This review concerns the first three of the four sections, until page 261. Part Four, The Savage Reservation, offers solutions. As a writer with an interest in Was, Is and What’s Next, I am not concerned with the fantastical realms of should, could and would.

Kingsnorth’s examination of the evolution of Modernity is deep, wide, informative and in this reader’s view, entirely accurate. He remains hampered, either by education or censorship, with standard modern notions of previous times which are false aspects of the deception he is battling in this inquiry:

1.) That transnational elites are a modern development, when they were the keystone of the Bronze Age,

2.) That there is such a thing as Western culture, when the notion of the West, which meant the land of death, of Hades, who there westered in lengthening shadow, was used to replace the notion of Christendom, as a worship of economic progress, which required movement towards virgin resources as the rape of earth and humanity created a desert from Ur to Mexico City,

3.) That “white” is an actual race, when it did not exist as a racial noun in European languages, until the 1500s after introduction by Non-Christian slave drivers, in order to replace the term Christian and facilitate chattel trade of Christians.

This is no criticism of this superb book. Above I mark three oversights implicit in the educated condition, which Paul certainly suffers from. A person attaining his literary credentials and published by a major house must either possess ignorance of the facts above or feign them. This book was gifted to me by Barry Bliss. I can recommend it to any reader interested in the current social insanity. Paul was an actual tree-hugger, and had in common with this denizen of the urban gutter and high school dropout, a regard for Edward Abby, author of the story that became the movie Lonely Are the Brave, and also a native, inborn fear and hatred of machinery. Other than that we seem to be opposite in many ways, including his deep reading of modern philosophers who I disdain as much as he disdains war, which I see as a positive force.

Somehow we came to the same conclusion about “western civilization,” even though he identifies it as a cultural force and I see it as an anti-cultural force. The blind spot seems to be the shared intellectual belief that only people of color were enslaved in the building of America, when it was mostly people like my ancestors from Paul’s own goddamned island that were so thoroughly trafficked that no official trace of their Two Million souls can be found in official sources, though they are numbered and named in my 21 books on American slavery, and this book, on the general fraud of slavery.

The west is simply the direction of unspoiled resources from Ur, beginning with the cedars of Lebanon cut down by Enkidu and Gilgamesh. This direction also happens to be into the sunset, the mythic dwelling place of the dead. 17 years ago I began writing The Sunset Saga, an epic science-fiction yarn about transhumanism, which ironically required an investigation into the early economics and cultural landscape of Plantation America, which finally brought me to Paul’s book Against the Machine, which was the theme of The Sunset Saga. Paul seems nearly a Tolkienesque version of my tree-hugging protagonist Three-Rivers!

I read Paul’s book last night and this morning on the #11 Train from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. During that drive, I was called by Richard Barrett, an exuberant young man who first sought me out for boxing advice and is having a hard time attaining Stoicism in the face of the lie that so binds us. As Paul points out, a web, and a net, are both hunting tools, used to trap prey. Yet we regard them as super highways of the mind.

Before continuing with Against The Machine, let me say, as I told Richard, that no one attains stoicism, no one that I have met, without boxing. Period, end of sentence. Everything worked out by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Epictetus were the products of men who wrestled as boys, youths, and men. Socrates means body-snatcher, and he was a noted wrestler and war-fighter. Every one of these men also boxed from age 12 through 21. Sophists of Late Antiquity were sissies who just watched. By wrestling, boxing, stick fighting, rather than going to school, my dumb ass was gifted with the clarity of reality that any ghetto gro knows, “That murkha,” has always been, since my youth in 1974, [1] “fake and gay.” Poor educated souls like Paul have to spend 30 years unlearning their induction protocols.

Changing The Machine is not a stoic, rational proposition—it is an agitated fantasy. God crashes The Machine in cosmic cycles. It’s is all in Prometheus Bound, by Aeschylus. Just read Zeus as God, gods as angels and the titanic sons of Khronos, “of heaven and earth,” as technologists and technical civilization. Prometheus gave fire, the root of all arts, to man, and is chained in the Caucasus, then a known source of petroleum. He gave number to man as well. He is the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the light bringer… It all fits. But we have been programmed not to be able to read our own myths but set them against one another. We are in Hesiod’s Age of Iron, the place where man falls. Prometheus, who was chained at about the time that Atlantis fell, about 11,000 years ago, the master of forethought, announced that he would rise and God would retreat from human affairs after about 10,000 years. What happened in 1,000 A.D. give or take a 200 years? The cutting down of the Grove of Odin in 1070?, the Great Schism [900s?], the triumph of Islam at Manzerkirt in 1071, The Magna Carta in 1216, finally demoting God from Judge to witness and then sacralizing debt unto enslavement of orphans and widows…

To the reader steeped in modern literature, it might seem that transnational elites are a modern thing. But in about 1200 B.C., the widowed Queen of Egypt wrote to the King of the Hittites, that her husband and son were dead and she would not marry one of her slaves, and that he aught to send her a son to marry.

There, I offer some ancient and modern examples of the timeless lie of the machine, which was old when the Spartans died at Thermopyle. What is the “fire” that the titan bestowed other than petroleum? Ichor was a caustic substance that was poison to life but was the blood of these gods. The powers who felt sorry for Prometheus, chained above the Baku Oil fields in punishment, where Oceanus and his nymphs, beings with the powers of nautical and aviation mobility. The other powers were Io, metaphor for a nautical nation harried through the hinterlands to Egypt, and Hephastious, technologist Arch Angel. These beings fly in the play.

In our history, the power of flight was developed by sea faring powers. One seafaring power today, has a dozen ships, each of which, if it were a nation, would have the fourth largest air force in the world. Robots and 3-D printers were in The Iliad 2700 years ago.

By way of the above, world’s worst book review, I simply try to fill in the blanks for Paul Kingsnorth’s excellent book on why we are being eaten by a machine, and the fact that the machine is the realization of a preexisting malevolent power that views us as food. Bravo to Paul for not veering away from the metaphysically obvious soul harvest. The chapters and sections are richly and meaningfully titled. On page 238 in his exploration of spiritual resistance to the machine, he covers the same subject that was the focus of Andrew Edwards recent novel Crowbar, and my 2020 novel The Filthy Few, that of systemic sacrifice to dark powers being at the crux of the modern world, and that America is its navel.

My two favorite quotes are:

“In the past, the act of staring into the smokey fire with family or neighbors was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare into digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories.”

-page 182

“The machine exists to create dependency.”

-page 183, when the book really gets sailing into dark waters…

“A rediscovery, or reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines.”

-page 229

The above quote is why I would have ended the book on page 261 with:

“Something is coming.

“Be ready.”

But I suppose Thesis, the imprint of Penguin, owned by Random House, owned by a bank, which provides sacrificial victims to The Deceiver via some malevolent NGO, required the 53 page solution in order to satisfy our imposed sense of contentious polarity. Paul’s advice, I am certain, is well above the norm for self help literature, and shall leave to less tired eyes to consider.

Thank you Barry and Paul.

Notes

1.) Age 11 was puberty for me, the awakening to the 360 degree adult lie.