Sundry Notes, September

Left Conservatism, Voting like a Chess Pawn, Jewish Nationalism, and "Anti-Woke Druids"

I.

The Pope was here the other day. Well, not here here, though, after my gym trainer asked me jokingly if I’d gone to see him in the city, I replied offhandedly, “huh? No, he’s coming over later.”

Actually, I did sort of want to go see him during his short visit to Luxembourg. I’ve a bit of a fondness for the man, being that he’s really not so much a dick as previous popes were. Also, I wanted to see what else I could see, both on the faces of the devout and also the presence(s) around the vicar of Christ.

But I didn’t, so there’s nothing to report regarding those matters.

However, I was quite amused by some of the cantankerous reactions of this country’s humanist/atheist society, and also that of neoliberal “left” political party leaders and the heads of feminist organizations here.

That first group was quite upset that the Pope had been invited by the Grand Duc of Luxembourg, seeing it as a violation of the nation’s very recent separation of church and state. They made as much fuss as possible about the matter, but to most catholics here — and even to a pagan as myself — they came across as just, well, dickish.

The latter group was even worse, though. Luxembourg’s “left” (the LSAP, the Greens, the Pirate Party, and the Left) mirrors all the worst qualities of progressive Democrats in the United States. Worse, they’re in the political opposition now, and so they’ve been acting like the worst sorts of spoiled children, throwing tantrums at every opportunity and doing all they can to try to sabotage any actually-helpful political change the Conservative-Liberal governing alliance tries.

So, they saw the Pope’s visit as the perfect opportunity to act like idiots, and they succeeded. Especially, they were quite upset that the Pope told the devout that they should consider having children.

Typical of the responses was from the head of the Luxembourgish version of Planned Parenthood, who complained that housing was too expensive for people to have children, so the Pope should basically “mind his own business.”

The complete lack of political imagination of whatever still passes for “the left” is quite maddening. It is a very true fact that many people are not having children because housing and other costs are too expensive. This is the same throughout Europe right now, and it’s part of why there is so much political and social instability.

The old “left,” basically the Communist left, would have seized upon this problem as a rallying cry to reduce housing costs, increase family subsidies, and create a family wage so that only one parent would need to work. But, thanks to the complete rejection of any real class consciousness on the new left, they instead just complain about those problems and tell the Pope to fuck off.

That leaves only the far right and the really, really small communist party arguing in defense of women who’d actually like to afford to have and raise children. Of course, the communists also argue in defense of women who’d like not to, as well, so the difference between the two is quite stark. But from the center, they’re painted with the same brush.

There’s an incredible political opportunity for a return to that “old left,” and this terrifies both the new left and their neoliberal centrist cousins. This is how to understand the intense international efforts made to smear German politician Sahra Wagenknecht’s “conservative leftism.” She and others like her argue both against capitalism and also against the social destruction capitalism is causing, meaning she’s able to speak both to the old left and also all the disenchanted voters who now side with the far right.

II.

A few readers have asked me who I am voting for in the US presidential election.

Yes, I know there’s that Rebecca Solnit quote that keeps going around, the one about voting being “not a valentine, but a chess move.” Solnit was at this kind of thing long before Trump, though. For instance, in 2012, she wrote an article in the Guardian deriding what remained of the old left for their anger at Obama’s warmongering and betrayals of all his campaign promises, insisting that it was still more important to fight the “radical right” than hew to anti-imperialist values.

In other words, it doesn’t matter who the US government kills abroad, as long as those who live within the US feel good.

Solnit’s role in helping to kill off what remained of class consciousness in the United States really deserves a deeper treatment, especially since she and others like her have done a lot to make sure there can never be a Sahra Wagenknect. I suspect if wouldn’t even require much delving into her and her kind before we start running into some familiar three-letter acronyms for government agencies.

But more importantly, no one ever seems to notice the other side of the chess metaphor. The US elections are absolutely chess moves, but we’re not the ones who are playing. Rather, the electorate are the ones being moved around like pawns.

And that’s my answer.

III.

I’ve been meaning to help promote some of the really interesting writing I’ve been reading here on Substack. I did this last year, but I unfortunately got out of the habit of doing this. I’m going to try this again by making at least one point in my Sundry Notes updates about someone else’s work.

This month, I’d love to direct your attention to two essays by

Yasha Levine

, both about the relationship of Judaism and Zionism.

The first is Zionists tried to use God. But God used them, in which he states the following:

…it didn't take long for me to realize that Judaism at its core has zionism built into it…not a soft nationalism but a hard nationalism that makes it easy to justify genocide, which is what we’re seeing now.

At the core of the Jewish religion is land.

YHWH is the Jewish god. YHWH’s relationship with the Jewish people isn’t some abstract thing that transcends the physical world, like it is with Christians and their god. According to the Torah — the foundational text on which Judaism rests — the sacred is rooted in territory, a very specific chunk of territory that YHWH promised to Abraham and his children. This god’s deal was this: I chose you as my special people. You are better than everyone else. If you obey me and honor me, I will give you this land forever and ever, let you dominate it, and make you fruitful and multiply. That was “The Covenant.” The land that was given in this pact was more or less the land that the state of Israel controls now. Actually YHWH promised Abraham much land…land that extends all the way to Iraq, and some zionists have wanted to claim the entirety of that territory.

And the second is a follow up to it, called Eschatology and denial, in which he specifically discusses how external pressures also enforce this core ethno-nationalism:

More and more we’ll see the codification of zionism as a protected religious practice.

Jews who believe that Judaism and Jewish identity is not synonymous with zionism might be outraged and concerned by this. And they should be. We’re in an environment where non-Jewish lawmakers and bureaucrats are defining the definition of what is and isn’t properly “Jewish.” But they’re working off something that already exists. And the truth is that zionism — a belief in a Jewish supremacist ethnostate — is currently at the of core of Judaism and Jewish identity for the majority of Jews in America…and in Europe and Israel, too. You can hate it, you can try to ignore it, you can hope that things change in the future. But it won’t make it go away.

Especially brilliant (and likely controversial to some, including my many anti-Zionist Jewish readers) is how he treats the foundational beliefs of Judaism as, well, foundational. That is, if your entire religion is founded upon the belief that a singular and all-powerful God gave you a specific piece of land, then that’s always going to shape how you see that piece of land. And there’s no way of getting around that, unless you reject the very foundation of the religion itself.

But then, if you reject that foundation, is there really a religion there at all?

IV.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a really big risk, and I’m deeply humbled and overwhelmed by the response.

If you’re one of my paid subscribers, you already know what I’m referring to. And there’s suddenly many, many more of you than there were before I started, and that’s part of what’s humbled me.

The risk I’m speaking of is my decision to write about the Cult of the Raven King. As I explain at the end of the first of the essays, “The Giant at the Black Gate:”

I had promised some giants I’d help rebuild the cult of the raven king. And it was one of the craziest things I’d ever said to anyone —human or otherwise — especially because I had no proof such a thing had ever even existed.

And I still don’t. But I need to do it, anyway.

This kind of writing is what I started with a decade ago, and what I was known best for. But it’s also a little scary to write so intimately, especially now that there are many more people who think I’m evil or fascist or whatever now than there were back then.

You maybe already know about a recent example of this, something I referenced in a subscriber chat last month. That was an essay on Verso’s blog, written primarily as an attack on

Nina Power

. It also included references to both myself and John Michael Greer in an attempt to create a larger conspiracy of “anti-woke druidry.”

The piece is riddled not just with errors, but woven together with a particularly sloppy kind of conflation which is truly dazzling in its absurdity. I’m a Marxist druid. Greer’s a druid who’s known for being rather vehemently anti-Marxist. And Nina, who was really the primary target of the essay, isn’t a druid at all (she’s quite public about her Catholic faith). Yet to read the essay, you’d imagine the three of us are all part of some dark druid order distracting preteens from puberty blockers by getting them to like trees.

I’ve requested Verso honor a “Right of Reply” to the essay, as it’s quite a thing to be grossly mischaracterized by the largest leftist book publisher in the world. That being said, I think it’s also true that writing the Cult of the Raven King series is also a kind of reply. That’s because many of the things I saw in the visions I describe are what have shaped my politics, and this hasn’t always been an easy thing.

One place where this happened quite painfully for me was in regards to my earlier enthusiasm for the “Green New Deal” and similar neo-liberal left environmental schemes. I seized upon these ideas as soon as I discovered them, fully believing it would be possible to have a “fair” and “socialist” transition from capitalism’s destructive modes of production and extraction to something more equitable for both humans and the planet.

The problem became that the vision on the hill mentioned in the second of the series — and all that I was shown in subsequent experiences — told me something completely different. For quite some time after, I tried to ignore the contradictions between what I wanted to believe and what I kept seeing, but eventually I couldn’t any longer.

Similar conflicts occurred between other “good” political beliefs to which I ferociously clung and what I was constantly being shown, and the result is what you know of me now. The moments when you stop fighting yourself on these matters are never exactly pleasant, but they do lead to much more clarity.

And what comes with that clarity is also something quite suprising: a profound sense of patience with others. In fact, I’ll admit I’ve quite an inexplicable fondness for some of my critics — especially the most vicious of them. I smiled quite a bit reading that essay, because I remember how hard it is to figure things out, how long it took me, and especially how intense the love-hate attraction of the Shadow can be. In a perverse and very human way, we obsessively hate the ones we most desire and obsessively desire the ones we most hate.

V.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that there’s still a little time left to get my books (and all others at Ritona) for 30%. That sale ends the end of the day on Monday, 30 September and the next sale will be on courses and digital-editions only. So, if you prefer print, go pick up some books now with code REDESIGN.