Man arrested after federal officials say he sought to destroy Nashville power site


The Nashville, Tenn., skyline is reflected in the Cumberland River July 11, 2022. 

(AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

BY KIMBERLEE KRUESI
 November 4, 2024

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Department of Justice said Monday that federal agents have arrested a Tennessee man with ties to white nationalist groups who they say attempted to use what he believed to be an explosive-laden drone to destroy a Nashville energy facility.

According to court documents, Skyler Philippi, 24, is accused of planning to attach several pounds of C-4 explosives to an aerial drone with the intent of destroying an electric substation in Nashville.

The newly unsealed court records reveal that Philippi in July allegedly told a confidential source who was working with the FBI that he wanted to attack several substations to “shock the system.” That confidential source later introduced Philippi to an undercover FBI employee, who began to collect information about Philippi’s plan with other undercover agents.

“Philippi researched previous attacks on electric substations and concluded that attacking with firearms would not be sufficient,” wrote Angelo DeFeo, an FBI special agent, in the court records released Monday. “Philippi, therefore, planned to use a drone with explosives attached to it and to fly the drone into the substation.”

Philippi allegedly told undercover law enforcement officials that he was affiliated with several white nationalist and extremist groups, including the National Alliance, which calls for eradicating the Jewish people and other races. Such extremist groups increasingly have viewed attacking the United States’ power grid as a means of disrupting the country.

The U.S. grid includes more than 6,400 power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines that span the country.

In September, Philippi provided the undercover officials with excerpts of his so-called manifesto, which focused heavily on preserving the white race.

On Saturday, Philippi and undercover employees drove to his intended Nashville launch site and prepared to fly a drone that authorities say Philippi believed had 3 pounds of C-4 attached to it. The material had been provided by the undercover employees, according to court documents.

Law enforcement agents arrested Philippi shortly after arriving at the site.

“As charged, Skyler Philippi believed he was moments away from launching an attack on a Nashville energy facility to further his violent white supremacist ideology – but the FBI had already compromised his plot,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

A federal public defender was appointed to represent Philippi and a request for comment was sent to the attorney on Monday. Philippi is expected to appear in court on Nov. 13.

C-4 explosive attack plotted against energy facility to ignite race war: feds

Matthew Chapman
November 4, 2024 

RAW STORY

Crime scene tape (Shutterstock.com)

A 24-year-old white supremacist has been charged with plotting to use weapons of mass destruction on an energy facility in Nashville, Tennessee, federal prosecutors said in a news release Monday.

Skyler Philippi, a so-called "accelerationist" who believes the destruction of society must be hastened to bring about race war, planned to use a drone equipped with explosives to target an electric substation, telling a confidential source such an attack would "shock the system" and bring down large parts of the power grid, the Justice Department said.

Philippi was also flagged earlier this year in a Raw Story exclusive investigation into online networks radicalizing young people into racial extremist groups. He was an administrator of a white nationalist Telegram channel known as the Primal Aryan Warlord Gang, or PAWG, which celebrated white supremacist violence and racially motivated mass killings.

"In September 2024, Philippi drove with undercover employees (UCEs) of the FBI to an electric substation previously researched and targeted by Philippi, and Philippi conducted reconnaissance of the substation," prosecutors said in the release. "While driving, Philippi ordered a plastic explosive composition known as C-4 and other explosives from the UCEs. Philippi later purchased black powder to be used in pipe bombs, which Philippi intended to use during the attack on the substation."

“If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis,” Philippi allegedly texted an informant, adding, “Holy s---. This will go up like a f---in fourth of July firework.”

Philippi was busted after he performed a ritualistic prayer to Odin and drove to the operation site with informants, where he was apprehended by federal agents.

“Those fueled by hate and inspired to violence by racial or ethnic bias pose a grave threat to our national security,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said of the case. “We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to identify, disrupt, and hold accountable those who seek to wage such hate-fueled violence, which has no place in America or anywhere else.”

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 ANARCHO GREEN FASCISM

Millenarian Insurrectionary Hail Marianism

Aug

27

2024

comments

Millenarian Insurrectionary Hail Marianism
Invecchiare Selvatico Reflects On
Warlike, Howling, Pure
by Areïon
(published by Contagion Press)

"The early anarchist movement was galvanized by its many martyrs…
the anarchist martyrs bore witness to the beautiful idea…
anarchic life is born from anarchic death.”
- Areïon, Warlike, Howling, Pure

“Another word for divine violence is anarchy.”
- Areïon, Warlike, Howling, Pure

“This is the Way.”
- Areïon, Warlike, Howling, Pure

The clock is winding down and there seems to be no path to “victory”, no chance of “winning” (concepts only relevant for those stuck playing Their games). But no, wait… Could it be? Religiosity, self-sacrificial martyrdom, and agenda-infused opportunistic historical re-readings (what the author would likely dismiss as historical revisionism)… that’ll get us to freedom, to anarchy! Awe, well, um, ok? Warlike, Howling, Pure feels like an act of desperation, a last-ditch effort at some sort of ending-times anarchist final triumph or last stand, one that hopefully will not pull other lost souls into its hallowed and insurrecto-thiestic void.

But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back and quickly trace the general path to this anarcho-rapture. First, many action-addicted and street-performing anarchists reconstituted their over-inflated revolutionary goals as insurrectionary (mostly a bad take on an earlier and more interesting Italian version), but most still believed in the inherently authoritarian project of Revolution and of transforming society to their particular idea of a “better world”. Then, some of the more sophisticated of the lot seemed to pay lip-service to criticisms by merely naming them and rebranding to “combative anarchy” and duped a new generation of wide-eyed pseudo-rebels and glorified activists to take to the streets for the “good fight” (a more edgy and militant front of the typical array of symptomatic left-oriented causes). And now, as a bleak darkness envelops, millennial-driven millenarian anarchism and the embracing of a religious warrior epic battle for anti-racist and anti-fascist glory is the latest vision in the desert of insurrectionary anarchism. Little has changed, except for the depth of depression, degree of delusion, grandeur in scope, level of exaggeration and bloated rhetoric. Like a divine message from the gods, Warlike, Howling, Pure opens up this new millenarian “cyclical phase”, which I would argue is actually sick-lical, monotonously repetitive, and spiraling downward.

Add to this bound text a disjointed, convoluted, and religiously-infused Forward by communist-flavored “insurrectionary” author Idris Robinson, someone who has written in previous work that they are apparently always in “pain” except when they are engaged in attack and who has continually pushed the idea of martyrdom. Now Idris’s “pain” is extended to everyone and everywhere with statements like “[Areïon]… demonstrates, incontrovertibly, that our everyday reality, is in fact, hell, in the most literal and concrete sense” and “what you are about to read is nothing short of a life or death struggle, over what is to live and what is to die”. Robinson goes on to further describe the righteous battle of heaven and hell (good and evil without being directly explicit), by offering what thirteenth-century mystic, Aziz O-Din Nasafi, supposedly “teaches us”, which when read through contemporary eyes follows a very similar march that Marx offers in which “all people must first enter hell to reach heaven”. Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!

In a moralistic millenarian-Marxism infused with hyper-religiosity and foaming-at-the-mouth fervor, Idris proclaims from the mount: “The directive is then as clear as ever: either burrow further into the deep recesses of yourself or the moment has arrived for the proletarians to finally storm heaven” and “as religious insight has repeatedly confirmed, hell is nothing other than individual torment without collective deliverance” and “whenever and wherever the exploited and the oppressed transform themselves into insurgents, rebels, and combatants, the gates are crashed, the oath is consummated, and all this is marked by the anointing of the messiah as the collective subject” and “the messianic is therefore a volatile tension constantly traversing the souls of the chosen”.

Then consider, for instance, Robinson’s glowing appreciation for and reprinting of Father George Willie Hurley’s adaption of the Ten Commandments with a list of “Thou shalls and shall nots…” which includes “Thou shall believe that the Ethiopians and all nations will rule the world in righteousness…”, and it is clear that Idris has a disturbing religious, communist, and insurrecto-messianic agenda. Combining Robinson’s forward with Areïon’s four essays which make up this short book, what you have is a recipe for something, in my mind, that is uninteresting, not very anarchist, and a little troubling. To be fair, Idris is far more troubled and troubling than Areïon, but still, Warlike, Howling, Pure appears to be a new depth of desperation and delusion from this particular camp, and comes regrettably from the otherwise provocative Contagion Press.

Obviously, there is an almost absolute and pervasive spiritual emptiness all around. Of course, this has been a deepening general crisis for over a century now (to some extent for multiple millennia), only magnified by science, rationality, politics, and most exponentially by technology, especially the virtual realm. But filling this hole with a millenarian religiosity of perpetual apostolic attack and endless rationales for martyrdom is just plain absurd. If this were a random wing-nut, or even a cute little cult, I could find some amusement in it all. I will admit that I appreciated early ITS and even found later “off-the-deep-end” and whacky incarnations (whether they actually existed or not) interesting on some perverse level. Hell, Charlie Manson gave me some chuckles from time to time and I must confess to a little crush on the bad-ass Sheela of Rajneeshpuram. The author of this book, however, is not some detached actor, but a long-term anarchist who is part of a developing sphere of theory and practice, which, for me, feels significantly different.

A Holy War, as detailed in the book or of any variety, is about as far from my reality as I can imagine. I am against civilization, not the projection and persecution of ideologically un-pure and politicized infidels within it. My spirituality feels unique and grounded in direct organic relations, not myopic thrusts of mythological chest-pumping warrior jiz. My shared spirituality feels intimate and penetrating, not rhetorical and opportunistic. My spirituality is the daily living of getting dirty. It is not removed, epically-driven, and merely metaphorically earthen. In my life, balancing and playing with belief, cynicism, uncertainty, and enchantment is essential in the way I relate to spirituality and is fundamentally at odds with any sort of Holy War.

Whether intended this way or not, Warlike, Howling, Pure reads like the beginnings of an anarchist holy scripture, despite any caveats or disclaimers. But anarchy is neither pious nor evangelical. It is heretical and dispersed. To try to convince others is already an annoying and conceited endeavor, but to suck people’s lives into a personal (or group) vision that is nothing more than another ideological and religious meat-grinding cause is atrocious. Why would we waste the precious little time we have being alive on the delusions of someone’s (or some group’s) desperate cause rather than figuring out, exploring, or remembering how to live freely?

Instead, I choose to carve out as much autonomy as I can outside, on the edges, and even amongst this messed up reality, on my own terms, with the people I love, anarchically not religiously. I’ll defend myself and our people and place on this earth to my last drop of blood, but I will never be a part of any righteous epic battle over what appears to me as another interpretation of good and evil, however its rationalized. Being willing to fight for our lives is much different than feeling an obligation to some larger struggle of cleansing the unrepentant in fire and blood.

It must be said, Areïon brings many important and interesting micro-histories to the table, and in a different context I would appreciate their sharing, but these stories tend to be used as historical fodder in the ultimate agenda of supporting their particular vision of insurrectionary anarchism. From various rebellious sects in ancient China to Spartacus in the Roman Empire to the Iron Column of The Spanish Civil War to a very opportunistic and thin painting of the Diocesan spirit (and animism for that matter), Areïon appears to have a clear goal in using these stories. This, of course, is always the case to some degree, we all do it, but I find their telling particularly manipulative, exaggerated, and predictable, as is the case with most would-be revolutionaries. For instance, just one of many over-stated claims is that the White Lotus Society “attempted to abolish distinctions between genders, and practiced mutual aid”, yet the only evidence of this in the book is the fact that, according to the sourced Elizabeth J. Perry’s “Worshipers and Warriors” in some factions “women were active fighters and group leaders” and “there is some evidence of cooperative economic activities… to aid the poorest participants in the struggles,” So, if that’s all it takes, I guess we are there?

Even when Areïon attempts to move on from the heavily-handed propagandizing of their reading of certain more distant histories and comes closer to the American experience and present times, they fall into an all-too-politicized and sadly too-familiar over-simplistic axis of diametrics: “Whiteness” and “anti-blackness” vs freedom and liberation. As if that is the only choice, the only way to view things, the only way to be situated, the only tensions, the only histories, the only way to respond, or the dominant description of our time. And often when they do this, they intensely project a solidified rationale and reasoning on the players of both sides of this forced and fabricated equation.

If only it were all so simple. If only there were a good and bad, right and wrong, victim and oppressor, then Areïon’s grossly simplistic “Antiracist Holy War” and anarchist millenarian jihad might warrant a second look. But we all know, whether we admit to it or allow it to muddy lame politics or derail thesis projects, that this type of opportunistic over-simplicity only feeds the beast and becomes the negative of what we are against, not to mention the argumentation of “anti-Whiteness” is parallel (with basically the same critique, metrics, and language, just maybe slightly-skewed to account for criticisms) to most leftists these days on the subject of race. It all begins to sound too much like NPR with the volume turned up real loud. Too limited a perspective for anarchists, too trapped, too controlled.

It really starts getting creepy, however, when the author begins writing about taking “loyalty oaths” and “declaring allegiance to all of those excluded” and marginalized by their declared (and offered by academia and activists) enemy in society: “Whiteness”. Deep bonds of trust between our kin (of all sorts and combinations) is essential, but their’s is an overlaid and projected loyalty that rises up to ideology, politics, religion, warfare, and even society in strange ways, not the creative decentralized lives entwined together in the mud and seed that I sink deeper into. Ours is familiar and tribal and anarchistic, not some vague movement of the oppressed holding people accountable for previous sins carried down from generation to generation. Sound familiar? Areïon’s rhetoric and reasonings reflect the vanguardist populism draped in religiosity, as well as the religious fundamentalism that has stained history with the blood of the unbelievers. Areïon has provided a volatile and blood-thirsty religious component for the knuckle-headed, bruit, obtuse, and unsophisticated ideas and actions of Antifa and other uncritical players and activists to use. Luckily, many of them probably don’t read.

Then enters the fire and brimstone, divine vengeance, martyrdom and personal sacrificial duties, and literal sacrifices to gods. And, just like God said to Noah, “Won’t be water, be fire next time!” Areïon assures us without missing a beat of their war-drum that “The fire is here and there is no escaping it” and that “hopefully” the new resurgence in “Spiritualism… will finally spill the blood that the vengeful dead demand. If not, the Furies will hound this guilty land with madness until its crimes are purged.” Not what I am looking for when I engage in a spiritual realm. I look to connect, not project.

Again, if this were some rando on the street corner with snot in their beard holding an upside-down and (perhaps) misspelled placard reading: “God’s Cumming Again!”, I might buy them a cup of coffee and chat a bit for shits and giggles, maybe. Or, I would attempt to avoid the hell out of them. In this case, however, I would say Areïon appears (in the book) to be playing on the fads, trends, depressions, misconceptions, distorted emotions, and the bad takes of so many pseudo-anarchists who are playing games of performance and desperation, in their evangelical attempt to brand their “Antiracist Holy War” and “divine violence” as “anarchy”. It is not. Their explorations in anarchism, adventures in the streets, and excursions in the occult seem to have led them to a very strange and empty place of exaggerated conclusion and dramatic explanation. Violence is not the problem. I have no qualms here. My issues are how and why it is justified and proposed (and most likely will never actually be acted upon in this particular bloody-battled way, luckily I guess).

Even the list of quoted authors has become all-too-predictable. Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diane di Prima, John Brown, Franz Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari, Fredric Nietzsche, etc. (I wonder where Georges Bataille is?) have all made interesting and important contributions (some more than others). But when they are combined in this way, in this type of proposal, it all begins to feel like one continual project of propaganda for a specific flavor of revolutionary struggle, oh, I mean, insurrectionary anarchism, um, sorry, combative anarchy, I mean millenarian anarchism, whatever.

Yes, this world is ending, but to propose that people throw their bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits into its gears is absurd. To ask people to spend their lives preparing for an insurrectionary and apocalyptic bloody wave which will almost definitely never come (especially based on the current crop of hyper-domesticated cyber-humans) is infuriating. But, to attempt to convince people of the heroic value and necessity of martyrdom is inexcusable. Your Black Flame is another con job, another surrogate cause, another guilt-release valve, another act of posturing that will waste precious time, energy, and lives for nothing. Fiction is great, but that’s not how this is presented or intended. Odd, irrational, and even disturbing beliefs can be important, even much needed at times, but this comes off as all-too predictable chest-beating bombastic nonsense mixed with performative spirituality (the kind that religions are built on).

Then we get to the final chapter of Warlike, Howling, Pure, the one that ties it all together, what this was all leading up to, feeding into, Their Way Forward: The Black Flame. We are told that “Anarchy is a spiritual practice, whether its practitioners understand it as such or not. We may distinguish three interwoven currents within it: the devotional, the ancestral, and the initiatory.” First, thanks for defining anarchy for us; funny how it is explained exactly the way you sell it in your book. Oh wait, that’s how propaganda works, it binds things too tightly and grafts ideas, events, and situations to agendas for utilization. And again, spiritual emptiness is a no brainer, especially in this appallingly alienated techno-post-modern nothingness age. Atheism has always been an unfulfilling half-step, rejecting the ideological, moralistic, and authoritarian mindset of religion (a system that enslaves our spirit) but never filling that void with a uniquely individual or tribally-shared spiritual relationship of people and place. So yes, spiritual emptiness is a colossal problem, but stuffing it with this religious garbage seems highly opportunistic.

As with much of the book, there are nuggets, statements, and thoughts that resonate with me in isolation, that I even agree with, but they almost always direct us towards a place I abhor, and this final section is certainly no exception. For instance, I would agree with Areïon, that anarchy is “a force within the world—a spirit.” I often describe it this way, yet to call it “devotional” both traps it and forces us to submit to it, rather than it moving in us. It is not something to serve. It is not something to kill and die for (specifically). It is not a practice or a religion. It is an agent of chaos and freedom that cannot be reified. It is life itself: undefinable, unmolested, unrestricted, uncontrollable.

Even to talk of anarchy in historical terms, as is often the case with certain insurrectionary types like Areïon, seems opportunistic, for we know not, nor live in, those contexts. How it flowed within those anarchic moments and people is purely speculation and often later agenda-derived for propagandistic purposes, not for anarchy. And while I gain personal strength from the written histories and statements of rebellious anarchists like Giuseppe Fanelli, Louis Lingg, or Emile Henry (all mentioned in the text), they are of certain situations and mostly not very transferable or fully understandable to us, especially in regard to martyrdom (of which Emile Henry was absolutely opposed to). This making of propagandist lore is littered throughout the book.

As far as Areïon’s claim that “to name oneself an anarchist is to situate oneself within an ancestral lineage, of all those who have named themselves anarchists before.” Well, yes and no. Intergenerational honoring and exchange is sorely missing in most people’s lives, but this relationship is most potent closer to home, outside of identity, politics, or ideas than most anarchists are willing to reach and is more meaningful in more selective and situational ways than most anarchists move in regard to other self-declared anarchists. If we lined up most people who have called themselves anarchists throughout history, I would have very little to do with most of them, and the closer one comes to our current pathetic subcultural manifestation, the less so. I don’t relate to people who primarily identify with what has become (and in many ways unfortunately always has been for most) a political identity or ideology. My grandmother—riddled with many problems from my perspective—had more to teach me and was more deserving of my love and remembrance than most anarchists.

True rebels, outlaws, drop-outs, deviants, and creative spirits warrant more respect from me and more to pass on than puffed-up play-warriors in some imagined struggle for liberation, and definitely much more than the millenarian insurrectionary religious zealots of this type. The parts of anarchist history that most anarchists fail to remember are the endless repeated mistakes both in theory and practice or the marginally-known exceptions to this norm (see the publishing project Enemy Combatant for some insights here). In the digital age, when every previous anarchist’s thought and action is supposedly at one’s fingertips, why do most continue to skip over the vital parts, have lame generalized and superficial takes, sink deeper into collectivism and leftism, play political games, promote reform, or even worse, martyrdom?

This idea that in “understanding anarchy as an ancestral lineage… anarchic life is born from anarchic death,” follows and promotes this lame logic of intrinsic lineage and martyrdom. Perhaps Areïon is most direct here: “The willingness of the anarchists of old to kill and die — to be martyred — for the beautiful idea enters the realm of the religious, or more properly the devotional, from Latin devotio, to “vow downwards,” originally a battlefield vow to gods and spirits of the underworld of one’s own life in exchange for victory.” So the one thing that is truly our own, our life, we sacrifice for a victory we cannot share in—except in the spilling of our own blood which is promised to the gods? (What about the 72 virgins?) No. The spirit of anarchy does not ask such a sacrifice (or offer empty rewards). It is not a god. If it were, I could only have a heretical and adversarial relationship with it.

To risk our lives for freedom or defense of autonomy or even as some night-time anonymous attack against specific parts of the machine’s apparatus (including individual actors), for sure, but that is very different than the religious martyrdom of some sort of notion of eternal glory and righteousness, I leave that for the multitude of fundamentalists and their endless wars. This all reminds me of a horrible take on the war in Palestine called “Gods Of Gaza”. It had very similar language and ideas as Warlike, Howling, Pure. It glorified Hamas and considered them part of a righteous “Axis of Resistance” (of which the authors situated themselves and anarchists within) which will eventually prove victorious across the globe, and soon! There was so much to criticize in the piece that it overwhelmed me. I burned it during a spontaneous pyre while the eclipse was occurring this past Spring, not as a sacrifice or offering, but as a heretical show of disgust for this type of thinking. My black sun and theirs seem to mean very different things, but that is another story.

The book continues on with Areïon’s faithful cult-like ideas on so-called “anarchist initiation”, filled with “secret rites and symbols, whose mystical significance can only be truly understood by the initiated.” I would agree, anarchy is not for most domesticated humans, but not because they are not anointed in some holy fluids or not in possession of the sacred and ordained black mask that is suggested. Despite its relative simplicity, anarchy is sadly over most people’s slavish heads (situationally not inherently). We are not proselytizers, we live anarchy, but we also are not a cult of those who hold the true wisdom either, mystifying the profane for only the high priests and prophetesses to comprehend and disseminate, making it sacred and removed from the dynamic elements of life. We are not the divine keepers of the holy Black Flame, nor carriers of the corny black and red banners, we are anarchists. We live anarchy, here and now.

As the book concludes with “Eternal Fire”, even when they describe interestingly immoral and more deviant historical (or possibly mythical) situations, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, and dutiful offerings of our blood for what Areïon has turned into a crusade of purity and righteousness is once again the main point, including very loaded and laughable statements like “May Day, the greatest of anarchist holy days”. May Day has never been that important of a day for me, no matter how hard I tried or it got pounded into me. The workerist and martyr angles never got me off. I suppose I can appreciate Beltane a little more, but still, it is not my holy day. I am left to pick through the detached and discarded refuse and make my own micro-cultural points of meaning with people I love.

I want to be absolutely clear: violence, revolt, belief, and spirituality, are not my problem here at all. In fact, they all are important elements to my very being and my relationship to anarchy. Even elements of myth-making, cult-like affinity, and ceremony can be interesting at times in certain ways. It is the “why” and “how” that I take issue with Areïon’s offering of Warlike, Howling, Pure. In times of deep desperation, millenarian, apocalyptic, and martyr-fueled ideas and actions are not uncommon, but as anarchists, they offer absolutely nothing but cautionary lessons. They are only relevant to religious zealots, political opportunists, or hyperbolic rhetorical posturing. “Warlike” is for people fighting for power, “Howling” can be authentically wild, but for most domesticated humans is usually just a bunch of self-aggrandizing hot-air, and “Pure”, well, this is the no-brainer concept anarchists should run from or attack.

So, the clock is ticking, all odds are stacked against us (especially if your lame goal is to transform society into your self-righteous vision of it, rather than fight for your autonomy and freedom from society and for those you care about), Areïon goes back to throw a last-ditched attempt at a millenarian insurrectionary hail Mary pass made of morality, religion and ideology, proposed with fiery rhetoric and opportunistic readings of history and myth, and filled with martyrdom, convoluted ceremony, and your anarchist blood…. Hmmm. Can you say blitz!

(Sorry for the sports reference,cI actually loath most forms of professional competition, but it seemed fitting.)

---------

* Invecchiare Selvatico was a primary editor and writer for Green Anarchy magazine and is the author of Black Blossoms At The End Of The World available from: www.underworldamusements.com or from the author: nazelpickens@gmail.com or PO Box 316 Williams, OR 97544

MANSON SPIRIT POSSESION

Trump's race-war fantasies continue to escalate — while the mainstream media pretends not to notice

Chauncey Devega, Salon
February 03, 2022


Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump greets fairgoers while campaigning at the Iowa State Fair on August 15, 2015 in Des Moines, Iowa. 

(Photo by Win Mcnamee for Agence France-Presse.)


Every day, Donald Trump becomes more his horrible true self. He commands the loyalty of tens of millions of people. He does not even pretend to be a statesman who loves America. He is a political cult leader, a sociopath and a model of antisocial and dangerous behavior. As psychologists and other public health experts have warned, Trump has "infected" many of his most loyal followers with the same mental pathologies.

Trump has an erotic attachment to violence, as do many of his followers. They are tied together by the Big Lie and other sadistic, and anti-human fictions. TrumpWorld is a malignant and vile alternate universe — one that longs to devour and consume the world as it actually exists.

Nearly every day we learn more evidence about Donald Trump and his cabal's attempted coup. In the face of the Justice Department's flaccid approach to those crimes (at least to this point), Trump and his agents continue to attack American democracy, the rule of law and the Constitution, now in plain sight.

Last Saturday at a rally in Conroe, Texas, Trump communicated his clear intent to cause mass mayhem and destruction in the United States — in essence, his willingness to burn it all down — should he ever face punishment for the crimes he committed as president.

Trump told his followers: "If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington. D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt."

He repeatedly described the prosecutors investigating him in New York, Washington and Atanta as "racist." (All four are Black.) He also attacked them as being "mentally sick" and said they were committing "prosecutorial misconduct at the highest level."

Trump also told the crowd in Conroe that "in 2024, we are going to take back that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white, that is so magnificent and that we all love. We are going to take back the White House." All these remarks were read off a teleprompter, rather than improvised.

Trump is a master performer who knows his audience very well. In no way were they uncomfortable with his white supremacist invective and implicit invitations to violence. They applauded. This should not be surprising: Public opinion research has repeatedly shown that Trump's voters are motivated by a sense of white victimology and racial grievance politics, and by a belief that white people like them should remain dominant in our increasingly diverse country.

During his Conroe speech, Trump acted as a political crime boss and dictator in waiting, promising (preemptive) pardons for his followers who engage in political violence and other criminal or terrorist acts on his behalf.

"If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly," he said. "We will treat them fairly. … And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly."

This fits into a larger pattern. At his rally in Arizona several weeks earlier, Trump made false claims about the pandemic and health care that were framed in explicitly racial terms:

The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating — just, denigrating — white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you're white you don't get the vaccine, or if you're white you don't get therapeutics. It's unbelievable to think this. And nobody wants this. Black people don't want it, white people don't want it, nobody wants it. ... In New York state, if you're white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health — think of it, if you're white you go right to the back of the line. ... This race-based medicine is not only anti-American, it's government tyranny in the truest sense of the word.

Trump's statements are more than stochastic terrorism or other implied threats. These are direct instructions to his followers about who their enemies are. Trump has recently focused his attention on Black people, even more than usual. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch suggests that we should "drill down on arguably the most important and alarming word in Trump's statement: racist":

At first blush, it seems to come out of left field, in the sense of what could be racist about looking into a white man's role in an attempted coup or his cooked financial books? Except that it happens that three of the key prosecutors investigating Trump — the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and new Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg — as well as the chair of the House committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, are all Black.

Thus, it's both alarming and yet utterly predictable that Trump would toss the gasoline of racial allegations onto his flaming pile of grievances, knowing how that will play with the Confederate flag aficionados within the ex-president's cult. In tying skin color into his call for mobs in Atlanta or New York, Trump is seeking to start a race war — no different, really, from Dylann Roof. Roof used a .45-caliber Glock handgun, while Trump uses a podium and the services of fawning right-wing cable-TV networks. Sadly, the latter method could prove more effective.

Trump's threats against Willis and James carry particular resonance at this moment, given that President Biden has announced his historic intention to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump is an entrepreneur of racial and ethnic violence. In that sense, he is not dissimilar to leaders in places like Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, who used fear, lies, stereotypes and other dehumanizing and eliminationist rhetoric and threats of violence to encourage ethnic genocide. Trump has made it clear that he wants a "race war", where black and brown people are targeted for widescale violence by white people. There may be thousands, or tens of thousands (or even more) of white people willing to follow his orders. The danger is extreme.

The thousands of Trump's followers who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, represent a deeper and broader group in American society who are becoming more radicalized and less restrained. While some of Trump's attack force may face incarceration, many have not been deterred in the least, and are only becoming more resolute and determined.

Fascist intimidation and threats of violence are being normalized across American society. Right-wing paramilitaries and street thugs are attempting to claim public space through marches, "protests" and other actions designed to signal their growing power and influence — and, most importantly, to intimidate those Americans who believe in pluralism and democracy.

Trump's fantasies of race war are only one part of a larger strategy aimed at turning America into a 21st-century apartheid state. Republicans intend to make it almost impossible for a Democratic candidate to win the presidential election — and many state and local elections as well. They are using the moral panic around "critical race theory" and other culture-war issues to impose an Orwellian reshaping of America's schools, where it will be illegal to tell the truth about American history or to discuss subject matter deemed to be "unpatriotic" or somehow "uncomfortable" for white people.

In Florida and other states, Republicans are using state authority and resources to silence dissent and protest. This includes laws that encourage right-wing vigilante violence, and the creation of "election police" intended to intimidate and harass Black and brown people as well as liberals, progressives and other "enemies" of "real America".

What should the American people do? Who is going to save democracy? Not the Department of Justice. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has limited powers to hold Trump and his cabal responsible. The Democratic Party has repeatedly shown that it lacks even a basic understanding of how to explain or address the existential dangers posed by Trump and the Republican fascists.

The mainstream media has continued to fail in its primary task as guardians of democracy. Instead of clearly, consistently and forcefully telling the truth about Donald Trump and the neofascist movement, the news media remains addicted to horserace journalism, "both-sides-ism" and other forms of false equivalency.

Writing at Media Matters, Eric Kleefeld summarized these failures:
Mainstream media outlets should be treating all of this as a five-alarm fire for American democracy and the U.S. Constitution. But instead, Politico's Playbook on Sunday pondered how Trump's declarations might affect Republican messaging and prospects for the midterm election….

The New York Times positioned Trump's comments in terms of supposed Republican infighting and messaging: "The statement signifies an increase in the intensity of the former president's push to litigate the 2020 election and comes days after Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, issued a public warning to Republican candidates to 'respect the results of our democratic process' during an interview with CNN." (The alleged conflict among Republicans is also exaggerated by mainstream media outlets.)
The Washington Post ran a piece Sunday evening, titled "Trump's Texas trip illustrates his upsides and downsides for Republicans and their midterm hopes." Immediately after the paragraph detailing Trump's offer of pardons to January 6 rioters, along with his incitement of new demonstrations against district attorneys, the article proceeded to discuss what this might mean for Republican candidates in primary and general elections ...

And in a separate but also consequential example of missing the real message, The Associated Press said that Trump's "offer represents an attempt by Trump to further minimize the most significant attack on the seat of government since the War of 1812."
Trump didn't just "minimize" what happened, he is actively trying to seed more of it.

Pro-democracy Americans will need to organize across society with the goal of pressuring the Democratic Party, major corporations and other elites into pushing back forcefully against the Republican fascist movement's attacks on American democracy and freedom. Pro-democracy Americans will also need to organize on the local level to resist, survive and defeat the rising fascist tide.

In the end, it will be the American people, through direct action and mass mobilization — strikes, boycotts, direct action and other types of corporeal politics — who must save American democracy.

On his eponymous TV show, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," Fred Rogers told children (and the many adults who were watching as well) that if they were in trouble they should "look for the helpers." America needs Fred Rogers' wisdom now. The helpers are our neighbors and other members of the community who are willing to struggle and suffer to protect America's multiracial democracy and to create a more humane society. The helpers are those who have been sounding the alarm, sometimes at great personal risk, about the dangers of Trump's regime. But in the end we are adults, not children. The most essential helpers are looking back at us in the mirror.

Black Sky Thinking

Why We're Investigating Extreme Politics in Underground Music
Dylan Miller , November 26th, 2018

With the far right in ascendence across the globe, there's never been a more necessary time to investigate fascist and racist infiltration, current and historical, into the underground culture we love. In an introductory essay to a new Quietus series, Dylan Miller explains why we're doing it

For over 10 years now this website has championed underground music, art and culture which seeks to challenge its audience, provoke thought and subvert mainstream ideas. Part of our purpose is to celebrate artists who have left a unique stamp on the world through uncompromising vision and determination, artists like The Fall, Sunn O))), Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Gnaw Their Tongues, Dragged Into Sunlight, Death Grips, Fat White Family and The Body. Whilst sonically dissimilar, all these bands share a disregard for convention and a sincere desire to push artistic and intellectual boundaries.

Artistic transgression and subversion are vital elements of any socially progressive culture, but mindlessly pushing against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, artistically, politically, or socially, is not necessarily progress.

In his excellent book England’s Hidden Reverse (2015), David Keenan argues: “to take morality so seriously you have to pick it apart yourself in order to rebuild it in the face of the truth of existence, in all its horror and beauty, is intensely moral”. To push limits of expression in such a way that boundaries are questioned and moral lines are overstepped (either intentionally or by sheer accident and experimentation) is a moral endeavour. But, through this process of picking apart the fabric of morality, the more positive and vital elements of our communities may, if we are not vigilant, be exposed to the threat of entryism – infiltration and appropriation – by those whose motives and beliefs are regressive and altogether more sinister.

Underground culture has frequently utilised the aesthetics and imagery of fascist or extremist ideologies as a means to subvert, satirise or mirror social, cultural and political trends. In the immediate post-war period we witnessed this in the biker gangs of the 50s, who openly flaunted swastikas and iron crosses brought home from WWII by their fathers, wearing them as an act of generational rebellion and, perhaps, twisted patriotism. They simultaneously celebrated the Allied victory over the Nazis whilst shocking the ‘straight,’ law-abiding citizens they sought to differentiate themselves from, and challenging the dour post-war values they sought to liberate themselves from.

Gradually – culture moved slowly in those days – these underground, potentially dangerous acts of social defiance manifested themselves in the new pop culture. Many have interpreted the wave David Bowie made outside Victoria Station on returning from Sweden in 1976 as a Nazi salute, while his coke-fuelled fascination with fascism rose to the surface on that year’s Station To Station, a record peppered with references to Nietzsche and the occultist Aleister Crowley. “I believe Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader. After all, Fascism is really nationalism” Bowie told a journalist that year, while musing to another that Hitler was “one of the first rock stars”. Bowie, to his credit, was publicly contrite the following year: “I have made my two or three glib, theatrical observations on English society and the only thing I can now counter with is to state that I am NOT a fascist.”

At that point, racism was part of mainstream culture. Later in 1976, Eric Clapton drunkenly declared his support for anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell to an audience in Birmingham, who probably wanted to hear him yell “Laaaaylaaaaa”, rather than “get the foreigners out, get the wogs out, get the coons out" and "keep Britain white". That year, a shit one for Britain, which was plunging fast into and social and economic doldrums, saw a surge of support for the Far Right, in the shape of the National Front, and the formation of Rock Against Racism as a response from the musical underground.

But not everyone got the message. High street punks, following the lead of Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious, adopted the Nazi swastika as a symbolic rejection of the suburban society they wanted no part of. In Manchester, Joy Division’s Hitler Youth stylings and references to Rudolph Hess – not to mention the fact they were named after a concentration camp brothel from the novel House Of Dolls – can, perhaps generously, be read as clumsy, yet powerful attempts to find beauty in the macabre and to hold a mirror up to Britain’s own psychic ills. In London, Throbbing Gristle brought extreme performance art to the music scene and invented “industrial” music, creating the blueprint for four decades, and counting, of electronic noise outfits. TG’s logo cleverly merged Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists lightning bolt with Bowie’s glam fash-flash from the cover of 1973’s Aladdin Sane. TG called their Martello Street studio the Death Factory, an overt reference to the Nazis’ wartime death camps and titled tracks ‘Zyklon B Zombie’ (a reference to the gas used to exterminate their victims) and ‘Subhuman’. Initially oblique, the reasoning behind their extreme references were gradually made explicit: an attempt to expose the hypocrisies of politicians and the conservative media, and to draw parallels between the mundane brutalities of day-to-day life and the horrors that mankind so often inflicts upon itself.

Following in TG’s wake came a grimly-determined race to the bottom, as the early 1980s experimental noise scene entirely blurred, or perhaps simply erased, the lines between provocative art and outright political incitement. Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend, Death in June and others sought to out-outrage audiences, and each other, with visual and lyrical preoccupations with far right politics, serial killers, rape and sadism. The deliberate obfuscation of motive was a standard technique for generating mystique amongst many of these groups – did they really want to move in with the Moors Murderers and bring about a new Holocaust, or did they just like shouting about it? Many of these early noiseboys, now older and perhaps wiser, put it down to youthful indiscretion; some have chosen to maintain their tired mystique, while others remain defiantly unapologetic.

In America Boyd Rice, aka American noise artist Non, still supported by Mute Records, has spoken publicly about amongst other things, his Social Darwinism, his misogyny and his unusual beliefs about rape and, over four decades, surrounded himself with a wretched pantheon that includes Tom Metzger (leader of US neo-Nazi organisation White Aryan Resistance), Bob Heick (founder of American Front, another White Nationalist order), Charles Manson (whom he visited in prison on a number of occasions) and Michael Moynihan, of neo-folk/martial band Blood Axis, himself for many years an intellectual influencer for America’s new right.

In Europe, cryptic references to the ‘metapolitical’ fascism of European New Right ideologues like Julius Evola, Alan de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin are de rigeur for the neo-folk/martial post industrial music popularised by Death in June, whose only core member Douglas Pearce is, shall we say, unguarded in his vituperation of racial diversity and multiculturalism – greatest hits include “The West’s liberalism will be its death” and “Britain imported millions of unskilled labourers from the colonies for that kind of work and look what a huge success that was”. Former DIJ member Tony Wakeford was at one time a British National Front activist (though he recanted his racist past in 2007), while his follow up groups Above the Ruins and Sol Invictus have included members – like Gary Smith and Ian Read – with direct links to right-wing extremism. It’s hardly surprising then that convicted National Action activist Claudia Patatas should be seen photographed, a beaming fan, alongside Pearce, or that a member of the murderous American neo-nazi organisation Atomwaffen Division, is seen sporting a striking Death In June totenkopf T Shirt.

In Scandinavia during the early 1990s, young Black Metallers prioritised the visceral impact of their look and their music over intellectual considerations. And, within the largely equal-opportunities misanthropy central to the ethos of the scene, a vein of explicitly National Socialist Black Metal emerged. Its poster boy was, and still is, Varg Vikernes of Burzum, whose beliefs that “true Norwegian culture” was being eroded by Judeo-Christian values were backed up with a series of notorious church burnings. Having served 14 years for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Euronymous, Vikernes now lives in France, spreading far right propaganda via his ‘Thulean Perspective’ YouTube channel. Countless National Socialist black metal bands have since sprung up across the globe, and as with the noise and neofolk scenes before it, it’s perhaps no surprise that fans of a musical aesthetic which thrives on darkness, misanthropy and sonic brutality, should be drawn to the outer edges of politics and occultism. Membership of organisations like the crypto-nazi-satanic Order Of Nine Angles have grown dramatically as a result.

The latter’s infiltration of the UK underground music will be the the subject of the first in an irregular series of features examining the ways in which extremist political ideas have entered (predominantly) underground music cultures. Looking at bands, albums, labels and movements the articles will attempt to understand, and present clearly, the motives of the players involved, the ideologies they address, the historical contexts within which they were formed and the problems that they may raise today.

We hope to discover why some people think it acceptable to wear a Burzum or Death in June t-shirt in public, when they would never dream of wearing of wearing the slogans of a White Nationalist organisation, or a far right political party; and we hope to understand why it might have been OK for Siouxsie Sioux to wear a swastika armband in 1976, but Christine and the Queens probably wouldn’t get away with it now (nor, presumably, would she want to).

Fear not, this isn’t the birth of a new, conservative era for the Quietus. We aren’t going to fall into the kneejerk-triggered traps that state that artists should be held responsible for the actions of their fans, or that participation in ‘negative’, misanthropic music scenes leads one to acts of violence. Real world atrocities are the result of a multitude of inter-related social, economic and psychological factors – culture can, of course, play a part in shaping and influencing events, normalising certain destructive attitudes and beliefs for example, but we know from years of experience that listening to heavy metal won’t make you a satanic murderer, that listening to Marilyn Manson didn’t cause the Columbine school shootings, and that rap, grime and drill aren’t the cause of gang violence.

But, what (if any) responsibility do we have to police our musical and cultural scenes? What responsibility do artists have to police their fanbase? Are an artist's personality defects, behavioural flaws or political beliefs reason enough not to at least explore their work?

There is an argument to be made that music scenes and artistic communities are self-policing, that the majority of small underground and experimental scenes are populated by reasonable people, that arseholes are usually pushed out simply because nobody wants to be around them. Following this logic, any attempts at political entryism by, say, a far right element would simply be excluded or ignored. Sadly, however, history has shown that this is an idealised, romantic vision of the cultural underground and arseholes, especially arseholes with bands or a following, are always amongst us, along with the same bigotry and ignorance that exist in the wider world.

Our task is not an easy one. At a time when the notion of objective truth is regularly called into question and the Orwellian practice of ‘doublethink’ is becoming an everyday reality, separating ‘difficult’ or ‘provocative’ art from genuinely anti-democratic far right sentiments becomes an increasingly difficult task. The xenophobic rhetoric of the far right filters down into the underground just as ideas emerging from the underground influence mainstream politics and culture.

Boyd Rice and Douglas Pearce might be brushed off as hipster pranksters using confrontational, dadaist or situationist methods to achieve their artistic ends, in part because underground culture audiences – who are, predominantly, good people – find it hard to accept that people like them mingle with people like us. The same blend of ignorance and denial means wearing a Burzum or Death In June T-shirt can be considered a harmless, edgier-than-thou exercise in naughty provocation, rather than the end result of an exchange that involves paying economic and cultural capital to people who would likely do many of us harm if so empowered.

The times have changed. Playing into the myth of harmless artistic provocation in the name of cultural libertarianism is simply feeding a beast that would remove many of our own personal, social and cultural freedoms. As music fans and supporters of underground cultures in all their raging complexity and beautiful diversity, we have a duty, and an imperative, to question, reappraise and, where necessary, hold to account, the artists who we listen to and support.

Year of the Pig

Today is Chinese New Year celebrated through out Asia, amongst those practicing Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

In the Taoist magickal practice (which Asian Astrology, alchemy and Feng Shui are based on) it is the year of the Red Pig, or Yin (feminine) Pig, not the Boar but the Sow.

In the Taoist scrying system of the I Ching the year of the pig is the Hexagram 31.

Astrology and other systems of magickal symbolism are psychological systems of subjective interpretation of events. While they have their debunker's and septics, they are as valid as other systems of subjective psychology like Rosarch Tests and Freudian dream interpretation.

As far as astrological significance of global events goes I have listed some for the year of the pig.

In the wonderful world of syncronicity the Year of the Pig was when Nixon declared the Vietnamization of the Viet Nam War and the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops from the war. And in this Year of the Pig we find America declaring the Iraqization of their war in Iraq and the beginning of the end of that war.

After all Sun Tzu was also a Taoist.

The Tao Te Ching, the Inner Chapters of Chuang Tzu, and the I Ching are not the only Taoist texts. There are many other famous and important ones we tend to overlook - The Art of War, and the other strategy books of that genre are all deeply rooted in Taoism.

Pigs in History

Pigs, Shit, and Chinese History, Or Happy Year of the Pig

A little background: In the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Chinese farmers actually did pretty well. Imperialist depredations damaged China politically but many farmers benefitted from new technology, expanded transportation, growing urban markets, and even exports. Alan’s map suggests to me that the number of pigs in North China grew because farmers, long skilled at responding to the market, used these old friends on a new scale. The Rural Reconstruction reformers correctly saw that the key to improving village life was not to destroy some unchanging “feudal” system but to take advantage of the long standing commercial mentality of the small farmer. Among other things, they introduced better breeds of pigs.

Schmalzer argues that the reformers nonetheless made several mistakes. One was to assume that Chinese pigs served the same function as American ones. American farmers wanted pigs to convert their abundant corn into bacon, not scraps into fertilizer. American pigs were “scientifically” bred to produce more meat and therefore less fertilizer. Second, the reformers left out gender: Chinese pigs were domestic partners, raised mostly by women. What’s more, the Chinese system prized sows, and over the years bred selectively for sows which produced large, frequent, litters of admittedly smaller piglets; American breeders valued boars and bred for size and fashionable looks to compete at the county fair. The reformers introduced American boars so huge that they had to build special support platforms for mating.

When the Japanese invasion of 1937 ended the Ding Xian experiment, the imported pigs disappeared into the chaos of war. James Yen and agricultural scientists had no time to produce modern, scientific techniques based in Chinese practice. So in the end the difference was not between “scientific” (i.e. Western) pig breeding and Chinese folkways but between American and Chinese needs and situations.

An afterword. When my wife and I visited Yen’s Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement in the late 1960s, local workers showed us the air conditioned pens housing the pigs introduced from the States; the new pigs, they explained, couldn’t stand the heat, were sensitive to sun burn, and demanded special treatment – not unlike, the local workers slyly added, most of the other Americans they knew.

And you thought pigs were pigs! If so, you should read Richard P. Horwitz, Hog Ties: What Pigs Tell Us About America (1998). Rich, a friend who teaches American Studies at University of Iowa, worked on a pig farm and knows his… fertilizer. Pigs are more like people than most animals, so Rich demonstrates that the way we treat them says a lot about our values and practices.

Forecast for Global Issues 2007

This is a year with countless gossips and arguments. There are dispute everywhere, on every level. The people have their own fights and the nature has its own conflicts.

The trigram that represents the world¡¦s luck in 2007 is ¡¥Xian¡¦. The Xian trigram represents the communion between the two genders and the connection between the heaven and earth. On the up side, it means understanding. On the down side, it may turn into arguments related to romantic affairs.

The trigram has the change on its fourth stroke, meaning the imbalance of Yin and Yang energy. That is why the world is filled with arguments and gossips. The fourth stroke is also where human stands according to legends. That explains why most important fights and disputes happen between human beings not nations.

Communication could make people feel good if it¡¦s not forced upon those concerned. Imposed mandatory communication is horrifying and repulsive. The arguments among human tend to happen behind closed doors. For instance, the U.S., China and even a small piece of land like Macau would have to deal with their internal conflicts. Their people would keep arguing on and on.

The Xian trigram (Hexagram 31) just gives a general impression of the state of matters, without revealing the details. Yet, more details are disclosed by its subsidiary trigram ¡¥Xiao Guo¡¦, the fifth stroke of which says, ¡¥Overcast without rain; clouds from the Western outskirt; crisis of the new sovereign just like an animal caught in its cave.¡¦ From a pessimistic point of view, the text can be interpreted as a major incident is in the making. No matter how hard someone tries to hide, he/she would still be discovered by those strong and powerful. This is especially for those countries which seal themselves completely from the rest of the world; and those which haven¡¦t been recognized internationally.

Those internationally wanted by the police, because of criminal offences, political issues and terrorism, would be arrested in 2007. Certain countries or regions would also be threatened by external forces.

On the other hand, certain objects or people that have long been forgotten; and those items with profound historical significance would be prioritized once again this year.

In terms of global economy, those less affluent countries would see more resources and national growth in 2007.

Finally, accidents are likely to occur to structures or geographic formations situated on great height, such as satellites, mountains, houses or bridges.

Year of the Golden Pig?

The belief about pigs is expected to be exaggerated more than ever this year.

The lunar calendar designates each year as one of the 12 zodiac animals; the pig is the 12th zodiac animal.

The lunar year follows the sequence of the 12 zodiac animals _ rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and lastly, pig.

But this pig year, called the year of ``chonghae,’’ which means a red pig, returns every 60 years.

Among other pig years circling in a lunar cyclic numeral system, the red pig year is believed to be the most auspicious pig year, according to a research of the National Folk Museum of Korea.

The red pig year is considered a year of booming businesses and family.

More interestingly, this year is strongly believed to be the ``Year of the Golden Pig,’’ which only comes around every 600 years, according to fortunetellers, a rumor that emerged in Korea and China.

People believe children born this year will be blessed with good luck and financial wealth. As wedding halls were crowded in 2006, maternity hospitals are expected to be in 2007.

Regardless of whether it's just superstition or not, the impact on society has been quite enormous.

The nation predicts that birthrate is expected to rise 10 percent from the previous average because of the myths of the Year of the Golden Pig, helping maternity and baby related industries enjoy a boom much like the effects of the millennium baby boom in 2000.

However, many say that this will be debunked just as 2006, which was dubbed the year of ``two springs’’ (lunar calendar) and also a lucky year for couples to get married, was just feeding wedding-related businesses.

Folklorists say that the year of the golden pig is groundless as it is hardly mentioned in Korean history, except for the mythical story about Choi Chi-won, a literati during the Silla Kingdom (57 B.C.-A.D. 935).

According to the museum’s research, the myth says that Choi was the son of a golden pig with magical powers that kidnapped a county magistrate’s wife.

The magistrate rescued his wife from the pig by using leather from a deer, which the pig feared, based on the mythical belief. Later, the wife gave birth to Choi, who was believed to be the pig’s baby.

A Mythical Animal with Supernatural Power

Although Korean historical records do not buttress the myths about the year of the golden pig, some attribute mythical meanings to pigs such as in the ``Samguksagi,’’ a history of the Three Kingdoms _ Paekje (18 B.C.-A.D. 660), Koguryo (37 B.C.-A.D. 668) and Silla (57 B.C.-A.D. 935) _ written during the Koryo Kingdom by Kim Bu-sik and ``Koryosa,’’ a history of the Koryo Kingdom (918-1392).

According to the museum, the two history annals include a story where a pig helped the kingdoms designate the capitals of Koguryo and Koryo in Kungnaesong and Songak respectively.

In Samguksagi, one day, King Sansang, who had no son, was given a supernatural instruction from a god to have a baby. During a ritual, a pig that was to be sacrificed ran away and a woman helped to catch the pig. The king had sexual relations with her and she bore him a son.

Like this, pigs played prophetic roles for many rulers and sometimes as a messenger connecting them to god.

Sacrificial Animal in Rituals

From ancient times to the present day, it is easy to see heads of pigs on tables as sacrificial offerings during shamanistic rituals, and sold in traditional markets due to consistent demand.

The folk custom to use a pig’s head as an object of worship and symbol of abundance dates back to the Koguryo Kingdom.

Pigs were sacrificed in Samguksagi, when people prayed to the gods of heaven and earth.

People pray for success to the heads of pigs when they start on a venture such as opening a business or even before filming of a movie.

Symbols of Wealth, Good Luck

Pigs are omnivorous animals that survive well under any climate and circumstances.

They also are fertile giving birth to 6 to 12 piglets on average, and grow faster than any other animal.

For that reason, a shop owner hangs a picture on his wall of a pig feeding a lot of piglets, symbolizing fertility and abundance.

Also, dreams about pigs are thought of as auspicious, foretelling the gain of wealth. When people dream of a pig at night, they often buy lottery tickets or make an investment.

Also, the dream considered as a sign of conception as a pig symbolizes fertility.

The Year of the Pig

by Emil De Antonio and Bill Nichols

from Jump Cut, no. 19, December 1978, pp. 37-38
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005

Year of Pig Marxist film

by Emil De Antonio

I want to reply to two lines in Bill Nichols's "New from California Newsreel" in Jump Cut, No. 17, p. 10.

"These films have their greatest value in ongoing political struggles to organize and mobilize the working class and Third World peoples. It is important to bear this in mind as a fundamental quality for it places them in a different context than left-liberal films that circulate predominantly in a middle-class, educational context (colleges, high schools, public libraries), such as IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG (Emile de Antonio, 1968)."

IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG was/is an organizing weapon, a collage/history of the people's struggle in Vietnam. That collage was made with the help of the DRV, the NLF, French Marxists, film and television friends of the Czech Democratic Republic (1967), the German Democratic Republic, U.S. deserters, antiwar veterans and the antiwar movement itself. It was made when the Movement was young, large, high on struggle and emotion, and without knowledge of what had happened in Vietnam, when it happened and why. No U.S. protest was shown in the film because it was the other addressing itself to us, frequently in our words and images. It was also the way we saw them from the mid-1930s to the Têt Offensive. It was a Marxist, historical line, not free from error.

Its audience was varied, intense, in some places even wide. It played European television but never U.S. Not even now. It played the U.S and Europe theatrically. Theaters were attacked. Screens were painted over with hammer and sickle (Los Angeles, among others); bomb threats to the theater in Houston; in Paris during a long, successful run, the cinema was systematically stink bombed. It was used as a tool by the Moratorium; it was a benefit for the Chicago Seven at the opening of their trial; the Australian antiwar movement used it as its primary film weapon; it played GI coffee houses; it played teach-ins. I still meet people who say, "Your film turned me to antiwar activity." And yes, it still plays colleges.

It was the first U.S. Marxist film to be nominated for an Academy Award. That didn't mean as much to me as the ring a DRV officer solemnly gave me in Leipzig where the film won a prize, a ring made from a plane shot down over the DRV.

If we forget history, we are only a convulsive twitch to today's media output. That output is false, bad and works to blot out yesterday's reality. The struggle is always the same; the ultimate goal is always the same; but the currents, the cast, the emphases, the disguises change. I am not a left liberal and neither is the film.

Year of the Pig

1911

• Northern Territory is separated from South Australia and transferred to Commonwealth control.
• January 3 - In London, in what becomes known as the Siege of Sidney Street, the Metropolitan Police and the Scots Guards engage in a shootout with a criminal gang of Latvian anarchists held up in a building in the East End.
• March - The first installment of a serialized version of Frederick Winslow Taylor's monograph The Principles of Scientific Management (online version here) appears in American Magazine. The complete series runs in the March, April, and May issues. It is the first time that The Principles of Scientific Management is widely read. The efficiency movement, which has been simmering of late, boils over and becomes a craze.
• May 8 - Pancho Villa launches an attack against government troops in Ciudad Juarez without Madero's permission. Government troops surrender May 10.
• May 11 - Futurist exhibition in Milan was the first of efforts by the group to make its theories concrete.
• May 15 - The United States Supreme Court declares Standard Oil to be an "unreasonable" monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders the company to be dissolved.

1923

• January 1 - Grouping of all UK railway companies into four larger companies.
• January 10 - Lithuania seizes and annexes Memel.
• January 11 - Troops from France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr area to force Germany to pay its reparation payments.
• March 9 - Vladimir Lenin suffers a stroke, his third, which renders him bedridden and unable to speak; consequently he retires his position as Chairman of the Soviet government.
• July 19-20 night - Assassination of Pancho Villa.
• July 24 - The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in the First World War.
• August 2 - Warren G. Harding, 29th President of the United States, (1921 - 1923) dies in office and is succeeded by Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929).

1935

• January 1 - Italian colonies of Tripoli and Cyrenaica are joined together as Libya
• January 7 - Italian premier Benito Mussolini and French foreign minister Pierre Laval conclude agreement in which each power undertakes not to oppose the other's colonial claims
• January 8
  • Elvis Presley is born in a two room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi.
• January 11 - Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California
• January 16 - FBI kills Barker gang, including Ma Barker, in a shootout
• January 19 - Coopers Inc. sells the world's first briefs
• January 28 - Iceland becomes the first country to legalize abortion on medical grounds
• April 14 - Dust Bowl: The great dust storm, made famous by Woody Guthrie in his "dust bowl ballads". The hardest hit areas were in Eastern New Mexico and Colorado, and western Oklahoma.
• May 6 - New Deal: Executive Order 7034 creates the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
• November 5 - Parker Brothers releases the board game Monopoly.
• November 8 - A dozen labor leaders come together to announce the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), an organization charged with pushing the cause for industrial unionism.

1947

• January 1 - British mines nationalized
• January 1 - Nigeria gains limited autonomy
• January 1 - The Canadian Citizenship Act goes into effect
• January 3 - Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.
• January 10 - United Nations takes control of the free city of Trieste
• January 15 - Elizabeth Short (the "Black Dahlia") is found murdered
• January 30 - February 8 - heavy blizzard in Canada buries towns from Winnipeg to Calgary
• January 31 - Communists take power in Poland.
• March 1 - The International Monetary Fund begins to operate.
• March 12 - The Truman Doctrine is proclaimed to help stem the spread of Communism.
• April 15 - Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to be on a professional baseball diamond.
• une 5 - Secretary of State Gen George Marshall outlines the Marshall Plan for U.S. aid to Europe.
• June 10 - Saab produces its first automobile.
• June 20 - Bugsy Siegel found shot in the Beverly Hills mansion of Virginia Hill
• June 21 - A Seaman named Harold Dahl claims to have seen six UFOs near Maury Island. The next morning Dahl reports the first modern Men in Black encounter.
• June 21 - The Canadian Parliament voted unaminiously to pass several laws regarding displaced foreign refugees.
• June 23 - The United States Senate follows the United States House of Representatives in overriding U.S. President Harry S. Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act.
• July 5 - Downed UFO allegedly found in the Roswell UFO incident, written about by Stanton T. Friedman.
• July 10 - Princess Elizabeth announces engagement to Philip Mountbatten
• July 11 - Exodus (ship) departs France to Palestine with 4500 Jewish Holocaust survivor refugees
• July 18 - Following wide media and UNSCOP coverage, Exodus (ship) is captured by British troops and refused entry to Palestine in the port of Haifa
• July 18 - President Harry S. Truman signs the Presidential Succession Act into law which places the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore next in the line of succession after the United States Vice President.
• July 19 - Murder of Burmese nationalist Aung San
• July 24 - 100 year anniversary of Brigham Young leading 148 Mormon pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City.
• July 26 - Cold War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman signs the National Security Act into United States law creating the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council.
• July 29 - After being shut off on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment, ENIAC, one of the world's first digital computers, is turned on after a memory upgrade. It will remain in continuous operation until October 2, 1955.

1959

• January 1 - Cuba: Fulgencio Batista flees Havana when forces of Fidel Castro advance.
• January 2 - CBS Radio cuts four soap operas: Backstage Wife, Our Gal Sunday, Road of Life, and This is Nora Drake.
• January 2 - Castro's troops approach Havana.
• January 3 - Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state.
• January 4 - In Cuba, rebel troops lead by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos enter the city of Havana.
• January 6 - Fidel Castro arrives in Havana.
• January 7 - The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
• January 8 - Charles De Gaulle inaugurated as the first president of French Fifth Republic.
• February 1 - A referendum in Switzerland turns down female suffrage.
• March 9 - The Barbie doll debuts.

1971

• January 7 - The British heavy metal band Black Sabbath releases their breakthrough album, Paranoid.
• January 19 - Representatives of 23 western oil companies begin negotiations with OPEC in Tehran to stabilize oil prices. February 14 they sign a treaty with 6 Persian Gulf countries.
• January 25 - In Los Angeles, Charles Manson and 3 female "family members" are found guilty of the 1969 murder of Sharon Tate and others at her house.
• February 7 - Switzerland gives women voting rights in state elections, but not in all canton-specific ones.
• February 8 - A new stock market index called the Nasdaq debuts.
• February 21 - The Convention on Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna.
• February 26 - Secretary General U Thant signs the United Nations proclamation of the vernal equinox as Earth Day.
• February 27 - Doctors in the first Dutch abortion clinic (Mildredhuis in Arnhem) start to perform abortus provocatus.
• March 1 - A bomb explodes in the men's room at the White House; the Weather Underground claims responsibility.
• March 1 - Bill Davis becomes premier of Ontario, replacing John Robarts
• March 4 - Prime Minister Trudeau weds Margaret Sinclair
• March 29 - U.S. Army Lieutenant William Calley is found guilty of 22 murders in the My Lai massacre and sentenced to life in prison (later pardoned).
• June 13 - Vietnam War: The New York Times begins to publish the Pentagon Papers.
• July 3 - The Doors musician Jim Morrison is found dead in his Paris, France apartment.
• August 15 - President Richard Nixon announces that the United States will no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value, effectively ending the Bretton Woods system. He also imposes a 90-day freeze on wages, prices and rents. The Dow rallies nearly 4% the next day.
• August 28 - Canada's first gay rights demonstration, organized by George Hislop, takes place on Parliament Hill
• August 30 - The Alberta Progressive Conservatives under Peter Lougheed defeat the Social Credit government under Harry E. Strom in a general election, ending 36 years of uninterrupted power for Social Credit in Alberta.
• October 29 - Vietnam War: Vietnamization - The total number of American troops still in Vietnam drops to a record low of 196,700 (the lowest since January 1966).

1983

• March 23 - Strategic Defense Initiative: U.S. President Ronald Reagan makes his initial proposal to develop technology to intercept enemy missiles. The media dub this plan "Star Wars."
• May 9 - Pope John Paul II retracts the ban on Galileo Galilei.
• May 17 - Lebanon, Israel, and the United States sign an agreement on Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
• June 9 - Conservative Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 1979, wins a landslide victory (42% of the popular vote) over Michael Foot, who led a highly-divided and weakened Labour Party which earned only 28% of the vote. The much improved economy (after 2-3 years of restructuring), her victory in the Falkands, as well as shrinking unemployment rates consolidates her election victory.
• July 25 - Anti-Tamil riots break out in Sri Lanka, leaving over 3,000 Tamils massacred and millions of dollars worth of their property destroyed. This genocide is the beginning of a deadly civil war and ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka.
• August 21 - Benigno Aquino, Jr., Philippines opposition leader, is assassinated in Manila just as he returns from exile.
• September 1 - Cold War: Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft enters Soviet airspace. All 269 on board are killed.
• September 25-September 26 - Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov averts a worldwide nuclear war.
• October 19 - Maurice Bishop, the Prime Minister of Grenada, and 40 others are executed in a military coup.
• October 25 - United States troops invade Grenada at the behest of Eugenia Charles of Dominica, a member of the Organization of American States.
• October 25 - Microsoft Word is first released.
• November 2 - Martin Luther King Day: At the White House Rose Garden, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating a federal holiday on the third Monday of every January to honor American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
• November 17 - The Zapatista Army of National Liberation is founded.

1995

• The World Trade Organization is established to replace GATT.
• January 4 - The 104th Congress convenes, the first controlled by Republicans in both houses since 1953.
• January 31 - U.S. President Bill Clinton invokes emergency powers to extend a $20 billion loan to help Mexico avert financial collapse.
• February 23 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average gains 30.28 to close at 4,003.33 -- The Dow's first ever close above 4,000.
• February 26 - The United Kingdom's oldest investment banking firm, Barings Bank, collapses after securities broker Nick Leeson loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
• March 3 - In Somalia, the United Nations peacekeeping mission ends.
• March 20 - Members of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult release sarin gas on 5 separate railway trains in Tokyo, killing 12 and injuring hundreds.
• March 24 - For the first time in 26 years, no British soldiers patrol the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland.
• May 11 - In New York City, more than 170 countries decide to extend the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty indefinitely and without conditions.
• May 25 - Egan v. Canada: The Supreme Court of Canada rules that sexual orientation is a prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
• Summer - Iraq disarmament crisis: According to UNSCOM, the unity of the UN Security Council begins to fray, as a few countries, particularly France and Russia, are starting to become increasingly more interested in making financial deals with Iraq than disarming the country.
• July 1 - Iraq disarmament crisis: In response to UNSCOM's evidence, Iraq admits for first time the existence of an offensive biological weapons program, but denies weaponization.
• July 11 - Bosnian Serbs march into Srebrenica while UN Dutch peacekeepers leave. Large numbers of Bosniak men and boys are killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
• Iraq disarmament crisis: Following the defection of his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al Majid, minister of industry and military industrialisation, Saddam Hussein makes new revelations about the full extent of Iraq's biological and nuclear weapons programs. Iraq also withdraws its last UN declaration of prohibited biological weapons and turns over a large amount of new documents on its WMD programs.
• August 30 - The NATO bombing campaign against Serb artillery positions begins in Bosnia, continuing into October. At the same time ARBiH forces begin an offensive against the Serb Army around Sarajevo, central Bosnia and Bosnian Krajina.
• September 4 - The Fourth World Conference on Women opens in Beijing with over 4,750 delegates from 181 countries in attendance.
• September 17 - The Weekly Standard, an influential American conservative magazine, makes its debut.
• September 22 - American millionaire Steve Forbes announces his candidacy for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination .
• October 1 - Ten people are convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in 1993.
• October 3 - O.J. Simpson is found not guilty of double murder for the deaths of former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. (He will be found liable in a second civil trial in 1997).
• October 16 - The Million Man March is held in Washington, D.C. The event was conceived by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
• November 10 In Nigeria, playwright and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with 8 others from the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop), are hanged by government forces.
• November 14 - A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the Congress of the United States, forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums, and run most government offices with skeleton staff.
• December 1 -Strikes paralyzed France's public sector.
• December 30 - The lowest ever United Kingdom temperature of -27.2°C is recorded at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands. This equals the record set at Braemar, Aberdeenshire in 1895 and 1982.

HEXAGRAM 31:
Some that marry young women get fortunes through it.

Although China's gender system was in many respects very different from that (or those) of medieval Europe, China clearly had a gender system, and like those elsewhere in the world it was fundamentally premised on a hierarchy of male over female. And in China as elsewhere, the image of male-female hierarchy was frequently deployed as a symbol or metaphor for political and other types of power relations,

An orthodox marriage in the Chinese traditional system was marked by a complex negotiation between the two families concerning the dowry the bride took with her on marriage and the bride price paid by the groom to the bride's natal family. This protracted form of gift-giving posed a considerable economic burden on both families. For this reason, throughout the imperial period, considerable flexibility was exercised in interpreting what constituted an orthodox marriage in order to allow impecunious families to marry off a daughter or obtain a bride for a son. This study will focus on one such form of marriage, one so ‘deviant’ and ‘primitive’ that it is usually relegated to the dawn of the history of the Han Chinese race or placed in the category of ‘objectionable customs’ (lousu) of the imperial past. I am referring to a form of marriage by abduction, commonly known as qiangqin (seizing the bride), which was prevalent in many areas of China until the 1940s. It is argued here that marriage by abduction should be considered less a ‘primitive’ remnant from China's ancient past than a socially acceptable response to the irrationalities of the dowry/bride-price system, in other words, a local ‘institution’.

Changes of the Zhou (B) Hexagram 31. Xian (Influence)

Swamp (above) Mountain is Influence; the Trigram Dui above, and Gen below.
Xian indicates, that there will be free course and success. Its advantageousness will depend on the being firm and correct, as in marrying a young lady. There will be good fortune.

The Tuan Commentary says: Xian is here used in the sense of gan (xian plus heart), meaning influencing. The weak trigram above, and the strong one below; their two influences moving and responding to each ofther, and thereby forming a union; the repression of the one and the satisfaction of the other; where the male is placed below the female; all these things convey the notion of a free and successful course, while the advantage will depend on being firm an correct, as in marrying a young lady, and there will be good fortune. Heaven and earth exert their influences, and there ensue the transformation and production of all things. The sages influence the minds of men, and the result is harmony and peace under all the sky. If we look at those influences, the true character of heaven and earth and of all things can be seen.

The Great Symbolism says: A mountain and above the marsh form xian. The superior man, in accordance with this, keeps his mind free from preoccupation, and open to receive others.

The first (lowest) line, divided (yin), shows one moving his great toes. The Small Symbolism says: "He moves his great toe": his mind is set on what is beyond.
The second line, divided (yin), shows one moving the calves of his leg. There will be evil. If he abide, there will be good fortune. The Small Symbolism says: Though there "would be evil"; yet, "if he abide quiet in his place, there will be good fortune"; through compliance there will be no injury.

The third line, undivided (yang), shows one moving his thighs, and keeping close hold of those whom he follows. Going forward will cause regret. The Small Symbolism says: "He moves his thighs", he still does not rest in his place. His will is set on following others; what he holds in his grasp is low.

The fourth line, undivided (yang), shows that firm correctness which will lead to good fortune, and prevent all occasion for repentance. If its subject be unsettled in his movements, his friends will follow his purpose. The Small Symbolism says: "Firm correctness will lead to good fortune, and prevent all occasion for repentance"; there has not yet been any harm from influence. "He is unsettled in his movements", is not yet either brilliant or great.

The fifth line, undivided (yang), shows one moving the flesh along the spine above the heart. There will be no occasion for repentance. The Small Symbolism says: "He moves the flesh along the spine above the heart", his aim is trivial.
The sixth line (the highest line), divided (yin), shows one moving his jaws and tongue. The Small Symbolism says: "He moves his jaws and tongue", he talks with loquacious mouth.

Hexagram 31

When King Wu had conquered the Shang, he could not sleep at night. He was worried and full of fear, because he had 'not yet ascertained Heaven's protection'. He decided to build a new city in which the sacrifices to Heaven would be valid again, and entrusted Tan, the duke of Zhou, with the planning and execution of this work. Tan asked the tortoise-oracle and found a site for the new city at the river Luo. The new city was called Luo-Yi. King Wu died and his successor, king Cheng, built the city, and so another name for this city is Cheng-Zhou. Cheng and Xian, the name of hexagram 31, are written almost the same, and are interchangeable.

This city was never used as capital by Cheng, it was only a place for sacrifices, a home for the ancestors. Here, the sacrifices to the ancestors could be brought, in new temples, where all the wrongs of the past no longer existed. If Wu only conquered the Shang, without honouring the goodness and greatness they had also brought in the past, the spirits would not help him. New life relies on the benevolence and support of all spirits involved, of past and present. And being a descendant of a Shang daughter, they were his ancestors too.

Xian is also the personal name of Tang the Completer, the founder of the dynasty of Shang. Tang the completer: the one who brought all together.

Xian²: together, all, unite, case or cover, complete, fully, generally, act together, union, harmony, universal, continual, everywhere, to move, to touch, influence, transform, (dissatisfied, resent ?). Name of the music of certain emperors, salt, salty. Xiang you (unite have): have under control (the 9 provinces).
Cheng²: to become, turn into, to bring to completion, succeed.
In the Mawangdui Yi Jing this hexagram is called qin¹: respect; obey with respect, imperial.
When respect is missing, then the other meaning of xian emerges: wounding with the mouth.

It is only permitted to influence (in order to make someone do something, or to make a connection), if the influence is aimed at building a city with a temple. Or in order to found a state, a solid lasting structure together. Influence for personal ends, for selfish wishes, to take advantage: these are all evil.

31 / 14 Influence (wooing)
Restrained joining
(58->31->52->41)

"HSIEN : come into contact with, influence; reach, join together; put together; put together as parts of a previously seperated whole; come into conjunction, as the celestial bodies; totally, completely; lit: broken pieces of pottery, the halfs of which join to identify partners." ERANOS p362

Image :

"[With self restraint comes intensity]
Above mountain there is marsh. Influence (Come into contact with).
One uses emptiness to make peace with people."

In a context of self-restraint we utilise intensity.

Commentary

In hexagram 31, The seeking of satisfaction has become concentrated in that one has found what one wants or fits with. By initially putting oneself in a giving position one can thus stimulate the other. The line text is partially a step by step description of one rising to speak. The emphasis is on the intent and purpose of the act, putting it all together to make a whole. Contextually, we develop from a loose associating (13) through a stronger degree of loyalty but at a distance (56) to a refined, but restrained, degree of joining.

(All four hexagrams (58,31,52,41) deal with attaining satisfaction as implied by their base trigrams associated with submission/self-restraint. There is thus an overall bias to concentration in a literal and metaphoric senses; concentration allowed 'outwards' comes across as intenseness)

The Traditional Single Changing Line Comments:

Line 1

"Influencing one's big toe. [In humans, the intention to move is betrayed by the movement of one piece of anatomy before anything else - the big toe of one's dominant foot. To begin anything we start with the big toe.]"

Line 2

"Influencing one's calves. Danger. Sit. [Apparent strength hides inner weakness (weak foundations), if you 'stand' now you will fall]."

Line 3

"Influencing one's thighs, Keeping to one's course. A regrettable move. [The power of the thighs pushes us up, ready to 'say our piece'. In this situation though, a certain level of deference is required.]"

Line 4

"Although in testing times, one's problems will be gone. A level of Indecisiveness (hesitation, coming and going) suggests one should consider joining with others. [Hesitation and coming and going can be associated with erratic breathing; influencing the middrift.]"

Line 5

"Influencing one's neck. [Lifting one's head and stretching the neck implies purpose and preparedness.]"

Line 6

"Influencing [through speech. (The power of the word.)]"

Extended Commentary

The raw context from which the situation derives is described by hexagram 13 grouping/associating. It passes through hexagram 56 restrained journeying before reaching here.

Transformative methods

By introducing this hexagram as context, you can change a state described by any other hexagram into a state described by hexagram 33. To make a state associated with another hexagram transform into this state, introduce hexagram 33 as context.

It is important to remember that, when using transformative methods, the more lines requiring change, the more energy required when attempting to introduce a different context. It may therefore be of benefit to work on existing changing lines and achieve your goal in steps rather than attempt, for example, a six-line change all at once.

Further IC+ extensions

THE HSIEN HEXAGRAM

XXXI.

Hsien indicates that, (on the fulfilment of the conditions implied in it), there will be free course and success. Its advantageousness will depend on the being firm and correct, (as) in marrying a young lady. There will be good fortune.

1. The first six, divided, shows one moving his great toes.

2. The second SIX, divided, shows one moving the calves of his leg. There will be evil. If he abide (quiet in his place), there will be good fortune.

3. The third NINE, undivided, shows one moving his thighs, and keeping close hold of those whom he follows. Going forward (in this way) will cause regret.

4. The fourth NINE, undivided, shows that firm correctness whi.ch will lead to good fortune, and prevent all occasion for repentance. If its subject be unsettled in his movements, (only) his friends will follow his purpose.

5. The fifth NINE, undivided, shows one moving the flesh along the spine above the heart. There will be no occasion for repentance.

p. 124

6. The sixth six, divided, shows one moving his jaws and tongue.

---

Footnotes

124:XXXI With the 31st hexagram commences the Second Section of the Text. It is difficult to say why any division of the hexagrams should be made here, for the student tries in vain to discover any continuity in the thoughts of the author that is now broken. The First Section does not contain a class of subjects different from those which we find in the Second. That the division was made, however, at a very early time, appears from the sixth Appendix on the Sequence of the Hexagrams, where the writer sets forth an analogy between the first and second figures, representing heaven and earth, as the originators of all things, and this figure and the next, representing (each of them) husband and wife, as the originators of all the social relations. This, however, is far from carrying conviction to my mind. The division of the Text of the Yî into two sections is a fact of which I am unable to give a satisfactory account.

Hsien, as explained in the treatise on the Thwan, has here the meaning of mutual influence, and the duke of Kâu, on the various lines, always uses Kan for it in the sense of 'moving' or 'influencing to movement or action.' This is to my mind the subject of the hexagram considered as an essay,--'Influence; the different ways of bringing it to bear, and their issues.'

The Chinese character called hsien is , the graphic symbol for 'all, together, jointly.' Kan, the symbol for 'influencing,' has hsien in it as its phonetic constituent (though the changes in pronunciation make it hard for an English reader to appreciate this), with the addition of hsin, the symbol for the heart.' Thus kan, 'to affect or influence,' = + ; and it may have been that while the name or word was used with the significance of 'influencing,' the was purposely dropt from it, to indicate the most important element in the thing,--the absence of all purpose or motive. I venture to think that this would have been a device worthy of a diviner.

With regard to the idea of husband and wife being in the teaching of the hexagram, it is derived from the more recent symbolism of the eight trigrams ascribed to king Wăn, and exhibited on p. 33 and plate III. The more ancient usage of them is given in the paragraph on the Great Symbolism of Appendix II. The figure consists of Kăn 'the youngest son,' and over it Tui ( ), 'the youngest daughter.' These are in 'happy union.' p. 125 No influence, it is said, is so powerful and constant as that between husband and wife; and where these are young, it is especially active. Hence it is that Hsien is made up of Kăn and Tui. All this is to me very doubtful. I can dimly apprehend why the whole line ( ) was assumed as the symbol of strength and authority, and the broken line as that of weakness and submission. Beyond this I cannot follow Fû-hsî in his formation of the trigrams; and still less can I assent to the more recent symbolism of them ascribed to king Wăn.

Coming now to the figure, and its lines, the subject is that of mutual influence; and the author teaches that that influence, correct in itself, and for correct ends, is sure to be effective. He gives an instance,--the case of a man marrying a young lady, the regulations for which have been laid down in China from the earliest times with great strictness and particularity. Such influence will be effective and fortunate.

Line 1 is weak, and at the bottom of the hexagram. Though 4 be a proper correlate, yet the influence indicated by it must be ineffective. However much a man's great toes may be moved, that will not enable him to walk.

The calves cannot move of themselves. They follow the moving of the feet. The moving of them indicates too much anxiety to move. Line 2, moreover, is weak. But it is also the central line, and if its subject abide quiet, till he is acted on from above, there will be good fortune.

Neither can the thighs move of themselves. The attempt to p. 126 move them is inauspicious. Its subject, however, the line being strong, and in an odd place, will wish to move, and follows the subject of 4, which is understood to be the seat of the mind. He exercises his influence therefore with a mind and purpose, which is not good.

Line 4 is strong, but in an even place. It is the seat of the mind. Its subject therefore is warned to be firm and correct in order to a good issue. If he be wavering and uncertain, his influence will not extend beyond the circle of his friends.

The symbolism of line 5 refers to a part of the body behind the heart, and is supposed therefore to indicate an influence, ineffective indeed, but free from selfish motive, and not needing to be repented of.

Line 6 is weak, and in an even place. It is the topmost line also of the trigram of satisfaction. Its influence by means of speech will only be that of loquacity and flattery, the evil of which needs not to be pointed out.

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