GenZedong

Rules for thee, Private Island for me.

Watching this made my cry thinking about how the empire manufactures consent to sacrifice the lives of these wonderful people in order to promote its interests in the region.

It's also quite interesting that she travelled to Iran right as the protests were breaking out. I wonder if she will be releasing some footage of that in the coming weeks.

In light of the Superb Owl occurring this weekend I thought I'd share this episode of Rev Left discussing the class nature of sports.

The conversation covers a lot of facets of the business of sports. Some things I found interesting were the purposeful sidelining of football (soccer) in the US and the way football clubs are owned in the global south (publicly by the fans or the community) vs. the imperial core (billionaires club), and the history of why certain sports are popular in certain regions.

Vera Mukhina, THE sculptor behind the worker and kolkhoz woman sculpture, would've probably convinced people to keep it purely for artistic value. She allegedly did it with the "Freedom monument" in Latvia, but the Latvian "Freedom" statue is so ugly I wouldn't have listened.

Here is the Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/s/wDDOMrFYNt

OP was initially anti-AI but the pro-AI people are, well, ugh...

It's always going on about "What about Stalinism?!" and doesn't tell you anything. It even parrots Robert Conquest's book.

See for yourself.

In the introduction to his new book, The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, Gerald Howard confesses to a rather surprising sentiment.1 Howard, a veteran New York book editor, was, he informs us, an English major when he attended college, but it was not until some time after his graduation in the early 1970s that, encountering Cowley’s Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation (1973), with which he was “smitten,” he realized “that writers were real people”—a fact that “had never really occurred” to him owing to his “hero-worshipping frame of mind.” (One wonders: had he never been assigned a literary biography to read?) Later, he perused Exile’s Return (1951), Cowley’s memoir of the American literary scene in the 1920s, “with equal avidity and admiration”; still later, as an editor at Viking Penguin, he had the pleasure of commissioning The Portable Malcolm Cowley (1986) and editing The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley (1988). Howard’s surprising confession appears in the closing paragraph of his introduction: “I have come to love his era,” he writes, “and Malcolm Cowley too.” Gerald Howard loves Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989), an important detail to keep in mind as one makes one’s way through this compendious (487 text pages) and, in certain ways, exceedingly curious volume.

Doubtless it is futile to seek to make sense of the alchemy whereby one person becomes the object of another person’s disproportionate affection. But one thing that’s reasonably clear from the start is that Howard has considerable regard for Cowley’s literary criticism and, more broadly, for the way in which his work as a critic, editor, anthologist, and lecturer helped define, disseminate, and promote American literature as a whole and, in particular, certain writings of his own time, most notably the works of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other cutting-edge young novelists of the interwar years. So significant a part did Cowley play in this process, in Howard’s estimation, that he actually refers to the period during which Cowley was professionally active as “The Cowley Era.” Now, to suggest that Cowley was the central figure on the American literary scene during the greater part of the American century is to make a colossally brazen claim; others who could with at least equal justification have been credited with occupying key roles in this story include Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, the editor of such writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe; Edmund Wilson, who as the editor of The New Republic and a book critic for The New Yorker helped establish the careers of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others; and Alfred Kazin, whose pathbreaking study On Native Grounds (1942) provided a comprehensive critical account of American fiction from William Dean Howells onward. (A longer list of candidates for this honor would include Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling.)

Howard’s claim for Cowley’s importance is especially audacious given that Cowley is today largely a forgotten figure, even among the well-read: literary friends of Howard’s, he admits, have misheard his answer to the ubiquitous question “What are you working on?” thinking that he was writing about Malcolm Lowry, the English novelist. Indeed, it is perhaps because of Cowley’s obscurity that Howard has, as he tells us, eschewed a “standard-issue biography” and instead given us a book in which his chief objective is to tell the story of American literature and its growing international reputation over the course of the twentieth century while using the figure of Cowley to tie it all together. To a limited extent, this is indeed the kind of book that Howard has written: there are long passages here—for example, on the poet Hart Crane, who was a close friend of Cowley’s (and, briefly, a bedmate of Cowley’s nymphomaniacal first wife, Peggy Baird, who was the only woman Crane ever slept with), and on Jack Kerouac, whose awful On the Road Cowley proudly shepherded into print—that in an orthodox literary biography would be considered unwarranted digressions. Also, as Howard admits in his introduction, he touches “only glancingly” on Cowley’s personal life—as a result of which we never get a well-rounded sense of Cowley or anyone else.

But despite Howard’s claim, The Insider is basically a biography. There’s a long (too long) chapter on Cowley’s rather uneventful boyhood in Belsano, Pennsylvania, followed by a detailed account of his years at Harvard, which were interrupted by periods in the bohemian subculture of Greenwich Village—where he met and married the aforementioned first wife (they divorced in 1932, whereupon Cowley wed his second wife, Muriel, with whom he remained until his death)—and as an ambulance driver on the front in wartime France. It was during this early sojourn in New York that Cowley clambered onto what Howard calls “the hamster wheel of reviewing”; for a time, Howard reports, the young Cowley was in the habit of dropping into the Manhattan offices of The Dial early in the morning to pick up three books, all of which, by noon of the same day, he had read, reviewed, and sold at a bookstore. We are presumably meant to see this as an admirable feat of youthful prolificity; instead it strikes me as an example of sheer irresponsibility: no one can read, digest, and judiciously review one book, let alone three, within such a brief time. The word hack comes to mind; questions of character begin to arise.

From 1921 to 1923, Cowley was in Europe, mostly in Paris, where he encountered a number of literary luminaries, among them Hemingway, who became a close chum; after returning to New York, he nimbly climbed the ladder of the literary establishment, becoming a regular reviewer for, then an associate editor at, The New Republic. For many years, he edited the “back of the book”—i.e., the culture pages, as distinguished from the “front of the book,” which was devoted to hard news. Cowley’s preoccupation with literature, however, ended with the arrival of the Great Depression. Almost overnight, his mind swarmed with thoughts of revolution: taking part in “panels, picket lines, conferences, congresses, strikes, parades” and joining more Communist Party front groups than even he, perhaps, could keep track of, he began to write in “the new literary language of class revolution.” Howard describes Cowley as having been “labeled, with some justice, a Stalinist fellow traveler.” With some justice? Cowley was the very model of a 1930s fellow traveler—which is to say an ardent, unambiguous Stalinist who, while never officially joining the Party, was as obedient to the latest Kremlin directives as any card-carrying Communist. This is, after all, a man who wrote in The Daily Worker that the October Revolution had been “the most important event . . . in history,” who declared in The New Republic that the Soviet Union had “the most democratic system that ever existed” and was “the most progressive force in the world,” and who was described by Eugene Lyons (the United Press’s man in Moscow from 1928 to 1934 and the first Westerner to interview Stalin) as “the Number One literary executioner for Stalin in America.”

For such a man, the term “fellow traveler” seems not, as Howard suggests, partly valid, but, rather, preposterously inadequate. Which raises the question: what are you to do if you’re a biographer whose subject—whom you profess to love, and whom you want your readers to love as well—spent a decade of his career shamelessly shilling for Stalin? Howard provides several answers. For one thing, you cite your subject as an example of Orwell’s statement that “a writer does well to keep out of politics”—as if being a cold-blooded, lockstep Stalinist were simply a matter of being involved in politics. You make a point of the fact that he was only one of “hundreds of . . . writers” who took their marching orders from the Kremlin—as if that excuses anything. (Does anyone today defend Nazis in such a fashion?) A related ploy: you present your subject as a noble soul who, during the “idealistic thirties,” was driven by his prodigious “social conscience” to join a movement populated by (in Cowley’s own words) “men of good will.” You remind the reader—more than once—that your subject never officially joined the Communist Party. You maintain that, having never visited the Soviet Union and having not been fluent in Russian, your subject was a victim of ignorance about life under Communism. Cowley himself proffered this excuse decades later, asserting that he’d known “nothing about Russia except from printed accounts.” How, then, one wants to ask Cowley, could he have sounded off about it, for so long, in such an authoritative manner? (As it happens, I’ve just read the memoirs of the songwriter Vernon Duke, who was one of many Russian refugees in New York from whom Cowley could have heard in harrowing detail about the Bolsheviks’ obscene transgressions. But like many American leftists today, Cowley was too much in thrall to an ideology to be capable of having his mind changed by mere facts.)

Then there’s this dodge: despite Cowley’s Stalinism, proclaims Howard, his

most profound and lasting loyalty was, first, last, and always, to language, and the ways that Communists deployed that precious resource seemed to him to debase its currency.

What? During the 1930s, few writers took a back seat to Cowley when it came to debasing language in the Party’s service. In 1938 he wrote an essay entitled “There Have to Be Censors.” (Howard calls this “a low point.” Not really: for Cowley, the entire decade was a low point.) Repeatedly, he wielded his cultural power to reprove Moscow’s critics and reward its lapdogs. For example, after John Dos Passos witnessed Stalinism in action during the Spanish Civil War, he left the Party—and Cowley punished Dos Passos’s apostasy by savaging his novel Adventures of a Young Man (1939); by contrast, when Hemingway produced pro-Soviet propaganda in the form of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Cowley celebrated it. Similarly, when the formerly Stalinist Partisan Review was revived in 1937 as a nominally anti-Communist—but, in its early years, somewhat Trotskyist—quarterly, Cowley was quick to blast its editors for their insufficient deference to Stalin. (Years later, in his 1952 novel Yet Other Waters, James T. Farrell depicted Cowley as Sherman Scott, a book-review editor who uses his exalted position to flog anti-Communists ruthlessly.)

Mainly, though, Howard deals with Cowley’s Communism by—quite simply—acknowledging it fully, and even taking him to task for it, but always writing about it in a distinctly dispassionate manner, as if to suggest that Cowley’s views and actions were less appalling than they really were. Take Howard’s account of the Spanish Civil War, during which Cowley, like other leftist writers, traveled to the front. Howard doesn’t try to conceal Cowley’s “rote and unquestioning acceptance of the Communist-dictated Popular Front version of events” or “his inability to perceive how the Soviets had taken control of the policies of the civil war”; he even points out that whereas Orwell, for one, wrote honestly about the Stalinists’ mass murder of Catalonian revolutionaries—which constituted, in Howard’s own words, an “eruption outside the Soviet Union of the Stalinist terror that would become a defining feature of twentieth-century totalitarianism”—Cowley, in his dispatches from Spain, didn’t so much as hint at any of this nefarious activity. Still, Howard attempts to mitigate his subject’s culpability by underscoring that Cowley’s views on the Spanish war “were shared by the vast majority of American literati” and by emphasizing Cowley’s purported empathy, as evinced by his declared wish to adopt war orphans (he never did so) and his lifelong claim that he was “haunted” by the “men of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.”

In addition to the war in Spain, the late 1930s also brought the Moscow show trials (1936–38), in which members of the nomenklatura were found guilty of plotting against Stalin before being summarily executed. There were widespread doubts at the time about the legitimacy of these proceedings (years later, it was definitively proven that they were a sham), but a 1936 New Republic editorial, probably written by Cowley, “dismissed out of hand the possibility” that the defendants’ confessions might have been coerced or tortured out of them. In 1937 Cowley served up an “even more vehement endorsement of the truth of the trials.” And after Dos Passos, Wilson, and other literary eminences organized a hearing to study the case of Trotsky—the most prominent of the defendants, and the one who’d escaped punishment (at least for the time being) because he’d fled to Mexico—he was found innocent. But even following this, and despite Cowley’s private admission to Wilson that he considered the trials only “about three-quarters straight,” he once again publicly insisted—this time in The Masses—on the trials’ legitimacy. In response, an exasperated Wilson shot off a letter to Cowley lambasting him for “plugging the damned old Stalinist line.”

Then, in August 1939, came the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Instantly, American Stalinism evaporated—with one prominent exception. While other fellow travelers and Party members abandoned Moscow tout de suite, Cowley hung in there, defending Stalin’s deal with Hitler as an understandable act of geopolitical realism. Soon enough, however, he caved: in February 1940, The New Republic ran an unsigned statement, written by him, in which it renounced Stalin. To be sure, Cowley’s devotion to Stalin exacted a price: relieved of his editorial duties, he was reduced to writing a weekly book page; as Howard puts it, “he had been removed from a power seat in American letters.” Tough: at least he wasn’t executed, like the defendants in the Moscow trials. On that topic: even after the Nazi–Soviet Pact, Cowley couldn’t bring himself to say publicly that those trials had been bogus: in January 1940, reviewing In Stalin’s Secret Service, the memoirs of W. G. Krivitsky, a former Soviet spy, Cowley yet again reiterated his stand on the issue—whereupon Wilson, in yet another angry missive, accused him of “Stalinist character assassination of the most reckless and libelous sort.” Not until 1968, when Robert Conquest proved beyond doubt in The Great Terror that the trials had been fraudulent, did Cowley finally throw in the towel.

Cowley spent much of the rest of his life talking about his decade of hardcore Stalinism—lying about it, playing fast and loose with the facts about it, and occasionally apologizing (sort of) for it. But to a large extent he seems never to have learned his lesson about the virtues of Communism vis-à-vis democracy. After the end of World War II, while other Americans were celebrating victory and/or trying to take in the unspeakable revelations about the Nazi death camps, Cowley professed to be disturbed by (in Howard’s words) “the soulless triumph of consumer capitalism,” America’s supposed “cruelty” to Germany and Japan, and “the want of sympathy and the want of imagination that are coming to distinguish this country.” Compared to where, exactly? (After the Marshall Plan went into effect in 1948, did he happen to notice that while the United States was spending a fortune to rebuild Western Europe, the ussr was enslaving the people of the Eastern Bloc?)

Howard plainly feels sorry for the post-war Cowley:

Malcolm Cowley may have wished that he could be done with politics, but politics was by no means done with him. This would become painfully clear very quickly.

Poor Cowley, having to pay the price for a decade as an unscrupulous Kremlin mouthpiece! Howard quotes a letter in which Cowley laments that if his Stalinist record were to be held against him, “it would make it very difficult for me to sell articles, get lecture dates or find an editorial job.” Good heavens: after all that he’d done, what on earth made him think he deserved any sort of work that involved the dissemination of facts and opinions? (Did it ever occur to him to wonder how a pro-American writer would be treated in post-war Russia?) At one point Howard describes Cowley as one of many “prominent liberals” who, after the war, were under attack from the right—this, after Howard has spent almost two hundred fifty pages documenting Cowley’s committed, unrelenting Communism. Howard furthermore characterizes the post-war criticism directed at Cowley and other Stalinists as a product of “fevered habits of mind.” How striking that while Howard’s account of Cowley’s Stalinist period is, as noted, supremely dispassionate, he doesn’t hesitate to use words like “fevered” when referring to the attitudes of decent Americans toward Cowley’s erstwhile perfidy.

Cowley, as it turned out, didn’t need to worry about finding work after his fall from grace at The New Republic. Even while the war was still on, the Roosevelt administration tapped him for a lucrative position at a new government agency run by Archibald MacLeish. Among those who expressed outrage at his appointment were Congressman Martin Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee, whom Howard gratuitously describes as “notorious and long-winded”; the columnist Westbrook Pegler, whom Howard calls “a rabid anti-Communist” (Howard never calls Cowley, or any Communist, “rabid”); and Whittaker Chambers, whom Howard accuses of delivering “an ugly sucker punch” for drawing attention, in a review for Time of one of Cowley’s poetry collections, to lines that Howard himself admits are “agitprop-heavy.” In fact the real “sucker punch” in this instance—and a truly shabby one it was—was delivered by MacLeish, who in retaliation for the review bad-mouthed Chambers to Time’s publisher, Henry Luce. (Old Communist habits die hard.) MacLeish also managed to obtain Cowley’s substantial fbi file and showed it to him. Howard contends that the file provided “a chilling glimpse of the surveillance state that J. Edgar Hoover had created.” No, what’s chilling is that MacLeish violated protocols and shared confidential documents with a longtime Soviet tool.

Although Cowley, under pressure, soon quit the government job, a generous five-year stipend from the Bollingen Foundation (why were such institutions so eager to throw money at Stalinists?—sorry, stupid question) soon enabled him to refocus on American literature. Over the next few years, he edited The Portable Hemingway (1944) and The Portable Faulkner (1946), edited and wrote introductions to anthologies, gave lectures, taught courses, and was eventually taken on by Viking Press, where he edited a 1951 book on “anti-Communist hysteria.” A sanitized (i.e., de-Stalinized) edition of Exile’s Return was published the same year. As the post-war era progressed, and what Howard calls “rabid anti-Communist paranoia” (there’s that word “rabid” again) faded in mainstream liberal culture, Cowley gradually resumed his exalted place in the literary hierarchy, exerting influence in the awarding of Bollingen Prizes and Guggenheim grants and serving as the president of the American Institute of Letters and as the chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1963, a diagram in Esquire put him near the “Hot Center” of the “American Literary Establishment.” Excited to play a role in the flowering of a counterculture, he edited Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)—about which Truman Capote famously said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”—and Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).

Then, in 1980, came his memoir The Dream of the Golden Mountains, a wistful look back at the days when he and others had been swept up in the beautiful reverie of Stalin worship. The mainstream press embraced the book; only on the right did reviewers have the bad taste to mention that Communism was, in fact, a rather unpleasant phenomenon. In The American Spectator, Kenneth S. Lynn noted that the book’s “overriding purpose” was “to rehabilitate the myth that the 1930s was an era of revolutionary brotherhood”; in Commentary, Robert Alter observed that rather than view his own sometime radicalism “confessionally, as a God That Failed,” Cowley depicted it “as a noble but naive illusion of his youth” and thereby conveyed “little of the ruthlessness, the orgies of character assassination, the readiness to prostitute literature, the willingness to abandon individual conscience, that went on in the name of loyalty to the revolutionary cause”—aspects of the Communist life in which, Alter added, Cowley “was frequently enough involved.” Ten years later came The Portable Malcolm Cowley, from which Cowley’s editor—Gerald Howard himself—conscientiously omitted the huge chunk of Cowley’s oeuvre that might expose just what a fool and a knave he had been in the 1930s.

And now that selfsame Gerald Howard has given us The Insider—and the timing is well-nigh impeccable. In 1990, when Howard put out The Portable Malcolm Cowley, some judicious pruning was still necessary to obscure just how devout a Communist the man had once been. These days, such efforts aren’t really necessary. The kind of people who are likely to buy The Insider are members of a political party that in recent years has migrated very far to the left; New York, the major market for books like this, has just sworn in a socialist mayor. Today Howard’s confession, in his introduction, that he loves Cowley will not cause any eyelashes to bat; what truly sophisticated American, in the era of Bernie Sanders, who swore in Zohran Mamdani, doesn’t love an old Communist? It’s telling, really, that while Howard apologizes, in that introduction, for the fact that “Cowley’s life and career and milieu were very white, very middle class and sometimes privileged, very male, and very heterosexual”—as well as for Cowley’s indifference to black literature and his use, in his writing, of such offensive terms as “lady novelist” and “pansy”—he seems to take it for granted that readers, or at least the readers he wants, will take his subject’s Stalinism in their stride, and that perhaps they, too, will come away from his book loving Malcolm Cowley. Alas, he’s probably correct: reviewing the book in the November 19, 2025, issue of The New Yorker, Kevin Lozano, the associate literary editor of The Nation, not only entirely buys Howard’s outsize claims for Cowley’s cultural importance (Lozano’s piece is entitled “The Man Who Helped Make the American Literary Canon”) but also treats Cowley’s unreconstructed Stalinism as nothing more than an unfortunate career move (“his star would briefly implode when he picked the wrong side of the debate that would tear apart the left, the battle between Trotsky and Stalin”). Who can doubt that the American literary establishment, with few exceptions, will share Lozano’s morally bankrupt view?

• Tim Anderson argues that much of the Western left’s hostility to BRICS stems from imperial habits of thought, orientalism, saviour complexes, and ahistorical “Marxism”, that align them, often unwittingly, with the very global order they claim to oppose.

Western left-liberals carry much more imperial cultural baggage than they care to imagine. Yet the problem with politics, at a time of propaganda wars, is that perspective is everything. Missing that, no slogans will save you.

This failure of left-liberal perspectives is due to social perspective, with several root causes which turn them into unwitting allies of their imperial states (however much they object to this status) and against the main emerging alternative of BRICS and, in particular, its most highly demonised protagonists: China, Russia and Iran.

Some generic problems faced by Western left-liberals are the failure to see that solidarity is for a people and presupposes that particular peoples determine their own future, and not pursue a path imagined by Westerners. This classic orientalism helps explain left-liberal hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the most powerful independent state in West Asia since 1979, key sponsor of the Palestinian Resistance and, for that reason, the main target of Zionist and imperial hostility.

Another problem is that left-liberal Westerners tend to cheer on those separatisms sponsored by imperialism, to break up independent southern states which refuse to submit. Adherence to these pseudo self-determination projects helps explain why much of the Western left cheered on the Zionists in the 60s and 70s and why many have cheered on Kurdish separatists this century, as they helped dismantle Iraq and Syria and moved against Iran. In the case of Iran, subject to a permanent hostility from the USA and "Israel", the ‘imperial left’ misses the obvious point that the 1979 revolution and its Islamic foundation were chosen by the great masses of the Iranian people and not by Western left-liberals. Yet there is hardly a pretext to dismantle and dismember Iran that is missed by most Western left-liberals. They would love to see it weak and divided like Iraq, Libya and Syria. The global dictatorship approves.

A final general problem is that wrong questions are posed about the emerging countervailing powers. For example, "Why doesn’t China save Palestine? Or, why didn’t Russia save Syria?" The idea that one nation can save another is classic orientalism, reflecting the Western ‘saviour complex’ embedded in imperial culture. It misses the key reality that a coherent indigenous struggle is essential for emancipation. Once that exists, others may assist.

A linked concept is the idea that the great countervailing powers are all corrupt and useless because they just pursue their own interests. This misses the point that any responsible state has to pursue its own national interests and so remain accountable to its own people. Given that, it is the task of indigenous forces and decent internationalists to make the case for building bridges based on common interests. That was exactly what the Iranian national hero, the late Qassem Soleimani, did when in 2015 he persuaded Russia to enter Syria, on invitation, to help fight the proxy terrorist armies and support the independent government led by Bashar al-Assad. Yet Russia could not “save” Syria after most of the commanders of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) were purchased by the enemy and the SAA collapsed. The collapse of the SAA was a tragedy, but no one can save those who will not save themselves.

What are the main rationales of these Western left-liberals, in denigrating and opposing the role of BRICS and its “controversial” leading states? It is clearly quite different to the emerging consensus in the Global South (most of Africa, Latin America and SE Asia) that a multipolar world, no longer ruled by an Anglo-American dictatorship, is desirable and the way to a more tolerable future. This presupposes a greater role for BRICS and for its most heavily demonised protagonists: Russia, China and Iran.

In that southern view, a multipolar world is replacing a centuries-old Anglo-American domination of the world, and presents the best possibility of escaping this hegemony, including that of the dollar dictatorship, which directly damages developing economies and allows Washington to weaponise the globalised financial system against independent nations. The expanded use of US and EU unilateral “sanctions” (actually ‘unilateral coercive measures’) continues to cripple entire populations under total or partial siege until they surrender. That is a vicious weapon many left-liberals fail to appreciate. BRICS provides hope for the first real alternative to this global dictatorship.

Demonisation of Russia's war in Ukraine, to avert a NATO threat and to end the post-2014 bloody war against the Russian people of the Donbass, has not been an obstacle to developing countries rushing to join BRICS. Rather, many (such as the revolutionary Sahel bloc) have seen Russia’s role in standing up to the great bullies of the world as a sign that there is some significant political will within BRICS.

Yet most Western left-liberals remain anti-Russia, as well as anti-China, and anti-Iran. While many profess “support” for popular struggles like those of Palestine, Yemen and the revolutionary West African states, they hold quite distinct perspectives to those of the Global South, including that of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who made it his life’s work to build stronger Latin and Southern organisation to resist imperial hegemony.

I suggest there are three overlapping currents of rationale for this hatred of BRICS and the emerging counter hegemonic states (1) the romantic orientalists, (2) the Anarcho-Trotskyists and (3) the ahistorical pseudo Marxists.

1. Romantic orientalists

This current has some sympathy for the struggles of oppressed peoples, such as the Palestinians and perhaps the Cubans and others, yet views any support from the big BRICS counter weights with disdain, often adopting the clichés of imperial demonisation.

This includes liberals (including liberal Zionists) who “support” Palestinians as victims but ignore or oppose the Palestinian Resistance and its chief allies, the regional Axis of Resistance led by Iran. This includes fans of the obsolete “two-state” solution, who naively imagine a weak Palestinian ghetto can co-exist alongside a voracious and heavily armed apartheid regime.

This claim of supporting a popular struggle without “dirtying” one’s hands with state politics extends to those Westerners who romanticised the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, while steering clear of progressive yet (in imperial parlance) “dictatorial” Latin American states like Cuba and Venezuela. Any independent state which arms itself to survive hegemonic pressure will be branded a “dictatorship” by the actual global dictatorship.

Avoiding both resistance and the independent states empowers many Western left-liberals with a sense of moral superiority while avoiding the avalanche of criticism that falls on the heads of those who actually support resistance. These western “saviours” then become the heroes of their own imagination.

2. Anarcho-Trotskyists

In a parallel current, we have Western Trotskyists and Anarchists (often indistinguishable) who habitually reject progressive states as “betrayals” of ordinary people, whatever their achievements. The draw on a deep tradition of Western cynicism, where all states are captured, and no emancipatory change is possible. In practice, these groups often revert to liberalism, to remain relevant and attract new members, supporting such things as public health, social security and refugee rights, all of which require state agency.

Yet the Anarcho-Trotskyist tradition is rooted in permanent attacks on left governments and competing splinter groups. For that reason, they are often coopted into support for imperial driven "color revolutions" and the destruction of independent states. The easy part of that is, when those color revolutions turn into humanitarian disasters (e.g. the destruction of Libya and Syria), they claim “the revolution was betrayed”. Many spend their lives saying this.

Of course, they hate Russia, as the successor state to the hated Soviet Union, and many deny that there was ever a socialist revolution (neither in Russia nor China nor Cuba), as none met their own esoteric criteria. Most are extreme sectarians who have never gained the trust of any part of the organised working class, the constituency of which they claim to be the “vanguard”.

Many of those who now raise their voices for the suffering of the Palestinian people have a track record of Israeli-aligned attacks on those who provided weapons to the Palestinian resistance, like Hezbollah, Syria (under Assad) and Iran. Some of them have established opinion columns in the Israeli media.

3. Ahistorical pseudo-Marxists

Another current is that of ahistorical pseudo-Marxism, those who cite 19th and early 20th-century canonical texts to determine that all capitalism and imperialism are the same and that China and Russia are just the latest additions to this global capitalist logic. In this sense then, global capitalism is not seen as a historical process with particular power structures but an amorphous matrix within which we are all helplessly trapped.

Now it is true that Karl Marx did not properly understand the colonial world and its emancipatory objectives. We see this in the biography he penned of Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American liberator, whom Marx labeled as just another Napoleon-like populist dictator. Marx missed the demands for a consolidated decolonisation, including the abolition of slavery and construction of states which could resist further imperial incursions and resource pillage. Yet he did recognise the importance of particular histories in shaping human futures. That much is missed by the ahistorical pseudo-Marxists.

For this reason, an end to the centuries-long Anglo-American hegemony is seen as trivial by these people. Displacement of the Anglo-American dictatorship by a multipolar order is seen as having no real meaning for ordinary or working class people. Similarly, the rise of China is not appreciated because it has accommodated a controlled form of capitalism. The tremendous achievements of China in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and spending its surplus on public infrastructure instead of wars of domination – are dismissed as meaningless and just a new phase in the integration of ‘global capitalism’.

Other ahistorical Marxists want this amorphous “capitalism” to destroy all traditional and indigenous social structures so that capitalist ‘modernisation’ will ‘inevitably’ lead to some sort of imagined socialism. This arrogant view abandons any idea of social struggle or resistance, let alone sympathy for ordinary human beings.

Orientalist clichés (“freedom from authoritarian regimes”) about the great BRICS counterweights are put up as “evidence” of a dystopian future in which there is no hope of change. This is little more than an empty cynicism, with no real sense of history.

Meanwhile, dozens of southern nations flock to BRICS, despite the Western demonisations, as it seems to offer a world order which will provide some relief from the dollar dictatorship and the possibility for little people and independent nations to survive, in a savage world.

Of course, the above currents do not fully explain the actual motivation for such stupidity. For that we should look to psychological explanations. I personally favour the Western “saviour complex” idea, where a moral high ground is staked out but without any inclination to support and defend the actual achievements of indigenous social struggles.

Yet, as the late Malcolm X said, “If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything”.

Source -> https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/why-do-so-many-western-left-liberals-hate-brics

I've been curious lately about Afghanistan. It's been awhile now since Taliban took complete control of the country. For anyone knowlegable, is some kind of resistance brewing in there, socialist or otherwise?

Epstein-Funded MIT Lab Hosted Panel On Giving Pedos Child Sex Robots

Unlisted youtube video: MIT Media Lab Forbidden Research Live Webcast

In every single fucking article about this, including the wikipedia article, if it is mentioned at all, describes this as a botched seduction. What is this you ask?

"Eric, it seems, had attempted to take things further and make serious love to Jacintha. He had held her down . . . and though she struggled, yelling at him to stop, he had torn her skirt and bruised a shoulder and her left hip."- Eric and Us, 2006

In what fucking world is this "seduction?" If you had seen this, what would you have done? Would you laugh, maybe cringe a bit? Or would you be running off to get someone, anyone, to help someone who is obviously being raped?

If Epstein was around back then, Blair would have been sat next to him on his plane and be talking about how the soviets weren't really socialists or whatever, just like that fucker Chomsky. Im so glad I managed to avoid the influence of that ivory eminence tainted in the disgusting stains of bourgeois impunity

I made this comment on reddit and people seemed to like it so I'll post it here too. I don't think it'd be worth a full in depth article on this topic in particular so I'll just paste it as it.

There are a variety of ideologies out there, but I think they fall into one of three categories. Animate, inanimate and dead ideologies.

Dead ideologies are the ones of feudalism, platonic Republicanism, the chinese mandate of heaven and ancien bushido and divine right of kings. These ideologies had their place in previous class societies like the Manoralist system and slave society, but nowadays have no class basis to survive on [what movement could form around reinstating serfdom?]

Animate ideologies are the ones that belong to classes and advance class interests that are existant. [Modern] Social democracy, liberalism and fascism are the ideologies of the Bourgeoisie, which are obviously animate nowadays. Meanwhile, Marxist socialism is the ideology of the proletariat who are also animate.

There are a plethora of ideologies which I consider "Inanimate" and only exist in the minds of ideologues. [Another name for them would be immaterial]. Ideologies like anarcho-communism, national bolshevism, anarcho-capitalism, among others, have no class basis. They go against political economy and are DOA because they serve no class's interest.

For national bolshevism for instance, it obviously doesn't serve the interest of the Bourgeoisie considering its advocating of DOTP, but the proletariat interest lies in internationalism and respect for self determination and mutual respect, which means it is counter to the interests of the proletariat as well. Ergo, national bolshevism withers and dies without a zeitgeist of either bolshevism, nationalism, or both, and only serves as a diversionary ideology. [The only possible exception would be an anti-colonialist perspective. I.e, bat`thism]

The US dollar has experienced accelerated depreciation during the last weeks of January, reaching levels not seen since March 2021. The dollar index (DXY), which measures the value of the greenback against a basket of six major currencies, has fallen below 97 points, approaching four-year lows against the euro and the British pound. This weakness represents the culmination of a structural erosion process that has seen the dollar lose approximately 10% of its value over the past twelve months.

This depreciation is not solely due to typical macroeconomic cycles, but rather to a growing loss of confidence in the global financial model centered on the US dollar. An analysis by Zero Hedge states that "gold's movement is a vote of no confidence in the entire global financial architecture." More than a safe haven, the currency has become a risky asset in the face of the aggressive monetary policy pursued by the Trump administration and Washington's increasing fiscal fragility.

This constitutes a systemic loss of confidence. As Erik Bethel, former director of the World Bank, pointed out , the artificial demand for dollars that sustains the US economy stems from the fact that 60% of the world's central banks hold reserves in this currency. When that demand disappears because global actors no longer want to use the dollar, the system suffers: "All that artificial demand for dollars disappears and we sink," warned Bethel, who anticipates scenarios of massive inflation or even hyperinflation if the trend continues.

2026: Convulsive onset as a symptom of a structural shift

The past few weeks have been marked by extreme volatility in currency and commodity markets . The Japanese yen has experienced sharp movements that have disrupted global stability, and in response, on January 23, the U.S. Treasury Department conducted a rate check to assess a possible intervention in the foreign exchange market and curb the yen's decline against the dollar. This episode, initiated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, reveals the level of nervousness among U.S. authorities regarding the destabilization of Japanese bond markets.

Yields on Japan's 10-year Treasury bonds (JGB) rose 4.5 basis points, reversing recent gains, as the yen weakened under inflationary pressure (CPI at 2.1%) and five consecutive trade deficits. Some analysts warn that Tokyo may need a US bailout, creating a paradox: who saves the savior?

Meanwhile, precious metals have experienced a historic rally . Gold surpassed $5,100 per ounce on January 26, marking a new all-time high. During 2025, the yellow metal appreciated between 60% and 71%, its best annual performance since 1979. Edu Estallo explains that "gold is the asset that historically wins when stock market valuations are stretched too far and confidence in the fiat system falters."

The S&P 500/gold ratio has touched an overvaluation line that has historically preceded major crises: 1929 (Great Depression), 1968 (the stagflation of the 1970s), 2000 (the dot-com bubble), and 2011. On each occasion, gold outperformed equities for years afterward. Estallo warns that this is the fourth time since 1880 that this pattern has repeated itself, indicating a structural cyclical shift where gold is regaining ground against overvalued equity assets.

• The orange line represents the purchasing power of the dollar, and the blue line represents the purchasing power of gold (Photo: Fidelity Investment)

Silver, meanwhile, has exceeded 161% gain in 2025, driven by supply and demand constraints linked to artificial intelligence and photovoltaic solar panels, trading between $107 and $110 per ounce.

This shift towards physical metals is a sign of the aforementioned "vote of no confidence against the entire global financial architecture." Copper and other industrial metals have also shown strength and reflected a structural rotation of capital towards tangible assets in the face of the deterioration of fiduciary instruments.

Debt vs. gold: A tectonic rupture

2025 has been a dismal year for the US dollar, with the DXY index plummeting by over 9%, its worst performance since 2017. This made it the weakest currency among 17 major global currencies. Such weakness occurred despite the Trump administration's promises to strengthen the dollar and transform the United States into a "Bitcoin superpower."

The recent weakness of the dollar is explained by a confluence of monetary, political, and strategic factors. On the one hand, the Federal Reserve maintained interest rates in a range of 3.5%–3.75% after a series of cuts scheduled to conclude in December 2025, reducing the relative attractiveness of dollar-denominated assets. At the same time, the deteriorating US fiscal situation is eroding the currency's credibility, while, for example, the government struggles to contain the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds, which increases the cost of servicing the debt, already exceeding military spending.

The macroeconomic context that explains this decline is an unprecedented debt crisis. According to The Kobeissi Letter, global public debt interest payments reached $4.9 trillion in 2025, an increase of $1.6 trillion in just three years. Total global debt climbed to $346 trillion, rising by $55 trillion over the same period, and for every dollar of global GDP growth in 2025, ten dollars of new debt were generated. During these three years, while debt expanded, gold appreciated by 142%.

• In blue, the growth of global debt and in red the percentage of global GDP corresponding to debt (Photo: Global Debt Monitor)

The United States adds $ 1 trillion to its debt every 150 days and, according to warnings from Bethel, pays more than $1 trillion annually in debt interest alone, exceeding the War Department's budget. This debt spiral has eroded confidence in fiat currency and was financed through printing money, which expanded the M2 money supply by approximately 40% between 2020 and 2022, according to data from the Mises Institute.

The dollar's share of central bank reserves has fallen from 66% a decade ago to 56.92% in the third quarter of 2025, according to IMF data. These institutions have accumulated 9,500 tons of gold since 2010, of which 3,700 tons represent unofficial, undeclared purchases, which have accelerated since the start of the conflict in Ukraine in 2022.

Countries such as Russia, China, and members of the BRICS are diversifying their reserves into physical gold, especially after the freezing of Russian assets in 2022. Basel III, a set of internationally agreed measures to be implemented in 2025 to strengthen the regulation, supervision, and risk management of banks, recognized physical gold as a Tier 1 asset, equating it with Treasury bonds, which has legitimized its role as a pillar of financial stability.

• Gold's appeal is growing as US government interest payments rise and new debt-related vulnerabilities emerge (Photo: Bloomberg)

The struggle for resources and the industrial dependence of the Global North

The decline of the dollar standard coincides with a structural crisis in the supply of critical raw materials. The International Energy Agency warns, in its 2025 annual report , that China dominates the refining of 19 of the 20 key strategic minerals, with an average market share of nearly 70%. In the battery sector, Chinese control exceeds 85% of global capacity and reaches 95% in anode manufacturing.

This geographic concentration creates systemic vulnerabilities on the other side of the planet. More than half of strategic minerals are subject to export controls, and the restrictions imposed by Beijing in 2025 on rare earth elements and battery components have highlighted the fragility of Western supply chains. A 10% disruption in rare earth magnet exports could affect the production of 6.2 million cars, one million industrial motors, and 230,000 civilian aircraft, according to IEA estimates.

In Europe, primary aluminum production has collapsed by 25% since 2010, leaving the continent with a structural deficit of 93% between domestic consumption and production. Slovalco, one of the most technically advanced plants, remains closed because high energy prices make smelting mathematically impossible, as it requires between 13 and 15 megawatt-hours per ton.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has pointed out that we are witnessing the simultaneous collapse of the fiat monetary order, the domestic political order, and the international geopolitical order, placing us "on the brink of war." Peter Schiff, for his part, anticipates that this crisis will be deeper than that of the 1980s: "This time it won't be the United States abandoning the gold standard, but the world abandoning the dollar standard."

The struggle for natural resources—evidenced by tensions over Greenland and trade sanctions or tariffs—is set against this backdrop of growing scarcity. The United States, far from being immune, exhibits a critical dependence on imports of processed minerals and advanced manufactured goods that its domestic supply chains cannot replace. The collapse of European aluminum production and China's control of critical minerals leave the Western bloc in a position of structural vulnerability as it attempts to maintain its monetary hegemony.

The combination of unsustainable debt, trade wars, resource scarcity, and geopolitical fragmentation presents extreme scenarios, including the possibility of internal conflicts in the United States, as some analyses suggest. The question that emerges is not whether the system will change, but how profound the transformation will be and which actors will define the new monetary order emerging from the decline of the fiat dollar.

The military attack against Venezuela demonstrates how the destructive influence of the United States is the only political tool left to a deindustrialized economy that has fallen into such a massive external debt that it now threatens to end the dominant and lucrative monetary role of the dollar.

Or is this an opportunity to reinforce the dollar's hegemony? A deliberate depreciation of the dollar can operate as a tool of structural power. By weakening, the United States pressures the central banks of other countries to intervene in foreign exchange markets to prevent excessive appreciation of their own currencies. This intervention typically takes the form of massive purchases of Treasury bonds, which in turn reduces the yields on these assets. The end result is cheaper financing of the US fiscal deficit, externalized to the rest of the world and free from domestic political costs.

It only remains for the world to finally understand this and decide to break with the chains of subordination and permanent transfer of resources towards a fictitious capital that constantly needs artificial respiration to survive imperially.

From the article:

Portrait of author Mary Shelley left, the frontispiece to Shelley's novel 'Frankenstein' by Theodor von Holst, right| People's World composite

Yet another Frankenstein film has made its way to the screen. Despite critical acclaim and projected awards, it has little in common with Mary Shelley’s novel. Readers interested in Shelley’s political vision and the historical pressures that gave rise to the book are far better served by turning to the original text. To mark the 175th anniversary of Mary Godwin Shelley’s death, we revisit this novel.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—written in 1816, when Mary was eighteen, and published two years later—emerged during a period of political conservatism in post-Napoleonic Britain. Fear that revolutionary ideas from France might cross the English Channel fostered an increasingly repressive social climate. The legacy of the French Revolution, followed by years of war and economic crisis, produced widespread unrest and prompted the British state and its allies to suppress ideas perceived as destabilising.

Radical politics, religious dissent, and new scientific theories about life and matter were regarded as threats to social order. Materialist models in particular, which explained life through body, sensation, and experience, as well as early evolutionary approaches, came under sustained conservative attack. Journals such as the Quarterly Review denounced materialism and anti-scriptural science as threats to the established Church and as deeply system-destabilising. Debates about the nature of life were treated as politically suspect, leading to renewed calls for censorship and prosecutions for blasphemy. Popular unrest was further fuelled by economic hardship, industrial change, and movements for political reform, and included the Luddite uprisings (1811–19).

Shelley’s novel must also be understood in the light of her family background and intellectual inheritance. As the daughter of William Godwin, the leading English radical philosopher of the 1790s, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering advocate of women’s rights, she grew up immersed in debates about reason, perfectibility, gender equality, and social reform. Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after giving birth to Mary, was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Frankenstein reflects this legacy. The novel engages seriously with contemporary radical science, presents life as a product of material processes without divine intervention, and derives human development from sensation, environment, and experience. In doing so, it explicitly aligns itself with materialist modes of thought that were under fierce attack in Britain.

The frontispiece to the 1831 ‘Frankenstein’ by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel| Public Domain

The Shelleys’ and Byron’s exile on the Continent underscores this pressure: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s outspoken atheism and radicalism made England an increasingly hostile territory for him. After leaving Britain in 1816, Mary and Percy Shelley never returned during his lifetime. From Switzerland and later Italy, they observed British repression; Shelley and Byron produced some of their most radical works, while Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was conceived in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, within the exiled circle around Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s personal doctor, John William Polidori. Persistent bad weather—the “Year Without a Summer”—forced the group to spend long evenings indoors, filled with conversations about philosophy, natural science, and the nature of life. After collectively reading German Gothic fiction (especially the recent collection Fantasmagoriana [1812]), Byron proposed a literary competition: everyone should write a ghost story.

This prompt gave rise to two texts of lasting significance: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s tale The Vampyre (1819). Polidori’s text established the modern literary archetype of the aristocratic vampire, Lord Ruthven, portraying him as a metaphor for a dangerous, blood-drinking feudal lord and thereby directly paving the way for Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (1897). Viewed in its historical context, this tale too is highly politically charged. While Byron and Percy Shelley’s own texts remained fragments, Mary Shelley transformed her vision into a philosophical novel that far exceeded the original “ghost story” and became a foundational reflection on science, power, responsibility, and social exclusion.

One of the most famous stories in world literature, Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist driven by curiosity and the desire to transcend natural limits, who animates a Being from assembled body parts. Rejecting the Being at the moment of its animation, Victor abandons his creation and leaves it to its fate. The Being initially behaves kindly, acquires language, literature, and human conduct, and carefully prepares for its first encounter with people. Repeated rejection, cruelty, and Victor’s persistent neglect eventually drive it to seek revenge on its creator.

The novel’s settings, Geneva and Ingolstadt, function as fundamentally opposed political spaces. Geneva, Victor’s place of origin, embodies the dialectical legacy of the Enlightenment: it is both a stronghold of repressive Calvinism and the birthplace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose philosophy radically challenged that order. The city thus represents a tense field of bourgeois duty, familial obligation, and the unrealized potential of radical social designs. Shelley counters this with Ingolstadt as a deliberately chosen site of rupture. In contemporary British perception, the city was inseparably associated with Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati order, which conservative circles—stoked by pamphlets such as John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797)—regarded as the epitome of a Jacobin-atheist world conspiracy.

By having Victor Frankenstein establish his laboratory precisely here, at the epicenter of the feared “conspiracy of reason,” his seemingly private experiment becomes politically charged. His secrecy, solitary pursuit of creative omnipotence, and deliberate circumvention of established institutions mirror the conspiratorial practices attributed to the Illuminati. Shelley thus situates Victor’s ambition within a space of revolutionary transgression that links scientific creation with social re-creation. Victor’s failure lies not in his pursuit of knowledge, but in its irresponsible execution, his decisive abdication of duty.

In the original 1818 edition, Shelley finally performs a remarkable reversal: it is not Victor Frankenstein, but the Being he creates, who proves to be the reflective observer, consistent moralist, and analytical thinker. Victor’s failure lies not in his pursuit of knowledge, but in its irresponsible implementation. Shelley’s tone towards Victor is often ironic or quietly contemptuous; he appears intellectually reckless, emotionally immature, and incapable of sustained responsibility. Shelley dramatizes the collapse of Frankenstein’s godlike ambition: “But now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Chapter 4). What follows is a decisive abdication of responsibility.

By contrast, the Being functions as an attentive scientific observer. It carefully documents its development and systematically reflects on sensation, language, emotion, and social relations. Its gradual learning unfolds through sensory experience, observation, imitation, and engagement with literature (Plutarch, Goethe’s Werther, Milton’s Paradise Lost). This process mirrors contemporary physiological and pedagogical research, particularly theories that emphasize the shaping role of environment, nerves, and experience. Shelley thus links scientific attentiveness with ethical competence: in this respect, the Being succeeds where Victor fails. It follows processes through, observes consequences, and reflects on the moral implications of knowledge.

Crucially, Shelley presents the Being as fully human. It is a moral creature with a developing character. Naturally benevolent, it performs good deeds in secret, restrains its anger, and approaches its first attempt at human contact thoughtfully, hoping that reason and compassion will overcome prejudice. Its moral goodness endures repeated rejection and violence; only the systematic denial of recognition and care—primarily by Victor—ultimately transforms its desire for compassion into revenge. Its plea for a female companion is expressed as a claim to natural justice, sociability, and mutual affection, and Victor’s destruction of the half-finished female marks a decisive betrayal that completes the Being’s isolation.

Shelley reinforces this critique through the novel’s structure. After Elizabeth’s murder—Victor’s bride—the narrative reverses the roles of pursuer and pursued: Frankenstein becomes the obsessed hunter, mirroring the Being’s earlier quest for compassion. Victor thus suffers the fate he had imposed on the creature, should he create a companion—exile from the “civilized” world into the wilderness. It is no coincidence that their final chase takes place in the Arctic, a region of eternal ice associated in Shelley’s Europe with political stagnation and restorative conservatism. Walton conveys the perspective of this society. The Being is granted nearly the last words of the novel: in an extensive account of its perspective, it confesses its crimes, expresses remorse, and declares its intention to withdraw from the world, while Victor dies unrepentant, clinging to his self-justification.

The novel closes with the tragic insight that neglect, isolation, and the refusal of responsibility by individuals and society can destroy even the most promising moral beginnings. The monstrous, Shelley suggests, lies not in the creature’s origin, but in Frankenstein’s abdication of scientific, social, and ethical duty.

Read in this light, the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, articulates on the level of myth the same political problem embedded in Victor’s education and ambition. Mary Shelley frames Frankenstein with Milton’s Paradise Lost, using as her epigraph Adam’s challenge to his maker: “Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?” The question shifts judgment away from the creator’s authority towards his responsibility and towards the rights of the created. The Being’s grievance is therefore as political as it is moral: it is denied recognition, community, and justice; it embodies the radical claim that authority without responsibility generates violence. The epigraph thus positions Frankenstein as a critique of illegitimate power and aligns scientific creation with contemporary debates about tyranny, equality, and revolutionary reform.

Finally, the novel situates its concerns within the broader horizon of imperial and expansionist ambitions. Victor’s friend Clerval’s idealistic desire to improve living conditions in India (clearly representing the thinking of the British Empire), and Walton’s Arctic expedition in search of a Northwest Passage—still largely unexplored in 1816—evoke the glorification of expansion, mastery over nature, and empire. Victor embodies the dangers of this mindset: while seeking to penetrate the secrets of life itself, he lacks the ethical and social resources required to wield such power responsibly. By contrast, the Being cultivates discipline, reflection, and moral restraint, carefully navigating social encounters and ethical choices. Only sustained exclusion and rejection transform this moral potential into violence.

The Being’s response to societal abuse prefigures Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, some thirty years later. Heathcliff’s trajectory similarly exposes societal hypocrisy and confronts readers with their prejudices. In different registers, both women challenge the norms of British bourgeois society, issuing a powerful plea for radical rethinking.

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