The heat is on

 

"Red Heat" is a somewhat strange film released in 1988, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, James Belushi and Lawrence Fishburne. I recently watched it on a Swedish TV channel, where it was marketed as a "comedy". Ahem, I beg you pardon? More like an extravaganza in Murder One (and some mayhem) if you ask me! But sure, Arnie and Belushi do try to add some comic relief here and there. Arnold usually by not smiling at all. He´s supposed to be a hard boiled Communist police officer from the old Soviet Union! 

The film was made during Gorbachev´s perestroika/glasnost, which may explain why the Russians are the "good guys" in this production. The "Soviet" segments were actually taped in Hungary, at the time the most "liberal" Eastern bloc nation. Curiously, "Red Heat" is so Russophile that it even assimilated Russian racism against non-Russian ethnic groups in the old Soviet Union. The villain is a Georgian (from Georgia south of Russia) and another bad guy is described as a "Mongolian hippie"...

On the American end, the bad guys are African-Americans and led by a certain Abdul Elijah, who turns out to be a Black supremacist, Marxist and drug kingpin. He is clearly intended as a hybrid between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X (or perhaps the Black Panthers). Abdul hates all White people with equal gusto, including...Russians. OK, so there is little Wokeness in this film, if you get the drift.

And yes, I noticed that the bus at the end was marked "American Liberty Lines". Perhaps interesting as cultural studies in 2025?

  

Gold Coast

 

How is this even possible today? The whole thing feels so 1970 or perhaps 1995. Is this woman a member of a cult of some kind?  

Leo Africanus?

 

From X. Original unkown. Not sure if true or just another rumor...

Get me a light beer

 

An old classic. This is actually a speech by Martin Luther King translated into German, which makes it sound Nazi?!

United Slaves

 

No relation to United Slaves!

LOL! Breitbart News goes mustang in this article, attacking Kamala Harris for celebrating Kwanzaa, but note the last sentence, in which they are forced to admit that even Donald Trump wished Black people a Happy Kwanzaa (although he never claimed to celebrate it himself).

Kwanzaa is a "fake holiday" according to Breitbart, invented by one Maulana Karenga who was a really bad boy. Maybe a proto-fascist? Or a left-wing extremist? One thing not mentioned in the screed is that some radical leftists actually believe that Karenga was an FBI stooge!

Oh, and why isn´t Christmas a fake holiday? It was invented by a proto-fascist Roman regime the main pastime of which was book burning, slavery and wars of conquest, but whatever...  

Biden-Harris admin wishes everyone a "Happy Kwanzaa"

Narrative busted? LOL

 

Far right Breitbart News tries to prove that capitalism wasn´t based on slavery or colonialism. Which kind of misses the point even if true. 

Note also the following quotes:

>>>The head of Political Economy at the IEA argues that while some select elite families within Britain and other colonial powers profited immensely during the time, such gains were not felt by the public at large, who rather than benefitting were instead steeply taxed to pay the exorbitant costs in extra military and administrative spending needed to maintain and protect far-away colonial outposts. 

>>>Niemietz did acknowledge that there is evidence that places in the world that were colonised did experience long term negative effects, particularly areas which were environmentally or otherwise inhospitable to Europeans at the time as they tended to establish authoritarian and “extractivist” forms of government, which when they left served as a power structure for continued poor governance from local elites.

>>>“A history of colonial extractivism, or a period of heavy involvement in the slave trade, made the subsequent development of good institutions less likely. The implication is that colonialism and slavery were not zero-sum games that benefited the colonisers at the expense of the colonised. It was more like a negative-sum game, which hurt the latter without really benefiting the former,” he concluded.

Indeed. Except for those rich elites, of course. 

Narrative busted: Colonialism did not make the British Empire rich

Kanye West Da God

 

A Christian YouTuber comments on Kanye West (Ye) and his religious peregrinations. Not sure if he entirely gets them, though... 

Implicit Whiteness

 

Why do Woke activists insist on Blackwashing (or POC-washing) succesful Whites (or White-coded people)? Why don´t they talk about actual Black/colored achievements? Instead of claiming Cleopatra, why not talk about the Kandake of Nubia who actually defeated Augustus? What about the West African empires of the Middle Ages? Or, if you really want to be a radical, what about the Haitian revolution, the slave rebellion in Demerara, or some such? 

I see two possibilities. One: iconoclasm. It´s "blasphemy" to claim that succesful White or White-coded people are actually Black, Brown, Gypsy, or whatever. The whole thing can be compared to how Communists destroy religious shrines, Christians or Muslims destroy pagan shrines, and so on. 

But there is another possibility: envy. If so, the oppressed colored masses have internalized their oppression. Their reactions are implicitly White. Why are they envious of the pastimes of their White oppressors? A bit like Blackwashing White slave-owners...

Oh, and another thing. How do we even know that the Woke activists are Black or POC in the first place? 

 

April Fool´s Day comes early

 

Why are all East Asians so smart, smarter than White people in fact, when they are so culturally different?

I assume the "Kendism" part of this article is ironic, and that the author (notorious gadfly Richard Hanania) really means that the explanation is genetic. 

In other words: all East Asians form one race. Or racial sub-group? Sure wonder how Hanania explain the low rates of success of, say, present day Mongolians or the Manchu...?

Perhaps it´s all irony, who knows. After all, if you read the article closely, the "social pathologies" mentioned by Hanania are those supposedly typical of Black Americans and/or Black Africans: crime, illegitimacy, population explosion, and so on. 

So what he really wants to tell us is that Blacks are racially inferior, despite obvious cultural differences between Black groups. Note that Ibram X Kendi is Black. (I assume he is some kind of Woke-BLM activist.)

Gotcha! 

The East Asian Package

Jammin´

 

Probably the wrong chant 

"Nichiren Buddhism in the Contemporary Jazz Improvisation of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter" is one of the more curious articles I ever read. It´s strictly speaking a kind of speech or tribute delivered at a conference in Arizona, the First Jazz and Philosophy Intermodal Conference (JPIC) in 2017 to be exact. None other than legendary jazz musician Herbie Hancock was supposed to participate at the con, but for some reason his participation had to be cancelled at the last moment, but the tribute by Steve Odin was delivered anyway. To be absolutely blunt, the article mostly repeats the same statements over and over again, almost as if it was a Buddhist chant. But then, it *is* (after a fashion) about Buddhist chanting!

Herbie Hancock is a Black American jazz musician who converted to a rather heterodox form of Japanese Buddhism, known as Nichiren Buddhism and represented in the United States by Soka Gakkai International (SGI). Wayne Shorter and Tina Turner have also been associated with the SGI. In passing, the article mentions that many jazz musicians were inspired by religious and spiritual sources, ranging from Christianity and Islam to Scientology, Bahai and the Fourth Way. The article then discusses some aspects of SGI metaphysics. The concept of "Buddha-nature" as expressed through "Three thousand realms in a single moment of life" is interpreted as the microcosmos reflecting the macrocosmos. This is connected in the "mutual containment of the ten worlds" - the idea that each one of us is simultaneously in ten states at the same time, ranging from Hell to Buddhahood. By chanting the mystical mantra Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the individual can unlock his creative potential in every moment, presumably accessing the "realms" or "worlds" we presently are unaware of. In this way, we can "create values" (Soka Gakkai means Value Creating Society), the most important of which are beauty, goodness and practical benefit. SGI seems to have amended the traditional Nichiren metaphysics with the idea of a vitalistic life-force that can be accessed through the mantra. 

Apparently, SGI founder Ikeda was interested in art, music and aesthetics. This presumably explains why some musicians and singers are drawn to this particular New Religious Movement. I read elsewhere that the SGI also promote Western classical music. Jazz seem to fall on the other end of the musical spectrum! 

As for Hancock, he apparently used the above take on creativity to further his work as a jazz musician, since jazz is based on improvisation and hence "creativity in every moment". I admit that I don´t get it - it sounds frankly pretentious and pseudo-intellectual - but then, I´m not a jazz aficionado, so I´m gonna give the bro the benefit of the doubt here. And in case the talk about unlimited creativity locked in every occasion sounds a bit like Whitehead, why, Odin has written a paper on process philosophy, too... 

Rockit, Buddha

 

The only Herbie Hancock composition I´m familiar with...

A propos a previous blog post on Black American musicians connected to Soka Gakkai.

Beyond Nichiren´s thunderdome

 

Our man Brad reflects on Tina Turner´s Buddhism. In September 2022, I actually linked to some content dealing with the same topic. Purely by coincidence, I researched it on the same day as a Tina Turner death hoax was spreading like wildfire on the web. Tina Turner did pass away eventually, but in May 2023.

I don´t claim to know the details of the pop icon´s connections to Nichiren Buddhism or the Soka Gakkai, but she did have an interest in it, at least for some time. Nor was she alone on the African-American music scene to adopt Nichiren chanting. Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock are two other examples. 

I admit I had no idea! Interesting.

The Black Death

 

A good debunking of some recent pseudo-history published in The Guardian and on BBC´s website. The Black Death was "racist", apparently. This shit never stops, does it?  

Black as folk

 

BBC says that Black women were overrepresented among 14th century plague victims in England. But how did the BBC reach that conclusion? How could they possibly know what human remains from the period question come from Black Africans (presumably a small community in 14th century England anyhow)? 

Well, it turns out that the study they cite...measured skulls. 

So "race" is a social construct...except when it isn´t! Or except when BBC does the social constructing for you.

Saint John Coltrane

 

I´ve heard of the mysterious Kenyan Orthodox Church before (I think it´s mentioned in passing in Kallistos Ware´s book "The Orthodox Church"), but I never reflected over its pre-history. Until now...

Apparently, the Kenyan and Ugandan Orthodox Churches (which today are "officially" Eastern Orthodox) were originally connected to the so-called African Orthodox Church in the United States, a quasi-Orthodox Church body set up by Black nationalist Marcus Garvey.  

One of the AOC´s congregations is very exotic. It´s named after the jazz musician John Coltrane, who was worshipped as God (!) by a small cult. When the cultists wanted to join the AOC, they were told to demote Coltrane from divine status to that of an ordinary saint (yes, they have icons of him). Apparently, mass is still celebrated with a saxophone?!

I admit that I never heard of the AOC, or Saint John Coltrane for that matter, before. You learn new shit every day, LOL. 

Donald Trump can still win! Here´s how.

 

OK, bizarre meme from a parody account on X, but I couldn´t help myself...

Real diversity

 

Is this even true? I admit I had no idea. It seems Dessalines didn´t kill all White people on Haiti...

A semblance of Docetism

 

A specter is haunting scholarship. The specter of Docetism, to be exact. Who were the accursed Docetae, who denied that Jesus had come in the flesh, indeed who claimed that the sweet Redeemer was just an "illusion" or "semblance"?

Very often, the Docetic doctrine (usually associated with Gnosticism) is depicted as quite absurd, as if the believers in this curious idea regarded Jesus as some kind of phantom or ghost. Indeed, he could shape shift, too! A bit like Odo in "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"? But how can you crucify a mere phantom? Absurd, I say, absurd!

But perhaps the real phantom is Docetism itself. Docetism sounds absurd because...well, because it is. And nobody really believed it in ancient times either...

So what on earth *was* Docetism? I see two possibilities. One is that the Gnostics were the original Mythicists. Perhaps their teachings had three levels. Let´s call them exoteric, mesoteric and esoteric. Or perhaps hylic, psychic and pneumatic? At the exoteric level, the canonical Gospels are real. At the mesoteric level, the Gnostic Gospels (with their strange stories) are introduced. And at the highest, esoteric, level? The initiate there learns that both the canonical and Gnostic gospels are really teaching stories, not to be taken literally. Christ is neither a sin sacrifice nor an angelic messenger. He is *within you*, the divine spark, which you can access by meditation techniques. This, then, is the "Docetism". Jesus was an "illusion" or "semblance", not because he was a disembodied spook from the séances of Simon Magus, but because he was seen as an allegory for the Spirit. Yes, the Gnostics did follow "well crafted myths"! The Docetism is simply the mesoteric level of teaching as further distorted by proto-orthodox Christians or bewildered modern scholars. 

But there is another possibility. Maybe the accursed Docetae viewed Jesus as a Hindu avatar? We can take Chaitanya as an example. Everyone (I think) agrees that he was a real historical person. A human, in other words. Yet, the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition - if I understand their position - consider him to have been 100% divine. That is, he was fully ontologically divine. In contrast to Jesus in traditional Christian theology, who was both human and god simultaneously. That is, a real ontological human besides also being really ontologically divine. But Chaitanya, by contrast, was "only" divine. Thus, his human form was "just a semblance". It was part of his divine play. It wasn´t a phantom, to be sure, but it was nevertheless just a temporary form taken by the Supreme Personality of Godhead. (The whole thing is *somewhat* more complicated, since strictly speaking everything in the universe is "divine" in a certain sense in most Hindu theological systems. But that´s the gist of it.) 

From a Christian theological viewpoint, this too would presumably be Docetism.

Note that the Alawites in Syria regard Ali as Allah. Now, I´m not a *yuge* expert on the esoteric teachings of the Alawites, but could this be similar to the Hindu notion of an avatar? Ali was really 100% God, although he temporarily took a seemingly human form. The same idea seem to pop up again and again in the history of religion. The Rastafarians of Jamaica regarded Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as God. The Nation of Islam regards W D Fard as God. And so on. Same thing?

My guess is that the Gnostic option is more likely in this particular case.

To an ordinary believer, it presumably doesn´t matter much whether or not the god-man you´re worshipping is "both god and man", "fully god but with a human form" or "fully god". But to theologians, that´s apparently very central. Presumably because of the sin sacrifice of Christ on the cross. The other god-men mentioned here didn´t sacrifice themselves in that way. 

Mystery solved. You learned something new today.  

The Democrats are the real racists

 

This must be the most bizarre political ad ever. It´s popularly known as "Make Rifles Great Again"...

Lord Dunmore: The Great Emancipator?

 

Some American leftists are confused by the fact that the British emancipated Black slaves and armed some of them to fight the Patriots during the War of Independence of the latter. For instance, the colonial governor Lord Dunmore in Virginia, who had been a Jacobite in his youth and later became a Toryesque "Bedford Whig". 

Emancipating the slaves of the enemy (or at least able-bodied male slaves willing to be cannon fodder) was standard practice during the Early Modern Period, so it´s not clear why Dunmore´s emancipation of slaves owned by "rebels" should be seen as any different? Or why on earth the old reactionary should be seen as some kind of Abraham Lincoln? Unless the point is the opposite: smear Lincoln. Not sure if these two agendas are compatible! Aren´t there any relevant differences between the oldest military tactic in the book, and Radical Reconstruction? 

The link below goes to a blog post by (the late) Louis Proyect, an independent Marxist who supported the 1619 Project, plus a commentary thread. The 1619 Project are a group of mostly Black activists who take the line that the American Revolution was really pro-slavery.   

Lord Dunmore and the Ethiopian Regiment