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Photo-Illustration: Vulture. Photos: HBO

The Character: Kelli Prenny, the fourth corner of Issa Dees close college friend group. Always prepared with a clever quip or comeback, Kelli was originally introduced as the party friend; in the final season, shes California sober (minus Champagne, which aint alcohol), on a path to enlightenment, and intent onbecoming BFFs with all her friends moms.

The Actor: Natasha Rothwell, 41, a longtime improv performer and comedy writer whose rsum includes a stint on SNL. She was the first writer hired on Insecure and was later cast as Kelli after a table read during the shows first season.

Essential Traits: Unfiltered, off-the-cuff one-liners; a ride-or-die mentality for her friends (keeping it real when theyre out of line but going to bat in front of enemies); an inexplicable beef with Issas brother, Ahmal; the life of the party, whether shes drinking and flirting or stoned at her goddaughters birthday celebration.

When Insecure was pitched and picked up by HBO, it was a show focused on best friends Issa and Molly navigating life and love in Los Angeles. Fresh off writing for SNL, Rothwell took a meeting with HBOs comedy chief Amy Gravitt, who identified Rothwell as a good fit for the room. Rothwell then spoke with creator and star Issa Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny. I didnt know if I was gonna get it, but I knew I loved talking to both of them and their thoughts about this world they were gonna create, Rothwell remembers. She was the first writer hired for the writers room, before Kelli was even the seed of an idea.

Once the room was assembled, writer Ben Dougan helped formulate the origins of Kelli Prenny. There was a need to fill Issas world with real people aside from Molly and Lawrence, Issas longtime boyfriend, and Dougan pitched Kelli as the eye-roll friend: a truth-teller who says what she thinks and thinks what she says. Initially, eye-roll friend was supposed to be judgmental, which ultimately became a version of Tiffany, says Dougan. Then we started using the phrase eye-roll friend in a different way: like the friend you roll your eyes at.

Establishing Kellis voice was crucial to understanding the character and her function within the larger story. Dougan recalls a few lines of dialogue from a now-scrapped dinner-party episode in the first season that helped solidify who Kelli was. In the episode, Issa and Lawrence decide to throw a party to prove that they are adults. They get a new couch and attempt to repaint the walls, but in true Issa fashion, she only has time to paint one wall. She tries to pass it off as an accent wall, but Kelli sees through her bullshit and was scripted to call her on it: What happened, you run out of paint? When Issa asks everyone to take their shoes off upon arrival, Kelli retorts: Oh, youre a shoes-off bitch now? The writers room recognized that Kelli could be the straight-shooting friend to push buttons. Not in a mean way, but in a loving way that only a friend could, says Dougan.

Rothwell on set in season four: When Natasha was cast, she took the character to entirely different levels, says Insecure writer Ben Dougan. Photo: Merie Weismiller Wallace - SMPSP/Merie Weismiller Wallace - SMPSP

When Kelli arrives onscreen in the third episode of the first season, Racist As Fuck, she is clearly filling the role of the funny friend who is boy-crazy and looking to take advantage of the open bar. Rothwell brings a confident, warm energy to the role; Kellis antics are positioned as funny party stories and she employs her signature comedic timing to rag on her friends, from awkward bitch Issas attempt at open-mic rapping to Tiffanys flawless-ass face. But even in these somewhat broader, clich character lines, Kelli immediately shows a thoughtful, more feminist side when she holds court about the type of man shes looking for. Kelli is sexually free and wont compromise when it comes to dating; from her first scenes, shes the confident friend who will speak her mind no matter the circumstances or outcome.

Rothwell never had aspirations to join the cast. Though she is a seasoned performer and never hid that part of herself, she was focused on bringing her best writing to the show, as it was her first scripted series writers room. So she pitched jokes and focused on crafting the seasons arc, while often doing bits that showed off her comedic timing and improv skills. She loved to perform in the room as much as she loved to pitch jokes for the show, Dougan remembers. Rothwell would use the office phone to place fake calls whenever a joke she pitched landed or bombed; when it bombed, shed take the phone and turn away from the rest of us, and pretended to field a call from her agent saying she just got fired. It was hilarious.

Rothwell read for the part of Kelli during the productions first table reads, bringing the spunk and perfectly timed line delivery needed for the role. Even though writers in the room often read for different parts, somehow, Kelli always belonged to Rothwell. I started reading for Kelli in every episode she appeared in. I wasnt suspicious or even excited about the prospects. I had pretty serious blinders on, Rothwell recalls. It wasnt until Rae and Penny asked her to play the part three months later that she realized the character was hers.

Rothwell wasnt scared to take the role, but she was nervous it might pull her away from the writers room. I was relieved when I knew I was going to be able to do both and felt supported, she says. Rothwell not only managed both, but thrived while pulling double-duty. The character we were initially brainstorming wasnt one-note, exactly, but served a specific function. When Natasha was cast, she took the character to entirely different levels, Dougan says, noting that Kellis distinct voice became fully formed with Rothwells performance and ad-libs. She took the ball and ran with it.

Once cast, Rothwell says she put all of herself into Kelli, though their personalities manifest in very different ways. Both have filters, but Kellis is more porous than Rothwells. Both are loyal, unapologetic, and opinionated, but the degrees to which those qualities come to the surface are varied, and Rothwell found it rewarding as a performer to calibrate parts of herself that made Kelli feel real. The Venn diagram of Rothwell and Kelli has many overlapping portions some obvious, some subtle which ultimately led to a more nuanced portrayal of the character.

Still, Rothwell had to establish her actor boundaries separate from the characters. In one season, someone pitched a scene in which Kelli would have a nip slip, which wasnt something Rothwell felt comfortable doing on camera. I was like, I think thats great for the character, but the actress is not gonna do it. I spoke with her, Rothwell remembers joking. However, set pieces occasionally made it into the script without her express approval. When Kelli gets fingered under the table at the diner in season-two episode Hella L.A., Rothwell had been in another room working on a different episode. When we went back to read each others scripts at the end of the day, I remember [everyones] eyes on me as we were doing the table read. When we got to the page that it happened, they just started laughing. I was like, Its too good not to do.

Its no secret that improv was encouraged on the Insecure set, and Rothwell improvised for every episode she appeared in. When you understand the psychology of a character, its really easy to improvise from their point of view, she says. Youre just reacting to the world around you like they would. It doesnt require a lot of exposition, and youre not forcing a joke. Youre just responding organically and honestly.

In the season-one finale Broken As Fuck, the four girls go to Malibu for Kellis birthday, but tensions simmer in the group. After an awkward drive and an uncomfortable decision about the weekends sleeping arrangements, Issa snaps at Kelli about her inability to shut up. Do you hear yourself? Issa asks. Kelli retorts, Of course I do, I have a podcast. That was a Rothwell improvisation: The scene actually ends on the page a couple of lines before, but the director didnt cut. Issa started that improv run by saying Do you hear yourself? That was unscripted. So I was like, Whats the most Kelli response possible? Of course, Ive got a podcast. I thought it was just a throwaway. I had no idea it would actually make the episode. Years later, fans were delighted when the podcast Prennys Preguntas got its own scene in the season-five premiere.

Season two made Kelli into a meme. When the gang attends an art exhibit in Hella Questions, the conversation turns to Issas hope for a reunion with Lawrence. After Kelli accidentally breaks the news that hes dating someone else, Issa insists she doesnt want any details about this other woman. Supportive, Kelli remarks, You know what that is? Growth, with a hand gesture that resembles a flower blossoming. A natural hand-talker, Rothwell included the movement in the first and second takes, dropping it for the third in order to provide some variety for the editing room. But director Penny, sensing a winning bit, encouraged Rothwell to follow her instincts after the third take.

A comedy with its fair share of drama, Insecure needed a character like Kelli to cut through tense moments. Her antics (and Rothwells line readings) offer some of the most quotable, laugh-out-loud moments in the show; from getting Tased and peeing her pants at Coachella to adopting a British accent to impress a boy at Issas block party, Kelli is the character whom fans are constantly clamoring around for a spinoff. She also has an ongoing, inexplicable beef with Issas brother, Ahmal, which Rothwell believes stems from an unrequited crush before Ahmal officially came out (Hell hath no fury like a Kelli scorned).

But Rothwell and the other writers wanted to make sure Kelli was more than just the wisecrack. In his notes, Dougan has a quote written down from the early days of her conception: Shes used for comic relief, but there are things she says that have meaning. Infusing her with depth was critical. I didnt want her to be the butt of a joke, Rothwell says. I never wanted her to be hypersexualized. I didnt want to fall into clichs or stereotypes.

In Rothwells hands, Kelli contains multitudes: She is unapologetic and irreverent, she has no filter and is self-possessed. But at the end of the day, she is deeply kind and caring, she says. Kelli is there for Issa when her friendship with Molly is crumbling, nudging Issa to reach out and make amends, even though its the last thing she wants to do. In the season-five premiere, she offers advice to Molly about how to restore their rapport, citing rough patches in her friendship with Tiffany that they worked through.

For Dougan, striking this balance was one of the harder parts of writing for the character. Its easy to take things too far. The biggest challenge was pulling back and remembering that Kelli is a real person. In the season-two finale, Kelli tries to run a marathon but has to stop midway when she gets her period. Its a moment of character building that shows Kellis life is more put together than what Molly and Issa perceive: Shes not only drinking heavily and trying to get laid, shes out here training for a marathon and striving towards personal goals when shes offscreen. Thats a situation where we had jokes that were all blood-related, like calling it the Red Wedding, Dougan says. But at the end of the day, it was a real moment where Kelli had a goal she had been working toward and didnt achieve, and she was disappointed. We didnt go all the way, and it was more satisfying as a result.

The final season has seen substantive growth for all characters, including Kellis own journey toward enlightenment. Shes abstaining from alcohol, asking herself (and her podcast listeners) deeper questions about life, and searching for her true happiness. For a season that tried to answer questions like What do you want your legacy to be? and Am I happy?, Preguntas was a good framing device, Rothwell says. I was super excited to have Kelli shepherd us into that idea for the last season.

Even though fans never saw as much of Kellis world as they would have liked, Rothwell thinks that means shes done her job. I take it as a compliment that Ive created someone whos interesting, and whos full and rich enough that [viewers] know theres more to her.

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How Kelli Prenny Went From Insecures Eye-Roll Friend to Zany Voice of Reason - Vulture

I was 25, and watched the film alone at Sterling Cinema in South Mumbai. It was that sort of a film; you remember details. As the fourth instalment of The Matrix releases now, many years after the trilogy was completed, let me remind you that in 1999, The Matrix was a global spiritual experience. I have met people who have missed its entire subtext and who think it was just a confusing greenish sci-fi film, but they are very few.

Before I walked into Sterling, I had not read a word about the film. So, a few minutes in, I was stunned. Or consumed by a great spiritual smugness. You see, the film was about me.

At 17, I was Neo in Madras; there was even a Morpheus. What happened was, one day, when a friend and I were alone in a big house something significant occurred. He started looking weird. Then he told me nothing is as it appears; there is something else out there. I got it immediately.

We were not so cool as the characters in The Matrix only because we were tropical, and did not require so many layers of black clothes. In fact, my Morpheus and I arrived at the theory that it is hard for people in cold nations to attain enlightenment because they are forever in the frivolous self-regard of excess costumes.

In Sterling Cinema, I thought that only I and very few people knew that the world around us is just a simulation, and that there was a way to find the truth. I was a bit surprised that Americans knew this too, but I was confident they were also very few. I thought most people will not get the film. They were, after all, like the extras in Matrix, too deep in the simulation to see the outer halos of reality. But then, in the coming days, I realized that everyone got it. I was very annoyed and disappointed. Everyone got it? That easy?

Even so, I discovered, there were two kinds of people. A majority who knew the theory of spiritual awakening, and those who had a closer experience with it because of a certain mental state, mental disorder, sorrow or drugs. People who want to believe in an alternate reality are people who do not enjoy the original reality.

The idea that the observable physical world is not real has corroboration in religion and other stories. And even in some theories postulated by scientists, which are often misconstrued as scientific theories. But the first three Matrix films were a corroboration at unprecedented scale and its impact was deep because it was not a farcical film. Even though it was made by the persuasions of mainstream entertainment, it was unafraid of complexity. It was a film that was prepared to fail.

The true power of spirituality, or philosophy, which is often spirituality for atheists, is in the vagueness of its meaning. As a result, it allows people to misunderstand its creators and messages. Misrepresentation is how people project their own character on to something else, and start admiring that thing without realizing that they are only loving themselves. The film gained from this, as people attributed their own meanings to its many allusions.

The Matrix is about our quest for something better. The film could have followed the formula laid out by all religion: Show truth as a paradise, something infinitely better than what a prophet persuades people to flee. But in The Matrix, the real world is impoverished, tough and grim. All it has going for it is that it is real. That is the films greatness. It showed truth need not be utopia.

The most convincing idea of the film is its argument that when people have to choose between an unreal paradise and a very real hell, many will pick the unreal paradise. But then there will be some who will choose truth above everything untrue.

Not all ideas in The Matrix are spiritual, or even philosophical. It hints at phenomena that happen in the real world known to us but do not always see. In the film, the matrix is a computer simulation created by advanced machines that have taken over the world. It has inbuilt flaws that allow the rise of human rebels and even rogue programmes. To that end, the matrix is a lot like capitalism. Every time it creates an affluent paradise, people grow disenchanted, they long for conflict, and humanitarians from well-off families arisebeneficiaries of inequality who wage a moral war against inequality. Thus it was not unnatural that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hailed from affluent families. And that after them, generations of academics and writers who called themselves Marxists were usually from wealthy families.

There is a scene in the second edition of The Matrix, where our hero, Neo, meets The Architect, the computer programme that has created the matrix. Neo, who is leading the human revolution against the machines, wants to know, Why am I here?" The Architect gives a tangential answer, You are the eventuality of an anomaly"

It is the same in real life. All our heroes who lead the war against capitalism, too, are creations of the very system they wish to dismantle. Their job is not to destroy capitalism because they cannot. Their job is merely to manufacture the hope that capitalism can indeed be destroyed. By promoting mediocre foes, capitalism ensures more threatening enemies never rise.

Manu Joseph is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, Decoupled

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How The Matrix was a massive spiritual experience - Mint

Today, as we reflect on COP26, it is fitting to ask what we can learn from Adam Smith, one of the great pioneers of the Enlightenment and a former lecturer at the citys historic university.

How might Smith have explored the climate emergency?

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon believes that Smith would have supported regulation.

We cannot know exactly how Smith would have responded to the climate emergency, but given his support for reasonable protections against, for example, abuse of monopolies it seems likely that he would have supported regulation to guard against the destruction of the planet, she wrote in the foreword to a series of essays reimagining The Wealth of Nations in the 21st century.

Expert authors from three continents have drawn on Smiths themes to reflect on the climate crisis.

For example, for those who say achieving net zero is too difficult and too expensive, sustainable fund management pioneer David Pitt-Watson hypothesizes what Smith might say.

Ultimately wealth depends on the accumulation of capital to make workers productive if nature withdraws its capital, no prosperous future can await our children and the economic gains of the last 250 years will all be lost, he argues.

Former Malaysian Central Banker Dr Zeti Aziz believes a 21st century Smith would be a strong voice and advocate for the protection of the environment, including to the risks that may have intergenerational implications leading to higher overall costs to our planet and humanity.

As we look back on what the Glasgow climate summit did or didnt achieve, it is worth remembering what is at stake here the world we leave to future generations.

For us at the Global Ethical Finance Initiative (GEFI), one of the overwhelming takeaways from COP26 was just how important finance and financing nature will be for the journey to net zero.

Research by the World Economic Forum has estimated that an incredible $44 trillion of economic value generation more than half of the worlds total GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and is therefore exposed to nature loss. Whether you are talking about algae carbon sequestration, womens empowerment, indigenous land rights or how to create a green jet fuel, much of the conversation in Glasgow was focused on the topic of finance.

The key question is how can we change the financial system to better include nature?

While new public funding pledges were made, in the context of the undelivered $100bn climate finance for poorer countries and the covid pandemic, it is easy to remain sceptical. John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, highlighted the role of private finance on the first day of the conference, warning that no government in the world has enough money to fuel this transition as rapidly as we need it but the private sector does.

While there is disagreement on whether The Glasgow Climate Pact was a success or not, COP26 has demonstrated that it will matter more than ever where we put our money.

Money will be our vote as private citizens, as businesses and as countries. It is the driver and the tool we can use to put pressure on moving things into a higher gear.

Or indeed the thing that will hold us back.

The debate is now one of innovation and transition namely to the way we include, or continue to exclude, nature from financial accounts, and whether our traditional investment models can accommodate new parameters such as nature, biodiversity loss and social impact.

Despite the recognisable complexity of practical implementation and the interdependency of climate and nature, momentum is building around the critical need for markets to better align to a net zero world.

Although GEFI has been looking at financing nature since 2018, regular COP participants expressed their delight that nature has finally being catapulted up the formal agenda.

This was noted as being a step change in comparison to previous COPs.

It was also evident that the nature conversation has moved beyond a collection of environmentalists, scientists and policy professionals with financial institutions and corporates willing not to only listen and learn but consider the practical steps they must take to address climate change and protect nature and biodiversity.

Another common theme, despite the criticism that this COP was too exclusive and elitist, was that young and indigenous communities are key to solving this crisis and their voices must be heard.

Indeed, some argue that, as those most impacted by climate change today and in the future, they should be leading the conversations. They should not just be in possession of just a seat at the table, but rather the entire table.

The question that echoed around the GEFI HQ during COP26 was: is it all too late?

Having explored the halls of the Blue Zone and Green Zone, as well as hosted an array of events throughout the two weeks in November, we face a dichotomy between those who contend that solving the nature crisis is complex and others convinced that it is pretty simple.

So here too is a lesson from Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.

The 21st century is once again faced with a period in history where scepticism to authority of all types and the power of reason is in question.

Once again, we are tasked with a simple but powerful challenge: to use evidence, truth and reason to address the greatest problems of our times.

The legacy of COP26 must be to prove that we can rise to the climate challenge.

Sam Wheldon-Bayes is an analyst at the Global Ethical Finance Initiative (GEFI) and editor of The Wealth of Nations in the 21st Century

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Sam Wheldon-Bayes: What would Adam Smith have made of COP26? - The Scotsman

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Madden NFL, one of the most popular video game franchises in history, has sold well over 130 million copies since its 1988 debut. And yet, says Fox Sports reporter Tom Rinaldi with amazement, There are people that dont know John Madden is a real man.

For anyone sadly in need of enlightenment about the name on the box as well as those who already revere Madden as coach of the Super Bowl XIwinning Oakland Raiders and the only color analyst to announce for all four major broadcast networks there is All Madden. This documentary profiles the figure who, intones Fox sportscaster Troy Aikman onscreen, was the authoritative voice for our sport and in a lot of ways still is.

(Credit: Dennis Desprois/Getty Images)

Madden has made an outsized contribution to our obsession with professional football. Visual broadcast features we now take for grantedthe ever-illuminated first-down line on TV screens, use of the telestrator to illustrate the movement of plays came to the fore because of his enthusiasm.

The film goes deep on Maddens life and broadcasting career, decades of which were spent alongside Pat Summerall in the booth. The Hall of Famer would joyously shout Boom! and Doink! when the play demanded it, but he also pitched products with the best of them, not to mention plugging his personal favorites, such as his beloved Thanksgiving Day turducken.

Madden gloried in players who toiled with guts and grit, and most poignant in the show are comments from current and former NFL stars such as Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Lawrence Taylor. Of the 38 various interviewees, We did not get a single no, notes Rinaldis codirector, Joel Santos.

Madden himself, 85, sits down too. What comes across is a picture of a very real man; being singled out by him was as valued by athletes and coaches as getting invited to Johnny Carsons couch was to comedians. Says Santos: Theres no one that has had more of an impact on the NFL than John Madden.

All Madden, Documentary Premiere, Saturday, December 25, 2/1c, Fox

Original post:
All Madden Pays Tribute to One of Footballs Biggest Icons in Fox Sports Doc - TV Insider

Imagine it is a regular Sunday morning. Youre at your kitchen table, chomping through some toast, drinking coffee, and watching TV. Suddenly your fingers twitch. Your mug shatters on the floor. Your body tenses and goes cold.

ITS TIME TO KILL! a gravelly, rumbling voice pounds through your head. THE PORTENTS ARE DELIVERED. THE SEALS ARE BROKEN. THE HOUR IS HERE, MORTAL!

The moment passes as quickly as it came. You feel exhausted to your bones and you sit there, mute and frozen in panic. What just happened? The black sludge of your coffee pools around your bare foot, and you reach for your phone. Luckily, youre a god-fearing member of your church and you have the priests number saved. After a few rings, he answers.

Father, I think Im possessed. I need you to exorcize me, you whisper.

He says hell be there shortly.

Unlike some church doctrine, exorcism actually has a lot of biblical authority. In Marks gospel (generally considered the earliest gospel), Jesus performs his first miracle when he exorcises a spirt at a synagogue in Capernaum. For much of the gospel, the only ones who recognize Jesus power are demons. The gospels seem to imply that Jesus became famous as much for his exorcisms as his ministry. In fact, the Pharisees (the villains to Jesus hero) accused Jesus of being in league with Beelzebub, the prince of demons to command demons so easily, he must himself be demonic, they thought.

At the time of the New Testament, illnesses were thought to be caused by demonic possession. This belief fed the burgeoning business of exorcism well into the mediaeval period. Hearing voices, having seizures, or being overcome by insatiable and uncontrollable urges might all be attributed to satanic influence. If a loved one had any kind of mental illness, youd likely go to your priest over a physician. Richard Burtons epic 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy goes into a huge digression about the varieties of demonic possession. In it, he mentions how devils and demons cause an entire compendium of mental illnesses, but also that anything objects and animals included can be possessed.

As Agrippas dog had a devil tied to his collar; some think that Paracelsus had one confined to his sword pummel; others wear them in rings, Burton wrote. (Quite amusingly, one emperors dead wife apparently had a demon confined to the wart in her neck.)

While the work of ancient (but pagan!) scholars like Hippocrates and Galen was still available in treating mental health, physicians simply didnt know what to do, for the most part. Even in our post-Enlightenment and scientific age, we largely only treat or manage the symptoms of mental illness; we do not cure it. Its no wonder, then, that people turned to their priests for help it was the only option.

In the gospels, exorcism is seen as a kind of extraordinary measure or treatment for the possessed. But as Christianity battled to become mainstream, exorcism took on a new purpose. In an effort to combat rival theologies and the sinful paganism of other cultures, exorcism came to be lumped together with the baptismal process. As early as the 3rd century, baptism was used as a way to convert heathens and rid them of any foreign, false religions demons.

But exorcisms for the possessed were still a huge part of the local clergys job description. Given this, its unsurprising that there were almost as many methods of exorcism as there were priests. However, there were a few noticeable trends.

The first is that water and salt are often used. A 12th-century manuscript features the use of salt and water with the following words (the cross represents the moment the priest must draw the sign of the cross): I exorcise thee, creature of salt, by the living God +, by the true God +, by the Holy God +, by the God who by the prophet Eliseus commanded thee to be cast into the water.

The second is that Biblical or canonical incantations are spoken. There were often certain prayers uttered: the Lords Prayer, Hail Marys, and so on. The Catholic Church still governs the rites and processes of exorcism from the 84-page document De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam, which can be bought online.

The third feature of exorcisms it that they involve some kind of sacred object or relic. Most often this will be the crucifix, but it might be some holy relic, or some otherwise blessed trinket that the exorcist has used to great success before.

But what actually happens today if youre to undergo an exorcism? Well, the first thing to note is that much will depend on who you go to and which Christian denomination you belong to. Methodists, Baptists, and Lutherans all have their exorcistic wings, but lets assume you want a vanilla deliverance. You choose Catholic.

The Roman Catholic Church revised and updated their rites of exorcism in 1999. The Cardinal who oversaw this revision said it has more sober language, with fewer adjectives than in the previous one. But the basic set-up is exactly the same.

You, the possessed, are typically seated or laid down and will have prayers spoken, chanted, or sung over you. The priests or pastors present will be regularly making the sign of the cross, and holy water (and salt) will often be used. There is sometimes someone present who has the gift of discernment who will be able to see the presence of the demons (and also angels), who might be able to steer the rite. The priest will often lay hands on you as they say the requisite prayers.

The 1999 revision does make substantial efforts to say that exorcism should not be a substitute for medical help, and that possession is not the same as mental illness. Exorcism is one thing, psychiatry another, Cardinal Medina said. If the exorcist has doubts about the sanity of a possessed person, he can consult a specialist. It can be a collaboration.

But that does not mean that exorcism is always only a harmless placebo that you might as well try. In his book American Exorcism, Michael Cuneo offers accounts of women being pummeled to death in San Francisco and a Korean woman being trampled to death in Glendale during exorcisms. Most disturbingly, he describes how a five-year-old Bronx girl died after her mother and grandmother forced her to drink a lethal cocktail containing ammonia, vinegar, and olive oil and then bound and gagged her with duct tape. The two women claimed that they were merely trying to poison a demon that had infested the little girl several days earlier.

The fact is that while official Catholic exorcisms might be relatively harmless to believers, the business of unlicensed and unofficial exorcists risks exacerbating mental illness and disfiguring or even killing those they profess to help. The mentally ill are not possessed and demons do not cause epilepsy, depression, bipolar disorder, or voices to be heard. To argue otherwise is dangerous and cruel.

Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book isMini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.

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Exorcism: The history of purging demons, from the New Testament to today - Big Think

As I watched James Lapines new musical, Flying Over Sunset, at the Vivian Beaumont, trying to summon some empathy with its subject matter, I started thinking through my own quite limited history with hallucinogens. Sunsetdirected by Lapine, who also wrote the book, with music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by Michael Korie, and choreography by Michelle Dorranceis the fictionalized story of three celebrities dropping LSD in the nineteen-fifties, searching for God knows what: tie-dyed enlightenment, perhaps, or an eased and possibly clarified relationship with the past, or maybe just simple fun. The writer Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), the actor-dancer Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), and the polymathic diplomat Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack) get together (theres no reason to believe that they did this in real life) and trip their extraordinary lives away (this, apparently, they all did), letting the audience see, often in fervent color and off-kilter motion, the troubled consciousnesses that vibrate beneath their well-maintained personas.

A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design. There werent many bright colors, but some theretofore unnoticed textural quirkson clothes, on faceswent wild with deep, scrutinizing, photographic detail. For many hours after those visual effects had faded, I haunted the hallways of my mind, regretting how many memories Id retained and neuroses Id cultivated. Mostly, I regretted eating the things at all. Nothing happened that Id want to put onstage; certainly, nobody sang.

While watching Sunset, I wondered whether its creative team had subjected themselves to some first-person experiential research when it came to LSD. (Lincoln Center Theatres in-house magazine features testimonials by the writers Deborah Kass, Francine Prose, and Gregory Botts on trips past; Lapine has spoken in interviews about his own youthful experiments.) Some of the productions other sources are made clear. In a composite scene early on, Aldous delivers a speech against the banning of his book Brave New World. Cary gives a press conference announcing his retirement from show biz, and defends Charlie Chaplin against charges that hes a Communist. Clare, DwightD. Eisenhowers nominee for Ambassador to Brazil, undergoes a rough confirmation hearing.

Part of the plays premiseor maybe its just what I wish it had managed to tease outis that LSD leads its users to a softer kind of questioning. Aldous and Clare are close friends of Gerald Heard (Robert Sella), a practitioner of the Hindu Vedanta philosophy and a forerunner of the consciousness movement, who serves as their guide while on the drug, always nudging them to sit cross-legged and chant as its effects gradually set in. Cary first hears about LSD from his wife, whos using it in her sessions with a Freudian analyst. In one scene, we see Cary bargain his way into the analysts sedate office, employing flattery, charm, and, before long, flat-out yelling, to get his hands on this stuff hes heard so much about.

Those two initial settingsspiritual and clinicalopen up two ways of thinking not only about the effects of LSD but also about the reasons that a desperate celebrity, rich but lost, might turn to it for answers. In Flying Over Sunset, though, all roads lead back to rote biography. Aldouss wife is sick and soon dies. Clares daughter has been killed in a car crash. Carys impending divorce has him ruminating on his tough childhood. As the characters trip onstage, these episodes and their central personaethe wife, the daughter, Carys young selfreappear over and over, with variations so slight that, often, they might as well not exist.

The presence of Gerald Heard made me think of J.D. Salingers God-obsessed Glasses, whose interest in the ancient Indian Vedas and Upanishads, and in Christ, made them vibrate with the kind of unself-conscious talk of higher things that might have done the likes of Aldous, Clare, and Carya morose bunch herea bit of good. But, instead of engaging one another in earnest conversation, the characters spend the majority of the show inside their own heads.

In recent years, Lincoln Center Theatre has presented two plays about the rocky terrain and the stubborn mysteries of the spiritual life: Tom Stoppards The Hard Problem, about consciousness and religious devotion; and Chris Urchs The Rolling Stone, about homophobic violence in a religious milieu in Uganda. Flying Over Sunset might have completed a kind of trilogy, but its insistence on one-to-one biographical causalitythis drug for that problemdesiccates its surface-level allusions to spirituality.

Perhaps thats why the show feels so earthbound despite its many references to flight. Sunset has a fairly formulaic approach to music: every dose gets its own song. The pattern is established from the start, when Aldous is in a drugstore with Gerald, sweating through the beginnings of a high that will continue through a mountain hike with his ailing wife. He gets fixated on a picture in a book: Botticellis The Return of Judith to Bethulia. The scenic designby Beowulf Boritt, perhaps the most consistently excellent part of the showshifts and the painting comes to life. Here comes Judith accompanied by her handmaiden, with the head of Holofernes in tow. That ecstatic visual idea gives way to a pretty but mostly conventional bel-canto number, through which we get the point that we keep on getting: Aldous is excited by what he can see under the influence, but haunted by the changing circumstances of his life.

Hadden-Paton is sympathetic as the nebbishy, intense Aldous, and Yazbecks tap-dance numbers with a young version of Cary (Atticus Ware) are the highlight of Dorrances choreography, which otherwise uses taps rudimentsfootsteps and their attendant natural rhythms, implicitly connected to the motions of the heartto establish a theme that never really makes it through the noise. Cusack sings well, but the effort is wasted on songs that sound like tropes.

One thing that I found mystifying was how un-weird the score ishere, as in few other musicals, there was a chance to dabble in abstraction and, even, atonality. Instead, the songs are fairly standard-sounding, give or take a fractured chord or two. If a drug musical cant sometimes sound weird or off-putting, which can? The closest Flying Over Sunset gets to true surreality is when Cary, a guy with mommy issues who is consumed with masculinity and its meanings, dons a body stocking and a cap and flails around, having become a facsimile of the phallus that possesses so much of his thought and his posture. The moment is brief, and the altogether too long two hours and forty minutes of the show roll on.

In an interview, Allen Ginsbergover whose work and person the idea of drug-induced inspiration has always hovereddenied the notion that there was any special relationship, positive or negative, between tripping and excellence in art. I think the myth put forward by the police that no creative work can be done under drugs is folly, he said. The myth that anybody who takes drugsll produce something interesting is equal folly. He did admit to having written the runic, nature-obsessed poem Wales Visitation under the influence of LSD:

What did I notice? Particulars! The vision of the great One is myriad smoke curls upward from ashtray, house fire burned low The night, still wet & moody black heaven starless upward in motion with wet wind.

The intensity that Flying Over Sunset tries to illustrate with its always capable and sometimes spectacular sets is seldom found in its dialogue or its songs. The play is based on a groovy idea, but it indulges in the myth that Ginsberg warned against: drugs alone dont make for interest. To reach across the gulf between stage and seat, inner experienceaddled, enhanced, or otherwiseneeds more upward motion, more of the stark feeling of wet wind. More particulars!

Read more:
The Bad Trip of Flying Over Sunset - The New Yorker

Japan poetry and a life blighted by ill-health: Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902)

Lee Jay Walker

Modern Tokyo Times

The final years of the life of Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) were filled with pain and long-lasting suffering. Ultimately, his life was cut short from the ravages of tuberculosis and other ailments that stemmed from this.

Shiki understood the frailty of life concerning the death of his alcoholic father when he was a small child. Also, unlike his alcoholic father, his grandfather was a Confucian scholar who installed a different way of life. Therefore, Shiki understood the chaotic nature of life when only a young child.

His childhood at a time when the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was altering the political, religious, and social landscape generated a wealth of emotions and passions. In time, this would bless his poetry.

From 1888/1889 onwards, the shadow of tuberculosis blighted his life. Yet, despite the pernicious shadow of death for someone so young and the pain he felt in the last 7 to 8 years of life he bravely endured and focused on poetry and other important matters.

Despite horrendous adversity concerning his health and the economic angle of supporting people he still emerges to be one of the masters of haiku. Hence, his name echoes alongside the esteemed names of Matsuo Basho, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson.

Shiki wrote, Until now I had mistaken the Enlightenment of Zen: I was wrong to think it meant being able to die serenely under any conditions. It means being able to live serenely under any conditions.

His short life created more decades of poetry than his actual age when he passed away from this earth. Hence, his legacy remains potent today.

Art by Sawako Utsumi

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-persimmon-tree-and-the-reflection-of-time-sawako-utsumi.html

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http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/sawako-utsumi.html Sawako Utsumi and where you can buy her art, postcards, bags, and other products. Also, individuals can contact her for individual requests.

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[Masaoka Shiki: His Life and Worksby Janine Beichman, p. 129.] Translation by Janine Beichman

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Japan poetry and a life blighted by ill-health: Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) - Modern Tokyo Times

This is an extract from Enzo Traversos new book Revolution: An Intellectual History, available from Verso Books.

The legacy of the October Revolution is torn between two antipodal interpretations. The rise to power of the Bolsheviks appeared, on the one hand, as the announcement of a global socialist transformation; on the other hand, as the event that set the stage for an epoch of totalitarianism. The most radical versions of these opposed interpretations official communism and Cold War anti-communism also converge insofar as, for both of them, the Communist Party was a kind of demiurgic historical force.

Several decades after its exhaustion, the communist experience does not need to be defended, idealized, or demonized. It deserves to be critically understood as a whole, as a dialectical totality shaped by internal tensions and contradictions, presenting multiple dimensions in a vast spectrum of shades, from redemptive lans to totalitarian violence, from participatory democracy and collective deliberation to blind oppression and mass extermination, from the most utopian imagination to the most bureaucratic domination sometimes shifting from one to the other in a short span of time.

Like many other isms of our political and philosophical lexicon, communism is a polysemic and ultimately ambiguous word. Its ambiguity does not lie exclusively in the discrepancy that separates the communist idea from its historical embodiments. It lies in the extreme diversity of its expressions. Not only because Russian, Chinese, and Italian communism were different, but also because in the long run many communist movements underwent deep changes, despite keeping their leaders and their ideological references.

Considering its historical trajectory as a world phenomenon, communism appears as a mosaic of communisms. Sketching its anatomy, one can distinguish at least four broad forms, interrelated and not necessarily opposed to each other, but different enough to be recognized on their own: communism as revolution; communism as regime; communism as anti-colonialism; and finally, communism as a variant of social democracy.

It is important to remember the mood of the Russian Revolution, because it powerfully contributed to creating an iconic image that survived the misfortunes of the USSR and cast its shadow over the entire twentieth century. Its aura attracted millions of human beings across the world, and remained relatively well-preserved even when the aura of the communist regimes completely fell apart. In the 1960s and 1970s, it fuelled a new wave of political radicalization that not only claimed autonomy from the USSR and its allies, but also perceived them as enemies.

The Russian Revolution came out of the Great War. It was a product of the collapse of the long nineteenth century, and the symbiotic link between war and revolution shaped the entire trajectory of twentieth-century communism. Emerging from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune had been a forerunner of militarized politics, as many Bolshevik thinkers emphasized, but the October Revolution amplified it to an incomparably larger scale.

World War I transformed Bolshevism itself, altering many of its features: several canonical works of the communist tradition, like Lenins The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918) or Leon Trotskys Terrorism and Communism (1920), simply could not be imagined before 1914. Just as 1789 introduced a new concept of revolution no longer defined as an astronomical rotation but rather as a social and political break October 1917 reframed it in military terms: a crisis of the old order, mass mobilization, dualism of power, armed insurrection, proletarian dictatorship, civil war, and a violent clash with counterrevolution.

Lenins State and Revolution formalized Bolshevism as both an ideology (an interpretation of Karl Marxs ideas) and a unity of strategic precepts distinguishing it from social democratic reformism, a politics belonging to the exhausted age of nineteenth-century liberalism. Bolshevism came out of a time of increasing brutalization, when war erupted into politics, changing its language and its practices. It was a product of the anthropological transformation that shaped the old continent at the end of the Great War.

This genetic code of Bolshevism was visible everywhere, from texts to languages, from iconography to songs, from symbols to rituals. It outlasted World War II and continued to fuel the rebellious movements of the 1970s, whose slogans and liturgies obsessively emphasized the idea of a violent clash with the state. Bolshevism created a military paradigm of revolution that deeply shaped communist experiences throughout the planet.

The European Resistance, as well as the socialist transformations in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba reproduced a similar symbiotic link between war and revolution. The international communist movement was therefore envisioned as a revolutionary army formed by millions of combatants, and this had inevitable consequences in terms of organization, authoritarianism, discipline, division of labor, and, last but not least, gender hierarchies. In a movement of warriors, female leaders could only be exceptions.

The Bolsheviks were deeply convinced that they were acting in accordance with the laws of history. The earthquake of 1917 was born from the entanglement of many factors, some set in the longue dure of Russian history and others more temporary, abruptly synchronized by the war: an extremely violent peasant uprising against the landed aristocracy, a revolt of the urban proletariat affected by the economic crisis, and finally the dislocation of the army, formed of peasant-soldiers who were exhausted after three years of a terrible conflict, which they neither understood nor perceived as nearing an end.

If these were the premises of the Russian Revolution, it is difficult to grasp in it any supposed historical necessity. The Soviet experiment was fragile, precarious, and unstable during its first years of existence. It was constantly threatened, and its survival required both inexhaustible energies and enormous sacrifices. A witness to those years, Victor Serge, wrote that in 1919 the Bolsheviks considered the collapse of the Soviet regime likely, but instead of discouraging them, this awareness multiplied their tenacity. The victory of the counterrevolution would have been an immense bloodbath.

Maybe their resistance was possible because they were animated by the profound conviction of acting in accordance with the laws of history. But, in reality, they did not follow any natural tendency; they were inventing a new world, unable to know what would come out of their endeavor, inspired by an astonishingly powerful utopian imagination, and certainly incapable of imagining its totalitarian outcome.

Despite their usual appeal to the positivistic lexicon of historical laws, the Bolsheviks had inherited their military conception of revolution from the Great War. The Russian revolutionaries read Clausewitz and dealt with the interminable controversies about the legacy of Blanquism and the art of insurrection, but the violence of the Russian Revolution did not arise from an ideological impulse; it stemmed from a society brutalized by war.

This genetic trauma had profound consequences. The war had reshaped politics by changing its codes, introducing previously unknown forms of authoritarianism. In 1917, chaos and spontaneity still prevailed in a mass party composed mostly of new members and directed by a group of exiles, but authoritarianism quickly consolidated during the civil war. Lenin and Trotsky claimed the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, but Julius Martov was right when he pointed out that their true ancestor was the Jacobin Terror of 179394.

The military paradigm of the revolution should not be mistaken, however, for a cult of violence. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky put forward solid arguments against the thesis widely spread from the 1920s onward of a Bolshevik coup. Rejecting the ingenuity of the idyllic vision of the taking of the Winter Palace as a spontaneous popular uprising, he dedicated many pages to the methodical preparation of an insurrection that required, well beyond a rigorous and efficient military organization, an in-depth evaluation of its political conditions and a careful choice of its execution times.

The result was the dismissal of the interim government and the arrest of its members practically without bloodshed. The disintegration of the old state apparatus and the construction of a new one was a painful process that lasted for more than three years of civil war. Of course, the insurrection required a technical preparation and was implemented by a minority, but this did not equate to a conspiracy. In opposition to the pervasive view spread by Curzio Malaparte, a victorious insurrection, Trotsky wrote, is widely separated both in method and historical significance from a governmental overturn accomplished by conspirators acting in concealment from the masses.

There is no doubt that the taking of the Winter Palace and the dismissal of the provisional government was a major turn within the revolutionary process: Lenin called it an overthrowing or an uprising (perevorot). Nevertheless, most historians recognize that this twist took place in a period of extraordinary effervescence, characterized by a permanent mobilization of society and constant recourse to the use of force; in a paradoxical context in which Russia, while remaining involved in a world war, was a state that no longer possessed the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Paradoxically, the thesis of the Bolshevik coup is the crossing point between conservative and anarchist criticisms of the October Revolution. Their reasons were certainly different not to say antipodal but their conclusions converged: Lenin and Trotsky had established a dictatorship.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, expelled from the United States in 1919 because of their enthusiastic support of the Russian Revolution, could not accept Bolshevik rule and, after the repression of the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921, decided to leave the USSR. Goldman published My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and Berkman The Bolshevik Myth (1925), whose conclusion expressed a bitter and severe assessment:

Gray are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are foresworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people. The breath of yesterday is dooming millions to death; the shadow of today hangs like a black pall over the country. Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot. The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.

Their criticism certainly deserves attention, since it came from inside the revolution itself. Their diagnostic was pitiless: the Bolsheviks had established a party dictatorship that ruled not only in name of the soviets but sometimes as in Kronstadt against them, and whose authoritarian features had becoming more and more suffocating.

In fact, the Bolsheviks themselves did not contest this trenchant appraisal. In Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Victor Serge described the USSR during the Civil War in this way:

At this moment, the party fulfilled within the working class the functions of a brain and of a nervous system. It saw, it felt, it knew, it thought, it willed for and through the masses; its consciousness, its organization were a makeweight for the weakness of the individual members of the mass. Without it, the mass would have been no more than a heap of human dust, experiencing confused aspirations shot through by flashes of intelligence these, in the absence of a mechanism capable of leading to large-scale action, doomed to waste themselves and experiencing more insistently the pangs of suffering. Through its incessant agitation and propaganda, always telling the unvarnished truth, the party raised the workers above their own narrow, individual horizon, and revealed to them the vast perspectives of history. After the winter of 191819, the revolution becomes the work of the Communist party.

The Bolsheviks eulogy of party dictatorship, their defense of the militarization of work and their violent language against any left-wing criticism either social democratic or anarchist of their power, was certainly abhorrent and dangerous. It was during the Civil War that Stalinism found its premises. The fact remains that a left-wing alternative was not an easy option. As Serge himself lucidly recognized, the most probable alternative to Bolshevism was simply counterrevolutionary terror.

Without being a coup, the October Revolution meant the seizure of power by a party that represented a minority, and which remained even more isolated after its decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly. At the end of the Russian Civil War, however, the Bolsheviks had conquered the majority, thus becoming the hegemonic force in a devastated country.

This dramatic change did not happen because of the Cheka and state terror, as pitiless as it was, but because of the division of their enemies, the support of the working class and the passing over to their side of both the peasantry and the non-Russian nationalities. If the final outcome was the dictatorship of a revolutionary party, the alternative was not a democratic regime; the only alternative was a military dictatorship of Russian nationalists, aristocratic landowners. and pogromists.

The communist regime institutionalized the military dimension of revolution. It destroyed the creative, anarchistic, and self-emancipatory spirit of 1917, but at the same time inscribed itself into the revolutionary process. The shift of the revolution toward the Soviet regime passed through different steps: the Civil War (191821), the collectivization of agriculture (193033), and the political purges of the Moscow Trials (193638).

Dissolving the Constituent Assembly, in December 1917, the Bolsheviks affirmed the superiority of Soviet democracy, but by the end of the Civil War the latter was dying. During this atrocious and bloody conflict, the USSR introduced censorship, suppressed political pluralism to the point of finally abolishing any fraction within the Communist Party itself, militarized labor and created the first forced labor camps, and instituted a new political secret police (Cheka). In March 1921, the violent repression of Kronstadt symbolized the end of Soviet democracy and the USSR emerged from the Civil War as a single-party dictatorship.

Ten years later, the collectivization of agriculture brutally ended the peasant revolution and invented new forms of totalitarian violence and bureaucratically centralized modernization of the country. In the second half of the 1930s, the political purges physically eliminated the vestiges of revolutionary Bolshevism and disciplined the entire society by establishing the rule of terror. For two decades, the USSR created a gigantic system of concentration camps.

From the mid-1930s, the USSR roughly corresponded with the classical definition of totalitarianism elaborated a few years later by many conservative political thinkers: a correlation of official ideology, charismatic leadership, single-party dictatorship, suppression of rule of law and political pluralism, monopoly of all means of communication through state propaganda, social and political terror backed by a system of concentration camps, and the suppression of free-market capitalism by a centralized economy.

This description, currently used to point out the similarities between communism and fascism, is not wrong but extremely superficial. Even if one overlooks the enormous differences that separated the communist and fascist ideologies, as well as the social and economic content of their political systems, the fact remains that such a canonical definition of totalitarianism does not grasp the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime. It is simply unable to inscribe it into the historical process of the Russian Revolution. It depicts the USSR as a static, monolithic system, whereas the advent of Stalinism meant a deep and protracted transformation of society and culture.

Equally unsatisfactory is the definition of Stalinism as a bureaucratic counterrevolution or a betrayed revolution. Stalinism certainly signified a radical departure from any idea of democracy and self-emancipation, but it was not, properly speaking, a counterrevolution. A comparison with the Napoleonic Empire is pertinent insofar as Stalinism consciously linked the transformations engendered by the Russian Revolution to both the Enlightenment and the tradition of Russian Empire, but Stalinism was not the restoration of the Old Regime, neither politically or economically, nor even culturally.

Far from restoring the power of the old aristocracy, Stalinism created a completely new economic, managerial, scientific, and intellectual elite, recruited from the lower classes of Soviet societies notably the peasantry and educated by new communist institutions. This is the key to explaining why Stalinism benefited from a social consensus, notwithstanding the Terror and mass deportations.

Interpreting Stalinism as a step in the process of the Russian Revolution does not mean sketching a linear track. The first wave of terror took place during a civil war, when the existence of the USSR itself was threatened by an international coalition. The brutality of the White counterrevolution, the extreme violence of its propaganda and of its practices pogroms and massacres pushed the Bolsheviks to establish a pitiless dictatorship.

Stalin initiated the second and third waves of terror during the 1930s collectivization and the purges in a pacified country whose borders had been internationally recognized and whose political power had been menaced neither by external nor by internal forces. Of course, the rise to power of Hitler in Germany clearly signaled the possibility of a new war in the medium term, but the massive, blind, and irrational character of Stalins violence significantly weakened the USSR instead of reinforcing and equipping it to face such dangers.

Stalinism was a revolution from above, a paradoxical mixture of modernization and social regression, whose final result was mass deportation, a system of concentration camps, an ensemble of trials exhuming the fantasies of the Inquisition, and a wave of mass executions that decapitated the state, the party, and the army. In rural areas, Stalinism meant, according to Nikolai Bukharin, the return to a feudal exploitation of the peasantry with catastrophic economic effects. At the same time as the kulaks were starving in Ukraine, the Soviet regime was transforming tens of thousands of peasants into technicians and engineers.

In short, Soviet totalitarianism merged modernism and barbarism; it was a peculiar, frightening, Promethean trend. Arno Mayer defines it as an uneven and unstable amalgam of monumental achievements and monstrous crimes. Of course, any left scholar or activist could easily share Victor Serges assessment on the moral, philosophical, and political line that radically separated Stalinism from authentic socialism, insofar as Stalins USSR had become in his words an absolute, castocratic totalitarian state, drunk with its own power, for which man does not count. But this does not change the fact, recognized by Serge himself, that this red totalitarianism unfolded in and prolonged a historical process started by the October Revolution.

Avoiding any teleological approach, one could observe that this result was neither historically ineluctable nor coherently inscribed into a Marxist ideological pattern. The origins of Stalinism, nevertheless, cannot simply be imputed, as radical functionalism suggests, to the historical circumstances of war and the social backwardness of a gigantic country with an absolutist past, a country in which building socialism inevitably required reproducing the gruesomeness of primitive capital accumulation.

Bolshevik ideology played a role during the Russian Civil War in this metamorphosis from democratic upsurge to ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. Its normative vision of violence as the midwife of history and its culpable indifference to the juridical framework of a revolutionary state, historically transitional and doomed to extinction, certainly favored the emergence of an authoritarian, single-party regime.

Multiple threads run from revolution to Stalinism, as well as from the USSR to the communist movements acting across the world. Stalinism was both a totalitarian regime and, for several decades, the hegemonic current of the Left on an international scale.

The Bolsheviks were radical Westernizers. Bolshevik literature was full of references to the French Revolution, 1848 and the Paris Commune, but it never mentioned the Haitian Revolution or the Mexican Revolution. For Trotsky and Lenin, who loved this metaphor, the wheel of history rolled from Petrograd to Berlin, not from the boundless Russian countryside to the fields of Morelos or the Antillean plantations.

In a chapter of his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky deplored the fact that peasants were usually ignored by the history books, just as theater critics pay no attention to the workers who, behind the scenes, operate the curtains and change the scenery. In his own book, however, the peasants appear mostly as an anonymous mass. They are not neglected but are observed from afar, with analytical detachment rather than empathy.

The Bolsheviks had started to question their vision of the peasantry inherited from Marxs writings on French Bonapartism as a culturally backward and politically conservative class, but their proletarian tropism was too strong to complete this revision. This was done, not without theoretical and strategic confrontations, by anti-colonial communism in the years between the two world wars.

In China, the communist turn toward the peasantry resulted from both the devastating defeat of the urban revolutions of the mid-1920s and the effort to inscribe Marxism into a national history and culture. After the bloody repression inflicted by the Kuomintang (GMD), the Communist Party cells had been almost completely dismantled in the cities, and its members imprisoned and persecuted. Retreating into the country, where they found protection and could reorganize their movement, many communist leaders started looking at the peasantry with different eyes, abandoning their former Westernized gaze on Asian backwardness.

This strategic turn, the object of sharp controversies between the Communist International and its Chinese section during the 1930s, was claimed by Mao Zedong at the beginning of 1927, even before the massacres perpetrated by the GMD in Shanghai and Canton that year. Coming back to his native Hunan, Mao wrote a famous report in which he designated the peasantry instead of the urban proletariat as the driving force of the Chinese Revolution.

Against the Moscow agents who conceived of peasant militias exclusively as triggers of urban uprisings, in 1931, Mao persisted in building a Soviet republic in Jiangxi. Without believing in the rural character of the Chinese Revolution, he could not have organized the Long March in order to resist the annihilation campaign launched by the GMD. Initially considered as a tragic defeat, this epic undertaking paved the way for a successful struggle in the following decade, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD itself.

The proclamation of the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing in 1949 was the result of a process that, from the uprisings of 1925 to the Long March and the anti-Japanese struggle, found one of its necessary premises in October 1917; but it was also the product of a strategic revision. There was a complex genetic link between the Chinese and the Russian Revolutions. The three major dimensions of communism revolution, regime, and anti-colonialism emblematically merged in the Chinese Revolution.

As a radical break with the traditional order, it was incontestably a revolution that heralded the end of centuries of oppression; as the conclusion of a civil war, it resulted in the conquest of power by a militarized party which, since the beginning, established its dictatorship in the most authoritarian forms. And as the conclusion of fifteen years of struggle, first against the Japanese occupation and then against the GMD a nationalist force that had become the agent of Western great powers the communist victory of 1949 marked not only the end of colonialism in China but also, on a broader scale, a significant moment in the global process of decolonization.

After the Russian Revolution, socialism crossed the boundaries of Europe and became an agenda item in the South and the colonial world. Because of its intermediary position between Europe and Asia, with a gigantic territory extending across both continents, inhabited by a variety of national, religious, and ethnic communities, the USSR became the locus of a new crossroads between the West and the colonial world. Bolshevism was able to speak equally to the proletarian classes of the industrialized countries and to the colonized peoples of the South.

During the nineteenth century, anti-colonialism was almost nonexistent in the West, with the notable exception of the anarchist movement, whose activists and ideas widely circulated between Southern and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and different Asian countries. After Marxs death, socialism based its hopes and expectations on the growing strength of the industrial working class, mostly white and male, and was concentrated in the developed (mostly Protestant) capitalist countries of the West.

Every mass socialist party included powerful currents defending the civilizing mission of Europe throughout the world. Social democratic parties particularly those located in the biggest empires postponed colonial liberation until after the socialist transformation of Europe and the United States. The Bolsheviks radically broke with such a tradition.

The second congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in July 1920, approved a programmatic document calling for colonial revolutions against imperialism: its goal was the creation of communist parties in the colonial world and the support of national liberation movements. The congress clearly affirmed a radical turn away from the old social democratic views on colonialism.

A couple of months later, the Bolsheviks organized a Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which convened almost two thousand delegates from twenty-nine Asian nationalities. Grigory Zinoviev explicitly affirmed that the Communist International had broken with older social democratic attitudes, according to which civilized Europe could and must act as tutor to barbarous Asia. Revolution was no longer considered as the exclusive realm of white European and American workers, and socialism could not be imagined without the liberation of colonized peoples.

The conflicting relationships between communism and nationalism would be clarified in the following decades, but the October Revolution was the inaugural moment of global anti-colonialism. In the 1920s, anti-colonialism suddenly shifted from the realm of historical possibility to the field of political strategy and military organization. The Baku conference announced this historic change.

The alliance between communism and anti-colonialism experienced several moments of crisis and tension, related to both ideological conflicts and the imperatives of the USSRs foreign policies. At the end of World War II, the French Communist Party participated in a coalition government that violently repressed anti-colonial revolts in Algeria and Madagascar, and in the following decade it supported Prime Minister Guy Mollet at the beginning of the Algerian War. In India, the communist movement was marginalized during World War II because of its decision to suspend its anti-colonial struggle and to support the British Empires involvement in a military alliance with the USSR against the Axis powers.

If these examples clearly show the contradictions of communist anti-colonialism, they do not change the historical role played by the USSR as a rear base for many anti-colonial revolutions. The entire process of decolonization took place in the context of the Cold War, within the relations of force established by the existence of the USSR.

Retrospectively, decolonization appears as a historical experience in which the contradictory dimensions of communism previously mentioned emancipation and authoritarianism, revolution and dictatorial power permanently merged. In most cases, anti-colonial struggles were conceived and organized like military campaigns carried out by liberation armies, and the political regimes they established were, from the beginning, one-party dictatorships.

In Cambodia, at the end of a ferocious war, the military dimension of the anti-colonial struggle completely suffocated any emancipatory impulse, and the conquest of power by the Khmer Rouge immediately resulted in the establishment of a genocidal power. The happiness of insurgent Havana on the first of January 1959 and the terror of the Cambodian killing fields are the dialectical poles of communism as anti-colonialism.

The fourth dimension of twentieth-century communism is social democratic: in certain countries and periods, communism played the role traditionally fulfilled by social democracy. This happened in some Western countries, mostly in the postwar decades, thanks to a set of circumstances related to international context, the foreign policy of the USSR, and the absence or weakness of classic social democratic parties; and it also occurred in some countries born from decolonization.

The most significant examples of this peculiar phenomenon are found in the United States, at the time of the New Deal, in postwar France and Italy, as well as in India (Kerala and West Bengal). Of course, social democratic communism was geographically and chronologically more circumscribed than its other forms, but it existed nonetheless. To a certain extent, the rebirth of social democracy itself after 1945 was a by-product of the October Revolution, which had changed the balance of power on a global scale and compelled capitalism to transform significantly, adopting a human face.

Social democratic communism is an oxymoronic definition that does not ignore the links of French, Italian, or Indian communism with revolutions, Stalinism, and decolonization. It does not neglect the capacity of these movements to lead insurgencies notably during the Resistance against the Nazi occupation nor their organic connections with Moscow for several decades. Their first open criticism of the USSRs foreign policy took place only in the 1960s, first with the Sino-Soviet split, then with the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks.

Even their internal structure and organization was, at least until the end of the 1970s, much more Stalinist than social democratic, as well as their culture, theoretical sources, and political imagination. In spite of these clearly recognizable features, such parties played a typical social democratic role: reforming capitalism, containing social inequalities, getting accessible health care, education, and leisure to the largest number of people; in short, improving the living conditions of the laboring classes and giving them political representation.

Of course, one of the peculiar features of social democratic communism was its exclusion from political power, except for a couple of years between the end of Word War II and the breakout of the Cold War (the swan song of social democratic communism took place in France at the beginning of the 1980s, when the (French Communist Party (PCF) participated in a left coalition government under Franois Mitterrand). Unlike the British Labour Party, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), or Scandinavias social democracies, it could not claim paternity of the welfare state.

In the United States, the Communist Party was one of the left pillars of the New Deal, along with the trade unions, but it never entered the Roosevelt administration. It did not experience power, only the purges of McCarthyism. In France and Italy, the communist parties were strongly influential in the birth of postwar social policies simply because of their strength and their capacity to put pressure on governments.

The arena of their social reformism was municipal socialism in the cities they led as hegemonic strongholds, like Bologna, or the Parisian red belt. In a much bigger country like India, the communist governments of Kerala and West Bengal could be considered equivalent forms of local, postcolonial welfare states.

In Europe, social democratic communism had two necessary premises: on the one hand, the Resistance that legitimized communist parties as democratic forces; on the other, the economic growth that followed the postwar reconstruction. By the 1980s, the time of social democratic communism was over. Therefore, the end of communism in 1989 throws a new light on the historical trajectory of social democracy itself.

An accomplished form of the social democratic welfare state only existed in Scandinavia. Elsewhere, the welfare state was much more the result of a capitalist self-reformation than a social democratic conquest. At the end of World War II, in the midst of a continent in ruins, capitalism was unable to restart without powerful state intervention. Despite its obvious and largely achieved goal of defending the principle of the free market against the Soviet economy, the Marshall Plan was, as its name indicated, a plan that assured the transition from total war to peaceful reconstruction.

Without such massive American help, many materially destroyed European countries would have been unable to recover quickly, and the United States worried that a new economic collapse might push entire countries toward communism. From this point of view, the postwar welfare state was an unexpected outcome of the complex and contradictory confrontation between communism and capitalism that had begun in 1917.

Whatever the values, convictions, and commitments of its members and even its leaders, social democracy played a rentiers role: it could defend freedom, democracy, and the welfare state in the capitalist countries simply because the USSR existed, and capitalism had been compelled to transform itself in the context of the Cold War. After 1989, capitalism recovered its savage face, rediscovered the lan of its heroic times, and dismantled the welfare state almost everywhere.

In most Western countries, social democracy turned to neoliberalism and became an essential tool of this transition. And alongside old-style social democracy, even social democratic communism disappeared. The self-dissolution of the Italian Communist Party, in 1991, was the emblematic epilogue of this process: it did not turn into a classic social democratic party but rather an advocate of center-left liberalism, with the explicitly claimed model of the American Democratic Party.

In 1989, the fall of communism closed the curtain on a play as epic as it was tragic, as exciting as it was terrifying. The time of decolonization and the welfare state was over, but the collapse of communism-as-regime also took with it communism-as-revolution. Instead of liberating new forces, the end of the USSR engendered a widespread awareness of the historical defeat of twentieth-century revolutions: paradoxically, the shipwreck of real socialism engulfed the communist utopia.

The twenty-first-century left is compelled to reinvent itself, to distance itself from previous patterns. It is creating new models, new ideas, and a new utopian imagination. This reconstruction is not an easy task, insofar as the fall of communism left the world without alternatives to capitalism and created a different mental landscape. A new generation has grown up in a neoliberal world in which capitalism has become a natural form of life.

The Left rediscovered an ensemble of revolutionary traditions that had been suppressed or marginalized over the course of a century, anarchism foremost among them, and recognized a plurality of political subjects previously ignored or relegated to a secondary position. The experiences of the alter-globalization movements, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, Syriza, the French Nuit debout and gilets jaunes, feminist and LGBT movements, and Black Lives Matter are steps in the process of building a new revolutionary imagination, discontinuous, nourished by memory but at the same time severed from twentieth-century history and deprived of a usable legacy.

Born as an attempt at taking heaven by storm, twentieth-century communism became, with and against fascism, an expression of the dialectic of the Enlightenment. Ultimately, the Soviet-style industrial cities, five-year plans, agricultural collectivization, spacecraft, gulags converted into factories, nuclear weapons, and ecological catastrophes, were different forms of the triumph of instrumental reason.

Was not communism the frightening face of a Promethean dream, of an idea of Progress that erased and destroyed any experience of self-emancipation? Was not Stalinism a storm piling wreckage upon wreckage, in Walter Benjamins image, and which millions of people mistakenly called Progress? Fascism merged a set of conservative values inherited from the counter-Enlightenment with a modern cult of science, technology, and mechanical strength. Stalinism combined a similar cult of technical modernity with a radical and authoritarian form of Enlightenment: socialism transformed into a cold utopia.

A new, global left will not succeed without working through this historical experience. Extracting the emancipatory core of communism from this field of ruins is not an abstract, merely intellectual operation; it will require new battles, new constellations, in which all of a sudden the past will reemerge and memory flash up. Revolutions cannot be scheduled, they always come unexpectedly.

Enzo Traverso teaches at Cornell University. His most recent book is Revolution: An Intellectual History.

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We Can Only Go Beyond Communism by Coming to Terms With Its History - Jacobin magazine

A few words of

enlightenment

Again, I would enjoy shining a few words of enlightenment with the priest, pastor, Apostles and the Sunday school teachers.

As we know, our world is all about history and truth. Do you know about the following dates on church history? In the first century, the first Christians in 33 AD on Pentecost, descent of the Holy Spirit up on the disciples preaching of St. Peter in Jerusalem conversions, baptism and aggregation of some 3,000 persons to be the 10 Commandments.

Also, St. Stephen was stoned to death. St. Paul was converted and baptized and beheaded between 64-67 AD. In 42 AD, St. James the Great was the first apostle to die and beheaded in 44 AD.

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At Antioch, the followers of Christ were called Christians for the first time. In 107 AD, St. Ignatius of Antioch was martyred and was the first to use the expression, The Catholic Church. In 165 AD, St. Justin, an importantworker was martyred at Rome. In 382 AD, the Canon of Scared Scripture, the first of the inspired book of the Bible. In 382 AD, St. Jerome translated the Old Testament and New Testament inot Latin. His work is called theVulgate version of the Bible.

There wasnt a Protestant religion until the 15th and 16th centuries. Now, we have 435 different ones.

Peter Panella

New Castle

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A few words of enlightenment | Letters To The Editor | ncnewsonline.com - New Castle News

On the list of things you can do to spark joy (to use a phrase that has infiltrated the zeitgeist), few people would think to include writing a book.

From conception to writing and revisions, right through to publication, when the final product ends up on a shelf (virtual or real), its a lengthy and often lonely journey thats riddled with a full spectrum of emotions. A way to spark frustration, more like.

Finding the Heart Sutra, by Alex Kerr 304 pages ALLEN LANE

But against those odds, author Alex Kerr thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing his new book, Finding the Heart Sutra. Thats probably because the book is dedicated to exploring an age-old Buddhist sutra that muses on wisdom and enlightenment, and its been a project in progress for the better part of 40 years.

I had such fun with this book Kerr tells me from his home in Bangkok. Hes been in the Thai capital since late March, and most likely will be there until March 2021. Its the longest stretch of time hes been away from Japan in decades, and hes itching to be on the road again. Particularly the one back to Japan, where he has lived more or less full-time since 1977.

Writing while having fun is a new experience for Kerr. Readers of his books on Japan, including Lost Japan and Dogs and Demons, would have found heavy doses of anger and finger-wagging from his iconoclastic takes on Japans destructive path over the past 50 years.

But, Finding the Heart Sutra is different for many reasons. For one, Kerr found humor in his subject.

You can see it as a poem, as a great philosophy, as a Zen meditation, as a mystical path, as a spiritualist power, but you could also see it as a joke, Kerr says.

Take, for example, one of the sutras most famous stanzas:

The material world does not differ from emptiness.

Emptiness does not differ from the material world.

The material world is itself emptiness.

Emptiness is itself the material world.

The first reading is gobbledygook, youll never get anything out of it, Kerr says with his trademark forthrightness. Its this tendency to call a spade a spade that makes Kerr a compelling writer and well-suited to write an ode to a Zen masterpiece. While there are likely many scholars of the sutra that would take exception to describing the sacred text as comical, Kerr is insistent:

Kerr the calligrapher: Sprinkled throughout Finding the Heart Sutra are Alex Kerrs brush strokes of Chinese characters from the ancient Buddhist text. | COURTESY OF ALEX KERR

Its ridiculous, he says. Its humorous and outrageous, and so on top of everything else, I treated it as a joke with punch lines.

Key to Kerrs approach is that he writes for the reader who is not steeped in Buddhist knowledge. In essence, what hes done with Finding the Heart Sutra is taken a wide-angle lens to an ancient verse, zoomed in on the significance of each character and deployed anecdotes and liner notes to unpack the gibberish.

What Im trying to do is, one by one, phrase by phrase, and sometimes kanji by kanji, get deep into (the sutra). What does this thing really mean and what have they said over 1,000 years about it? Kerr says.

One way he gets at the heart of the sutra was to highlight its relationship with calligraphy. Sprinkled throughout Kerrs book are brush strokes of Chinese characters, all of which are taken from the Buddhist text.

Thats critical, Kerr says. Its the essence of the Heart Sutra, because its been involved with calligraphy from day one.

It also provides readers with a new view of the author: Kerr the calligrapher.

A few years ago, while interviewing Kerr in his home in Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, I noticed beautiful hand-drawn characters on display and later found out much of it was written by Kerr.

The original plan was for it to be a visual book, Kerr says. He was meant to be the calligrapher while French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar would write about the sutra. That plan, hatched in the 1980s, never panned out; Yourcenar died in 1987, but Kerr never stopped thinking about and re-reading the Heart Sutra.

Finding the Heart Sutra: Guided by a Magician, an Art Collector and Buddhist Sages from Tibet to Japan by Alex Kerr

The sutra is short, which magnifies the significance of each character. Kerr reproduces it in English, Japanese and Chinese. It comes in at under 60 lines, many of which are just two characters long.

Kerr says the brevity of the sutra is why it has survived for so long and influenced so many. As he writes in the book: The Heart Sutra is so short you can recite the whole thing in about a minute. Its a haiku of wisdom, wisdom you can carry in your back pocket.

Its also intense; it covers a lot of ground in what it surveys, especially emptiness, which the sutra arrives at almost immediately.

You have to be aware of the emptiness, Kerr says. One of the things I harp on a lot about in this book is equanimity so that you can rise above all the nonsense and the troubles. Because you have to realize these things are small, they are blips in the cosmic scheme of things, and so are we. Then you can find a bit of peace.

Someone asked me what they should do after finishing the book. I said they should read it again. This is a book you can read and read again.

Much like a poem you can ponder again and again. Each time it says something new or different. Or nothing at all. And thats OK, too.

Alex Kerr discusses sustainable tourism and Finding the Heart Sutra in episode 74 of The Japan Times Deep Dive podcast. Listen now at jtimes.jp/podcast.

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'Finding the Heart Sutra': Alex Kerr finds humor at the heart of wisdom and enlightenment - The Japan Times