Deleuze, Guattari, & The New Right, Part 3: Capitalism & Schizophrenia

By Mark Dyal

       

“There are things which do not disturb thought and those which force us to think. The first are objects of recognition: thought and all its faculties may be fully employed therein, thought may busy itself thereby, but such employment and such activity have nothing to do with thinking. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” – Gilles Deleuze[1]

The Search for Smooth Space

Part Two of this examination of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from a radical New Right perspective introduced the Deleuzian split between nomos and logos, and Deleuze’s insistence on difference as a radical counter to Plato’s Idea, to representational thought, as well as to the logic of the bourgeois Cogitatio natura universalis. While the paper presented Deleuze’s highly Nietzschean reading of post-Socratic Greece, its thinkers, and its forms of thought, as the triumph of decadence and degenerative social forces, it did so with the intention of promoting critical awareness of how the radical impetus of nomocentric thought can bolster forms of rebellion that are deeply entrenched in  logocentric thought.

As we move deeper into Deleuze’s philosophy – and connect it with that of Félix Guattari – the elaboration of nomos becomes more clearly a celebration of forms of thought that do not conform to the foundations of liberal modernity, which themselves become identified as “State-sponsored” thought. If he draws a line from Plato to the liberal nation-State, it is not only to highlight the relationship between forms of thought and political possibilities, but also to show that forms of thought and political structures directly represent instinctual forces and their appropriate valuation of values. For the New Right, this has critical ramifications, as the transvaluation of values must include the forms of thought that give rise to the State, as these also give rise to the bourgeois liberal values and evaluations against which we are aligned.

It is entirely probable that the primordial pre-Socratic form of Greek thought that some corners of the New Right seek to emulate stands in direct opposition to the logocentrism that spawned representative democracy, egalitarianism, and even race and nation. That there is something to Deleuze’s evaluation of nomos as a break with modern quantitative rationality is apparent to any good student of Homeric Greece, as the lack of orthodoxy regarding the composition and function of the Olympian deities has led scholars to claim that the Olympians, therefore, are not even religious entities. Of course, modern religion is a product of logos, so the confusion is perhaps one of instincts and not merely of evaluation.

In Capitalism and Schizophrenia (the collective title of the two-part series Anti-Oedipusand A Thousand Plateaus), nomos and logos become the bases of two new binary oppositions: schizophrenia and paranoia, and smooth and striated space, both of which set the ontological and epistemological boundaries between modern man and his revolutionary counterpart. It is hoped that at the conclusion of this series, more political actors on the Right edges of modernity will understand themselves and their project as the search for schizophrenia and smooth space.

Without giving away the punch line, this would entail a complete transvaluation of modern values and forms of thought, the subsequent disconnection from modernity that that would entail, and finally a reengagement with modernity as a revolutionary adversary that creates spaces of exteriority in the heart of the liberal State.[2] In this too-brief summary, one clearly sees the potential for the New Right and other forms of Right revolution to be on the front lines of what Thomas Nail calls a “return to revolution.” For what the true Right has made essential – and that the Left has never understood – is precisely the transvaluation of modern values. And while the Left only fights for a more inclusive and compassionate modernity,[3] the true Right fights to destroy modernity itself.[4]

The State, Capitalism, and Desire: Secondo la Guerra Lampo[5]

This, more than “cultural Marxism,” explains the exclusion of New Right thought from the Academy; for the New Right is simply beyond the terms of inclusion, and rightly so, as nothing revolutionary can be included in the State. From the State’s perspective (and in Deleuze’s language), the New Right is different. It is minor – at odds with truth and morality. It is a derelict space.

And in turn, the liberal State is a taxation and conscription machine. It is repressive and destructive of logos, nomos, creativity, and all critical thought.[6] It seeks only one thing: human energy to labor for its economy. Not White, Black, Latino, or any other particular human energy – just plain ol’ universal bourgeois human energy. It makes of citizenship a right to labor. It discriminates or outlaws discrimination only in the name of commerce.[7] It psychologizes every man, woman, and child – making a teleology of development – so as to optimize the economic value of each and all.

It cares nothing of peoples, homelands, races, ethnicities, genders, or individuals, but only uses these to produce more economic production – as markets of labor and the production of consumption. It is the enemy of art, cultural particularity, and the will – unless these can be brought into the service of the economy by reducing them to multicultural fads.

It is not, however, the enemy of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Biology, or Political Science, because these and other disciplines are in the service of the State, making the Academy merely the finishing ground of the State’s bourgeois purpose.

It forces us to send our children to school, it asks us to be pious and attend church, it provides us with entertainment and employment, and demands only that we obey laws put in place for our own benefit – and at each and every turn we not only become the rational homo economicus, but are also given a plethora of rewards for participating in the form of life at hand.[8] And it makes sense, but how? It does all of this without ideology or deception, but instead with our deepest consent. For how could it not?

Enter Deleuze and Guattari, who created a philosophical system designed to explain how the liberal State works to create a particular (bourgeois) form of life that is craved like the corporate death burgers and sugary chemical drinks with which it is most closely associated. The point of entry into Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy involves the State, capitalism, and desire.

The liberal State is an agent of capitalism, providing rational, economically sensible labor from the vast flow of human potential, and economically exploitable resources from the equally vast flow of natural potential.

Capitalism is a system of unceasing economic production that successfully utilizes these flows while demanding nothing in return beyond unceasing production.

And desire is the human will to produce, consume, and make connections with life.

The State, then, codifies desire in order to produce bourgeois humans. Capitalism uses these humans, but at the same time undermines (decodes, or deterritorializes) the State’s codes by reducing all of life – even the previously useful codes like myth, tradition, life, death, tribe, and peoples – to economic rationality.

But desire is always aloof. Like capitalism, it desires only production: to flow, to explore, and to connect.[9] Give it homo economicus and American Idol, and it will function as required, quickly falling in love with the opportunity to produce and consume in a bourgeois manner. Tell desire that it is defined by lack, as modern State-sponsored thought demands, and it will see lack everywhere and seek to fill it with the spoils of the labor, democratic politics, and popular culture that the State provides. But recode desire to connect with transvaluation and the destruction of liberal modernity and it will create new possibilities for life.

Why, then, do the masses shun revolution? The easy answer is because they desire homo economicus, the comfort and safety of the liberal State, and the productive and consumptive possibilities of capitalism. The more complicated answer is that homo economicus, the State, and capitalism are easy investments for our instincts and desire.

So, where is the potential for revolt? Well, the body, say Deleuze and Guattari, is a desiring-machine, and as said above, it will produce, flow, and connect by nature. The problem, ultimately, is with what modernity, the liberal State, and capitalism give the body to connect. This is why mere regime change is of little value, revolutionarily speaking.

The locus of revolution must be desire.[10] In order to create new decoded or deterritorialized flows of desire, we must first create spaces that cause breaks in the bourgeois order. These derelict spaces have to be zones of schizophrenic bodily decoding, wherein state-sponsored thought, capitalist production and consumption, and liberal humanism are no longer functional.[11]

Perhaps we are beginning to see why the New Right and other forms of Right revolution have a prominent role to play in the revolt against modernity prescribed by Deleuze and Guattari.

Félix Guattari: An Aside

We have yet to spend much time on either the life or philosophy of Félix Guattari. This is partly symptomatic of a general neglect of Guattari’s contributions to Deleuze’s philosophy found in the secondary literature on the duo,[12] but also a purposeful neglect based on Guattari’s political life and a favoring of Deleuze’s profound Nietzscheanism. Nonetheless, Guattari played an important role in turning Deleuze toward explicit political philosophy.

While Deleuze always remained a committed academic and professor – keeping a respectful distance from liberal and anti-liberal politics, Guattari remained a radical Trotskyite – becoming known in the French press as “Mr. Anti-” for his role in the politics of anti-colonialism, gay rights, prisoner rights, and environmentalism.[13] He befriended Antonio Negri when the radical Leftist sociologist fled to France in the wake of charges that his Autonomia Operaia movement was the brains behind Red Brigade terrorism. Guattari openly supported the Autonomia movement and celebrated Italy as the only site of true revolution in the West.

Theoretically, Guattari combined Lacanian psychoanalysis with radical Marxian anti-capitalism, seeking to find links between the productive energy of desire and the process of capitalist production. Anti-Oedipus is the apotheosis of this project, which came to fruition only after Deleuze imposed Nietzsche’s vitalist naturalism on the matter.

Toward Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Deleuze and Guattari met in 1969. The student uprising of the previous spring enchanted both of them, and they sought a way to explain the unscripted and uncontained unrest as a revolution. While Guattari’s approach led him to discern exploitable ruptures in the State and capitalist market, Deleuze further developed difference and nomos into political concepts capable of debilitating the liberal human.

These are not concepts that seek to create more inclusion in the modern project, but to offer a way beyond that project. Nomos, as we have already seen, was developed as a counter to Platonic forms of thought. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia it functions as a political metaphor for spatial dynamics of thought and social organization, with nomos becoming nomadic thought and behavior, and logos, “State science,” and economic rationality. Politically, logos is the regime of modernity, while nomos leads one beyond the regime.

Likewise, difference (the great mass of individual specimens that resist all forms of representation and universalization) leads one beyond the regime of universalization and standardization promoted by statist logos. In the context of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, difference entails a relationship between majority – or, those who conform to the standard or ideal type of the collectivity in question – and minority – or, those who are defined by the gap between themselves and that standard.

Far from vulgar liberal politics of difference, which defends the right of the minority to be included in the majority by continually reconfiguring the standards of majority inclusion, Deleuze and Guattari propose the process of becoming-minor, wherein individuals and groups actively diverge from the majority. In other words, becoming-minor involves the same active transvaluation of the bourgeois form of life that has prompted the creation of the revolutionary Right. Becoming-minor, then, places the onus of revolutionary action squarely on our shoulders, as the potential for social transformation is not a determination of those seeking majority inclusion, but of those who are no longer subjugated by a majority.

Desire is crucial for Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of difference, because it is the location of power’s influence on the individual. In Marxist terms, desire is central to the infrastructure – investing it, organizing power, and even organizing systems of repression.[14] But against the Marxist orthodoxy that conceptualizes power as repressive, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy gives power a positive and creative quality. Life, as the continual interaction of various desiring-machines, strives to preserve and enhance itself by connecting desires with other desires. These connections produce social wholes and communities, from the level of human populations to the relationship between wasps and orchids.[15]

Power, then, is not the repression of desire, but its expansion. Social wholes do not use ideology to repress desire but are themselves productive and positive, using desire to produce interests – the coded, regular, collective, and organized forms of desire that make it quantifiable. Given this explanation of desire, power, and social forms, one concludes that interests like humanism, capitalism, and egalitarianism have their roots in desire.[16] Clearly, desire and the investments that it produces can turn against life, becoming reactive and producing values and evaluations based in ressentiment. For, what do our investments in the bourgeois form of life make of us? The body, individualism, willful ignorance, greed, and moralism are not merely personal features added onto character but impersonal forces from which bourgeois character itself is effected. Being bourgeois, then, is a symptomology of a collection of investments, but, as the derelict space of the “true Right” has demonstrated, it can be broken.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Welcome to the world of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the two-part opus that first seeks to explain how capitalism makes an economy of desire and then to demonstrate how to destroy that economy. It is a world of erudition for those who read it – a true marvel of philosophical exposition – but a cloth and paper Molotov for those who use it. In fact, in one of Deleuze and Guattari’s interviews about the bipartite philosophy (Anti-Oedipus[1983] and A Thousand Plateaus[1987]),[17] they suggested that the books have far more uses than merely being read, that they have no inherent purpose. One might even find them useful as gas soaked and burning projectiles to hurl at a police line.

Anti-Oedipus focuses primarily on the relationship between the individual and capitalism, while A Thousand Plateaus focuses on the individual and the State. Both volumes create a rich tapestry of concepts, theories, and examples – none of which, the authors insist, are to be read metaphorically – that change the function of almost every word in either book on multiple occasions. That being said, it is Anti-Oedipus that is more rewarding to the reader, but A Thousand Plateaus that best rewards the man in revolt.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia begins by explaining how unconscious desire gets invested in economic, social, and political fields.[18] Desiring-production (desire in machinic form, as it makes connections and investments) is repressed by social-production (the social manifestation of desiring-production) in order to create specific forms of life. Oedipus enters the fray as the form of repression specific to capitalist modernity. Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate this by comparing social-production in three social forms: savage, despotic/State, and capitalist.

In the savage form, life and desire are determined by a superabundance of codes that connect the individual to the tribe and earth. Kinship relations are strictly social and are designed to make connections amongst families, not to prohibit incest. Social-production is entirely social as well, with individuals sharing the fruits of labor. While this leads to a repression of the desire to directly appropriate ones own production, it is a form of life with an open system of debt that does not work to castrate the flow of life.[19]

In the despotic/State form, life and desire are still determined by codes but where they were once horizontally organized, they are now vertical, as all value flows to and from the despot. It is the despot who imposes infinite and unilateral debt paid as tribute, which Deleuze and Guattari – following Nietzsche – explain as the origin of money. This is an important thread running through both books, as money is not only bound up with guilt and debt but also with the establishment of transcendent standards of equivalence and value – acting in both senses as a judgment against life.[20]

But the despot also makes existence a form of infinite debt, as he holds the power to make and extinguish life at will. Thus he has access to every woman beneath him, creating an overcoding of desire that in turn makes incest a symbolic form of sexual normalcy and makes desire a desire of what one lacks. This infinite debt also diminishes, if not demolishes, the alliances that once created the boundaries between life and death.[21]

Under the despot, desire becomes entirely reactive, lashing out in ressentiment at the State, even when it is democratic in form. From the perspective of desire, the State is a system of continual terror, as it holds the permanent possibility of death over every subject, either through transgression of law or simply the needs of the State. It is here that one may begin to enquire about the possibilities of personal enemy formation that is at odds with the enemies provided by the State.[22]

Whereas the savage form of life was constructed territorially – that is, with a specific and grounded association between individual, tribe, and earth – the State makes these affiliations abstract, turning the earth into land capable of producing rent and resources. This is striated space – “drawn and riddled with lines of divide and demarcation that name, measure, appropriate, and distribute space according to political designs, history, or economic conflict” – that is appropriated by the State in a form of capture.[23] Capture is the process whereby a form of thought or sociality is forcefully brought under the domain of the State, detaching it from its previous purposes in order to serve those of the State. Deleuze and Guattari use anthropological and historical sources to explain capturing processes, focusing upon the transformation of earth into land, and political reason into public opinion.

While striated space is opposed by smooth space, the latter is not embodied in savage territory, but instead – as we shall soon see – in striated space made smooth by war machines that stand opposed to the State.[24]

This abstraction is a boon for capitalism, which follows the same path laid out by the State in disconnecting peoples from territory. However, it goes even further, reducing all of life to the market. In capitalism, the codes and overcodes that once governed conception and behavior have no value, as all meaning is eliminated from life (hence the first function of schizophrenia, as a form of normalcy of a life devoid of meaning). Where savagery and the despotic State had need of codes in order to arrange/codify desire to local forms of social-production, these codes now impede the purely abstract, and global economic, flows of capital. This is because all desiring-production and social-production now flows through the market. “Alliances and filiations no longer pass through people but through money.”[25]

And because the market that determines the possibilities of life under capitalism is devoid of meaning – providing only the pure truth of economic rationality – Deleuze and Guattari describe its social field as an axiomatic, or a domain that need not provide definitions of its constituent parts in order to function. The capitalist axiomatic controls flows without the introduction of a transcendent agent – making it the most lethal form of domination ever invented.[26] As Eugene Holland says, “were it not for the inconvenience of having human workers, managers, and consumers, capitalism would do nicely without any meanings whatsoever.”[27]

For these, however, capitalism is dependent upon the State, which, while still producing codes and meanings – job training for workers, research for schools and corporations, image making for marketing – these never add up to a stable global code that could challenge the axiomatic life. To make their message more clear, Deleuze and Guattari actually switch from discussing codes to territories (making codification = territorialization, decoding = deterritorialization, and recoding = reterritorialization), because without meaning there can be no codes.

Under the capitalist axiomatic, the limited access to consumption that defined the status of the individual vis-à-vis the savage tribe gives way to a hyper-consumption that is not designed to sate the lack-full desire of the individual but instead to sate the capitalist demand to produce at any cost. But, in fact, the desire of the individual is sated, making desire immanent to the system of production. Thus while the infinite despotic debt remains, it is paid to capital itself, allowing surplus-value to flourish as a road to redemption, and making the individual a happy component of the ceaseless creation of capitalist over-production.

In other words (those of Deleuze and Guattari), capitalism deterritorializes the codes and meanings provided human life by savage and despotic/Statist forms of life – leaving the human in a position wherein the possibility of creating new values is possible. But, this moment is ever-so fleeting, as the axiomatic reterritorializes desire in the terms of the surplus-values of capitalist production. This, then, is not the terrain of the Marxist opposition between labor and owners of capital, but between the social-production of surplus-value and its private ownership and management, whereby sociality (desiring-production connected to a conformity-machine) and labor (desiring production connected to a profit-machine) are quantifiable in the terms of the production and consumption that valorize capitalism.[28]

However, this is a continual process, and as such, capitalism will soon enact a deterritorialization of the desire it previously reterritorialized in order to maintain production and the flow of capital. Over time, and from the perspective of the liberal State, this process establishes the purely economic basis of all social institutions. But, while all institutions are apparently social, the one major exception is the nuclear family, which becomes the site of a private submission to the authority and sensibility of the bourgeois regimentation of life.

Deleuze and Guattari return to Nietzsche’s suggestion that money is not only about exchange but also debt and guilt, making these central to how capitalism is lived by individuals. And this, as suggested above, is what makes capitalism truly insidious. Devoid of meaning but in need of subjects (laborers and consumers), capitalism hands responsibility for creating these subjects to the State.

But the State is beholden only to capitalism, so it leaves subject formation up to the family, and for the first time, makes reproduction a “private” affair. While this is the origin of the Oedipus complex, as primal sexuality is focused on members of the immediate family that are forbidden it (training desire to manifest itself as lack), it is also the perfect domain for making production, consumption, and submission a matter of free will, choice, opinion, taste, aesthetics, and many more bourgeois justifications. Thus, the State’s work is done for it by the family, and children are inculcated in the process by an unending succession of advertising, leisure activities, learning actions, and even food digestions that all point to the primacy of both the capitalist axiomatic and the bourgeois codes of the liberal State: produce to consume, movement is money, money is freedom.

The Nomadic War Machine against the State

But all the while, desire is flowing, wanting only to produce, taking no joy in consumption. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is what points to a beyond modernity, especially when combined with the destruction of codes and the deterritorialization of desire inherent in capitalism. While the system seems monolithic – especially and perhaps exclusively from America – it is inherently unstable; but that instability can only be exploited if desire goes to war with capitalism and liberal modernity.

Deleuze and Guattari posit schizophrenia as a revolutionary process. Whereas the first function of schizophrenia, mentioned above, is a form of normalcy in an axiomatic life devoid of meaning, the second is as a radical opposition to Statist paranoia. At the macropolitical level, this opposition explains the contrary needs of the State and capitalism, in that capitalism seeks the diminution of the State and the creation of a single global market and what Deleuze and Guattari call “universal history.” The liberal State obliges these goals particularly because its entire existence is predicated on the triumph of the capitalist axiomatic, and not the elevation or well-being of its subjects. In this light, multiculturalism, security, and the prohibition against certain forms of violence are laid bare as tools of axiomatization.

At the micropolitical level, schizophrenia and paranoia become poles in an opposition based upon the nomocentric and logocentric forms of thought. Nomos as schizophrenia is the tool of the nomadic war machine – individuals, groups, or processes that lie beyond the sovereignty (or interiority) of the State – that can take the form of anything from social relations and methods of production to nomadic tribes and squadristi. And, while the war machine is often schizophrenic, it is less often revolutionary, because it is not enough to escape the State, but to “make what one is escaping escape.”[29]

In other words, revolution is not merely ascetic but must actively engage in warfare against the State. “The state is sovereignty,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “but sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, or appropriating locally.”[30] Sovereignty and appropriation bring us back to the idea of the State as a mechanism of capture, whereby communities (or local particularities) are brought into a general space of comparison – in which access is equal and free to all whom the State judges worthy (in effect justifying the capitalist axiomatic in one fell swoop by making money the adjudicating factor) – and sovereign power – through which the Good of the State trumps all other considerations of value.

Given this conception of sovereignty, logocentric thought becomes the lingua franca of the liberal State, with its paranoid insistence upon codifying and territorializing every aspect of life, as well as its normalization of universal conceptions of man.

But, while we are witnessing the omnipresent universalization of the bourgeois human, it is not the State that is driving his apotheosis but capitalism. For while there are many spaces of dereliction – smooth space that can neither be codified nor axiomatized – in relation to the State, there are less so in relation to the capitalist market. This explains why the post-WWII liberal State has allowed capitalism to dictate its foreign and domestic policy.

Much of A Thousand Plateaus consists of either making smooth space of one’s image of thought or of presenting a myriad of (mainly scientific and anthropological) examples of types of war machines and the lines of flight that they may use to escape the State. The important thing to remember is that escape is possible. In one of their most interesting chapters on nomadology and the war machine Deleuze and Guattari use Georges Dumézil – a fascist philologist who studied the creation of sovereignty in modern States – and Pierre Clastres – a radical anthropologist who studied how nomadic tribes in South America used agonic war as a tool to keep the State from capturing its people and territory – to explain the necessary gulf between the State and the war machine.[31]

Via Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari conclude that the liberal State ultimately uses labor to capture the war machine, by reducing warring to a job while keeping space striated so that men cannot war on their own behalf.[32]

While nomadic warriors vanished from Europe because of a process of capture involving sovereignty and the appropriation of the right to wage war, there are still aspects of European life that are irreducible – and exterior – to the State. These can be formalized in a line from Nietzsche’s thought to the examples of ultra-localism that have erupted since the establishment of the European Union. In other words, new forms of sovereignty, just like forms of representation, always leave a large swath of experience running free. While these experience used to be understood as civil society, they are now something much less central to State sovereignty due to the development of neo-liberal methods of controlling civil society through capitalism, communication, and perpetual connection to a global village.[33] Instead, Deleuze and Guattari point to the always local and particular instances of exteriority (like CasaPound Italia) that do not have to rival the sovereignty of the State but only call it into question. The challenge for these types of experiences, as mentioned above, is to do more than just escape, but to become-revolutionary.

The New Right, Right anarchism, and secessionism each point to a type of becoming-minor that can become-revolutionary. From the perspective of the war machine, the logic of the State is not all or nothing, but a relationship between interiority and exteriority: being at once engulfed by, and beyond, the State. While this is a dangerous existence, it is also one that affords maximum opportunities for revolutionary engagement.

The challenge to Deleuze and Guattari posed by the revolutionary Right hinges upon its own reading of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Does becoming – and becoming-revolutionary in particular – that points to a line of flight beyond the bourgeois liberal human look like peace or agon? Does modernity impose peaceful coexistence with impersonal forces of mediocrity on human desire or something else? Deleuze and Guattari ignored these questions, even while proposing that desiring-production is made knowable through Nietzsche’s – rather than Freud’s and Marx’s – engagement with modernity. Knowing the answers to these questions makes the true Right a nascent war machine.

Conclusion

As this concludes the critical exposition of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, it should be noted that several works by both authors – and many by each of them – have been ignored. The most important of these is What Is Philosophy?(1994), the last book Deleuze and Guattari wrote together. But while the book was ignored, its focus on philosophy as an exercise in the creation of concepts was not. In fact, the idea of creation – along with affirmation – has been central to this series of papers.

Affirmation as Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Guattari understand it, is the basis of a noble form of life; that is, a form of life that does not condemn as its primary energy and intensity, that knows and needs nothing of an oppositional force to justify its existence, that is critical in valuation and evaluation on its own terms. In sum, it is the diametric transvaluation of ressentiment. This affirmation is what separates the “true Right” from the liberal Right, the liberal Left, and illiberal Left.

However, this is not always apparent, given our propensity for “outing” our adversaries. But, as the conclusory paper to this series will make clear, to be a successful war machine we need to make use of every single weapon at our disposal. We must also have a greater desire to create than to destroy. As said Deleuze:

What we most lack is a belief in the world, it has been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volumes. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.[34]

Notes

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 139.

[2] Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari, and Zapatismo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 50.

[3] http://attackthesystem.com/2013/04/16/bill-ayers-gets-it-right/

[4] This paper, like the two that preceded it, rests on an explanation of the revolutionary potential of both the New Right and Nietzschean transvaluation. But as was the case with the first two parts, this paper will move in directions that might obscure that avowed goal, as it will problematize many aspects of New Right thought – bringing to the fore the question of whether or not the New Right truly seeks to destroy modernity, or just make it less inclusive and compassionate.

[5] A lightning strike. This is a very light glossing of Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s political philosophy that is meant only to orient the reader. In no way does it suffice as an explanation Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

[6] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 442–43.

[7] The regulation of interstate commerce was the linchpin of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

[8] Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge: Swerve/MIT Press, 1992), 125.

[9] Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 345.

[10] Félix Guattari, Chaosophy, Sylvére Lotringer, ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), 62.

[11] Functional is used in opposition to meaning. Deleuze and Guattari, unlike deconstructionists, care nothing about meaning, as it is erased from being human by Capitalism.

[12] Gary Genosko, “Deleuze and Guattari: Guattareuze & Co.” in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154.

[13] Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.

[14] Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2004), 264.

[15] A Thousand Plateaus 10.

[16] Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), 91.

[17] For those seeking the context in which these ideas arose, Anti Oedipus was published in French in 1972 and A Thousand Plateaus in 1980.

[18] Deleuze 2004: 228.

[19] Anti-Oedipus 146.

[20] Eugene W. Holland, Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 7.

[21] Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999), 78.

[22] Anti-Oedipus 196.

[23] Tom Conley, “Space,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition. Adrian Parr, ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 262.

[24] Deleuze 2004: 33.

[25] Anti-Oedipus 264.

[26] A Thousand Plateaus 460.

[27] Holland 1999: 21.

[28] Anti-Oedipus 250.

[29] Anti-Oedipus 341.

[30] A Thousand Plateaus 360.

[31] A Thousand Plateaus 351–60.

[32] A Thousand Plateaus 490–91.

[33] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 177–82.

[34] Negotiations 176.

What Really Is Behind The 40-Hour Week: Slavery

    
Posted by Lukas Magnuson

One of the most common pieces of knowledge and essentially guarantees in life is the idea of a full time job. Full-time jobs often have varying definitions with some being full-time if it is 35 hours a week and others that require 40 hours of work per week. The question that many do not seem to ask is why is it 40 hours a week? Who decided that insurance coverage is only available unless someone has a job that requires at least 40 hours a week? This question and the issue of a 40 hour work week is studied and comes out with quite a fascinating perception to the entire idea of 40 hour work weeks.

Studying 40 Hour Work Weeks

In this reading, they use the term economic slaves to describe the wages as they indicate that economic slavery is best defined as people who rely on wages to maintain their life to the best of their abilities. This has probably perceived as obvious that people need to work to make money, however as time as passed there has been an increased sense of false security that the government and the mass media gives out. They tend to say that people have economic freedom in the 21st century. However, this is technically not true. People are essentially forced to have to take on a 40-hour job that does not pay enough. This doesn't even include the fact that many jobs require people to work overtime, which still is not enough to pay off the bills and many other necessities to live the "American Dream" and enjoy life.

People are essentially working 50-60 hour jobs and are forced to, due to the fact that they are pressured and heavily judged by employees and employers if they do not take on the task of extra work past their hours. Sure it pays more, however there is less leisure time and this technically lowers the amount of economic freedom someone truly has. The average salary in the United States is in the low number of about 22,000, but often have bills for the bare essentials that people leave them with no spare money of their own. This essentially is slavery in that there is not really an accomplishment and breaking even after working hard all week is not really productive. The stress still exists and no one but the companies feel better, but the employees definitely doesn't.

The issue of economic slavery also is prevalent, through trying to better one's life through something like college. Colleges leave students on average with about $20,000 worth of college loans. These often are unsubsidized, which means that interest constantly accrues interest every single year. This increases for several years and the more money stacked in loans the more interest that accrues. These payments can take a decade to pay off, which really puts the term economic freedom into question. Where is the freedom if all millennials are constantly working just to avoid prison or bankruptcy? This is simply legalized slavery. The only people who do not suffer are the elite and select few.

This has lead to the need to increase the hourly wages, however people have continued to fight it. This is a very hard issue to conquer.

The 40-Hour Work Week Turns You In An Economic Zombie

by Lukas Magnuson

How the forty hour week is an essential tool for capitalist control.

Economic slavery, also known as wage slavery, refers to a complete dependence on wages accrued from labor in order to survive. Naturally, this state applies to most people that live on this planet. In the developed world, wage slavery has effectively sculpted society and individual habits. The majority of people who are employed work for approximately forty hours a week. In those forty hours, they often submit to fairly dehumanizing conditions. They are told what to wear, when to leave and when to arrive, what to eat and even when they are allowed to go to the toilet. Why are the vast majority of people in the developed world so happy to meekly submit to this frankly ludicrous state of affairs?

Surprisingly enough, the forty hour work week was actually a hard-won concession on the part of trade union movements. In the dawning days of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, it was considered to be normal to work for between ten and sixteen hours a day. When exhausted workers began to protest they demanded a more reasonable settlement on working hours from their employers. The factory bosses conceded to a forty hour week, which has now been replicated throughout most of the developed world.

From the stance of a global capitalist, the forty hour week is essential to maintain equilibrium and control. While it does not exhaust and outrage ordinary citizens to the extent that they will rebel against the state of the world, it did leave them exhausted and occupied enough that they will not be capable of fulfilling any kind of meaningful collection in the spare time.

The forty hour week has also proved to be the nourishing force behind consumerism, particularly when it comes to over-indulgent spending. As workers have very little free time to themselves, they are suggestible to spending vast amounts of money on the entertainment and conveniences they consume in the hours spare that they have a week. The result of this is a perpetuation of debt and inflation, in addition to restricting how much time an individual can feasibly spend on more worthy and potentially revolutionary activities rather than mindless entertainment.

Review: How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Passivity in the Face of Nazism

             Posted by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.

           

At the close of my review of the late David Cesarani’s Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933–1949, I remarked that “the Holocaust,” as a cultural concept, had performed one of the greatest vanishing acts in history — the disappearance of the Jews as active participants during World War II.^[1] Faced with an almost blanket portrayal of Jewish victimhood and passivity during the period, I commented: “Examining the thousands upon thousands of histories of World War II, one would get the impression that there was not only one war, but also only one aggressor. Quite how and why “the Jews” leave the historical stage as belligerents in 1939, when the preceding six years had witnessed them engaging in international propaganda wars, political maneuvering, and targeted assassinations in several European countries, has been surprisingly overlooked.” Benjamin Ginsberg’s relatively short but efficient work, How the Jews Defeated Hitler (2013, First Paperback 2016), may be considered a significant exception to this overwhelming omission, offering an argument that Jews played “a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.”^[2]

In the introduction to his text, Ginsberg, a Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, outlines the structure of his argument along with his definition of Jewish resistance to the advance of National Socialism in Europe. Ginsberg’s definition of Jewish resistance is important because it differs significantly, in terms of its discursive parameters, from those generally employed in Holocaust historiography and its offshoots. For those interested in a more detailed exploration of the issue of Jewish resistance during World War II, as a subject of historiographical debate, The Holocaust in History by Michael R. Marrus (Penguin, 1989) and Histories of the Holocaust by Dan Stone (Oxford University Press, 2010) are perhaps the best and most succinct introductions to the most pertinent themes. However, in brief, historiographical argument prior to the 2010s was limited to two strands of thought, each biased and deeply flawed. The first strand of ‘resistance’ historiography was the negation of the idea of Jewish resistance. This involved lachrymose assertions that Jews offered no opposition to an unprovoked and irrational German hostility, and were led to sensationalized forms of mass murder like ‘lambs to the slaughter.’ A prime example within this strand is Martin Gilbert’s The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (Harper Collins, 1986), and is also strongly associated with Raul Hilberg’s assessment that “the reaction pattern of the Jews is characterised by almost complete lack of resistance.” This first strand of argument was particularly popular in the diaspora, and in the United States and Great Britain in particular. The Holocaust developed as a cultural trope in these countries in tandem with the development of this lachrymose strand of historiography.

The idea of totally passive victimhood was, however, less popular among Israeli academics and hardline Zionists more generally. In the eyes of these Jews, the Jewish experience during World War II had fortified and proven prewar arguments on behalf of a Jewish national home, and it was almost a matter of national pride that some emphasis be placed on explicitly Jewish efforts to fight against National Socialist Germany. In this context, histories began to emerge from Israel in the 1960s glamorizing Jewish partisan warfare, or events such as the Warsaw Uprising. The second strand to Jewish resistance historiography of course retained the idea that Jews, ultimately, were victims, in the sense that they were victims of an unprovoked and irrational German hostility. However, the difference was that this strand denied total passivity in the face of such hostility, and made strenuous efforts to emphasize armed Jewish participation in European national resistance movements, and in partisan warfare. It represented, for lack of a better term, an idea of ‘muscular victimhood.’^[3]

Both of these strands suffered from severe methodological and theoretical failings in that both discussed Jewish resistance only within the sphere of armed, guerilla, partisan action. Even the briefest of glances through Jewish history would illuminate the fact that, at least since the sack of Jerusalem by Titus in AD 70, Jews have pursued their social and political goals via means significantly more abstract than armed conflict. Indeed, the century prior to World War II witnessed the development of modern Jewish politics, with features involving the consolidation of media power, the strengthening of transnational political networks, the development of international Jewish mutual aid networks (particularly following the Damascus Affair in 1840), and the ascent of the Jews into Western governments and the professions. It should therefore be regarded as remarkable that discussions of Jewish opposition to National Socialism should have neglected these international and incredibly influential spheres of influence as potential or actual avenues for resistance. Ginsberg’s unique contribution is to take the mainstream discussion of Jewish resistance into these neglected areas. Across four chapters, Ginsberg explores Jewish activism in the United States, the Soviet Union, in the field of counterintelligence, and in partisan warfare, and argues that Jewish actions in all spheres were crucial to the defeat of National Socialist Germany.

Ginsberg’s chapter on the Soviet Union is particularly interesting. For centuries Jews have lacked the conventional means of defense available to a threatened nation, and in the 1930s Jews were a group of around 18 million people scattered across the globe. To combat such strategic deficiencies however, Jews could rely upon centuries of experience in more abstract forms of defensive diplomacy, and in the 1930s this involved “working for, with, and through states and political leaders who shared their hostility toward Nazi Germany.”^[4]Ginsberg explains that by the 1930s Jews exerted a remarkable level of influence in Soviet government and society. Jews were crucial to the founding of the Social Democratic Party in the 1890s, and the Jewish Socialist Bund played a major role in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution. In the period leading up to the 1917 revolution, Jews were instrumental in the leadership of both the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties. It was therefore quite predictable that after the revolution, “among the first official acts of the victorious Bolsheviks was outlawing pogroms and anti-Semitic movements.”^[5]

Jews came to play major roles in the Communist Party and the Soviet state, taking key roles in areas such as “foreign affairs, propaganda, finance, administration, and industrial production.”^[6] Half of Lenin’s first Politburo were Jewish, and during the early decades of Communist rule Jews were “especially prominent” in the security services. For example, the Jewish pharmacist Genrikh Yagoda was head of the secret police during the 1930s, and specialized in preparing poisons for his agents to use in liquidating Stalin’s opponents. Ginsberg adds that “other high-ranking Jewish secret police officers included M.T. Gay, who headed the special department that conducted mass arrests during the “Great Terror” of the 1930s, and A.A. Slutsky and Boris Berman, who were in charge of Soviet terror and espionage abroad.

Quickly rising as an elite in Soviet society, Jews enjoyed privileged access to the professions and influential political and cultural positions. “Though making up less than 2 percent of the overall populace, between 1929 and 1939, Jews constituted 11 percent of the students in Soviet universities. This included 17 percent of all university students in Moscow, 19 percent in Leningrad, 24 percent in Kharkov, and 35.6 percent in Kiev.”^[7] Ginsberg adds that “Jews had become the backbone of the Soviet bureaucracy and constituted a large percentage of the nation’s physicians, dentists, pharmacists, and other professionals, as well as nearly 20 percent of the scientists and university professors in such major cities as Moscow and Leningrad.”^[8] The USSR’s most influential journalist, Mikhail Koltsov, was Jewish, while the Soviet Union’s official radio announcer, Yuri Levitan, was also a Jew. Other culturally influential Jews were Semyon Lozovsky, chief Soviet press spokesman, Ilya Ehrenberg, the leading publicist for anti-German sentiment, and Vasily Grossman, the Soviet army’s most influential war correspondent. The Soviet film industry was also dominated by the Jews Sergei Eisenstein, Mikhail Romm, Mark Donskoy, Leonid Lukov and Yuli Reisman. Thus, while Jews ostensibly had no nation of their own, Ginsberg remarks that they “had a good deal of influence within the new Soviet state.”^[9]

Jews used this influence to combat a very strong threat from National Socialist Germany. During the first weeks of the German attack, the Wehrmacht destroyed more than 17,000 Soviet aircraft, 20,000 tanks, and 100,000 heavy guns and mortars. As many as 5 million Soviet troops had been killed or captured or were missing in action. Jews had an obvious interest in fighting against such odds, and flooded the army’s influential positions in order to push a fanatical resistance effort. Ginsberg remarks that it was commonly remarked by troops (and repeated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn) that no Jews were to be found on the front lines.^[10] Ginsberg himself concedes that Jews “sought whatever refuge they could find and preferred rear-echelon assignments.”^[11] However, Jews were over-represented at officer level, and remarkably comprised more than 10 percent of the army’s political officers — essentially the enforcers of government doctrine. Ethnic nepotism resulted in such a high number of medals being spuriously awarded to under-represented Jewish front line troops that in 1943 the Soviet regime was forced to try to reduce the number (and avoid aggravating non-Jewish combatants) by issuing a statement reading: “Medals for distinguished conduct are to be awarded to men of all nations, but within limits with regard to the Jews.”

Aside from warfare, Jews were essentially slave-masters overseeing the vast sphere of Soviet war production. The millions of Russians working ceaselessly in munitions factories came under the control of Boris Vannikov, deputy people’s commissar for armaments, while mass population movements of workers were orchestrated by the commissar for transport, Lazar Kaganovich. Those workers tasked with building more and more factories were under the control of the Director of the Commissariat for Construction, the Jew Semyon Ginsburg. Steel production (Semyon Reznikov), aviation (Solomon Sendler), naval construction (Grigory Kaplun), the chemical industry (Leon Loshkin), and the fields of electricity, heavy industry, and fuel, were under Jewish authority. The vast Russian workforce was essentially under Jewish control, and put to use in defense of Jewish interests. Meanwhile, the German workforce was operating on only one shift, continuing to produce consumer goods. Children went to school and women stayed at home. In the Soviet Union, the factories of the Jews operated every minute of every day, two million women were drafted into the military, and children were forced into the systems of production. A worker had to show up for work 66 hours per week, with only one day off per month.^[12]

As well as possessing a vast and captive workforce for war production, Jews also engaged in intensive popular mobilization efforts. This was necessary because many of the USSR’s citizens “hated the regime,” which had uprooted, dispossessed, and starved to death millions of peasants. Ginsberg demonstrates that Jews dominated the machinery of both popular coercion and persuasion, effectively maneuvering public opinion in line with Jewish interests. In the area of coercion, Jews were prominent in the NKVD, and the head of the army’s political officers was Lev Mekhlis, a Jewish Communist who had played a major role in the military purges of the 1930s. One of the main responsibilities of Mekhlis was “making certain the soldiers fought and did not surrender.” But Jews were much more prominent in the field of persuasion. In the army, political workers called politruks were assigned to military units in order to enforce discipline and also lecture troops on their duties to the motherland and the bestial nature of the Germans. Ginsberg stresses that Jews were hugely over-represented at politruks, and were very important in preventing instances of Soviet surrender. The Jewish-dominated Soviet film industry also dedicated itself to “exhorting the frightened and exhausted citizenry to fight the Germans.”^[13] Mikhail Romm and Mark Donskoy both specialized in films portraying the brutal torture of Russian women by Germans. Jewish-made films like these were then “shown throughout the war to fan feelings of Russian nationalism and hatred for the Germans.”^[14]

The official army newspaper, Red Star, was edited by the Jewish David Ortenberg. Ortenberg worked in tandem with co-ethnic Ilya Ehrenberg to create propaganda calling upon “every Soviet citizen to kill the Germans.” One of Ehrenberg’s most famous slogans was “If you have killed one German, kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.”^[15] Jewish propagandists like Ortenberg and Ehrenberg also worked abroad to build support for the Soviet cause. “The major vehicle for this effort was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) composed of prominent Soviet Jewish political figures and intellectuals.” The JAFC raised money in the United States and Great Britain. “Though nominally an independent entity headed by the famous Soviet Jewish actor Solomon Mikoels, the JAFC was actually part of the Soviet Information bureau and closely monitored by a Jewish NKVD official, Sergei Shpigelglaz.”^[16]

The JAFC found it easy to establish contact with similarly influential networks in the United States because that nation too had by World War II witnessed the rising power of the Jews. Ginsberg’s chapter on the United States is perhaps the most interesting of the entire text, and certainly from my own perspective justified the modest purchase price. Ginsberg begins by charting the rise of the Jews under FDR— a “long climb to power and prominence.”^[17] More than 15 percent of Roosevelt’s top-level appointees were Jews—at a time when Jews constituted less than 3 percent of the population. Jews became such a prominent and visible element of Roosevelt’s New Deal program (a term coined by the Jewish Samuel Rosenman) that opponents referred to it as the ‘Jew Deal.’ Ostensibly a purely economic platform, the New Deal acted as a gateway for Jews into a much wider array of influence.

Among the most important Jewish figures in and around the Roosevelt administration were Henry Morgenthau (Secretary of the Treasury), Felix Frankfurter (appointed to the Supreme Court), Louis Brandeis (Supreme Court Justice), Jerome Frank and Abe Fortas (Securities and Exchange Commission), Isador Lubin (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Charles Wyzanski (Department of Labor), David Niles (White House Special Assistant), David Lilienthal (chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority), Nathan Strauss (U.S. Housing Authority), and Benjamin Cohen, the author of most New Deal legislation. These Jews, and lower level co-ethnics in and around the Roosevelt administration, were instrumental in challenging American isolationism. Ginsberg states that in combination with organized Jewish groups, these figures were crucial in bringing “isolationism into disrepute and turning American opinion against Germany.”^[18]

The same period also witnessed the beginning of the end for the WASP establishment, mainly because WASPs (as one of the only Anglophilic elements in White America) decided to enter into a marriage of convenience with Jews in order to fight isolationism. Departing from a prior hostility to Jews, Anglo Northeastern Protestants let their guard down and made formal organizational pacts with Jewish propagandists. This was most notable in the form of the Century Group, which “worked vigorously for American intervention against the growing power of Nazi Germany.”^[19] In the Century Group, Jews like James Warburg, Walter Wanger and Harold Guinzberg rubbed shoulders with Ward Chaney, Joseph Alsop, Frank Polk, Dean Acheson and Allen W. Dulles. After the defeat of France in 1940, the Century Group called for the United States to declare war against Germany without waiting to be attacked. Another strategy of the Century Group was to sponsor celebrities to give anti-German speeches, particularly in response to pro-isolationist meetings headed by figures such as Charles Lindbergh. The media networks controlled by the Century Group manipulated public opinion through tactics such as giving prominence to anti-German speeches while “relegating opposing points of view, such as those expressed by Charles Lindbergh, to the back pages.”^[20]

Jews were crucial in sending destroyers and military hardware to Great Britain. As well as trying to shift public opinion in an anti-German direction, it was Benjamin Cohen (at Felix Frankfurter’s insistence) who sent a memorandum to Roosevelt arguing that he had the legal authority to release the destroyers without consulting Congress.^[21] Another major supporter of this scheme, and the Lend Lease scheme which helped finance it, was the Fight for Freedom Committee (FFF) another group bringing together Jews and the Eastern WASP establishment. In common with many such groups, while its visible leadership was WASP, its influence derived from socially and culturally prominent Jews, in the case of the FFF Warburg and Guinzburg of the Century Group, along with Hollywood producers Jack and Harry Warner, labor leader Abe Rosenfield, and New York businessman Mac Kreindler. The FFF, which also had a close working relationship with British intelligence, was instrumental in a prolonged anti-Lindbergh campaign, and was successful in making a connection between “pro-isolationism” and “pro-Germany” in the public mind. Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League also undermined the isolationist position through propaganda and infiltration. “One ADL agent, Marjorie Lane, became an active and trusted member of a number of isolationist and anti-Semitic groups, including Women for the USA, Women United, and Mothers Mobilize for America.”^[22]

In common with the situation in the Soviet Union, American Jews used the film industry to mobilize non-Jewish support for Jewish interests. Most of America’s film studios had been founded by Jews, and the 1930s witnessed an outpouring of anti-German productions. Roosevelt would later personally thank the movie industry for its “splendid cooperation with all who are directing the expansion of our defense forces,” and intervened to secure a reduced sentence for Jewish fraudster and head of Twentieth Century Fox, Joseph Schenk, who had been convicted of income tax evasion (an incident with eerie premonitions of the pardon of Marc Rich under Bill Clinton for the same crime).^[23] The news media was also highly involved in the effort to shift public opinion, and both CBS and NBC (two of the most important networks) were owned by Jews.^[24]

Go to Part 2

^[1] A. Joyce, ‘A Tactical Retreat on the Holocaust: Review of Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933-1949 by David Cesarani’, in The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 2016-2017).

^[2] B. Ginsburg, How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Passivity in the Face of Nazism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p.1.

^[3] For a more complete overview of this strand of argument see O. Kenan, Between Memory and History: The Evolution of Israeli Historiography of the Holocaust, 1945-1961 (Peter Lang Publishing, 2003).

^[4] Ginsberg, p.7.

^[5] Ginsberg, p.9.

^[6] Ginsberg, p.9.

^[7] Ginsberg, p.10.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Ginsberg, p.11.

^[10] Ginsberg, p.18.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ginsberg, p.32.

^[13] Ginsberg, p.34.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Ibid.

^[16] Ibid.

^[17] Ginsberg, p.37.

^[18] Ginsberg, p.40.

^[19] Ginsberg, p.41.

^[20] Ginsberg, p.42.

^[21] Ginsberg, p.43.

^[22] Ginsberg, p.46.

^[23] Ginsberg, p.49.

^[24] Ibid.

Jews Against Humans

Jews Against Humans

By Kevin Larson 

I don’t know what Jews are, but I know what they are not, which is human. I don’t know where they come from. For that matter, I don’t know where we come from, but it’s not the same place.

Jews are aliens in every sense of the word. They even cultivate an alien appearance. Is there anything as strange as an orthodox Jew with his sinister black clothes and curly earlocks and ugly fedora? And of course bathing is not the custom of the orthodox, so they smell very bad all the time. They do this on purpose, for effect, for the shock value on us humans.

Thanks to the latest Gaza slaughter, things are coming into focus for many more people. Many people are wondering: what’s wrong with Jews? Why is it so easy for them to kill people? Why do they enjoy it so much?  Thanks to the Internet, millions are now wondering this online. Before the Internet, there was no place to wonder this in public.  We weren’t allowed to wonder anything about Jews except how wonderful they are.

Today the world knows that Jews aren’t wonderful. The world knows that Jews are dreadful. And the Jews know this. The Jews want the world to think of them as dreadful and to be afraid of them. They want the world to fear the Jewish nuclear arsenal which they coyly decline to discuss. One of their military professors, van Creveld, was authorized to threaten Europe with Jewish nuclear attack if Europe should turn against Israel:

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force…. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under."

Based on the total FUBAR by Israel of its part of Operation Cyanide in 1967, we have to wonder if the Jewish arsenal is really a carefully contrived hoax. Pretty much everything we think we know about Jews is a Jewish hoax.  

For example, their Jewishness. The Jewishness of Jews is the number one Jewish fable. The Jewish writer Arthur Koestler demolished this fable back in 1976 with his best seller, "The Thirteenth Tribe," the first popular look we got at the Khazars and their descendants, the Ashkenazim.  

The Ashkenazim are the ersatz Hebrews who happen to make up the entire leadership of Israel. Three years ago an Israeli named Shlomo Sand ripped off Koestler with a virtually identical book, "The Invention of the Jewish People." This book again took the Jews by surprise, undercutting the basis of Zionism, the alien invasion, occupation and mass theft and murder of Palestine. Like the Koestler book, it wrecked the “anti-Semitism” racket. Both authors explained to their Israeli readers that they, the Israeli readers, were neither Semitic nor Hebrew. Same for the New York readers and the LA readers and the Miami readers. They’re all fake, wannabe Jews.

Briefly, the people of Khazaria were, around 800 AD, ordered by their king to adopt the law of the Hebrews as their own. We can’t call it a religion. The Talmud and the Old Testament are actually manuals of war against humanity based on harsh racial laws. There is no mercy for their human enemies in these very unpleasant works. The name of their god, YHVH, also means the Jewish people. This allows them to choose themselves and to worship themselves in what we could call a closed loop of extreme and violent narcissism.

Their priests insist that non-Jews are on this planet to serve them. And that it is kosher that non-Jews can be cheated, lied to and murdered with impunity. This Jewish principle is honored on their most sacred holiday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.  Another hoax, because they atone for nothing. Instead of atoning for their crimes against humanity, they declare a new war three times on this “holy day,” with the thrice-recited oath, the Kol Nidre. This vile “prayer” is a personal declaration of war against the humans. It is a warning that nothing a Jew says for the next year is true.

The Jewish story is a tale of murderous insanity, as we have seen over the past week in tiny Gaza. The first time we actually see this in the modern era is in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Shortly after Jews massacred the entire family of Tsar Nikolas in 1918, Trotsky’s Red Army newspaper announced:

"Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. … let there be floods of blood of the bourgeoisie -- more blood, as much as possible."

“Bourgeoisie” is the Communist word of contempt for the middle class. Trotsky himself wrote about the murder of the Tsar’s family:

"The decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either total victory or total doom. This Lenin sensed well."

Trotsky’s real name was Bronstein. Lenin (Ulyanov) was revealed in declassified Soviet documents as a Jew. Their Jewish colleague, Grigori Zinoviev, said this at a Communist meeting in 1918:

"We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated."

The Jews murdered a lot more than ten million Russians and other peoples by the time they were done. Hell, they probably killed that many just in Ukraine, rather than the advertised three million. The generally recognized Soviet death toll is over sixty million souls. Some researchers insist that the appetite of the GULAG for seventy years of extermination of normal people by working them to death would have exceeded even the Communist Chinese death toll.

There are two main branches of Judaism:  Terrorism and Finance Capitalism. Terrorism is the action arm of Judaism and comes in two main forms:  Communism and Zionism.  Jewish terrorism was first seen in the French Reign of Terror but not widely understood as such, since the big Terrorists were French Freemasons. The author of the "Jewish Protocols" explained around 1897 that the Freemasons are tools of the Jewish syndicate and are not independent.

Finance Capitalism is how the terrorism gets paid for, because terrorists are very expensive. Finance Capitalism is the big Jewish secret of success. It is the lending of credit to governments which become hopelessly indebted to the Jewish lenders, who must be repaid in something valuable plus interest. Substitute payments for unpayable debts were favors, appointments of Jews to powerful positions in government, special licenses, etc.  

The Jew traditionally has sought to be the invisible power behind the throne. We usually didn’t see powerful Jews in the US government until Louis Brandeis was appointed by Wilson to the Supreme Court in 1916. JFK had the Rostow brothers as advisors and Johnson had Abe Fortas and Arthur Goldberg working for him. Then all hell broke loose with Nixon appointing Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor and then secretary of state!  

That unleashed the Jewish dogs of hell which erupted in the Reagan administration with the so-called “neo-conservatives,” virtually all Jewish Communists who switched to the Republican Party and made it pro-Israel. Communism and Zionism are virtually identical forms of terrorism except the former is based in New York and Moscow and the latter is based in New York and Tel Aviv. The Communists pretended to be our enemies and the Zionists pretend to be our friends.  

Peter S. sent an important point yesterday which prompted this essay:

"On behalf of his sponsors, the Rothschilds, Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned a fabricated history of Ancient Egypt from Jean Francois Champollion for the purpose of "validating" the Torah so the Rothschilds could use it to back up their claim for Palestine. They did not want Palestine for the Jews, they wanted the Jews for Palestine, to be human shields for Mossad, the private intelligence and assassination service of the Lombardy bankers since Babylon."

The same could be said for Cyrus Schofield and his Zionist concordance bible. This ex-convict (for fraud and forgery) was sponsored by the infamous Jewish lawyer, Samuel Untermeyer, and the Jewish fixer, Bernard Baruch, to annotate the Bible to justify Ashkenazi Jews flooding into Palestine. This Schofield propaganda is the basis for the Christian fundamentalists’ fanatical support for Jewish terrorism and dominance in the Middle East.

Untermeyer and Baruch teamed up in 1917 to pressure President Wilson to declare war against Germany, according to Benjamin Freedman, who later accompanied Wilson to Versailles to lower the boom on the defeated Germans, which led to incredible suffering, mass starvation, hyperinflation and the eventual violent deaths of millions of Germans and millions of others due to the actions of the Jewish monsters.

And then the same Untermeyer and Baruch pushed America into World War II with Untermeyer being authorized by the Jewish syndicate to declare Jewish economic war on Germany in 1933, when it became clear that Adolf Hitler was demonstrating to the world how to achieve prosperity with no Jewish gold, despite the denial of Jewish debt-based currency to the starving peoples of the world by the Jewish Federal Reserve.  

This, in the middle of the Great World Depression, was the German Economic Miracle that took destitute Germany from starvation to full employment in a year and a half, simply by issuing debt-free currency.  For this greatest of all offenses to Jewish finance capitalism, Germany had to be fire-bombed into smoking rubble and, again, subjected to slow death by starvation.  According to James Bacque in "Crimes and Mercies," Dwight Eisenhower’s post-war starvation orders resulted in the deaths of from nine to twelve million Germans from the end of the war to 1948, more than were killed during the war by Eisenhower’s generals.

In an interview after he was out of office, Eisenhower said the smartest thing he’d ever done was to ask Bernard Baruch for advice on his career when he was a lieutenant-colonel going nowhere in 1939. Soon he was on the fast-track to five stars and the mass slaughter of the German people on behalf of Judaism – and the presidency as his reward.  

That’s why I say that the Jews are some alien life form that is totally hostile to the Earth’s human population. I don’t pretend to know whence they came, or claim that they are reptiles. They act like reptiles and are certainly as cold-blooded and heartless as reptiles and what I do know is that they have to be wiped out entirely, just as rattlesnakes under your house have to be exterminated.  

The Jewish mayor of New York has the face of a reptile, so I can see how this idea got started. This is the guy who prohibited food given to the hungry because it might not have his Jewish idea of nutritional value! If a non-Jew had done this, the New York papers would have made him into a laughingstock.  A Jew must not be mocked in New York – or anywhere.

Remember one thing: famine is the favorite Jewish method of extermination. It costs nothing and it produces an agonizing death.  It’s what’s planned for America when the Jews think the time is right. The reader must prepare for the famine that is planned for us by the Jews. Have a look at Ukraine’s holodomor. It’s the model for what they, the Jews, plan for us in America. Precious metals will not be precious in a famine.  Food, water and ammunition will be precious. These are the things we will need to survive and destroy Judaism.  

While there is no actual connection between the Ashkenazi Jews and the legendary characters of the Old Testament, today’s Jews base their behavior on that of the legendary Jews. The number one role model is Joseph, eleventh son of Jacob, as told in Genesis. Study this story of contrived shortages and deliberately-caused famine. It is the story of the Federal Reserve and Monsanto.

If we continue on our present course of government borrowing from Jewish lenders, our monetary system will kill us because society will collapse. If we continue to eat poisoned food provided by Jewish Monsanto, we are doomed. The monetary policy can be fixed virtually overnight but our genetically modified food may not be so easily neutralized. One thing is certain: if we do not remove every aspect of Jewish control of our lives, the human race will die out, and rather quickly.  

Some say, forget about Gaza – concentrate on America. Well, we can’t forget about Gaza because that’s our baby. Gaza and the rest of Palestine is running in blood again because of the Jewish American government. The only thing we Americans can do is kill this Jewish government that is using Israel as its agent of sadism, murder and total destruction.  

Israel itself doesn’t do much damage compared with the American air force and army obliterating whole countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.  Israel can’t do much because it is run by inept and kill-crazy but lazy Jews. But Jewish finance capitalism is the quartermaster of the Jewish American death machine. Without Jewish financing, Communism and Zionism collapse. The US military will also collapse without Jewish funding. Without Jewish direction, the US military will stop threatening the world with extinction.

So our first great task as American revolutionaries is to destroy every vestige of Judaism in America, in government, banking, the food chain, medicine and information (mind control). Everywhere we find Judaism, we must eradicate it. The first step toward anti-Jewish action is to discuss this with friends and family. Jewish friends must be dropped and Jews in general shunned.  After all, what has any Jew whom you know done or said anything to stop Israel from its plan to nuke Iran?  

As Brother Nathanael has warned, every Jew is politically aware and sees all issues by one measurement: “Is this good for Jews?” If your Jewish friends aren’t talking, it’s because they approve what America and Israel are doing to the humans. Put as simply as possible – what the Jews have done to their human enemies must be done to them.  

Everywhere in the world but mainly in Jewish America. They’ve slaughtered millions of Middle Eastern human enemies in the past two decades, not even to mention the damage they did, the blood they spilled, in Russia and Germany. On a one-for-one basis, the Jews owe us humans just about their entire population, whatever that is.  

It’s only fair.

Is The Gospel According To Mark An Allegory?

                        By Aedon Cassiel

In my last essay, I presented the argument for why the strength of the historical evidence for the life of Jesus provided by the Gospels basically reduces to the strength of the evidence provided by the anonymously-authored book, written shortly after AD 70, that subsequently acquired the title “The Gospel According to Mark” most likely sometime in the 2nd century AD (henceforth, “Mark”).

So now it’s time to ask how strong that evidence is.

Now, the next step in the argument is this: it would be entirely reasonable to interpret Mark as a literary work of allegory, rather than as an attempt at history to begin with.

This may sound absurd at first, because most of us reading today assume that the whole entire point of the Gospels is to attest to the historicity of Jesus’ life. But bear with me: once you see how much the hypothesis can make sense of, I think it seems downright obvious. This understanding of the Gospels as works whose point was to attest to the life of a historical Jesus comes from theological constructs that did not exist until after the Gospels had already been in existence for some time. Those constructs were then applied to the Gospels themselves, retroactively. As we’ll see, the same goes for the standard reading of the works of Paul.

First, I’ll outline a couple general stylistic elements that indicate that the book can plausibly be seen as residing in the genre of allegory. Then, I’ll show what the allegory was actually supposed to be about.  To the first point, not only do the names of many characters in the story work to symbolically represent the role they play in the narrative, but there are multiple examples of stories in Mark that make no sense at all until we interpret them against the Old Testament passages to which they are making literary allusions.

When Jesus is being sentenced to his death, the Gospels claim that Pilate used his power to commute a prisoner’s death sentence by popular acclaim to offer the crowd a choice between a “Barabbas” and Jesus. In what appear to be the earliest variations of the text, Barabbas’ full name is actually given as “Jesus Barabbas”. Etymologically, the name “Bar–abbas” literally means “Son of the Father.” Is it a coincidence that the man offered up to the crowd as the alternative to Jesus happens to have a name which literally means “Jesus, Son of the Father?”

If you are reading this essay, you are probably aware that Judas is the name of the character that betrays Jesus and sells him over to his death for money. It is significant that in the original Greek, “Judah” (the land of the Jews) and “Judas” are literally the same word: Ἰούδας.

If you didn’t catch that, read it again: the name of the man who betrays Jesus is “Judah.”

And this particular coincidence becomes even more significant when comparing Gospel passages about Judas with the Old Testament passages to which they are making literary allusions.

For instance, pay close attention to this passage from Mark 14:

Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. When they heard it, they were greatly pleased, and promised to give him money. So he began to look for an opportunity to betray him.

…

Immediately, while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; and with him there was a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ‘The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.’ So when he came, he went up to him at once and said, ‘Rabbi!’ and kissed him. Then they laid hands on him and arrested him. But one of those who stood near drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.’ All of them deserted him and fled.

A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.

This random mention of a naked guy running around in the middle of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus has perplexed many scholars for a really long time. But pay attention to this passage from Amos, written some time around 750 BC:

Thus says the Lord; For three sins of the children of Judah, and for four, I will not turn away from him, because they have rejected the law of the Lord, and have not kept His ordinances, and their vain idols which they made, which their fathers followed, caused them to err. And I will send a fire on Judah, and it shall devour the foundations of Jerusalem.

Thus says the Lord; for three sins of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away from him, because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for sandals, in which to tread on the dust of the earth, and they have smitten upon the heads of the poor, and have perverted the way of the lowly; and a son and his father have gone into the same maid, that they might profane the name of their God. … I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and led you about in the desert forty years, that you should inherit the land of the Amorites. And I took of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for consecration. Are not these things so, you sons of Israel? Says the Lord.

But you gave the consecrated ones wine to drink, and you commanded the prophets, saying, Prophesy not. … flight shall perish from the runner, and the strong shall not hold fast his strength, and the warrior shall not save his life; and the archer shall not withstand, and he that is swift of foot shall in by no means escape; and the horseman shall not save his life. And the strong shall find no confidence in power: the naked shall flee away in that day, says the Lord.

The passage talks about the “sins of the children of Judah [Judas],” emphasizes that “they sold the righteous for silver” (Matthew 26:15 amends Mark’s use of the word “money” to say that Judas betrayed Jesus for “thirty pieces of silver”), and ends saying that “the naked shall flee away.” The parallel is obvious. And it fully explains the otherwise bizarre inclusion of a random, nameless, previously unmentioned naked guy just running around during Jesus’ betrayal.

As it so happens, almost all of the details of Jesus’ life can be seen as adaptations from scriptures in this way. One could argue that the evidence can be read one of two ways: it could be that the Gospel writers created the story of Jesus’ life by lifting directly from the Old Testament, or it could be that Jesus’ life really did fulfill everything that was ever said by the prophets.

But we have one definite way of establishing that the former explanation is superior to the latter. Sometimes, when the Gospel writers add details to Jesus’ life from the Old Testament scriptures, they misinterpret them or rely on mistranslations present in only the Greek Septuagint. For instance, Zachariah 9:9, written around 520 BC:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

The author is clearly repeating the line, “on a colt, the foal of a donkey” as a way of adding emphasis. The image is supposed to be of a King, humble enough to ride on such a lowly steed as a donkey—yes, a donkey. Grammatically, the idea might be represented better as so: “Humble and riding on a donkey—on a colt; the foal of a donkey.” But when the writer of The Gospel According to Matthew adopts this into his narrative in 21:2–7, he changes Mark’s original story of Jesus riding only a colt, and literally has Jesus riding a donkey and a colt at the same time:

Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied there and a colt with her … Now this took place that what was spoken through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying, “Say to the daughter of Zion, ‘Behold your King is coming to you, gentle, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’” And the disciples went and did just as Jesus had directed them, and brought the donkey and the colt, and laid on them their garments, on which He sat.

Back to the parallel between Mark 14 and Amos 2. The important point here is not just how clearly the verses happen to parallel each other. The important point is why.

The traditional placement of the date of the writing of the Gospel According to Mark is based on the timing of the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem. The reasons for this conclusion are too numerous to list in detail here, but one indication is Mark 13’s prediction of the Temple’s destruction:

As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”

“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?”

… Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

In any case, scholars unanimously appreciate the significance of the AD 70 destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem when it comes to dating the Gospel According to Mark. But they may have underestimated its significance when it comes to interpreting the meaning of its content.

According to Josephus, 1.1 million people, mostly Jewish, were killed during the AD 70 siege of Jerusalem, and 97,000 more were captured as slaves. Suffice it to say that this was a really big deal. The Talmud also addresses the causes of the destruction of the Temple directly:

[W]hy was the second Sanctuary destroyed, seeing that in its time they were occupying themselves with Torah, [observance of] precepts, and the practice of charity? Because therein prevailed hatred without cause …

This passage resides in a long list of Jewish writing that blames the calamities that befall the Jews on the Jews’ own sins—whether “idolatry, immorality, and bloodshed” or “groundless hatred,” a constant theme throughout Jewish writing is that calamities that befall the Jews are punishment by God for their own weakness of faith and actions of religious infidelity.

The Gospel According to Mark was an allegory to establish this same point.

What is the book of Amos about? Exactly the same topic. It was a prediction of the calamities that would befall the nation of Israel if they didn’t turn from their rebellion.

Here’s another passage that fits the same theme, and makes no sense otherwise.

Mark 11:12–21 —

The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it.

On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written:

“‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

The chief priests and the teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching.

When evening came, they went out of the city.

In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!”

As a 21st-century reader, what am I supposed to believe here? Am I really supposed to believe that God, after incarnating himself as a man, got pissed off at a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season and then cursed a tree? Even if we step away from the religious element and just look at the Gospels as flawed, human works of their time, what am I supposed to believe? How could a story like this one have even grown out of legend?

It all makes sense when we turn to the Book of Hosea, also written in the 8th century BC.

Do not rejoice, O Israel; do not be jubilant like the other nations. For you have been unfaithful to your God; . . .

The days of punishment are coming, the days of reckoning are at hand. Let Israel know this. Because your sins are so many and your hostility so great, the prophet is considered a fool, the inspired man a maniac. . . . When I found Israel, it was like finding grapes in the desert; when I saw your fathers, it was like seeing the early fruit on the fig tree. But when they came to Baal Peor, they consecrated themselves to that shameful idol and became as vile as the thing they loved.

. . . Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal, I hated them there. Because of their sinful deeds, I will drive them out of my house. I will no longer love them; all their leaders are rebellious. Ephraim is blighted, their root is withered, they yield no fruit.

As this excerpt from Hosea 9:1–17 makes clear, the topic of the Book of Hosea was, likewise, the calamities that would befall the nation of Israel if they persisted in their behavior. And the parallels are once again remarkable: we have “early fruit on the fig tree” (Mark 11 makes it clear that the fig tree Jesus saw was “in leaf” and therefore that it was early in the growing season), we have people being driven “out of my house,” and then we have not only barren trees, but common use of a specific turn of phrase in “withered roots.”

Even if we were trying to take the “centrist” approach of interpreting the stories about Jesus as legends that grew up around a real historical figure, this passage makes no sense. But as literary allusion, it makes perfect sense. The most plausible way to understand this verse is that the author of the Gospel According to Mark was making the allusion intentionally—for literary purposes—because the book was a work of allegory, not about a historical Jesus, but about why the Jews brought the AD 70 destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem upon themselves. The Jesus of Mark’s story is just the medium for the delivery of the message.

As mentioned in the introduction to this series, the Gospel According to Matthew and the Gospel According to Luke both contradict each other by ten whopping years over the date when Jesus is born (Matthew’s story places his birth before 4 BC, because this is when the Herod it depicts died; Luke’s places it after AD 6, when Quirinius became governor of Syria).

But it is even more significant to recall why this was possible to begin with: Mark, the very first gospel, contains no stories about Jesus’ childhood. And modern readers would be surprised to learn how the very first–written of all the Gospels ended: there was no resurrection story. The elaborated endings of modern copies of Mark including resurrection stories are now known by all scholars, including the most conservative, to be forgeries.

As Richard A. Burridge puts it in Four Gospels, One Jesus?, “Mark’s [original story] ends as abruptly as it began. There was no introduction or background to Jesus’ arrival, and none for his departure. No one knew where he came from; no one knows where he has gone . . .”

In Mark 14:18, before the crucifixion, Jesus says: “But after that I am risen, I will go before you into Galilee.” Afterwards, the original story ends with Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome coming to anoint Jesus’ body, and finding inside the tomb a man who told them, “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified . . . But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.” And the narrative ends on this verse: “And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they anything to any man; for they were afraid.”

In the next entry, I’ll fit the writing of the allegorical Gospel According to Mark into the context of the writings, and theology, of Paul.