheism. In letter after letter he returned to his convictions with distinctly masochistic delectation.

Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. And this is another thing that curdles the blood when one discovers Lovecraft's universe. The deaths of his heroes have no meaning. Death brings no appeasement. It in no way allows the story to conclude. Implacably, HPL destroys his characters, evoking only the dismemberment of marionettes. Indifferent to these pitiful vicissitudes, cosmic fear continues to expand. It swells and takes form. Great Cthulhu emerges from his slumber.

To be continued in this article...

SRM Reviews (#66 November 2009)

Published in Sweden Rock Magazine #66 November 2009.

Ataraxy
Rotten Shit - 8/10
Demo CD-R

Herrejävlar! Efter att ha tvingats igenom tre svenska, finlemmade döds- och blackproduktioner är det en fröjd att dänga på spanska Ataraxys Rotten Shit-demo och bara spy ner sig själv fullständigt. Ljudet äter sig genom hjärnan likt ett gäng överfeta likmaskar som inte kan få nog i sin eviga jakt på död och förruttnelse. Så fett! Så skitigt! Man baxnar.
Låtmaterialet går heller inte av för hackor. Helvete vad man baxnar! De vet ex-jävla-akt hur låtarna ska byggas upp för att lille Indy ska gå ner i spagat, förbanna gudarna och dricka din mammas blod.
Och jag älskar band som hyllar känslan och viljan framför den musikaliska perfektionen. De skulle kunna göra tusen omtagningar och få trummorna perfekta, men hur tråkigt blir inte det? Astråkigt givetvis. Det här är äkta. Inget trams. Zombiesnubben på omslaget har tygmärken med Nihilist och Nirvana 2002. Stil och klass!
Jag är redan nervös för att de ska ha ”finat till sig” inför albumsläppet.
Låt det icke ske!

----------

Mr. Death
Detached From Life - 6/10
Agonia (Sound Pollution)

Jag siktar en nygammal generation gammeldödsmanglare i Svedala!
Efter det att ynglingarna i Invidious, Tribulation, Morbus Chron och Gravehammer sparkade liv i liket på ett strålande sätt kan man nu skåda ett gäng rangliga gubbar med förflutet i diverse tidiga orkestrar som återigen har plockat upp yxorna. Bombs of Hades och Tormented är de som ligger mig varmast om hjärtat. Och nu har vi här Mr. Death, med medlemmar från bland annat Treblinka och Expulsion. Ett uselt bandnamn, men vad göra när allt annat är upptaget och förbrukat? Och snubbarna ser för fan ut som korthåriga IT-konsulter! Man vet inte vad man ska tro, så man får lyssna.
Och det låter riktigt bra. Grottig, murken dödsmetall som sällan lämnar motorvägen, och som har Det med stort D – även om man ibland får gräva djupt för att finna. De kunde måhända ha rensat bland materialet, för just nu känns en fullängdare i längsta laget. Ändå: så oerhört mycket bättre än mycket annat i skivbackarna.

Now reading: Nick Cave

I've been listening to Nick Cave for many years, but only a few of his albums - which is kind of odd. There are still loads of records by The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman that I haven't heard yet. I guess too much of this kind of music is just... too much.
Let Love In (1994) and Murder Ballads (1996) were given almost weekly spins at my place a couple of years ago. The one album I prefer the most though is The Proposition (2005), the soundtrack to the fantastic film which he did with his fellow Bad Seeder Warren Ellis. They also collaborated on the music to the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), and they're doing the same thing for The Road (2009). Can't wait for that one!

As for his books I only recently got to read them, and I like them a lot. His debut, And The Ass Saw The Angel (1989), is a tough read, though. The language is complex and very poetic, and thus the story becomes hard for me to grasp - especially since English is not my native language. It was only after I read some reviews and articles about the text that I started to like it.
What others had to say:

 This novel is strong enough to provoke nightmares and make the hardiest reader reflect on the human condition at it's worst and most pathetic.

[...]

The empathy that pours forth from the reader while Euchrid's tale is told is so powerful and overwhelming -- I can't even begin to describe how I felt while reading this book. And the ending -- the ending! All I can say is that it's a masterpiece. The bitterness towards religious fanaticism is so sweet -- at least it was for me. I'm very bitter towards religion and Christianity, and this book just seemed to justify it.

[...]

And all is told with an almost prophetic Biblical tone, with infinite foreboding and dark overtones.

The second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro (2009), is an easy read. I finished it in one weekend and even though it may seem more shallow than his debut, it certainly has a lot of depth. At least it got my mind going. In short, it's about sex addiction.
What others had to say:

 This novel is bound to spark lots of different reactions because it is provocative and explicit and strange and dangerous and incredibly funny and genuinely challenging. But I hope that the beauty of the writing and the seriousness of the book's moral dimensions are not overlooked because of the 'controversial' aspects of the novel. For this second novel by Nick Cave is a major piece of literature that makes so much of what is being written today in this country look anodyne and flaccid.

[---]

Like a modern day Bukowski, Nick Cave's post-beat gen road trip takes a journey through hell and back, through reckless sex and restless grief and loathing...

Check out some excerpts from the audiobook here, and since Cave and Ellis have composed a soundtrack to the book, you get to hear their amazing music as well.

Stockholm International Film Festival

The Stockholm International Film Festival has always been a pleasure. Last year I couldn't go due to various reasons, but this time I'll do my best not to miss out on some of the experience.

My best year was in 2003, when I had the pleasure of interviewing director Royston Tan (featured in the paper edition of Ny Moral #1). We hung out quite a bit, and watching his film, 15 – The Movie, was amazing after having spoken with him about it. I don't think I would've enjoyed it as much if I hadn't known the background, the struggle and all the madness surrounding the creation of the film.
The movie's plot synopsis reads like this:
Fast, frenetic, and furious, 15 is the story of five Singaporian teenagers who, abandoned by the system and estranged from their parents and life in general, build their own world in which gangs, drugs, fighting, piercing, self-harm and suicide are common and brotherhood is important above all else.

Royston is a huge fan of Roy Andersson, and somehow somebody managed to get us invited to Roy Andersson's studio, Studio 24, and that was really interesting, since I'm a huge fan of Roy as well. We got to see some of his sets and his private cinema, and I also became friends with the producer of Sånger från andra våningen [Songs from the Second Floor], Lisa Alwert. I was supposed to interview her later on, but somehow that went down the drain. She's got some wild stories about the production which I haven't read anything about elsewhere. Maybe that'll show up in Ny Moral #2...
We hung out a bit with Roy as well, but he really didn't say much. Good guy, though.

I also exchanged a few words with David Lynch at Lydmar Hotel (check it out if you ever come to Stockholm, they have the coolest elevator!). I don't remember what we said. He is one of my idols, so I guess I got starstruck.
All I could think of was what his big hair would look like after a shower... Weird.

I also got to see Ong Bak, Goodbye Lenin, Aillen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, The Grudge 1 & 2, Prozac Nation, The Station Agent, Internal Affairs and Memories of Murder – all very watchable films (well, maybe not the Grudge films...). The worthless "graffiti" movie Bomb The System and the pretty dull and disappointing The Cooler are now erased from my memory.

In 2002 I had my most memorable cinematic experience ever. Gaspar Noé's sickening film Irréversible really fucked with my mind. The opening sequence with the spinning camera, the evil sounds (Gaspar uses infrasounds that cause awe and fear to make people extra anxious), the disturbing images, the intensity... A lot of people left the theater after ten minutes. Even more left during the infamous rape scene. The ones who stayed until the end were rewarded with a very good film. But remember, it's a whole different thing watching that stuff in a good theater with superhigh volume, sick surround sounds and these huge images attacking your eyes, compared to watching it at home. I'm really glad I got to see it then and there.
It won the Best Film award that year, which is pretty brave, because it really is an unpleasant movie. Even though I think the quality of the films has been lower over the recent years, they knew the game back then. They realized that it was a very good movie, even though it was highly controversial. I like that, and I hope they will bring that vibe back someday.

This year is the 20th edition of the Sthlm International Film Festival, and so far I only get to see four or five films. Hopefully they will blow my mind as well.

The Road
I read the book in 2006 when it came out and it was easily the best book I had read in a long, long time. It's still one of my all time favourites. I wrote about it here.
I hope the movie has the same darkness, the same emptiness, the same uncontrollable combination of uncertainty and hope, and of course the same love.

The Limits of Control
Jim Jarmusch has never disappointed me, and I love how this movie is described in the press: Lights! Camera! Inaction!
As a fan of minimalism, film art and Jim Jarmusch this one should hit the spot for me.

Dogtooth
I have a feeling this one will be both scary and funny. The Fritzl theme brings the darkness. The absurdity brings the joy.

Waiting Room
A short film.
And I'm a sucker for gas masks.
And the plot synopsis rules:
The predicament of man forced to live in an immense void surrounded by nothing but waste, emptiness and degradation. A young man wearing a gas mask wanders through the deserted streets of a crumbling city. Only a few people - all male - still roam the streets and frequent the coffee shops. The anonymous young man is an existentialist hero in a world where man has been robbed of all purpose.

The Road

The Limits of Control

Dogtooth

Waiting Room

Johanna Basford

The designs of Johanna Basford.

Why we fight

Why do people think that just because you give voice to one opinion of one political party, you're down 100% with that specific party? Just a disclaimer, because I'm not down with any party. So therefore, here's some old school communism for ya, the way I like it: classy! Because if there's gonna be a class war, I'd like it classy...

Johannes Jäger made me aware of this one. Check his blogg (in Swedish) here.

Work Community Politics War
Arbete Gemenskap Politik Krig

Modern film posters

Yes, modern film posters are ugly as hell. I guess that's representative for shallow and soulless lives lead by bastards who want everything served on a silver platter. This is beyond doubt the age of stupid in every possible way. People are lazy fucks. People are stupid fucks. I could continue on...
However, there are of course some people who defy the laws of tradition (Primus pun intended - check the jam here, its' awesome!) and create what in my mind is good looking shit.
Here are some posters and designs created by allcity. They would be even better looking without the ugly review quotes, but this is about as clean as it gets, and that's the way I like it. The unused ones are in my opinion way better than the ones that were chosen in the end.
It's all a matter of taste...

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Czech film posters

Thanks to my man Hynek Pallas I discovered the Czech Film Posters website.
I'm hooked.

Related posts about poster art
Malleus

The Art of Persuasion: British propaganda posters

The Art of Persuasion: American propaganda posters

The Art of Persuasion: German propaganda posters

Stolen text from the Czech Film Posters website:
"Following a communist take-over in 1948, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a totalitarian regime for over forty years. The level of oppression varied throughout the period – the stifling Stalinist practices of the 1950s gradually gave way to a more liberal rule in the 1960s. But the 1968 Prague Spring movement to break free from the leash held by the Kremlin was brutally supressed by the Red Army in August. The following period of darkness – referred to by the regime as “the process of normalisation” – gradually lightened with the onset of Gorbachev’s Perestrojka in the mid 1980s. Like most other Central European communist regimes the Czech one fell in 1989 during the wave of changes set off by the powerfully symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall.

[...]

The decision on which foreign films could be approved for cinema distribution and which local artists could be allowed to make Czech and Slovak films was totally up to the authorities.
The attitudes of the censors rode the same waves as the regime in general.

[...]

Following the Russian invasion in 1968 and the subsequent occupation, the 1970s saw a new tightening of the censorship screw, but it largely concentrated on the local scene and foreign films continued to slip through the iron curtain. Czechoslovak film-goers could see a number of European club movies (Bergman, Fellini, Visconti), more than a few US blockbusters (The Sting, Jaws, Marathon Man, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer v. Kramer, Alien and others) and a good crop of conspiracy theory thrillers (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men). The communist authorities liked the latter for their exposure of the rot in the Western world.

[...]

But it took until the early 1990s for the Czechoslovak screens to finally see the light shining through such seminal rolls of celluloid such as Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Wings of Desire not to mention any of the James Bond movies or any other film with Russian baddies.
[...]

Due to the high cost, film posters were rarely imported with the film – a smaller number of French film posters being the exception – and so from the early days it was the local artists who were given the task of creating images to get bums on cinema seats. The Czech film poster of the 1920s and 1930s almost exclusively used realistically painted characters and scenes from the film and screamed the names of its stars often in letters larger than those of the film’s title. Notable exceptions to the rule were Atelier Rotter’s Art Deco works and Frantisek Zelenka’s Modernist designs for the Werich & Voskovec films.

Towards the end of the 1930s, photos of the main character started appearing in the film poster design – usually on a painted background, complemented by lettering created by the poster’s designer. The film poster art lost most of its bite and glamour during the Nazi occupation when the film industry was under the complete control of the German authorities and films in the cinemas were either German or heavily censored Czech productions.
[...]

The decade between 1948 and 1958 was dominated by communist propaganda in all aspects of life and film was one of its main tools.

[...]

The 1960s became the golden age of the Czech film poster. It was a period in which the relative artistic freedom enjoyed by the artists gelled with a range of other factors such as a unique concentration of talent, a wave of new and inspirational films coming from both home and abroad and closer links with the international art world. This cocktail of ability, inspiration and attractive topics to work on gave birth to a collection of hundreds of highly original and inovative film posters that stand apart from the main stream of the genre. While the American and Western European film poster primarily served the film, in Czech and Polish film poster art it was – with a bit of exaggeration – the film that served the poster in the sense that the poster developed into an art form in its own right. It was still used to promote the film but the art of the poster went far beyond the mere capture of the public’s attention. Another factor that enhanced the perception of the Czech film poster as a work of art rather than a purely promotional vehicle was the fact that the text on the poster was usually limited to the film title, name of director and the leading actors – no logos of film distributors and sponsors, quotes lifted from reviews, studio information etc.

[...]

The decade of hope ended with the Russian invasion in August 1968. The newly appointed pro-Kremlin government turned one of its searchlights on the arts and entertainment. Paranoid aparatchiks searched for anti-communist propaganda where there was none – film poster designs submitted by artists were often rejected or had to be reworked for bizarre reasons. In her article “Czech Film Poster from 1945 until today” published in the book Czech Film Poster of the 20th century, Marta Sylvestrova writes about a commissioning editor getting fired because of a claim by a communist official that the space between the legs of elephants pictured on a poster for the film “Surrounded by Elephants” looked like a swastika. According to Sylvestrova Zdenek Ziegler was interviewed by the secret police about where he got the 100 USD banknote he used in his design for the 100 Rifles poster and Josef Vyletal had to obscure the US flag on the back of Henry Fonda’s jacket with smoke from one of the passing motorbikes on his poster for Easy Rider."

The Israel Lobby - A letter from John Mearsheimer

 I got a letter from John Mearsheimer the other day. I opened and read it, it said they were suckers.

Well, he didn't say that, really, but he enclosed a speech he gave in Norway recently, and the finishing words read as follows:

"The bottom line is straightforward: President Obama is not going to be able to push Israel to accept a two-state solution. Instead, Israel will continue to colonize the West Bank and eventually turn itself into an apartheid state. Given that grim future, the Israelis are likely to think more and more about expelling the Palestinians from their midst, as they have done in the past. All of this is to say that Netanyahu’s recent victory over Obama was no victory at all. On the contrary, it means that there will be big trouble ahead for Israel, the United States, and especially the Palestinians."
John Mearsheimer, October 5 2009, Oslo, Norway

I'll return to John's speech and letter as soon as possible.
To be able to communicate with the author of the book I'm reading and obviously using as source for these articles is amazing. Hail the internet, freedom of speech and a true and honest debate above all.
Read more about John Mearsheimer.

The Israel Lobby - The cash

 No words can express our gratitude for your generous support, understanding, and cooperation, which are beyond compare in modern history.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1994

 We're both born of struggle and sacrifice. We're both founded by immigrants escaping religious persecution in other lands. We have both built vibrant democracies, built on the rule of law and market economies. And we're both countries founded on certain basic beliefs: that God watches over the affairs of men, and values every life. These ties have made us natural allies, and these ties will never be broken.
George W. Bush, American Israel Public Affairs Committee speech, 2004

 And I know that when I visit AIPAC I'm among friends, good friends... friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow, unbreakable forever.
Barack Obama, AIPAC speech, 2008. Hardly watchable here.

Yitzhak, you're completely right. U.S. support to Israel pale in comparison.
George, do you think God is proud of what you're doing? And what's this bullshit about He who values every life? Whitey, please... Say that to the millions of people you have killed, and the billions of people whose lives your country has ruined over the years.
Barack, your ass kissing is disgusting, and in return you'll be the most ass-kissed president in U.S. history. What an anal orgasm, huh? Peace, bro!

But seriously, even if Israel had been a poor country, the level of material, economic, military and diplomatic support that the United States provides would have been remarkable. By 2004, Israel, a comparatively small country, had become the world's eighth largest arm supplier. It is a without a doubt a powerful modern industrial state.

As of 2005, direct U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel amounted to 154 billion dollars. Nowadays Israel receives about three billion dollars per year in direct foreign assistance. These are not loans. They're grants. Also, Israel is the only country that doesn't have to account for how the foreign aid is spent. Aid to other countries are given for specific purposes, like children's health, improving education, etc., but Israel receives a direct cash transfer and there is no way to tell how Israel uses U.S. aid.
In addition to all this craziness, Israel, again as the only country, receives its total cash transfer in the first days of the year, while other countries get their cash in quarterly installments. To make such a huge cash transfer possible, U.S. government needs to borrow the money up front, and it's estimated that it costs U.S. taxpayers between 50 and 60 million dollars per year to borrow funds for this early year payment.
When given money from the United States as military assistance, countries are normally required to spend the money in the U.S. to help keep American defense workers employed (i.e. to buy U.S. weaponry). This is not the case when it comes to Israel. According to a special exception in some crazy ass bill, Israel is allowed to use about one out of every four dollars on its own defense industry.

However, during the 1950's, economic aid to Israel was quite modest, and the U.S. did not provide much military assistance at all. It was the Kennedy administration that made the first commitment by selling U.S. Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Israel in 1963. This sale opened up for more weapon deals, most notably the sale of more than two hundred M48A battle tanks in 1964. To disguise American involvement and avoid anger from the Arab world, the tanks were shipped to Israel by West Germany...
Between 1966 and 1970 economic aid was at 102 million dollars per year. In 1971 that support sum was raised to 634.5 million dollars, and after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, economic aid more than quintupled (five times the size!). In 1976 Israel became the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, a position it has retained ever since.

Three billion dollars per year is  hardly the whole story, though. The actual total is much higher, since Israel is given money under unusually favorable terms, and the U.S. also provides Israel with lots of other material assistance that is not included in the foreign assistance budget.
America allows Israel, and only Israel, to borrow money from commercial banks at very low interest rates. For example, in the early 1990's Israel received ten billion dollars to finance the costs of settling Soviet Jews immigrating to Israel.
As for private donations, every year Israel recieves about two billion dollars from American citizens. According to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, one recent (2006) dinner in New York raised 18 millions dollars in private contributions, money which is tax deductible under U.S. law.
Also, the aid that the U.S. provides to Israel's neighbours – particularly Egypt and Jordan – is at least partly intended to benefit Israel as well. The cash is rewards for good behavior, like when these countries sign peace treaties with Israel. In 1979, when the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty was signed, U.S. aid to Egypt reached 5.9 billion dollars. When King Hussein of Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, Jordan's 700 million dollar debt to America was erased. These are just a couple of examples of Washington's generosity toward the Jewish state.

Mearsheimer and Walt are constantly being accused of anti-Semitism because of their book. They've discussed pretty much each and every accusation in a 73 page long PDF document entitled Setting the Record Straight - A Response to Critics of "The Israel Lobby".
Read it in case you're in doubt.

Part One in this series.
An introductory video to the Israel lobby.
The photos they don't want you to see.

The Israel Lobby - What it is

Because the United States is a nation of immigrants it has created a great number of interest groups who obviously work for their own ethnic good. Cuban Americans have lobbied to maintain the embargo on Castro's regime, for example. The Israel lobby works the same way. There's nothing strange about that.
However, the Israel lobby has convinced many Americans and people world wide that American interests and Israeli interests are identical. They surely are not. Just by making an open debate impossible (you're immediately labelled the Jew Hater and the evil Anti-Semite, whenever you try to discuss these subjects (the amount of anonymous emails I've recieved since I started this blog is pretty interesting...)) Israel and the Zionist idea encourages anti-Semitism – and with that comes the anti-American vibe. Hence, their policy is simply contraproductive. Anyone should be able to see that, really.
So the strange thing here is the very special relationship between Israel and the United States.

So what is the Israel lobby? It is ”a loose coalition of individuals and groups - not a single, unified movement with a central leadership - that seeks to influence American foreign policy in ways that will benefit Israel”, as defined by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
And the political power of the Israel lobby is p.o.w.e.r.f.u.l. as hell, I kid you not.
Any politician in the United States who challenges Israel policy stands little chance of becoming president. That's plain fact. Democrats and Republicans alike fear the lobby, which is totally obvious. The presidential candidates may argue and disagree on whatever important issue facing the United States, but they all agree firmly on one specific subject: their deep personal commitment to one foreign country – Israel. The candidates are all too willing to criticize many of the things that other countries do, but they never criticize Israel.
Click here for President Obama's AIPAC speech, just to pick a recent example.

Why does Israel, and no other country in the world, recieve such consistent support from America's leading politicians? No matter what Israel does, the level of support remains unchanged. Almost every country in the world criticized Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon 2006 (and in Gaza 2008/2009) – but the United States did not. Instead they endorsed the war.
This is all thanks to the political power of the Israel lobby.
If you think this is a conspiracy theory, the conspiratory fool is definitely you.

So why the constant bitching about anti-Semitism? Because the lobby's arguments are so terribly weak. That's why their only choice is to marginalize serious discussion. That's why they always play the Holocaust card. In fact, there's a huge gap between what the broader public thinks about the Israeli/American relationship and how governing elites in Washington conduct American policy. If the American public and the world could be involved in serious debates about Israel they would be even more aware of the lobby's huge influence and how it destroys American interests – and in the long run, Israeli interests as well. And in an even longer run – which is not that far away – the slow and painful annihilation of the Earth. However, open debate is non-existent.
The main reason for this gap is – yes, you guessed it - the political power of the Israel lobby. We all know how the mass media work. Noam Chomsky influenced me to spit it out like this, and he's a Jew, you know:
(Correction: he's a self-hating Jew, according to the Israel lobby...)

Fucked by the mainstream - Part 1
Fucked by the mainstream - Part 2
Fucked by the mainstream - Part 3
Fucked by the mainstream - Part 4

And here are the photos they don't want you to see:
Gaza massacre 2008/2009
This is what the Nobel Peace Prize is all about.

To be continued in Part Two where we deal with America's economic aid to the Holy Land.

War is peace? Nigga please!

The Nobel Peace Prize is such a bad, repulsive joke. Somebody, please: end all life now. And that's not a joke.

George Orwell once again:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Click here for related Obama posts.

The Israel Lobby - An introductory video

I'm planning on writing some articles about The Israel Lobby mostly based on the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Until then, please make room for 50 minutes of your precious TV-time and watch this program.



Related posts:
Zionism, Jews and conspiracy theories (with lots of additional links to earlier posts)
Gilad Atzmon - Taking Elder Peres apart
McCain or Obama - Does it really matter?
The war on/in Iraq
The Clash of Civilizations - Part 1
The Clash of Civilizations - Part 2
Ahmadinejad posts

Young Men's Christian Association

People like this.
Thanks to Doom-Jon for spreading the disease.

Y.M.C.A.

The Earth shall inherit the meek

There are tons of propaganda movies telling us how bad we are and how good the Earth is. I like them all! They are proof of mankind's stupidity, and pretty much proof that it's way too late (this is probaly where I disagree with all those movies...).
Anyway, HOME by Yann Arthus-Bertrand is one of the better ones when it comes to pure and straight information. It's available for free on YouTube and the website home-2009.com. It's a scary movie - for real.

Click here to watch it!

Since 1950, the world's population has almost tripled, and since 1950, we have more fundamentally altered our island - the Earth - than in all of our 200,000 year history. Nigeria is the biggest oil exporter in Africa, and yet 70% of the population lives under the poverty line. The wealth is there, but the country's inhabitants don't have access to it. The same is true all over the globe. Half the world's poor live in resource-rich countries. In 50 years the gap between rich and poor has grown wider than ever. Today half the world's wealth is in the hands of the richest two (2!) percent of the population. This is the cause of population movements whose scale we have yet to fully realize.
The city of Lagos had a population of 700,000 in 1960.
That will rise to 16 million by 2025.
Deep down we all know this shit.
And you still have hope?
...I am the misanthrope.

Night on Earth

The man of a thousand and one blogs, Magnus "Reflektor" Tannergren, asked me to participate in one of his latest thousand and one projects: Remix - a virtual mixtape powered by Spotify.
I listen to a lot of music at night, so I decided to share one of those nighttime playlists entitled Night on Earth. It's just a couple of mellow tunes that slows down my mind.
Direct link here.

In case you haven't got access to Spotify, here's the playlist:

The Doors Riders on the Storm

Iron Maiden Remember Tomorrow

Mogwai feat. Roky Erickson Devil Rides

Krister Linder Eternal Life

Esbjörn Svensson Trio Tuesday Wonderland (Live in Hamburg)

Fleshquartet Nsms

Cypress Hill Hits from the Bong

The Jimi Hendrix Experience All along the Watchtower

The Orb Little Fluffy Clouds

Sleep tight!

Eric Arthur Blair

 One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

Eric Arthur Blair, British writer, better known as George Orwell, died at age 46. He was one of the best when it comes to explaining the brutal consequences we face when turning away from the truth.
If you still haven't read Nineteen Eighty-Four - published in 1949 - now is the time.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Sunday blasphemy - Norman Finkelstein

Sunday is a good day for blasphemy, because that's when the Lord of Lies, Christ, hateful master, is asleep...
One of the most blasphemic scholars out there is without a doubt Norman Finkelstein. Of course, he is one of my heroes (check his webpage here). I admire him for his rational and logical thinking, his straight-forward approach, courage and honesty regarding the Holocaust industry, and his amazing accuracy when it comes to dissecting his opponents arguments. For he has many, many opponents. Israel imposed a 10-year ban on him, just to pick an example.

One of the most important books of present time has got to be The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. In part because of its content, obviously, but also because the controversy following its release (the Israel lobby in full effect). Here's an interview with the man. The host is a dick, almost ruining the interview ranting about irrelevant crap, but these clips are well worth watching anyway.













And to make things even more blasphemous, here's Finkelstein honouring the Hezbollah.



In his other book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, he talks about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He claims the controversy surrounding the conflict is due to people wanting to divert attention from, and sow confusion about, the documentary record.
The mainstream version, put forth by Israeli officials and written about in scholarly literature, was that Palestinians left during the 1948 war after Arab leaders, primarily via radio broadcasts, ordered them to clear the field for invading Arab armies. However, this was proven false in the late 1980's (also see the post The New Historians).
Today most of the scholars agree that the Palestinians suffered an ethnic cleansing in 1948, although there are ongoing debates every day about whether or not this ethnic cleansing was systematically planned (the Holocaust Part 2...).
In the book he also shows how U.S. Media tend to attach greater credibility to information from representatives of the Israeli state than from Human Rights Watch, an independent nongovernmental organization. Israel's real human rights record is virtually nonexistent... Why do media block out reality? You digest that for a second.
See also the posts about media here, here, here and here.

Finkelstein also talks about how Israel plays The Holocaust and New Anti-Semitism cards to sow confusion about the real historical record and to discredit criticism of Israeli policy. Each new Arab/Muslim leader threatening Israel is Hitler reincarnate, and the threat is routinely compared to The Holocaust... At the same time the Holocaust industry intones that The Holocaust was unique and any comparison between it and other crimes is a form if Holocaust denial... Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians in a diplomatic way, there will for sure be an extensive campaign saying that the world is facing a new anti-Semitism. The perpetrators are turned into the victims, putting the spotlight on the suffering Jews today, rather than on the suffering Palestinians...
It should be obvious that if the hostility to Jews has increased it has everything to do with Israel's ruthless policies, and the best remedy would be for Israel to end the occupation.
The racist Zionist Apartheid regime must be abolished.

Related posts:
American Radical - A documentary about Norman Finkelstein
Zionism, Jews and conspiracy theories

Click here for an interview with Finkelstein in an Amnesty blog

SRM Reviews (#65 September 2009)

Published in Sweden Rock Magazine #65 September 2009.

Griftegård
Solemn, Sacred, Severe - 9/10
Ván (Sound Pollution)

Allvarsmättat? Jo, tack.
Sakralt? Så in i helvete.
Kännbart? Minst sagt.
Tyngden är ofattbar. Atmosfären så närvarande. Och allting har en stabil grund att stå på: allvaret i sökandet efter meningen med tillvaron. Man slipper det ytliga poserandet, det larviga som aldrig betyder något. På så sätt blir Griftegårds doom genuin på ett sätt som är få förunnat.
Och Thomas Erikssons röst svävar över allting annat och fullkomligt krossar konkurrensen.
Om du inte förnekar hårdrockens rötter lär du även kunna ta till dig de partier som på detta verk kan uppfattas som smöriga och pretentiösa. Hos mig går de rakt in i hjärtat, och det känns skönt att även kunna finna några smörklickar bland all aska som jag vanligtvis kryddar mina musikaliska rätter med.
Den som har svårt för religiösa tongångar – de tar sina mest extrema uttryck i psalmen Noah's Hand - kanske inte faller pladask. Inte heller de som förväntar sig rockiga midtempolåtar. Inser man däremot det sakralas betydelse för den långsamt stundande undergången lär man hitta rätt direkt.
Doom metal blir knappast bättre än så här. Sacred, Solemn, Severe är en milstolpe.
[Interview in the print edition of the magazine]

----------

Switch Opens
Switch Opens - 8/10
GMR (Border)

Många band gör musik som ska låta på ett visst sätt. Switch Opens musik låter på sitt sätt, och det höjer dem över mängden.
Trummisen dyrkar The Police. Ena gitarristen har Van Halen som husgudar, medan den andre tillbringar huvuddelen av dagen inne i sitt huvud tillsammans med Hawkwind. Sångaren och basisten, Jesper Skarin, hyllar Megadeth och spelar trummor med technosnubben i The Field. Ni hör ju själva. Detta är helt jävla sjukt! I stället för musik: förvirring? Nej, inte alls.
Efter att tidigare ha hetat Fingerspitzengefühl och släppt två rejält spretiga men svinbra album har bandet äntligen hittat hem. Det schizofrena uttrycket har kokats ned till vad de gör bäst: de vänder ut och in på tyngden. Ändå är detta deras mest varierade album. Det händer saker hela tiden. Udda trumkomp, fantastiska sånginsatser, psykedeliska gitarrsjok och basfetma som berör både fysiskt och psykiskt – dessa fyra hjältar torde kunna rädda världen!
Produktionen är både taggigt trasig och mjuk som ett duntäcke. Bergsmassiv och genomskinlig. Man fattar inte riktigt hur det har gått till, men de har som sagt hittat hem.
Årets tripp? Fuglesangs fjuttiga rymdresa är en spottloska i havet.
[Interview in the print edition of the magazine]

The Age of Stupid

London underwater, year 2055.

When reality has caught up with the apocalyptic images...

Previous posts about living with the dying

Into The Wild and the ego

Planet Earth and misanthropy

Living with the dying

Calm before the storm

The way things go

Thanks to spud for this one!

The Way Things Go from Jack Turner on Vimeo.