A Million Little Gods

About A Million Little Gods

A Million Little Gods: A podcast on the consolation of uncertainty. It's about being of two—or more—minds about things and being okay with that. Hosted by Aaron Gowen of the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Hamburg. amillionlittlegods.com amillionlittlegods.substack.com (https://amillionlittlegods.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Aaron Gowen

Category

education · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

15 Jul 2015

Latest episode

8 Aug 2025

Latest episodes

37 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Aug 2025

   Book 3: Introduction – Part Two

   Cafe La Morenita (https://www.amazon.com/Morenita-Tostado-Azucar-Molido-Roasted/dp/B00N7PMH4W). “The little dark-haired girl.” Ehn. Should’ve made Yerba Mate or something. All right, let’ get back to it. Once people around the world had finally caught on to the fact that they’d been the marks in a shell game they’d foolishly been betting on since the industrial revolution—that their personal labor had been structured within a set of legal and economic institutions and had been measured in standardized units (hours of work) that could be traded and sold on a market for a set value—they had reacted with . . . predictable indignation. You might think that I am alluding to another feature of the reality Perón found himself lodged in before the junta: “dialectical materialism”—what some call Marxism. And you certainly cannot explain Perón’s rise devoid of that half-baked theory of everything. But there is another way you can strike out on once you face up to the abuses suffered by the subservient. By the early 1940s, Communism, the purest distillation of Marxist thought, had long-since made its expansiveness apparent: Its most basic dictate—that the lowest level of human experience (the struggle for power and “material” possession) subsumes every other facet of human behavior—was voracious. Everything else—family bonds, career ambitions, fealty to nation, altruism, charity, . . . and (famoulsy) religion—was consumed in the monomaniacal maw of this basic principle, according to which human coexistence is necessarily impelled to one inevitable conclusion: a classless, stateless society where all property is collectively owned and wealth is distributed based on need. The adherents of this principle believed that some further evolutionary state hidden beyond the veil of those ends might be possible; but that we are culturally blind to that possible state because we cannot look past the aforementioned institutions: the state, the family, religion. In order to achieve those ends, the seductive phantasms of institutions holding them back had to be exposed and brought into synthesis with them. As you can imagine, the Catholic Church was not amused. It didn’t like being called an institution. It didn’t consider itself the work of humans at all. But much worse: to be rendered a mere diversion—to be labeled as priestly magicians, pressing made-up concerns to distract the people, all the while fleecing the people of their needs, and of the means to attain those needs, either for the gain of the Church itself or, worse yet, in the service of secular powers—that was more than flesh and blood could stand. Now, you can explain away this reaction as angry deflection or denial. “Of course the Church would resist such a conclusion,” you might say. And, well, maybe. Alternatively, I can call you a self-important cynic. What you might call deflation or reduction, I might call nihilism. Your psychologizing of the Church, or of the Clergy, presupposes the very things you are claiming are “merely” instruments of class domination: values, principles. Marx himself had wavered before leaning into “revolutionary materialism.” He was enthralled not merely by Hegel’s dialectic, but by his idealism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/). I’m just gonna help this guy out. So, you should note that when he says “idealism,” he doesn’t mean it in the common way people use it to mean having high ideals or aspirations. He’s using the philosophical term of art: The notion that our minds, our consciousness, our ideas—our values and principles—are real; and alternatively that reality is, at least somewhat, shaped by our minds and ideas. In Phänomenologie des Geistes, The (https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%20Hegel%20-%20The%20Phenomenology%20of%20Spirit%20(Terry%20Pinkard%20Translation).pdf) (https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%20Hegel%20-%20The%20Phenomenology%20of%20Spirit%20(Terry%20Pinkard%20Translation).pdf)Phenomenology of the Spirit (https://files.libcom.org/files/Georg%20Wilhelm%20Friedrich%20Hegel%20-%20The%20Phenomenology%20of%20Spirit%20(Terry%20Pinkard%20Translation).pdf), Hegel argued that we do indeed encounter the “things” of the world. They are outside of us. But we also “make” them, in every facet. Outside of our ideation they are never fully real. Their reality is tied to the process of our conceiving and understanding them. When we begin to understand the things we have conceived in thought as separate from us—and especially when we perceive ourselves as objects, separate from us—this is estrangement.⁠ However, Hegel contends that this process is, nevertheless, an essential part of our becoming complete selves—for the things of the world are separate from us; yet we are objects in the world. When we reconcile ourselves to this paradox, we are alienated, but we are free. Marx turned this idea on its head. In Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (http://%20https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf), what in English we abbreviate as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx borrowed the notion of “estrangement.” But where Hegel saw “alienation” as the positive version of estrangement—a stage in the development of self-consciousness—Marx saw only the worker's estrangement⁠ from labor, production, and ultimately, their human essence. And as he “matured,” Marx jettisoned ideas and self-consciousness altogether.He criticized Hegel for viewing ideas as the primary drivers of history, arguing instead that material conditions and economic structures determine consciousness. In the set of manuscripts by Marx and Engels (and probably a few others) that we call The German Ideology, they famously declare (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm): “Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sander umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt.” (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”) A Million Little Gods is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Unto the breach rode Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci. Alternatively known as Pope Leo XIII (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09169a.htm). From one perspective, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Pope Leo wanted to provide the Church with a philosophical and theological bulwark against the encroaching influence of modern ideologies. You could of course think of him as a CEO whose one job is to secure the bottom line—butts in pews, knees on prie-dieux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prie-dieu), pesos in collection baskets—for the red-cassocked board of directors. But that begs the question that was at hand: What was wrong with those ideologies? Hegel’s philosophy of reality as a dynamic unfolding of contradictions through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—and especially his views on God and his nigh-on deification of historical progress—those didn’t sit well with Leo. But he understood where they were coming from. The diversity of beliefs, and the difficulty of living together in peace given that diversity, make Hegel’s model of reality appealing. If God is an end toward which things evolve, a self-directing principle that governs or animates reality; and if the truth itself evolves over time; then you can fudge your way through moral quandaries in God’s good graces. It was an enticing notion, but by Leo’s lights discernibly wrong. Meanwhile, Marx. Marxism denied the spiritual dimension of human existence altogether and placed the onus of virtuous “progress” on the struggle between the classes. If the good is simply all the means necessary to effect the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist structures, then there are no moral obligations for the lower classes—as long as they break the chains of oppression, whatever the lower classes do is, by definition, good. Leo believed this purely economic and materialist view of history dismantled any moral and metaphysical order. So in one of his first acts as Pope, he released the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris (http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html), which reintroduced the world to a figure once dismissed by the likes of Voltaire (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voltaire/) and Diderot (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/diderot/), d’Holbach (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/holbach/) and Hume (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/): St. Thomas Aquinas (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/). It’s not enough to say Leo’s revival of Thomism was simply an academic preference; nor that it was a strategic intellectual or theological response to the challenges posed by Hegelianism, or Marxism, or logical positivism, or whatever other philosophical movement was ascendent in his day. Yes––unlike Hegel, who subordinated theology to philosophy; or Marx, who eliminated theology altogether––St. Thomas provided a balance, where reason supported faith rather than undermining it. And he reinforced the immutability of truth, particularly in metaphysics and ethics, which countered Hegel’s relativistic historicism and Marx’s radical materialism. But he did more than that. Leo believed Thomism offered a better response to that question of how to live together as diverse individuals in a system seemingly bent on stripping us of our individual spirits. The Enlightenment thinkers had disparaged Aquinas, Leo argued, because he represented medieval Scholasticism, natural law theology, and Aristotelian metaphysics, all of which they sought to replace with rationalism, empiricism, and secular political thought. But Leo argued that their own latter-day evolution into historicism, phenomenology, and dialectical materialism had proved that the Enlightenment’s priorities were a shallow soil that, no matter how long you left it to fallow, could bear no fruit. Leo believed St. Thomas had already foreseen Hegel’s insights, but had given a more elegant, more beautiful account. God is indeed an end.But the truth itself does not evolve. Aquinas built his metaphysical framework on participation (https://iep.utm.edu/thomas-aquinas-metaphysics/#H3) (participatio), which means that all created beings derive their existence from God, who is Being Itself (Ipsum Esse Subsistens (https://www.mdpi.com/3154694)). Everything in creation possesses being by participation, meaning not that the world is God but shares in His existence. Thomas writes (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4001.htm#article1)in the Summa Theologiae that Christ, as the Word (the Logos), is the principle of creation. Everything exists through Him, as confirmed in John 1:3: "Through Him all things were made; without him, nothing was made that has been made." Christ is not only the Creator but also the ultimate end (telos) of creation. His incarnation fulfills the divine purpose of history. The human soul is created with an intellectual and volitional capacity to receive God. Through grace, Christ becomes present within us. When a person receives grace, they receive a real but participatory share in Christ’s divine life. This means Christ emerges in us through sanctification. To turn away from Christ and rely on ourselves is not freedom. It is emptiness and death.We become our free and sovereign selves only by giving ourselves over to participating in Christ’s life—even if we have never heard Christ’s name or heard His words; even if we have heard them and question them. I mean . . . . first of all, this guy has lost the frickin’ plot. Second: He’s kinda making the Enlightenment philosophers’ case for them. This stuff just sounds like fantasy and fiat. Thomism rejects the idea that nature and grace are opposed; rather, grace builds upon nature (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm#article8)). This means Christ’s emergence is not destructive but elevating, fulfilling creation’s original purpose. Thus, creation itself is oriented towards Christ, and His emergence in us and the cosmos follows from our participation in divine being. Now, as I said before, the Enlightenment thinkers shifted to empiricism as a reaction to Aquinas and other medieval Scholastics’ model of cosmic order. Their reasoning was not just intellectual, but political and cultural. They saw Scholasticism as propping up an outdated hierarchy. It was “authoritarian.” Huh. It’s like . . . it’s like he’s listening to me. Is this– . . .? I’m playing with words. Words are so very fun to play with. By “authoritarian,” I mean that as of the eighteenth century, the received wisdom about medieval Scholasticism had hardened into hardness. In philosophical and scientific discourse, power had supposedly improperly lain with authority over inquiry; and in politics, a sovereign king had unjustly had more authority than a sovereign people. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as Ruiz de Montoya (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13223c.htm) was smuggling the pot of imperfect embers that would ignite our reality, a mischievous pombero among the island monkeys named Francis Bacon stole the honey that had been used to hold that reality together, and left a new reality in its place. Bacon wrote (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bacon-novum-organum), and I quote, “As the present sciences are useless for the discovery of effects, so the present system of logic is useless for the discovery of the sciences. The present system of logic rather assists in confirming and rendering inveterate the errors founded on vulgar notions than in searching after truth, and is therefore more hurtful than useful. The syllogism is not applied to the principles of the sciences, and is of no avail in intermediate axioms, as being very unequal to the subtilty of nature. It forces assent, therefore, and not things.”⁠ Woah, woah, woah, whoah, woah. Slow the crap down, Tex! The Forger⁠ here has the luxury of pasting together a book, which means that you can disembark from his fantasy cruise at the next port of entry, and avoid all the locals, and get all the information you need, like, What does “syllogism” mean? And discover that, oh! by the way, the word “vulgar” actually doesn’t mean what you think it means—at least not yet in 1620. Bacon meant of the vulgare—of the common people. It’s a folk category and therefore susceptible to being kind of made up. You know, like I said before: “ fiat.” As for a “syllogism,” it’s classic three-part logical argument that deduces a conclusion from two stated premises. So, you know, “All bacon is salty. This author is Francis Bacon. Therefore this author is salty.” I have no idea what a “pombero” is. And “island monkeys”? Come on! Within 120 years the inchoate reality that Bacon left behind had cracked through its chrysalis and emerged fully formed in the likes of David Hume . . ., and his ridiculous red-velvet shower cap, . . . who wrote, and I quote, “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”⁠ At least some of the germ of Bacon’s new reality took to the wind and would eventually transplant itself in our own forebears, lodged in the cassock threads and the minds of Francisco Suárez (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suarez/) and Luis de Molina (https://www.jesuits.org/stories/free-will-luis-de-molina/). Yet, while some of its traits took hold, we were resistant to utter transformation; inoculated by Aquinas, who had long-since countered such arguments in the very first question of his Summa (https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm), on the nature and extent of sacred doctrine. Some truths, he insists, exceed human reason—we need revelation to reach them. Revelation helps reason—it does not replace it—especially for truths that are otherwise hard to reach or regarding which we are prone to error. In that vein, even truths that reason can reach are better known through divine teaching, because it provides clarity and accessibility to minds that otherwise struggle. Okay. Look buddy, clearly, you and I are both Catholic. And I get it. I see the appeal of all this reverting back to Thomas Aquinas. I stand up, and kneel, and sit, and stand up again and say the creed at mass, too. But I can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I know there are people out there for whom none of that makes any sense. I can’t shake off Hume’s words. They’re very sticky: Facts are the things on which people agree. People don’t roll their eyes when you appeal to facts. Yeah, okay, some people do. But still, not people acting in good . . . faith. Perhaps you are so used to your surroundings that you do not notice their utility. Do you believe that Aquinas did not know that people grow skeptical of things they do not observe for themselves. he entire architecture of his Summa is built around the pillars of skeptical questions to address. Francis Bacon didn’t create skepticism. He stole it to make his reality. Realities are not eternal. They are the spandrel spaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel) that emerge when we draw lines through the eternal with our rulers and compasses. But Aquinas was a thief himself. The honey he stole was Aristotelean logic. And as Francis Bacon’s own editor and commentator at the turn of the last century points out,⁠ Bacon erringly forsook that logic to form his reality: “The demonstrative forms [that logic] exhibits,” the commentator writes, “ . . . are necessary to the support, verification, and extension of [observation], and when the propositions they embrace are founded on an accurate and close observation of facts, the conclusions to which they lead, even in moral science, may be regarded as certain as the facts wrested out of nature by direct experiment.” Aristotle said that there are two modes (https://www.logoslibrary.org/aristotle/prior/223.html) by which we invesitgate: we either we build up from particular facts to general laws and axioms, or dig down from universal propositions to the individual cases that exemplify them. Mmm-hmm. And it seems to me like Aquinas sort of mixed up the two modes and treated particular facts—like scripture—as if they were universal propositions. Perhaps Aquinas—and Duns Scotus (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/), and their heirs—favored too highly the former mode of invesitgation. But Bacon—and especially Hume—disparaged the latter mode altogether, and made even the former seem suspicious. And one wonders, given the lines they drew, whose reality was better built. That reality could not have sloughed off its chrysalis at any given point in the intervening 120 years between Bacon and Hume. That century and change were a transformative juncture. The imaginal discs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginal_disc) Bacon had hidden in the stolen honey remained dormant—quiescent—for some time, before the full materialist form emerged and spread its dusty wings. Okay buddy. I’ve got the mental twisties. I thought your were going to tell me about Juan Peron, and somehow we landed on English Civil War radicals⁠. I’m supposed to be going somewhere with this myself. I’m going to need another cup of the little brown haired girl. I’ll be back. Get full access to A Million Little Gods at amillionlittlethoughts.substack.com/subscribe (https://amillionlittlethoughts.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   31 Jul 2025

   Book 3: Introduction – Part One

   Uki Goñi was born in the United States. Much to the chagrin of folks whose political fortunes—and embarrassment of power—have lately been restored, that would normally mean that Goñi was an American citizen. But his father was an Argentine diplomat stationed at that country’s embassy in Washington, D.C. when he (Uki) was born. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the first section of which achieved enfranchising freed slaves) does state that anyone born on US soil is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but it excludes the children of foreign diplomats from that jurisdiction. So, Uki Goñi spent most of his first 14 years living out an American childhood not unlike my own: saying the pledge of allegiance in the courtyard of his local Catholic parish’s parochial school; wearing that AAA Safety Patrol belt the neon color of candied orange peel, making sure his classmates didn’t jaywalk; and hearing stories every November about the exploits of captain Myles Standish, Squanto, Massasoit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf6wY6FDYE), and a bunch religious dissenters—who, if they agreed on one thing, it was that they didn’t like Catholics; but who also (crowded in the hull of a beat-up Dutch cargo (https://www.jstor.org/stable/548611?seq=11) fluyt (https://mayflowerhistory.com/probate-inventory-of-the-mayflower) anchored in what’s now Provincetown harbor, in November 1620) signed a compact (https://themayflowersociety.org/history/the-mayflower-compact/) that they would “covenant and combine [themselves] into a civil body politic for their better ordering and preservation.” But eventually the services of Goñi’s father were needed elsewhere (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jessica-sequeira-interview-uki-goni/), namely the Argentine diplomatic mission (https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/08/20/silence-is-health-how-totalitarianism-arrives/) in Ireland (https://eirla.cancilleria.gob.ar/en). Just as his juices were flowing and his sense of self was taking shape, he landed in the middle of that country’s charms, and its notorious (https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/faq/faq2.htm) troubles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Troubles_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland). He was mostly sequestered from those convulsions, though, at a private prep school in Dublin (https://stconleths.ie/); a place not devoid of its own darkness. His French teacher was dead-eyed and sadistic, and, as it turned out, was a native Breton who had enthusiastically joined the Nazi Schutzstaffel (the S.S.) in the Second World War (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-15990524) and who was enjoying protection from prosecution for war crimes. The strange juxtaposition of earthy homeyness he felt in Dublin with absolute injustice being willfully ignored (or maybe even furtively desired) was jarring—and all the more troublesome when he started getting used to it. But he was happy in Ireland, with high hopes of being a poet and musician. Youthful plans fall apart, however; or the scales fall from your eyes (I guess it depends on how you look at it), and when he turned 19 (https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/08/20/silence-is-health-how-totalitarianism-arrives/), Uki’s family had to return to Buenos Aires. Having no financial means to stay behind and make his own way (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jessica-sequeira-interview-uki-goni/), he moved for the first time in his life to the country whose passport he carried. Normally he would have had to fulfill military duty, but his situation in a diplomatic family gave him some leeway. So he set off in search of a job. His Spanish being tinged (how could it not be?) by flat American and lilting Irish vowels (making finding a job a bit tricker), he turned to the Buenos Aires Herald (https://buenosairesherald.com/), the storied (https://buenosairesherald.com/culture-ideas/the-buenos-aires-herald-archives-a-treasure-to-be-restored) English-language daily newspaper, which was preparing to celebrate its centennial anniversary the next year year. And boldly (naively) he asked if they wanted to publish some of his poetry (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jessica-sequeira-interview-uki-goni/)—which they promptly laughed off, saying they didn’t publish poetry, but that he could write some articles for them, if he liked; and if he proved to have a knack, they would hire him. As it happens, he did have a knack, but that might have had more to do with the confluence of factors outside his own proclivities (what people of a different age or bent of mind called destiny.) You see, Uki’s father had been summoned back to Argentina because his country was enduring troubles that—improbably—far outweighed those of Ireland. Even though it’s chauvinistic, I doubt any American can help but feel like the story of Argentina’s path to Independence sounds a little like some imposter has copied clauses and phrases from a US history book and reassembled them—with a few fake bits to hold up the creaky syntax—into a pastiche about a thinly veiled, fictional, analogue country, whose history takes twists and turns that feel familiar but wind up with a completely different outcome. And the forger has pasted his cancel pages into an 80s hardback with a cocked spine and a plastic foiled dustcover, foxed with studiously sporadic brown dots, and has snuck his fabulation onto the shelves in the the public library of some run-of-the-mill town where no one would find it. But we do. Spain’s grip on the South American colonies had grown weak because it was distracted by the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Either from valid grievances about colonial trade and yearning to decide their own fate, or simple post hoc justification of their motives (why not both?), Enlightenment ideas swarmed through the mouths, pages and streets of San Migel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires. Local elites and intellectuals ousted the Spanish viceroy and established a provisional government. And on July 9, 1816, Argentina ratified the Declaration of Independence at the Congress of Tucumán (https://www.casarosada.gob.ar/international/latest-news/50572-9-july-argentine-independence-day). General José de San Martín (https://www.casarosada.gob.ar/international/latest-news/50616-jose-de-san-martin-the-liberator-hero-and-his-immortal-legacy) defeated the Spanish, but independence was fraught with internal rivalries between Centralists and Federalists (advocates of provincial autonomy). Mneh. If he’s gonna stick his forgery on an American library shelf, that’s kind of a confusing way to use the word “federalism.” It’s basically the opposite of the way Hamilton meant it (https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text). Whoever this faker is, he spins a good tale, but when it comes to the niceties of style, he’s kind of a hack. A flourishing sense of national identity among the fiercely independent rural and working-class folks finally achieved something like unity. Throughout the 19th century, leaders like Bartolomé Mitre (https://greekreporter.com/2024/11/06/bartolome-mitre-greek-president-argentina/)and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (https://www.casarosada.gob.ar/international/latest-news/50360-eternal-legacy-213th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-domingo-faustino-sarmientowww.casarosada.gob.ar/international/latest-news/50360-eternal-legacy-213th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-domingo-faustino-sarmiento), prioritized modernization and economic development—but they favored landowners and elites, laying the groundwork for new unrest. By the early 20th century, industrialization had taken hold on the backs of European immigrants who came in droves, yearning to breathe free, but those immigrants brought along socialist and anarchist ideas, which fueled labor movements, culminating in the formation of the Radical Civic Union (https://www.ucr.org.ar), whose leader Hipólito Yrigoyen (https://www.todo-argentina.net/historia/radicales/Yrigoyen1/index.html) became the first democratically elected president of Argentina in 1916 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHJ98cQObKw), with overwhelming support of the working class, who had finally gained the right to vote. And a sense of genuine steadiness settled in for a time. But then an alternate reality, with its own history—which its inhabitants call American history—infiltrated this reality, causing a rift in its history. Ho ho man, this guy has gone off the rails. In that other history, following what they brazenly call the Spanish-American war, the United States, (which these strapping, young people—so cock-sure of their manifest destiny—named themselves) had a good thing going in the western hemisphere, and they did their best to intervene in their neighbors’ affairs to make sure things went to their liking. I think he’s talking about the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, “speak softly, but carry a big stick,” and all that. These “United States” began fighting the so-called “Banana Wars”; supposedly policing the “ne’er-do-well” tropical states with their “corrupt and lawless” politicians. But that alternate reality was not left untinged by its encounter with this one. A figure not known to many in that alternate reality—because there were those who preferred his name and hierophantic knowledge never get out—Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-people/b/butler-smedley-d.html), a man whose soul was a melted wax clotted and embossed by the filigreed arrows clenched in the talon of the Eagle on the great seal of his country. This Maj. Gen. Butler had fought in the Philippine–American War (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/war)and the Boxer Rebellion (https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1999/winter/boxer-rebellion-1.html) in China. But though he won the Medal of Honor for bravery in the occupation of Veracruz (https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-occupation-vera-cruz)and again in Haiti (https://history.state.gov/milestones/1914-1920/haiti), and fought with valor in Honduras (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1903/ch71), by the time he arrived in Nicaragua (https://oregoned.org/professional-excellence/conferences-events/events/anniversary-us-occupation-nicaragua#:~:text=The%20formal%20occupation%20of%20Nicaragua,sole%20rights%20to%20do%20so.) in1910, to help begin a 21-year occupation of that county, he had begun to submit to the minute and vast evidence of our timeline. Oh, Butler’s mind, molded as it was by the pressures of his native reality, was an imperfect vessel for our truths. Consciously he harbored animosity to the people of our reality, referring to them with slurs from his own. As he wrote to his parents from Nicaragua, “Things are about the same down here and I see not the slightest probability of our getting away for several months yet; that is if we are waiting for the ‘Spicks’ to stop scrapping. They are the most worthless, useless lot of vermin I have struck yet; even worse than our "little brown brothers" the Filipinos, for the Filipinos will fight and these dogs won’t.”⁠ But then immediately his thoughts turned more commensurate—if not, by our lights, coherent—as he confessed his doubts about his own beloved country’s motives: “What makes me mad,” he writes, ”is that the whole revolution is inspired and financed by Americans who have wild cat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a Government which will declare a monopoly in their favor. The whole business is rotten to the core and I am ashamed to think that a Republican Administration is, if anything, assisting the revolution.” We need not expend too many words on Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler. Too late! But suffice it to say that when World War I rolled around, he was considered—despite his ample qualifications—too revolutionary to promote to a commanding role. He then, mysteriously to himself, felt compelled to tour his country with a speech he’d give at pacifist and socialist rallies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_vJH2nrMl8). The speech was entitled “War is a Racket,” and he subsequently published (https://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-General-Smedley-Butler/dp/B09NRNV4DD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Q6DO272T2UGD&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.6L78W5DHdI8pA8mry0AwM78DsLIGxcvsWWuIK4TeBZE-bKBSnaiMbLB5EJHwgTK-Xkn8L4-H_DNhXq5mYa7IJcQYfKJ0YWw5hd1DJ9EnIQ8VxHLtKh60i7_YNy3zAZLtj5h5DaFEp5ztAZwxw8XmTPfWpfqMUy_e2UlMcsPMa9dRa7PaARSdpsxG7KVKHiJfBU3uTk3rnw5cxr4_r-ul1TdSfEFq6LL1nMwaJD3wHa4.LRTNoiH2xAra3BHK0U9AFN1Y44YijY2gefp51_3tCA8&dib_tag=se&keywords=war+is+a+racket&qid=1753891253&sprefix=war+is+a+racket,aps,164&sr=8-1) it to some acclaim⁠. Eventually the Great Depression—a catastrophic event shared by this reality and our own (much like the diluvial myths shared by the various Mesopotamian traditions)—spread ruin throughout these “United States.” And in its wake a president named Franklin Roosevelt—possibly touched (if indirectly) by the knowledge of our reality that Butler had begun to disseminate in theirs—attempted to alleviate the immense material discomfort his country’s fealty to “unfettered” market economics had wrought. It didn’t take long for the barons of capital to see the threat of our reality slowly insinuating itself into theirs. (Not that our two realities are diametrical; it’s nothing so insipid as that.) And these barons did not take kindly to the election of someone who would threaten their security. In the words of one of their own historians (https://www.librarything.com/author/archerjuleshttps://www.librarything.com/author/archerjules) (another in whose mind the crystalline structure of Butler’s knowledge had copied itself), these financiers were horrified that Roosevelt’s policies would undermine “both private and business fortunes [and lead] “to national bankruptcy. Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist, out to destroy private enterprise by sapping [them] of wealth in order to subsidize the poor.” And though you may find it strange, for it is hard to free yourself of a captivating duality, our own reality is replete with examples of this truth: Our souls are full of the same needs, and so no trick is simpler than commandeering the trappings of our enemies. Between 1934 and 1935 finance employees and foreign legion members slowly attempted to groom Maj. Gen. Butler to lead a group of veterans in a coup against the president. Butler then did something remarkable (reinforced, we can only imagine, by virtue of his exposure to our alternate reality): He appeared before a so-called Congressional Committee (https://archive.org/details/UniversalNewsreel-Gen.ButlerBaresplotByFascists)—a council of the legislation of these “United States”—to testify about the attempted putsch. “The plan as outlined to me,” he announced, “was to form an organization of veterans to use as a bluff, or as a club at least, to intimidate the government, and break down our democratic institutions. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to takeover the functions of government. My main interest in all this is to preserve our democratic institutions. I want to retain the right to vote, and the right to speak freely, and the right to write. If we maintain these basic principles, our democracy is safe. No dictatorship can exist with suffrage, freedom of speech, and print.” Some have attributed Butler’s turn to pacifism to his “Quaker” heritage, which in that alternate reality is a religious profession that renounces all ministerial setting apart; which insists that all people share responsibility, in common, for ensuring peace and justice, because all people are guided by an inward light (https://quaker.org/the-inner-light/). But we know better. First, where was this Smedley Butler’s pacifist inner light during his many years of avid and passionate war-making? Why become not merely a soldier, but an outstanding soldier if this so-called “Quaker” heritage meant so much? No, quite contrary to some flat hierarchy of mutual simplicity, we know that he was indeed a man set apart—ordinated with sacredotal rank—by his exposure to our reality. Wow. You gotta give it to him. He’s just a first class confabulist. But who is this guy?! Or woman—I don't know. I'm just imagining a man right now because I talked to the librarian and asked her who could have possibly snuck something like this into the library, and woo boy, she had some ideas. Well, really only one idea. She was particularly devoted to the theory that it was this one guy who came two or three times a week over a period of a month, about a year and a half ago. He stood out to her because he always wore a face mask: the surgical kind, not the coffee-cone, N95 kind. And she said that the only people who still wear face masks are, you know, those people. I asked if they had any CCTV cameras, and she said they only had the one outside at the entrance: no public funding, you know? She got back to me a couple of days later after having triangulated roughly when she thought she had seen the guy, and then looking through the footage for a while. And she finally found one shot of him coming in. Seemed like kind of a young guy based on the way he was walking, but I couldn't really tell because he was so covered up. Besides the face mask, he also had this wax canvas coat on, and the hood was up. But you could kind of see his eyes. They looked like puppy dog eyes. Of course there’s no way to know whether that’s really the forger. I’d be surprised if it were someone so young. I have reason to believe whoever it was is a trained book conservator. So, a book is made of big folio sheets, printed with four pages on each side in a complex order, then folded into fours, stacked, and sewn and bound together, and then cut along their edges to make individual pages. That means each of these forged cancel pages has a counterpart. They didn’t just haphazardly paste these pages over the old originals. They meticulously detached the stitching with a pinpoint awl and tweezers, found each counterpart page, and bonded them with Japanese kozo paper and wheat starch paste. Then they artificially aged the thread and restitched the sections. It’s almost completely undetectable. But WHY?! I mean, clearly they’ve got an agenda, And so do I! I’m trying to circle back to Uki Goñi here, so—oh well, I guess there’s no way but forward now. During his two terms in office, Yrigoyen championed labor rights, expanded state intervention in the economy, and sought to reduce the influence of traditional elites, particularly large landowners and oligarchs. He introduced social reforms, including labor protections, increased public works and measures to improve education, all of which gained him strong support among the working and middle classes. He also made ample use of tariffs to reduce Argentina's dependence on foreign markets, who were fleecing them. However, these policies alienated conservative sectors and provoked hostility from all those powerful landowners, industrialists, and much of the military. Yrigoyen’s second term coincided with the onset of the Great Depression, which, as we’ve already noted, was an event equally epochal in our own reality. And as the tide rose, engulfing nations with waves of economic collapse, unemployment, and hardship—leaving no shore untouched by its devastation—Yrigoyen tried to sandbag Argentina’s economy by doubling down on his policies—indeed wisely increasing public spending, but perhaps unwisely reducing the influx of foreign goods in the hopes of maintaining self-reliance. Yrigoyen’s isolationist bent not only counteracted the priming effect of his public spending, the resultant suffering it exacerbated when the demand for Argentine exports collapsed provided his critics with a wedge to accuse him of cronyism, inefficiency—even authoritarianism. It mattered little that these accusations were largely baseless. Facts are thin walls that cannot insulate too much noise. It mattered what people felt. And what people felt was that he was too old, in poor health, slow and no longer fit for the job. That was a set of environmental pressures perfectly attuned for a military coup. And so, on September 6, 1930, a military junta led by General José Félix Uriburu overthrew Yrigoyen, marking the beginning of a 13-year era of political instability and military “interventions” known as the "Infamous Decade.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infamous_Decade) Uriburu couldn’t just turn the spigot and end the Great Depression, of course. And a debauchery of government efficiency didn’t much help ingratiate him to the public. But once his cohort had grabbed the bull’s horns, you could be damn sure they were’t going to let go. Elections in 1931 brought Agustín Pedro Justo (https://tvdoc.com.ar/video/1932-asuncion-de-agustin-p-justo/) to power. However, these elections were widely seen as fraudulent, setting a precedent for systematic corruption during the decade. The conservatives, often referred to as the Concordancia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordancia_(Argentina)) coalition, maintained their hold on power through electoral manipulation, including vote-buying and intimidation. Yrigoyen had long ruffled feathers with those aliens from the United States’ reality by refusing to take sides during the First World War, claiming the mantle of non-intervention. But this was never simply a pragmatic maneuver in self-interest. You might say it was a principled stand, but perhaps a principle that if I may use the word ought—ought not to have had such high priority: namely the belief that if Spain—and (sure, why not) Italy and Germany—wanted to protect their cultural integrity, well . . . fair enough, and we “ought not” interfere with that. Yrigoyen might have found it unpropitious to say out loud, but he was fine with the implicit warrant: “everyone needs to get their own s**t together.” And this was a fleetingly rare point of agreement between the Radicals and the Concordancia. They happily maintained the policy of neutrality. Only the Concordancia didn’t care about standing on ceremony. Rules and institutions were only useful inasmuch as they kept up the naturally ordered boundaries, such as those between the landed and the un-landed, the weak and the strong. So, when it came to getting Argentina’s “own s**t together,” they had no compunction not merely tolerating the fascists, but following their example, dissolving their Congress, imposing censorship, and suppressing political dissent. As the economic situation worsened, urban workers and labor unions became disillusioned with government of all stripes The Radical Civic Union and other democratic forces seemed ineffectual, self-righteous, and corrupt; the Concordancia oppressive and just as corrupt. Among the populace, protests grew, and nationalist and socialist ideas gained traction (of a more rigorous sort than the gradual and halting policies of Yrigoyen) Meanwhile a nationalist faction within the military was happy to follow the Concordancia in rejecting liberalism—not to protect old inequalities, but to establish an autarkic, “socially cohesive Argentina.” I don't know why I keep trying to listen to podcasts while I'm working. I cannot concentrate. I mean, I do. This guy just keeps rambling on. I thought I had a problem losing the plot. The discontent with the Concordancia reached a breaking point by the early 1940s, and on June 4, 1943, (https://www.nytimes.com/1943/06/05/archives/washington-hails-coup-in-argentina-qualified-hope-exists-that-the.html) that nationalist, reformist faction of the military—calling themselves the “Grupo de Oficiales Unidos” (https://www.pjbonaerense.org.ar/g-o-u-grupo-de-oficiales-unidos/) (the United Officers’ Group)—staged a coup, overthrowing President Ramón Castillo, the last in the string of presidents the Concordancia had propped up with their sham elections. The Officers’ Group didn’t have a singular, publicly recognized leader, since they were a clandestine organization. General Arturo Rawson (https://historica.fandom.com/wiki/Arturo_Rawson) was the first leader of the post-coup government. However, his tenure was extremely brief—two days. He didn’t pass the purity test imposed by subfactions within the group who believed he was still too willing to include traditional conservatives in his cabinet. Among the ranks of the Officer’s Group was a young officer named Juan Domingo Perón. Perón had spent the decade prior to the junta studying the art of war, including three years ensconced in yet another alternate reality. The War Ministry under the Concordancia had sent him to study mountain warfare in the Italian Dolomites, and then assigned him as attaché in Rome under Mussolini and Berlin in Nazi Germany. Some have said that it was in those years—in that crucible—that an isomorphic strain had insinuated itself in Perón’s mind. (https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2337&context=honors-theses) But they are wrong. Yes, it was there he saw that something different from what had come before was possible. But what he witnessed happening there . . . wasn’t what he envisioned. But I get ahead of myself. The big wigs in the Officer’s Group fought it out, trying to establish just how fascist they would indeed like Argentina to be, staying neutral in the Second World War, and playing a coy game of will they/won’t they sever diplomatic relations with the Axis Powers, Meanwhile, Perón was shelved away, named to an office long-since written off as irrelevant: Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare⁠. Where the presiding military officers had chucked labor rights and syndicalism onto the ash heap of history along with Yrigoyen, Perón realized the power this position could unlock. But now I misspeak. I’ve been breathing the air of the United States’ reality for too long; accepting a logic that makes it sound as though Perón’s goal was merely securing political power and enacting his preference, That was not his goal. I’ve been breathing the air inside this guy’s skull for too long. I need a break. I’m going to go take a walk. We’ll reconvene here. See you in a bit. 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3. 

   16 Jul 2025

   Book 3 Teaser

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