Overthrow

Alejandro Jodorowsky's film "The Holy Mountain" at first glance just seems like an incomprehensible melange of shockingly violent and sexual, vividly psychedelic and disparate images. It doesn't have a standard plot or narrative, and that might lead a less-reflective viewer to miss the critical message of the film and to instead be mesmerized by the spectacular images.  The shallow interpretation would take the film as saying "find your own spiritual enlightenment by living your real life." First, this ignores how scathing and blasphemous the whole of the preceding scenes are towards religion and spirituality in general: Jesus reduced to a thief; to a mass produced wax and plaster trash mountain; gibbering priests; Jewish rabbis playing with shit; the narcissistic absurdity of mystical ritual meditation (looking at one's reflection in a bucket of water), et al. Each depiction of the holy is tied to massacre and sexual debauchery. Secondly, this is precis...

 Part of the World Socialist Web Site's criticism of the AFD (Alternative for Germany, far-Right Nationalists) goes like this: first, they are fascist sympathizers who are trying to revive revisionism about the Nazi Holocaust in order to shed guilt about feelings of German patriotism. Secondly, "The AfD did not object to the orgy of enrichment for speculators and banks that accompanied the bailout. What the party did object to was any form of financial equalization between the richer and poorer euro countries." (WSWS, "10 years of the Alternative for Germany: How the state, its political parties and the media promoted the far right") The first is obvious enough: constant scandals of prominent AFD members getting caught doing nazi salutes or with Nazi literature and flags. But this criticism of the AFD fails to see how pride and shame are flip sides of the same coin. It fails to see how the culture  of remembrance simply cultivates taking pride IN shame, and the...

Translation from:  https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/die-decke-unter-der-die-da-oben-alle-stecken-ist-schwarz-rot-gold-und-hei%C3%9Ft-deutschland/ Table of contents : 0. Why another text about conspiracy theories? 1. What are conspiracy theories? Are they even theories? 2. Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? 3. What is attractive about conspiracy theories? 4. How do conspiracy theories connect to normal citizen thinking? 5. How do real scandals seemingly confirm conspiracy theories? 6. But ideas about “reptile people” and rejuvenation serum made from children’s blood must seem absurd to normal people? 7. How are esotericism and conspiracy theories related? 8. Why are conspiracy theories ideologies and not just errors in reasoning? 9. Are conspiracy theories always hermetic? 10. Which discontents are a basis for conspiracy theories? 11. Aren't the elites all in cahoots? 12. But what about international meetings of “the elites”, for example at the World Economic Forum or...

 This is a rough and dirty translation of a piece written by comrades from "groups against capital and nation". Original here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/eine-kritik-von-glauben-aberglauben-new-age-esoterik-okkultismus-feng-shui/ When the moon is in the seventh house... Supersensibility has been booming since the 1980s. The market is broad and differentiated. A lot is promised: life support, religious meaning, health, prosperity, knowledge about the future. The more traditional forms of superstition have never died out, such as astrology, witchcraft, witchcraft rituals or table-turning and dowsing, which is now very popular with young people.  There are also the more established forms of religion such as evangelical Christianity, Buddhism and anthroposophy. In the 80s, many new religious and quasi-religious forms of the atrophy of consciousness came onto the market. On the one hand, there are hundreds of obscure theories about how people should eat properly, dan...

A rough and dirty translation from an article "Gespensterjagd -- Zur Ideengeschichte des Antikommunismus" from Gruppen Gegen Kapital Und Nation (Groups Against Capital and Nation). Original can be found here: https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/gespensterjagd-zur-ideengeschichte-des-antikommunismus/ “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."“ All the powers of old Europe have united in a holy hunt against this specter,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto — and that, contrary to other claims in that work, is a pretty true statement. Hatred and fear of radical change in civil society is as old as its revolutionary implementation itself. At the latest with the French Revolution, which did not operate in a religious disguise like the Dutch and English revolutions, and which was much more radical in its theoretical justification than the American one, the fear of the “Red Terror” arose (before “La Grande, by the way. “Terreur” really started in ...