Because Suffering is Joy, Humanity is Shit, and Capitalism is Evil, we return once more to Rhyd in his driving quest to destroy all joy in society and rub people;s noses in excrement for the simple fact that they want to find some happiness in this world. Let us delve further into: The Violent & The Dead

Paganism and the Return of The Dead

Consider how, after Hurricane Katrina, a common lament of the poorest New Orleans black communities was about the water-logged, bloated, decomposing corpses left unattended for weeks. No image made clearer to me the connection between Capitalist exclusion and ignoring the Dead. How much must we ignore the Dead in order to maintain our skewed and oppressive violent enjoyment of inequality?

Actually, the dead being left to rot had nothing to do with Capitalist exclusion. It didn’t even have that much to do with ignoring the dead.

It did however have everything to do with the city of New Orleans being criminally negligent both with their keeping up their city and their evacuation plans, the state of Louisiana being horrifically negligent with their response, and the Federal Government being just as bad as the state of Louisiana with how they let FEMA handle the situation and its aftermath.

Capitalism, ironically, wasn’t even really involved. And for a guy who insists on Anarchy sans Government, it’s a bit hilarious that he is pointing to Katrina as an example. Katrina was one giant example of what happens when the State fails to be there. For all the good it did people, the State did not exist. This was not a failing of capitalism, this was a clear cut case of Anarchy.

Anarchy which Rhyd and friends insists is better than having an “oppressive” State. Because when there’s no one to tell you what to do, there’s also no one there to clean up the bodies when the Gods decide to drop a massive flood on your heads. But no, it’s “all the proof” Rhyd needed to cement his point of view in his head…despite the fact that it had nothing to do with what he believes. It would be like me watching a train hit a parked truck and concluding that this was evidence that Tom Cruise is the smartest man alive.

Cut down a forest to build a shopping center and you do not just have an absence of forest, you also have a dead forest. Bomb a village in the Middle-East and you do not only have an absence of a village and its inhabitants; you also have a dead village and dead people. The mountain doesn’t go away when we strip it for coal, nor does the gasoline we combust to drive our vehicles.The bones of the raped mountain litter the earth, just as the carbon from our consumption litters the sky.

The Dead don’t go away. They are always with us, even when we refuse to notice.

Yes, and once you cook and eat a hamburger it’s gone forever. Destruction is death. Death is part of life. No thing lives forever. I hate to sound cavalier here, but I am from Helheim. Death is….our existence. Insisting that things dying is the height of immorality or even inhumanity shows not only a deep lack of understanding of what death is, but a mortophobic attitude which frankly I am shocked to find in such an enlightened and tolerant individual as Rhyd.

It’s true, the dead don’t go away. The dead are often with people, both in the materials which are used to create new things and in spirit. Nothing can be created without first destroying. Destruction itself is an act of creation. Death is the price of living. Sometimes we pay it, some times others pay it for it, and sometimes we pay it for the sake of others.

But just because a raped mountain’s bones litter the earth at the moment doesn’t meant that they will not become new mountains in the future.

It’s one of the fundamental principles of my own path, which I often call the Black Lotus Path. Death is not a thing to be feared, for from death comes new life. The dead exist beyond the mortal, and the mortal grows from the dead. We are all made of dead things, most of which died to some form of violence…just as future life will be born from our dead flesh and deadly workings.

When Capitalism sweeps through a formerly non-Capitalist people, one of the first things to get destroyed is the ancestral traditions and reverences of those people. Witch persecutions in Africa, Asia, and South America mirror the same persecutions in Europe that required us to divorce from an understanding that included the Dead in life-activities. It does so because Capitalism must sever people from a recognition of the Dead, must obscure and displace the excremental effects of its exploitation. For peoples who remember the destroyed forest, the wound of Capitalism is ever-present. Its ghost still haunting the place it once stood. The rape remains even though the rest of us have forgotten just as the dead child remains in the bombed village, out of sight but never fully flushed away.

Actually, most of the witch hunts I hear about in Africa and Asia have more to do with Islamic conversion and Muslim destruction of Pagan religions than it ever does to do with Capitalism. But hey, Rhyd is blaming capitalism for things it never even did or was a part of, so why let facts get in the way now.

But even the witch hunts in Europe and South America have more to do with Christianity doing as the Muslims do and purging the infidel. If anything, Capitalism is pro-Paganism because it is only under a liberal capitalism that we Pagans have been able to come out, discover that which was lost, reconnect with each other, and in some cases actually make livings supporting our Pagan communities. This is not something found under Marxism, and Krasskova had a wonderful article showing how Marxism typically does to Pagan and native religions what Rhyd is claiming Capitalism does.

And capitalism doesn’t “sever us” from the dead, there’s a huge capitalist system for the preservation of our our dead, their safe keeping, and their honoring.

So, facts, I guess. Probably shouldn’t bother with them.

Western, particularly American, Capitalism denies the Dead in order to erase our memories, and we play willingly along with this Forgetting — this exclusion.

Let’s see, not only do we have the entire funeral industry, we have history classes enshrined in every level of education out there. We have psychics and seances to commune with the dead, various divination tools freely available and mass produced. Our graveyards are openly shown and even open to the public for viewing.

Capitalism is woven through all these things. Capitalism does not deny the dead. Capitalism may put an emphasis on the living, and on enjoying things you can while you’re alive, but in all my years I have never seen Capitalism ever work to erase the dead.

Marxists on the other hand….Oh yeah, those guys disappear the dead left and right.

But the Dead persist, no matter how hard we try to ignore them. Consider our fascination with ghost stories, or more precisely, the peculiar Anglo-American fascination with zombies. These are depictions of shambling men and women, shuffling through the streets in torn clothes, reeking of death, moaning incoherently without substance to feed upon the ‘living.’  Zombie films remarkably depict our fear of the “living dead,’ the homeless, the immigrant, the prisoner, the refugee — that is, the very people we exclude from our society in order to enjoy it, those who continue to live despite being ‘dead to us.’

Yes, stories and movies produced via capitalism.

I swear the level of self blindness only ever grows.

Also, well done disproving your own point about how “capitalism” disappears the dead. If capitalism was all about disappearing the dead, you wouldn’t have all this necrotic stuff all over the place. We wouldn’t have enshrined as one of our most popular and holiest days Halloween, which is not only all about the dead, but so far has managed to make Christmas back the fuck out of October. So, yeah, much “erasure of the dead” there.

Few people like to look at their own feces, or even talk about it. In fact, we consider it perverse to do so, just as we consider those who speak of the dead as ‘morbid.’  Similarly, any calls to change or abolish the Capitalist system, which is warming the planet and ruining lives, are considered ‘extremist.’ The few brave souls willing to actually do something about this matter are called ‘radicals’ or ‘terrorists.’

Clean it up there, Rhyd.

Okay, so he likens people talking about the dead, people talking about the shit they just took, and people who work to overthrow society as…roughly all the same thing.

First off, we call people who want to overthrow society and destroy the government as “radicals” and “terrorists” because that is what they are. They wish to inspire terror, or unleash it, upon people in order to gain what they want. Those willing to use violence and cause death in order to accomplish their goals. Which, when they’re capitalists it’s apparently bad, but when they desire the radical establishment of an anarchic-communist communion it’s a okay.

this is supposed to be as “harmless” as talking about the time you got the green apple runs or how you made offerings to dear dead aunt Edna…

And yes, we do consider some people who talk about their shits as perverse when they take it to the near sexual frenzy you have Rhyd. It’s just…creepy. I’m pretty open minded, but scat is pretty disgusting. But hey, apparently Rhyd’s upset no one wanted to watch his “Two Bros, One Bucket” video in highschool or something.

The return to a way of thinking which doesn’t ignore the Dead might be the only chance we have to build societies which create less excrement. The various Paganisms which acknowledge the dead can return to our denialist society precisely what it refuses to notice.

Given that one of your most vocal antagonists in this whole mess is me, a Death Worshiping necromancer married to the Goddess of Death, who spends 95% of his time with the dead and their spirits in one form or another, and I happen to be a staunch Capitalist…I really don’t think your theory here is going to hold much water.

I am practicing exactly the kind of Paganism which acknowledges the dead, who brings the dead to the attentions of the world, and guess what…I have found your Marxists far more guilty of the sins of ignoring and abusing the dead than any Capitalist nation in history.

The destroyed forests remain as Dead forests, and we must insist they be remembered. Only by doing this may we learn not to destroy them.

The burned oil and coal are the compressed remains of our earliest ancestors, and we must acknowledge them as Presences melting our ice-caps and flooding our cities. Only in this way might we finally admit the consequences of our consumption.

The poor, the homeless, the downtrodden all live on as ‘walking dead,’ and we must again see them as the excluded foundation of our very societies. Until we do so, we will meet their rage and horror with malevolent, brutal fear.

It’s funny, Rhyd keeps insisting that we stop everything that makes modern society exist. He demands the unmaking of private property. He demands we stop cutting down trees, burning coal and oil, shut down all industry and mechanical devices.

And yet he himself refuses to live by his own words. He own private property. He travels by carbon based fuels. He flies around the world, making speeches about the evils of global warming when he could easily make a podcast at home. Hel, he could give up all his electronics, retreat from electronic and modern society, and find a place to live a completely natural existence.

Instead he flies to Europe. Instead he spends countless hours online, using modern technology to try and insist that people should live by a morality he doesn’t even practice himself. He founded an entire website and pagan convention to get other like minded people to do as he is doing, preach to others how they should live, all while they refuse to practice what they preach.

If I believed as they did, the only time you heard from me might be if I got interviewed by a TV crew about why I was living a life of subsistence and Marxist life in the wild. If I believed what they preach half as much as they claim they believe, I would have retreated from society. Heck, if I believed it half as much as they claim to, and had the connections they do, then I would have gotten everyone together to come live in one big happy Pagan Marxist commune to be a shining example to everyone that what I preached was morally right and physically possible.

But they aren’t doing that. Rhyd isn’t doing that. No, like the televangelist he preaches against Sins, but he then goes home and practices them every day. If Rhyd’s job really was what he described it, and he had any moral character, he would have quit his job so that he would not be part of this “hiding the shit.” But he didn’t, he doesn’t, and he won’t.

Because this isn’t about Capitalism, or the environment, or the homeless or anything like that. This is about Power, and Rhyd wants it, Rhyd sees this getting it for him so long as he says the right words and preaches the right sermons. And who cares if people die to a “radical Marxist’s bomb” because they got inspired, at least that person didn’t die for “big oil.”

And the Dead themselves, the gathered ancestors of all our peoples, stand before us, just on the edge of our sight. If we learn to acknowledge them, to see them, to accept what they have to teach and listen to what they have to say, we may finally learn what it is like to truly live.

I did.

I listened to my ancestors. I learned their lessons. I learned what their lives were like, and why they did what they did. And you know what my Ancestors taught me?

Capitalism.

Imperialism.

The value of individual liberty and private property.

The dangers of a collectivist, communist world view which strips of men their humanity and reduces them to things that must be kept equal to each other, and never allowed to rise above.

Perhaps you should have paid attention at Ghost School, Rhyd.

But in all honesty, how long are we going to keep up this charade Rhyd? I mean, if things really were a fraction of how bad you claim things are, your inaction is inexcusable. If you honestly consider engaging in terrorist action to be no more harmful than discussing your last bowel movement, if you honestly feel that the whole of society is nothing more than a charnel house destroying humanity and the planet, why aren’t you doing something?

You keep crying out that the world needs to be saved…you keep crying out for a savior. For someone who will do something to change things. But it’s always someone else. It’s always you excusing someone else s actions…but never you taking the actions. You imply that a marxist terrorism engaged in overthrowing the systems of destruction would be good and even as harmless as speaking of the dead…but I don’t see you doing it.

So really, either be the change you want to be, by leaving society and living by your ideals or picking up a gun or a bomb and stepping up to do something. I honestly don’t care at this point. But right now, all this? It’s pathetic. You march around waving an impotent flag as if it is the salvation of the world…and I keep pissing on it. You keep making your ridiculous claims against modern civilization and I keep pointing out the monstrosity of the civilization you wish to create. And I’m tired of it.

Either admit you’re factually and morally wrong or start actually fighting to create your reality, not with words, but with deeds. Practice what you preach, live it. Hel, I know that means in theory and practice you and your friends would probably start killing people, but then at least Chris could finally start to live up to something like being the warrior he claims to be, Bones could finally incite all the mobs he wants burning and looting, and you could finally stop being a dickless hypocrite too scared to practice what he preaches because it would mean giving up his cushy safe space behind a computer or in front of a panel and actually make something of yourself.

I am never going to consider the Marxists of old anything but monsters, but at least I can acknowledge and even respect their monstrosity because they put their lives on the line for what they believed. You and your friends do not do that. Hell, at this point I suspect you and your friends can’t do that either because you do not honestly believe this horse shit you’re peddling, or you’re too scared that you’ll lose and you will face all the destruction that you have been wanting to unleash upon innocent people.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but I have challenged you and your friends to a battle of wits and found you unarmed. I cannot reinvest you into society, not when you guys have so forsaken it. But either throw off your chains and have at it and see if arms succeeds for you where words will not, or end the misery that is your oppressed existence and let the rest of us go back to living our lives in peace.

 

 

Bellona Invicta