True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 360: Helmsmen of Brixton
Aired: 2024-03-07
Duration: 01:21:32


=== Wearing the Chinese Shirt (02:56) ===

[00:00:00]  Yeah, get the gong.
[00:00:01]  We need the gong.
[00:00:01]  We need the gong.
[00:00:02]  What are we doing here?
[00:00:05]  Can't believe you're not wearing your little frog closure shirt.
[00:00:09]  Fuck, dude, I should have dressed like a Chinese guy today.
[00:00:12]  Well, we don't need to go that far.
[00:00:14]  I should have.
[00:00:15]  I think that this is – recently a picture emerged of Mark Zuckerberg dressed as if he was like a high-class gentleman from the Orient.
[00:00:25]  Really?
[00:00:26]  I haven't seen this photo.
[00:00:27]  You haven't?
[00:00:27]  Yeah.
[00:00:28]  He looks fucking good.
[00:00:29]  Wait, I want to see.
[00:00:30]  Is it like he's going like a shogun?
[00:00:34]  I don't know that.
[00:00:35]  I don't know what that is, really.
[00:00:38]  I mean, I know why.
[00:00:39]  It's sweeping the nation.
[00:00:40]  I know, but I know it's more Chinese to me.
[00:00:44]  And I got to say, I've been wearing my little Chinese shirt out more and more.
[00:00:49]  Mine is more of like perhaps a eunuch's shirt rather than like he appears to be like some high-ranking courtier or something.
[00:00:58]  I think he uses Unix, too.
[00:01:21]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Truanon Center for Liz Franzack Thought.
[00:01:28]  My name is Subcomrade Brace.
[00:01:32]  I'm just a stupid little worm who's not fit to even be trod upon by Liz's cloven hooves.
[00:01:40]  I am Liz.
[00:01:41]  Why did I say I am?
[00:01:42]  That was so weird.
[00:01:43]  I am Liz.
[00:01:45]  The great helmsman.
[00:01:47]  The helmswoman.
[00:01:48]  You know what?
[00:01:48]  Primitive.
[00:01:49]  The great helmswoman.
[00:01:50]  Thank you.
[00:01:51]  The perfect helmswoman.
[00:01:52]  That's right.
[00:01:54]  And then, of course, we have the eunuch.
[00:02:00]  Young Chomsky, who is producing this podcast, which is called, I might remind you, once again, Truanon.
[00:02:05]  Hello.
[00:02:06]  Hello.
[00:02:08]  Liz, I'm so excited.
[00:02:09]  I know.
[00:02:09]  This is your favorite stuff.
[00:02:11]  This has been—I've been pushing for this episode for a while.
[00:02:14]  It's not pushing.
[00:02:14]  We just said, yeah, let's do it.
[00:02:16]  And then we pushed.
[00:02:16]  We just, it got bumped on the schedule because of a timing thing.
[00:02:19]  I don't mean pushing backwards.
[00:02:21]  I've been like, what I'm talking about.
[00:02:23]  You're Jones in.
[00:02:24]  I've been jonesing to do this episode for a while.
[00:02:25]  Yeah, because you're addicted to freaks.
[00:02:28]  I...
[00:02:28]  Listen, I'm addicted to freaks, but I also have, I am, one of the things, because obviously I'm deeply, you know, like I have pretty well documented mental illnesses, like suffer deeply from schizophrenia.
[00:02:40]  Of course, I have DID, all that kind of stuff.
[00:02:42]  But one of the things I can do is see the hidden webs and patterns behind our episodes, right?
[00:02:47]  And one thing we've done is we've done some episodes about a group called Black Hammer.
[00:02:53]  And I'm like, you know what?

=== Starting a Maoist Party (02:21) ===

[00:02:56]  This is kind of within that realm of like, essentially, well, I wouldn't call Black Hammer Maoist.
[00:03:04]  I would say that they're like a post, post-Maoist group.
[00:03:09]  Well, no, it's something else, but it's within the realm of it.
[00:03:14]  This is a freak show about communists.
[00:03:20]  And a lot of people are like, oh, you're a left-wing podcast.
[00:03:23]  You're a left-wing.
[00:03:24]  We're just a podcast.
[00:03:27]  We're just a podcast.
[00:03:29]  Today, we are talking about some left-wing things, specifically some left-wing freaks.
[00:03:35]  The Gong is going to get some heavy usage.
[00:03:37]  As it should.
[00:03:38]  We are talking about the Workers Institute of Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought.
[00:03:48]  Which sounds, if you are familiar, let's say you're familiar with just communist parties, Maoist offshoots, whatever, whatever, but not in this case familiar with this situation.
[00:04:00]  That sounds like, hey, that's a normal name for a Maoist party.
[00:04:04]  There's a billion of them.
[00:04:05]  Exactly.
[00:04:05]  Like some combination.
[00:04:07]  Well, the thing is, and we'll get into this a little bit later.
[00:04:11]  Starting a Maoist party, or really starting a Communist Party like post-1960s, really this happened a lot in the 1970s.
[00:04:18]  You're really struggling for the correct combination or a previously unused combination of your country's name, the word communist, and then some parenthetical initials.
[00:04:32]  And so obviously, like the first wave was all like Communist Party of such and such country.
[00:04:36]  And then it was such and such country Communist Party.
[00:04:39]  Yes.
[00:04:40]  They switched them around.
[00:04:40]  And then it's like the MN.
[00:04:42]  Another name of the country, maybe a more like casual name.
[00:04:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:46]  By the 80s, you're having to name your Communist Party like Red Flag or something like that.
[00:04:50]  You just have to name it after Communist Party.
[00:04:52]  And then they start sounding like bands.
[00:04:54]  Yes, exactly.
[00:04:55]  And they get more and more kind of away from, you know, I mean, it kind of mirrors actually what these communist parties end up kind of starting to be.
[00:05:04]  Kind of becoming a subcultural thing.
[00:05:06]  Yeah.
[00:05:07]  So this party, this specific party had a bit of a different trajectory than a lot of typical, even for Maoist parties.

=== Subcultural Communism (05:39) ===

[00:05:18]  Yes.
[00:05:20]  If there's one thing that many people know about Maoism, unfortunately, it is not about the tenets of the political philosophy, but is often about some of the stranger offshoots that came from the movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
[00:05:34]  And I say there is few stranger than this particular group.
[00:05:39]  We shouldn't actually call it, I probably will call them a party throughout this because they're they were sort of an explicitly anti-party building formation because they believe themselves to be the only official foreign wing of the Communist Party of China, which was not signed off by the Communist Party of China or something.
[00:05:59]  It's sort of like a kind of something they just declared themselves.
[00:06:04]  But to get back to the beginning, we have to actually go to one of the heartlands of not only Maoism, but also revisionism, which is Kerala, India.
[00:06:15]  Okay.
[00:06:16]  So I guess the sun from which all the planets of this story revolve around is a guy named Aravindan Balakrishnan, aka Comrade Bala, aka AB.
[00:06:29]  We'll probably mostly call him Bala through this because that's kind of the easiest thing to do.
[00:06:34]  He was born on the 16th of July in 1940 in Kerala, India.
[00:06:38]  And his mother believed, and this is something we don't know a ton about his early life except for a few sort of notable details.
[00:06:46]  One of them is that his mother believed that he was imbued with magical powers to get people to do what he wanted.
[00:06:52]  And she nicknamed him Black Tongue.
[00:06:55]  He also claimed that he was conceived on 16th October 1939, which later he used in much of his Maoist magical numerology of which he constructed his sort of his mythos of the world.
[00:07:08]  So he leaves Kerala when he's relatively young, nine years old, and moves to Singapore where his father had found work.
[00:07:13]  I believe his father was a soldier.
[00:07:15]  And this is during the 1949 Malay insurgency, where the British used brutal counterinsurgency methods to destroy the Communist Party and their peasant base.
[00:07:24]  It lasted from about 1954 to about 1960.
[00:07:28]  Crazy little fact about the Malay insurgency, not this Malay insurgency, although technically also this one, but the next one, is that, you know how everyone's like, oh, I probably mentioned this fact on the show before, but like, you know, there's like the Japanese holdouts who like surrender in the 70s.
[00:07:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:44]  The last two actual Japanese soldiers to surrender was in like 94 when they came out of hiding because they had been with the communists in Malaysia.
[00:07:55]  Really?
[00:07:56]  Wait, have we mentioned this in the show?
[00:07:57]  I think we probably have.
[00:07:58]  Yeah.
[00:07:58]  Because there's very, yeah, there's some sort of like the last guy story that kind of like lines up with.
[00:08:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:08:08]  You always, I mean, and those technically don't count because they weren't fighting for Japan anymore.
[00:08:13]  Right.
[00:08:13]  But you got to think, I think about those Japanese soldiers sometimes.
[00:08:17]  It's like people sort of like, oh, it's this duty, honor thing.
[00:08:20]  It's like, these guys just sound like fucking idiots.
[00:08:23]  You know?
[00:08:24]  Yeah, I feel like if you're not in it, you know, it's hard to see it from.
[00:08:28]  Yeah.
[00:08:29]  But after a while, you stop hearing planes, right?
[00:08:31]  Right.
[00:08:31]  And you're like, the planes, did everyone run out?
[00:08:35]  Anyways, he comes into socialistic and communistic ideas at university while in Singapore.
[00:08:42]  And then gets a scholarship, wins a scholarship to the London School of Economics, Liz's alma mater, and hits the scene in 1963.
[00:08:51]  Swing in 60s in London.
[00:08:54]  And this is just alleged, but apparently he had a very eye-opening threesome with one Austin Powers.
[00:09:01]  I knew you were going to make that reference.
[00:09:02]  Well, it's just.
[00:09:03]  Did Austin Powers, was he like he was they, they let him go and they shouldn't have wait.
[00:09:13]  Should we mention that young Chomsky found on EBAY young, the Austin Powers cryo chamber that I like desperately want to get for the studio, but it's so expensive only $6,800?
[00:09:26]  I will say it's less expensive than I thought it would be, but then I was like well, what would be a?
[00:09:30]  I don't know what we would do with it and it is like a little like way too like geek mandan for my taste.
[00:09:37]  However, I do feel like a very strong spiritual affiliation with Austin Powers, the franchise and this podcast one.
[00:09:45]  We've got you, we've got me, we've got young Chomsky.
[00:09:49]  You're obviously number two with the eye patch, original form, great suit, I'm afraid to say what you are.
[00:09:58]  Come on, my name is Liz Hurley, I didn't say that, but thank you, I agree.
[00:10:04]  That's so nice of you to say yeah um, but no, I feel a very like spiritual connection with Austin Powers and I always have um from the start of this show.
[00:10:12]  I say this with no sarcasm or irony or anything.
[00:10:16]  Austin Powers is legitimately like.
[00:10:18]  His example is probably the only reason I've ever been able to like speak to women in my life because of time travel.
[00:10:25]  Well yeah well that yes that um, but also just because I'm like well, if he can do it.
[00:10:30]  You know, I don't really, it's just freezing.
[00:10:34]  Do I make you horny?
[00:10:35]  That's always been such a classic line that I use.
[00:10:38]  Do I make you randy, etc.
[00:10:39]  Right right, and you know, adopting a fake British accent is, you know yeah yeah, always a great move.
[00:10:47]  I love it, especially if you can't do the accent.
[00:10:49]  So he is in the London school.
[00:10:51]  By he we mean Bala, not Austin Powers.
[00:10:54]  No, Austin is complete.
[00:10:55]  He's Oxford through and through.
[00:10:56]  Yeah, and it's there.

=== Achieving Parliamentary Majority (15:24) ===

[00:10:57]  He joins the Communist Party OF England in 1967.
[00:11:02]  Now, this is not the Communist Party of Great Britain.
[00:11:07]  This is the Communist Party of England, which we'll get to in a little bit.
[00:11:12]  Yeah, a little bit of a split there.
[00:11:14]  Because it's 1967, so take that into account.
[00:11:17]  We are seeing a, let's say, a thousand flowers bloom when it comes to communist parties in a lot of Western countries.
[00:11:24]  Yeah, I think that we kind of have to do a classic Trunon pause for a second, not that new kind of pause.
[00:11:31]  Okay.
[00:11:31]  But the like, just like stop the story for a second to give a little bit of a kind of backdrop here, a little bit of British communist history, just to kind of set the scene.
[00:11:44]  Because so Ball is hitting this in 67, but we got to go a little bit back because we're basically talking about the development of revisionism and anti-revisionism, which become very important discursive weapons in the communist arsenal, basically, well, I mean, for a long time, but it really, really gets a new kind of lease on life.
[00:12:08]  The contradictions are very much sharpened in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.
[00:12:13]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:13]  And it becomes a real, you know, everyone's kind of favorite slings and arrows, I suppose.
[00:12:19]  But I think that anyone who has kind of like been a part of any kind of Marxist political organizing or around anyone who has been, you know, you've heard that term revisionism.
[00:12:32]  And, you know, in a very broad sense, right, it means someone who just kind of attempts to like rewrite or revise Orthodox Marxist thought.
[00:12:40]  Yes.
[00:12:41]  Right.
[00:12:41]  So you have, there's kind of two things.
[00:12:43]  It's like a split away from and a masking over.
[00:12:47]  It's kind of a double move there, classic double move.
[00:12:50]  But it's about typically favoring kind of like electoral sort of approaches or over revolutionary ones or statist approaches, parliamentarism or kind of like cross-class collaboration.
[00:13:03]  Those are kind of more of the classic ones.
[00:13:04]  The kind of like, we can just socialize the stock market, which is the classic, you know, Bernstein move.
[00:13:11]  I was going to say, like, that's the, it's really, it's a, it's been a constant within socialist and communist movements since the inception, right?
[00:13:22]  Yes.
[00:13:22]  Is you have these sort of two paths, which is the revolutionary and the reformist path.
[00:13:26]  Right.
[00:13:27]  And, you know, obviously when 1917, when the Soviet Union began, I mean, there was a huge, like very much a revolutionary movement in a lot of countries.
[00:13:39]  But as, you know, unfortunately, the Soviets failed to make it past Poland And things became what they became in the interwar period.
[00:13:52]  You had this like this like massive contradiction, or excuse me, this like these two tendencies, like these socialistic or socialist social democratic parties and these communist parties.
[00:14:04]  And one was like, we can achieve socialism by electoral means, particularly, but we must kill the communists first.
[00:14:11]  And then you had the communist parties who are like, we have to have a revolution and came rather close in some places, and we also should eventually kill the socialists.
[00:14:18]  Sure.
[00:14:19]  I'm a little more sympathetic to that view.
[00:14:23]  But of course, the socialists won in most places, which led to Nazism.
[00:14:30]  And with World War II, you had this interesting thing because the Soviet Union became sort of the motherland of socialism.
[00:14:40]  All of these communist parties in the West, in these capitalist countries, had to make these accommodations with the ruling classes in their country.
[00:14:49]  And so you had all these groups in America signing no-strike.
[00:14:52]  That were, by the way, oriented against the Soviet Union, right?
[00:14:56]  And so it's not just that, like in the West, the communist parties are aligning with forces that are very much oriented against the Soviets.
[00:15:05]  But it's like this temporary alliance in World War II.
[00:15:08]  And so it's like they are in the main, yeah, obviously, like they're against the Soviet Union, they're fucking American capitalist class.
[00:15:16]  But in order to like further the war effort, these communist parties make all of these like concessions, essentially.
[00:15:24]  And this leads to some ideological confusion.
[00:15:30]  Well, so specifically in the UK, because it's a little bit different in every Western country.
[00:15:36]  Yeah.
[00:15:37]  I mean, especially in the U.S. is its own fucking thing.
[00:15:40]  But I mean, in Western Europe.
[00:15:42]  But the UK takes on a kind of like, you know, there's a specific character there having to do with the makeup of the British left after the war.
[00:15:51]  Because you have to understand, I mean, everyone knows this, but Britain was fucking decimated after the war, like destroyed.
[00:15:56]  And it's in that destruction.
[00:15:58]  I mean, the Labor Party has one of its most decisive victories and passes all of these, I mean, really, you know, big social democratic reforms.
[00:16:09]  You have the creation of the NHS, you have the big welfare programs, you know, everyone, so on and so on.
[00:16:13]  All the big council housing reforms.
[00:16:14]  All of that comes in the wake of the state being basically destroyed.
[00:16:19]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:21]  But they don't last very long because basically labor achieves all this stuff and then they don't really know where to go.
[00:16:28]  Yes.
[00:16:29]  And they're routed by 51, and Churchill actually comes back.
[00:16:33]  Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the problem with, I mean, all of these like early to I mean, they kind of stopped trying by like the 70s, but like these socialist social democratic parties in Western Europe that come into power, they will put forth these like social democratic changes, but then like what's next, right?
[00:16:52]  Like there's no, this is this is sort of the great cleavage, right?
[00:16:56]  Like there is no, like, you can't have a revolution.
[00:16:58]  You're in fact, you would arrest someone trying to have a revolution.
[00:17:02]  And so like you actually can't overcome the actual ruling class by these parliamentary means.
[00:17:09]  Right.
[00:17:10]  And then you have the kind of bizarre problem of kind of the upward mobility of lower classes getting antsy because that mobility has then kind of stopped alongside your impossible, like the impossibility of you to pass further reforms.
[00:17:27]  Yeah.
[00:17:27]  Yeah.
[00:17:28]  Right, right, right.
[00:17:28]  So there's a limit there.
[00:17:30]  And so, but it's in this atmosphere, right?
[00:17:32]  Churchill coming back, Labor being routed, that the Communist Party of Great Britain, CBGB, which I mean.
[00:17:41]  What did I say?
[00:17:41]  You said CBGB.
[00:17:43]  I knew I was going to do that.
[00:17:44]  CBGB.
[00:17:45]  Johnny Thunder's in there.
[00:17:48]  I always do.
[00:17:48]  It just looks the same to me.
[00:17:50]  It does look the same, yeah.
[00:17:51]  But we have to keep it straight because all these fucking acronyms are all the same.
[00:17:57]  Okay, CPGB, they adopt this party line called the British Road to Socialism that basically freaks everyone the fuck out.
[00:18:06]  Now, it's in this pamphlet that the party outlines that Britain has basically unique conditions for transitioning to socialism, unlike other countries that require violent revolution.
[00:18:19]  And they basically said, okay, and this is the Communist Party of Great Britain, right?
[00:18:23]  This is not the Labor Party, this is the Communist Party, saying, like, we can basically achieve socialism by working within existing democratic structures, basically adopting a very standard social democratic line.
[00:18:35]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:18:36]  You know, let's just, you know, if we just secure parliamentary power, we can destroy the capitalist state from within.
[00:18:43]  Everyone knows this line, but it's specifically here they're saying that the movement and the mass of people it would require to mobilize within Britain to actually achieve a kind of parliamentary majority would be a kind of a climax of a mass struggle in and of itself, which would kind of prove that it was sort of revolutionary, like when you think about it, man.
[00:19:06]  Well, it's funny because like, you know, there's a certain degree of class collaboration that exists within revolutionary communism as well, right?
[00:19:15]  Like this is something that has been the case very openly since the beginning.
[00:19:20]  Right, podcast class.
[00:19:21]  Podcast class, exactly.
[00:19:22]  They need to win over the podcast class, which I'm sorry you haven't yet.
[00:19:26]  But I'm still libdem for motherfucking life.
[00:19:30]  But it is this explicitness.
[00:19:32]  And this really kind of comes out a lot of the popular front stuff of the 30s and 40s.
[00:19:37]  This is ideological zigzagging, right?
[00:19:39]  Like that really fucked a lot of people up.
[00:19:41]  Like in America, this is essentially like British Browderism, right?
[00:19:45]  Like in America, fucking Earl Browder like dissolved the Communist Party and made the Communist Political Association and was like, oh, we can actually achieve socialism because it's different here.
[00:19:56]  We can achieve it through parliamentary means.
[00:19:58]  Seems like it couldn't achieve it through any means.
[00:20:01]  But it's the same thing.
[00:20:03]  It is not something that a lot of members necessarily take kindly to.
[00:20:07]  Well, that's the thing.
[00:20:08]  So basically, the Communist Party of Great Britain is saying, like, we're going to work alongside the Labor Party to push them.
[00:20:15]  Yeah.
[00:20:16]  We're working like inside and outside, man.
[00:20:19]  Like, that's always the move.
[00:20:21]  We're inside and we're outside.
[00:20:22]  It's like a one-two punch.
[00:20:26]  And initially, I mean, I do think that this made sense to a lot of members initially, right?
[00:20:32]  And it was supported by a lot of members of the party.
[00:20:34]  You know, they had just lived through a lot of real social democratic gains that now Churchill's government had just rolled back.
[00:20:42]  Yes, I mean, just like almost immediately, except for the ones that he couldn't really touch.
[00:20:46]  But I mean, they really, you know, kind of came in real quick with that one.
[00:20:51]  But it inspired a lot of real criticism from the more die-hard ML wing of the party.
[00:20:57]  Yeah.
[00:21:00]  And as the kind of years went on and the direction of the party grew, particularly with how it related to like trade unions, the party's relationship to the Labor Party and so on and so forth, that kind of tension just got more and more pronounced.
[00:21:15]  And so it reaches ahead in probably one of the biggest, like the most important years in, I would say, 20th century left-wing history when you're talking about kind of party politics, which is 1956.
[00:21:28]  A lot of shit goes down in 1956.
[00:21:30]  A lot of shit.
[00:21:32]  Some people, I always want to say this, Liz.
[00:21:37]  Some people you give a chance to, right?
[00:21:41]  And you take a chance on and you risk part of your reputation on.
[00:21:46]  And, you know, you help build them up and you boost them.
[00:21:51]  And then something bad happens to you, like you die, maybe.
[00:21:54]  And then they come out and they're like, he was a liar.
[00:21:57]  He was a fake friend.
[00:21:58]  He never helped me.
[00:21:59]  He did all this, and this.
[00:22:01]  And not only do you say that, but you say it secretly.
[00:22:04]  You say it secretly.
[00:22:05]  But everyone's back.
[00:22:07]  You talk fucking shit and then like you leak this fucking letter.
[00:22:11]  Like, oh, actually, like, no, I didn't say it publicly, but like, yeah, he's a bad dude.
[00:22:15]  So in 1956, the fucking poison dwarf Khrushchev, little skinhead fuck, comes out and gives this secret speech when he says, everything bad that happened is Joseph Stalin's fault.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:31]  And a true betrayal.
[00:22:33]  Yes, exactly.
[00:22:35]  And I want to go to America after that.
[00:22:37]  I want to go to Disneyland after this.
[00:22:39]  Although I will say he only visits one year.
[00:22:41]  We need blue jeans.
[00:22:42]  Yeah, we need.
[00:22:43]  Yeah, well, that's his.
[00:22:44]  That comes a little later.
[00:22:46]  He's got blue jeans on the mood board, though.
[00:22:48]  And he is too.
[00:22:49]  He's got his, what is it called?
[00:22:51]  His vision board.
[00:22:52]  He's like, you know, trying to actualize blue jeans, Coca-Cola.
[00:22:56]  He's got visions of the future.
[00:22:58]  He's like, we can make all of this.
[00:22:59]  He's going to manifest.
[00:23:01]  And so Khrushchev gives the so-called secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing Stalin and the cult of personality.
[00:23:12]  Yeah, and this speech is leaked.
[00:23:14]  Yeah, I mean, it's leaked.
[00:23:15]  It's quote unquote leaked.
[00:23:16]  It's leaked.
[00:23:17]  But I mean, to be clear, this throws everyone into fix.
[00:23:21]  Because they're like, wait, don't we like Stalin?
[00:23:23]  And now we don't.
[00:23:24]  We don't like Stalin.
[00:23:26]  But I thought we did.
[00:23:27]  Yeah.
[00:23:27]  And now you're saying, yeah, they're having a break.
[00:23:29]  This is a total mental breakdown.
[00:23:32]  Not just that, though.
[00:23:34]  That's not just the only thing that happens in 56.
[00:23:36]  You also have the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, I guess.
[00:23:41]  Yeah, let's call it that.
[00:23:43]  I'm not going to get into it.
[00:23:45]  Well, I'll get into it a little bit.
[00:23:46]  I want to say this.
[00:23:48]  I want to say this.
[00:23:50]  First of all, the airing of the grievances.
[00:23:52]  Well, I'm just saying there's a mic in your face, and I think you should say it.
[00:23:57]  I think I should say it.
[00:23:58]  I'm not going to say that I'm in favor of it.
[00:24:01]  I'm saying that I'm glad that they did intervene there.
[00:24:04]  But I just want to make this very clear here.
[00:24:09]  In 1956, guess who was dead?
[00:24:12]  Joseph Stalin.
[00:24:14]  Guess who was in charge of those tanks that rolled into Hungary, which gave rise to one of the most annoying fucking words, both used as a pejorative and as like an ironic self-referential thing, tanky.
[00:24:27]  That was Khrushchev the betrayer.
[00:24:30]  Yeah.
[00:24:30]  Right?
[00:24:31]  So a tankie is a Khrushchevite, if we're being for real here.
[00:24:36]  But yes, the semi-fascist Hungarian uprising is brutally crushed by the Soviet evil empire, which also leads a lot of people into an ideological.
[00:24:52]  And specifically in Britain, I do want to also say that you have the invasion, the invasion of the Suez Canal.
[00:24:59]  Okay.
[00:25:00]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:01]  By British and French forces.
[00:25:02]  He was going Rishi Sunak.
[00:25:04]  Yeah, this fucking invasion.
[00:25:07]  No, but that like flips people out, right?
[00:25:09]  Yeah, So it's like all of these things in 56.
[00:25:13]  So, you know, everyone knows it's not until 62 that Mao officially denounces the Soviet Union.
[00:25:18]  I mean, spoiler alert, as revisionist.
[00:25:22]  But it's way before then that people are taking the position that Khrushchev is the ultimate betrayer.
[00:25:27]  Yes.
[00:25:28]  And it's like, it's these two things that happen at the same time, right?
[00:25:30]  It's like the Khrushchev stuff happens and like hardcore, like true believers, like, what the fuck, fuck you.
[00:25:36]  And then you have 56 Hungry, and people are like, I don't know if like shooting a bunch of people with Soviet troops to like implement, it's like military communism is the way to go here.
[00:25:47]  And then they quit.
[00:25:48]  And so you have this like mass defection, not mass defection.
[00:25:52]  Well, the Hungry stuff definitely caused a lot of people to leave.
[00:25:56]  But you have this like sort of ideological atom bomb that goes off.
[00:26:00]  Yeah.
[00:26:00]  And, you know, it's important to note that I think for a lot of party members, these crises, kind of like intellectual and political crisis and social crisis, right?
[00:26:09]  It was felt on very personal levels as well as on the kind of like macro party level.
[00:26:16]  So you had people like legitimately questioning what they had devoted their life to.

=== Ideological Atom Bomb (14:37) ===

[00:26:22]  Yes.
[00:26:22]  Like all of these kind of so like breaking up with their friends over this.
[00:26:27]  Like it was, it was a huge, huge division.
[00:26:29]  And it was like kind of a shattering of, I mean, this is how people have described it.
[00:26:34]  If you read their, you know, memoirs or their diaries or their letters to the parties or whatever.
[00:26:39]  Like it was like a shattering of like all that they believed in.
[00:26:43]  It was 1956 in the international communist movement was truly the year of fake friends.
[00:26:48]  Like, you know, whether you're talking about Hungary and Soviet Union being fake friends, we're talking about people being fake friends to Stalin.
[00:26:54]  We're talking about people being fake friends to their own party.
[00:26:56]  Yeah.
[00:26:57]  And neighbors.
[00:26:58]  And neighbors.
[00:26:58]  Yeah.
[00:26:59]  It's the year of a lot of trust was broken.
[00:27:03]  Exactly.
[00:27:04]  So in the UK, okay, back to the UK.
[00:27:06]  Before we get into like Vala's craziness, I do think this is kind of fun to get into.
[00:27:10]  But in the UK, this causes basically three splits that are important to outline.
[00:27:16]  Okay.
[00:27:17]  From the CPGB.
[00:27:19]  Not CPGBs.
[00:27:21]  You have then the creation of a separate ML party, the CDRCU, Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity.
[00:27:31]  That's Michael McCreary's group, who's kind of a famous figure for all of our UK heads out there.
[00:27:37]  Then inside the party, you have a group called Forum that didn't really want to break from the official party, but was like, we can change them for the inside.
[00:27:46]  Do you see how all of these strategies, by the way, are like refracted and repeated?
[00:27:51]  Yes, I do want to make that very clear for people that I'm trying to.
[00:27:55]  Well, this is, I mean, this is going back to like, I mean, fuck Trotskyism, right?
[00:27:59]  Yeah, exactly, man.
[00:28:00]  Yeah.
[00:28:01]  We're going to do a 12-part mini-series on the history of Trotskyism and all of the various parties.
[00:28:10]  I do.
[00:28:11]  Part of me does want to just do occasional series about insane communist parties because I know it's like the one area of knowledge that I have naturally.
[00:28:21]  Okay, so you have the kind of inside pressure group.
[00:28:26]  You have the outside group.
[00:28:27]  And then it's important to note, because among this, it's important to note, though, not super germane to Bala, but important, that then you have a group of intellectuals and theorists who basically are like, no, no, no, we want to create a third space between like Stalinism and from the kind of like provisionist trajectories.
[00:28:48]  We are just a diffused group.
[00:28:50]  We are bohemians.
[00:28:51]  We are intellectuals.
[00:28:53]  We don't want to, you know, we're creating our own thing.
[00:28:55]  And that is called, you know it, you love it, the new left.
[00:29:00]  Now, it is like we really don't need to get into, or it's a different episode to talk about the kind of history and the inter-Nicene ideological wars that consumed the new left for like three decades.
[00:29:12]  And I will say it is still very germane to the current political environment and trajectory of the left.
[00:29:23]  But we're not going to get into that.
[00:29:25]  I think there's a couple things I want to mention as well, too, that sort of presage these struggles, which probably don't need to mention for the episode, but there are a couple things.
[00:29:34]  We're having some fun.
[00:29:34]  Well, we're having some fun here.
[00:29:36]  One is almost mirroring the dissolution of the American Communist Party or CPUSA is the dissolution of the Common Turn, which is the Communist International, and replacing it with these series of essentially like bullshit group, like common form and shit like that.
[00:29:55]  These like bullshit international organizations.
[00:29:58]  And this is all done for this idea of peaceful coexistence, right?
[00:30:03]  And this is something that also is a sort of crucial, and frankly, late period Stalin in practice form of international diplomacy.
[00:30:15]  And what it really is, and this is also presages like the big break between the Chinese and the USSR, is this idea of like, we're just going to try to learn to get along a little bit.
[00:30:26]  And I mean, obviously they were fighting behind the scenes and also on many third world battlefields, but like on the main, like we're not going to go to war with the capitalist states.
[00:30:35]  I understand nuclear weapons puts a big changes the physics of some things.
[00:30:44]  Exactly, exactly.
[00:30:45]  But this was just like another sort of like, everything was kind of like leading towards this like essentially capitulationist line with a lot of Western Communist parties.
[00:30:57]  Things were a little different in the third world.
[00:31:00]  But in general, a lot of Western communist parties essentially followed this peaceful coexistence line in various ways.
[00:31:07]  Yeah, and I think like, you know, even when looking at the new left, you see the way that they articulated what they wanted to.
[00:31:17]  I mean, you know, people talk about the new left as like you had these kind of intellectual groups in the UK, but it's also talking about kind of a general, you know, diffused group of like students, activists, writers, theorists, like from like, you know, kind of like the late 50s through up until like 68, obviously that's when it shit hits the fan.
[00:31:37]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:31:37]  Everyone knows the Maoist teens in Paris.
[00:31:40]  Like everyone knows all the, you've got all those images.
[00:31:46]  But, you know, they also were sort of, they imagined themselves as not being a rigid party because as like, you know, it was a deliberate choice to not form a party because they were sort of reacting to what they saw as kind of rigid orthodoxy, kind of stuck in the mud.
[00:32:06]  Man, you're trying to do this old shit.
[00:32:07]  We're trying to keep up with the times.
[00:32:09]  You got to be kind of diffuse.
[00:32:11]  You got to, you know, we have to make this cultural turn, right?
[00:32:14]  What I'm trying to really hammer home is that all of these kind of offshoots are all reacting to one another and developing out of one another.
[00:32:23]  And in a lot of ways, repeating a lot of the same kind of divisions and sort of decisions about tactics or criticisms of one another.
[00:32:36]  Well, in their flight from dogmatism, a lot of these people end up basically coming to just like absurd lines.
[00:32:43]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:44]  There is no getting around it.
[00:32:46]  Like the party form is the only way that like any kind of communist movement has ever taken power.
[00:32:53]  There has never been even close to any other, unless you subscribe to like some crazy right-wing, like, actually Joe Biden's a communist thing.
[00:33:02]  Like, no, the Communist Party, communist parties are the only organs that have ever taken power in any kind of situation.
[00:33:11]  You start saying Joe Biden is a communist.
[00:33:13]  Well, he, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I would, I would, that's of a certain type.
[00:33:19]  But yeah.
[00:33:20]  And so there's this, there's this sort of like, you know, this, this, again, like, let a thousand flowers bloom, the seeding of all these new ideas, many of which actually, frankly, to turn out to be, to be pretty bad.
[00:33:30]  Well, so if we go back to the Communist Party of Great Britain, right?
[00:33:35]  So the offshoot group, Michael McCreary's group, he, so McCreary dies in 65, and so that group just kind of like dissolves and perish.
[00:33:44]  The forum, the inside group, basically, I mean, the Communist Party of Great Britain does its best job of kicking all of those guys out.
[00:33:53]  And it's just like, actually, all of you are critiquing us.
[00:33:56]  We're not going to deal with it.
[00:33:57]  You're out of the party.
[00:33:59]  And so, you know, imagine then you have basically a scattering of what I would call extremely personally vindictive Maoist members and loosely affiliated groups that had, for the better part of a decade, basically been focused strictly on struggles from only within the party organization, right?
[00:34:21]  You've got a just a, you keep saying a thousand flowers bloom, but it's true, like a scattering of fucking crazy people that are obsessed with really kind of personal and long-standing beef, right?
[00:34:35]  And it, you know, because all this shit is just, it's one big social group at the end of the day in a lot of ways, right?
[00:34:42]  So just to, again, hammer this home real quick, the CBGB had basically taken, you know, to what amount, like a Labor Party line on achieving socialism in Britain.
[00:34:56]  And all of its detractors left or were kicked out, both the kind of intellectual heavyweights within the new left, who are all now doing the work of like translating Gramsci and debating Altuse and critiquing labor and all of that kind of shit, right?
[00:35:11]  They're doing the real heavy-hitting like intellectual work.
[00:35:14]  I mean, that's there.
[00:35:16]  No, yeah, we've got communism from it.
[00:35:20]  But also, so you have all the other like fringe elements and the kind of very personally invested members who feel very betrayed, they're all out of the organization as well, right?
[00:35:32]  So you have a consolidation on one hand of the social democratic line and this kind of conciliatory parliamentarist, laborist, whatever you want to call it line, and then a diffusion of vindictive, personally aggrieved, extremely over-socialized political agitators on the other hand.
[00:35:49]  Yeah.
[00:35:49]  With all of the kind of theoretical work siloed into internicine magazine wars.
[00:35:54]  And it's under this backdrop, right, that someone as insane as Comrade Bala is able to basically do what he ends up doing.
[00:36:04]  One thing I do want to mention, Liz, that it should be of personal use to you in your own time, is that there was a dissident section of the Polish Communist Party that followed the Maoist line that was located in Albania throughout the Cold War, although I believe they later left due to personal disagreements with Edvarhoxha.
[00:36:24]  Comrade Bala was in this movement.
[00:36:27]  This is like London School of Economics is for some reason, even though I think of that as like Chicago or like this Fabian-ass school.
[00:36:34]  Do you think the London School of Economics is Fabian?
[00:36:37]  Yes.
[00:36:38]  I think that's fair.
[00:36:39]  Everything in England is Fabian, which means fascist.
[00:36:43]  But yeah, I mean, I think of it as like a Fabian-ass school.
[00:36:46]  I don't know.
[00:36:46]  It's just, that's how I think of it.
[00:36:48]  I could be right, I could be wrong.
[00:36:50]  But I think I'm right.
[00:36:52]  Bala is in this movement.
[00:36:53]  And he's like, there's a ton of international students there.
[00:36:56]  And he's like, he's in this like Malaysian student mass organization.
[00:36:59]  Because this is also, remember, fucking 60s, this is the time of all these third world uprisings, right?
[00:37:05]  And so a lot of diasporic or students from third world countries in the West become like very active in these like liberationist communist movements, many of which are Maoist aligned or what is becoming Maoism aligned.
[00:37:20]  So he marries this woman, Shanda Patney, who is a woman of Indian descent from Tanzania, which as a student, astute learners of history will know, there's a lot of Indians in Africa.
[00:37:34]  And that isn't really germane to the rest of the story, but it's just always something to keep in mind.
[00:37:39]  I don't know why I said it like that.
[00:37:40]  I don't mean that in a weird way.
[00:37:42]  So Bala is immersed in this movement.
[00:37:47]  And he opens up a bookstore called the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong thought in Brixton with a 20-foot-high Mao poster.
[00:37:56]  If you had a Mao poster, it's got to be pretty big.
[00:37:58]  It's just like mine kind of.
[00:38:00]  I have a Mao.
[00:38:01]  Mine's just regular size.
[00:38:02]  Yeah, yours is regular.
[00:38:03]  I got all the grates on the wall.
[00:38:06]  This is a quote I want to say about this bookstore, and it's just very fun.
[00:38:11]  An encounter with the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought, truly the most lunatic of the lunatic fringe of left politics in Britain, can be an unsettling experience.
[00:38:21]  Tiny in numbers and fanatical in zeal, carrying dogmatism, rhetoric, and sectarianism to ever greater extremes, it is many people's idea of a typical Maoist group.
[00:38:32]  Not what Maoism needs, by the way, the brand.
[00:38:35]  No, definitely not.
[00:38:36]  And I will, I will, that is true.
[00:38:39]  I think many people think of Maoism as insane people like this.
[00:38:42]  These guys are much more insane than a lot of what you might even think of as insane Maoists.
[00:38:47]  Like these are legit, well, we'll get into this, legitimate crazy people.
[00:38:51]  But that's why we subscribe to normal Maoism.
[00:38:53]  We're normal.
[00:38:54]  Yeah, this is different.
[00:38:56]  That's a movement.
[00:38:57]  It's called normal Maoism.
[00:39:00]  So Comrade Bala was also a forceful voice within the Communist Party of England, ML, Marxist-Leninist.
[00:39:07]  Not to be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxist-Leninist.
[00:39:12]  Perhaps he was a bit too forceful.
[00:39:17]  So this is a quote from the Leveler from 1978 about the Communist Party of England, Marxist-Leninist.
[00:39:22]  A strange and slightly sinister crowd of students and middle-class weirdos, classic mix, who are well known for reciting the most extraordinarily long and complex slogans when on demos.
[00:39:35]  Shunned by other Marxist-Leninists and suspected by some of being agent provoctures, they publish Workers Weekly, well known for such eye-catching headlines as, British monopoly capitalist class denies working class the right to uphold political beliefs of their choice.
[00:39:52]  I kid you not.
[00:39:54]  This is such a classic description, by the way.
[00:39:57]  It's crazy how, I mean, you could see this criticism of offshoots of contemporary leftist political affiliations, we'll say, in tweet form.
[00:40:11]  Yeah, well, it's also just funny because like a lot of people sort of Maoist standard English has kind of become a meme with the three K's and using the dollar signs and instead of S's and stuff like that.
[00:40:23]  But true, like high Maoist standard English is sentences like British monopoly capitalist class denies working class the right to uphold political beliefs of their choice.
[00:40:34]  For some reason, Maoist groups from the 1960s and 1970s, it's almost like they're trying to write like a Chinese sentence translated into English a lot of the time.
[00:40:46]  And so you'll often see, I mean, this is the case with a lot of communist parties, the sort of like ape language that it was used in a pamphlet like 40 years before them or something.
[00:40:54]  The Maoists of this time were very, very, very, very set on this.

=== Maoist Cliqueispers (09:38) ===

[00:40:59]  So unfortunately, things with Bala and the leadership of the CPEML come to a head in 1974.
[00:41:06]  And this is from, and this is available on Marxist.org.
[00:41:10]  This is from the internal journal of the National Executive Committee of the CPEML.
[00:41:16]  Liz, would you do the honors?
[00:41:17]  At an extraordinary plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England, Marxist-Leninist, held on July 17th, the Central Committee decided unanimously to endorse the decision taken by the National Executive Committee of the party on July 10th to suspend Aurovindin Balakrishnan from all posts and from membership of the party.
[00:41:38]  The Central Committee also took appropriate disciplinary action on members of Arovindan Balakrishnan's small clique.
[00:41:46]  Oof.
[00:41:46]  Yeah.
[00:41:47]  That's shade.
[00:41:48]  We don't want.
[00:41:48]  You don't want.
[00:41:49]  Calling it a clique.
[00:41:51]  Arovindin Balakrishnan and his clique were suspended from the party because of their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities and because of their spreading social fascist slanders against the party and the proletarian movement.
[00:42:08]  So from what I can gather from other contemporary documents and memories of people from this time is Bala was already kind of insane.
[00:42:19]  I was just going to ask you, when do you think he went insane?
[00:42:21]  I think he went insane like early 70s.
[00:42:24]  I mean, he was probably always insane, but I think now he had, once he had gathered a certain amount of followers around him, I think his insanity had time to like, or had the space to like bloom into what it became.
[00:42:36]  Those thousand insanities bloom.
[00:42:38]  Because there's a lot written in this statement.
[00:42:40]  I mean, that is just like literally just the beginning.
[00:42:43]  It goes on and on and on.
[00:42:44]  And you have to kind of read between the lines of like this very formal sort of communist style of writing to be like, they're like saying this guy is insane, essentially.
[00:42:54]  And they're saying he has a clique.
[00:42:55]  They're not saying he has a party or a movement or anything.
[00:42:58]  They're like, you and your like little weirdos need to get the fuck out.
[00:43:02]  Yeah, well, and he does.
[00:43:03]  So he leaves with about 10% of the membership and starts describing the CPEML as the Communist Party of Elizabeth most loyal.
[00:43:13]  Yeah, that's my party.
[00:43:17]  So his new group starts going by the Workers Institute of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong thought, but was not, it explicitly said, a party, but regarded itself as a section of the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:43:32]  Yeah, kind of like a cell, but not quite.
[00:43:35]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:36]  It's like sort of a sleeper cell.
[00:43:39]  Well, they sought to go, to quote Lennon, lower and deeper by establishing themselves in the revolutionary base area of Brixton, which at that point was the home of a lot of immigrants.
[00:43:50]  I think it was like a lot of the Windrush generation, kind of like a lot of immigrants from basically Britain's colonies were living there.
[00:43:57]  But they go completely off the rails after Mao dies.
[00:44:01]  And they start the Mao Zedong Memorial Center in I think 1976.
[00:44:08]  I would love to spend a nice evening at the Mao Zedong Memorial Center in Brixton.
[00:44:12]  They start calling every other, I mean, this isn't that unusual, but they start calling every other left-winger fascist for party building because they're like, if you're building a party, that means that you don't have faith that the People's Liberation Army of China is going to literally invade England and free us from capitalism.
[00:44:32]  So it's unclear when they actually started believing a lot of this stuff, but by like 75, one of their lines is that there's a secret dictatorship of the proletariat.
[00:44:42]  And I'm quoting, a secret dictatorship of the proletariat all over the world.
[00:44:47]  And by the end of 1975 and 1977, according to other pamphlets, we would have a world revolution.
[00:44:54]  So there's basically already a hidden shadow government of communism.
[00:44:59]  Which is crazy because that's also what the right wing believes.
[00:45:02]  Yes.
[00:45:02]  Well, it's also weird because Bao later believes that there's also a hidden, which he literally calls shadow government headed by David Rockefeller that also controls the world.
[00:45:09]  Weird.
[00:45:10]  But then he also thinks that he's the control of the world.
[00:45:12]  Yeah, it definitely takes on different angles.
[00:45:16]  So at this point, he had gathered a group, a clique, you might say, of third world women and a few men around him.
[00:45:24]  These include Aisha Wahab from Malaysia, O Kar Ng, who is a Chinese woman from Malaysia, and eventually, I think, believe brings this about 10 people total, some being kind of closer to the core, none of the men living with him.
[00:45:40]  Aisha actually threw her engagement ring in the Thames to prove her devotion.
[00:45:46]  The what?
[00:45:47]  The Thames?
[00:45:48]  The Thames.
[00:45:49]  How come they don't spell it T-H-E-M-E-S then?
[00:45:52]  The themes that would be called then.
[00:45:54]  The Thames.
[00:45:55]  I throws my engagement ring in the Thames.
[00:45:58]  Engagement ring rings.
[00:45:58]  My engagement ring in the Thames.
[00:46:01]  See, this is what I'm saying.
[00:46:02]  You got to just use the British accent.
[00:46:05]  Women will love it, especially if it's bad.
[00:46:07]  I was to be wed today.
[00:46:12]  And all right, so 77 is here, the fucking year of CBGB's.
[00:46:17]  And the Mao Zedong Memorial Center comes under heavy police repression.
[00:46:22]  First of all, Singapore strips him of citizenship.
[00:46:26]  Several members, including Bala, are arrested multiple times.
[00:46:32]  This is like actual police repression.
[00:46:33]  Like they say they're busting into the center, they're looking for drugs.
[00:46:37]  They don't find any, but they still lock basically everybody up.
[00:46:40]  But it's kind of sad because no one's like, free them, free them.
[00:46:44]  There's a freedom movement because everyone's like, those guys are crazy.
[00:46:46]  Please jail them.
[00:46:47]  Yes.
[00:46:48]  Well, because, yeah, that's the thing is, like, any observer, observer, or participant in the observer or participant in the left will realize that, like, for a good portion of the left-wing's existence, a lot of just resources have been devoted to getting some people out of jail.
[00:47:01]  Yeah.
[00:47:02]  Everyone's like, I'm good on this dude.
[00:47:04]  Like, he said I was a fascist.
[00:47:08]  We kind of get a hint from what they're turning into from a few lines from the pamphlet called On the Closure of the Mao Zedong Institute by the British Fascist State from 1978.
[00:47:18]  That's, I mean, that title goes hard, I guess.
[00:47:21]  Yes, it's pretty good.
[00:47:23]  They cannot grasp that the victory of the World People's Revolution and the establishment of the international dictatorship of the proletariat in 1977.
[00:47:30]  Using covert forms, our world party is now leading the great reorganization of the world so as to carry forward the proletarian socialist world revolution victoriously.
[00:47:41]  They cannot grasp this because they have never grasped that the principal form of warfare has long ago changed to electronic warfare, now affecting every field of human endeavor, where space technology, release of atomic energy, and the electronic computer are the main instruments.
[00:48:00]  They pay no heed, no heed, when China says that science and technology plays the key role in its modernization.
[00:48:09]  Because of their shallowness in scientific knowledge, they cannot grasp that socialist China leads today in the decisive field of computer technology.
[00:48:19]  And as such, the two, quote, superpowers have lost their control over 250 satellites that circle this earth of ours.
[00:48:28]  I got to say, my man, he was too early.
[00:48:33]  A little too early.
[00:48:34]  This is the curse of be look, as I've mentioned myself, my cross to bear.
[00:48:40]  You know, I'm an early adopter.
[00:48:42]  I'm too early to the scene.
[00:48:43]  You know, you know, you are.
[00:48:45]  Yeah, you had an iPod in 1994.
[00:48:48]  I understand the frustration where you see where this is going.
[00:48:51]  They are paying no heed, no heed.
[00:48:53]  He's basically saying the same thing that like Hoover Institute.
[00:48:58]  The Chinese control our satellites and they have back doors and all of our shit.
[00:49:03]  Yeah, maybe I have a point about that at the end of this.
[00:49:05]  It is very, very kind of him to think that the Chinese in 1975 led the world in computer technology.
[00:49:14]  Yeah.
[00:49:14]  But you notice he likes.
[00:49:15]  Yeah, propaganda is important.
[00:49:16]  It is important.
[00:49:17]  And it's like very clear that he read some pamphlet where China's like, computers are important for like modernization.
[00:49:23]  And he's like, they're sending me secret messages.
[00:49:26]  Like they're telling me that they actually control the satellites in the world.
[00:49:29]  So Baala's obsession with satellites is in full display here.
[00:49:36]  His whole thing is, and this is a constant, although it kind of morphs away from China in later years, is that the Chinese secretly control the world because they've taken over every computer, but they can also use computers to make people do things.
[00:49:54]  It's also good.
[00:49:55]  Yeah, he wants this because he is technically the leader of the British section of the Communist Party of China.
[00:50:03]  Which is kind of crazy because you would think that he wouldn't kind of want to, he would want to keep the cover on the operation.
[00:50:10]  Instead of making pamphlets about it?
[00:50:11]  Yeah.
[00:50:12]  I've read every single available, of which there are several, pamphlet that they ever put out.
[00:50:19]  Doesn't seem to be, first of all, I don't get the impression they were widely read.
[00:50:23]  They're very sort of shoddy.
[00:50:26]  Well kept.
[00:50:26]  Well, they're just shoddily mimeographed.
[00:50:30]  I actually did buy a few from Valerium when we were doing this.
[00:50:33]  I just love to support Balarium Books, greatest bookstore in the world.
[00:50:36]  Look it up in San Francisco.

=== You Were Photographed from Below (03:58) ===

[00:50:37]  It's fantastic.
[00:50:38]  They do mail order.
[00:50:40]  But this is like, it's the police repression.
[00:50:44]  Even though there's a secret dictatorship of the proletariat and China controls everything via satellites and mind control, the police still do bust his whole group.
[00:50:53]  And so they go underground in 1978.
[00:51:06]  So at this point, they're sort of bleeding the members that they have left.
[00:51:09]  But this woman, Josephine Haravel, who's the daughter of the wealthy genius John Haravell, who's one of the Bleckley Park code breakers, has joined the group and is keeping them afloat on some of the family money.
[00:51:21]  Classic tale.
[00:51:22]  There's a couple, I know, this is a classic loony heiress.
[00:51:25]  It's so-gets involved with a cult and is like bankrolling.
[00:51:29]  There are so listen, this is a true non-rule.
[00:51:32]  If you listen to me, if you are a loony heiress, if you are a loony heiress and some guy is like, come live with me in my group.
[00:51:43]  In my underground compound.
[00:51:44]  My underground compound.
[00:51:45]  Don't, first of all, we've been saying don't go to the compound.
[00:51:48]  Yeah.
[00:51:49]  Don't go to the compound.
[00:51:49]  Especially this underground.
[00:51:50]  But don't be like, I'm going to give you my dad's money for the compound.
[00:51:54]  Yeah, give me your dad's money.
[00:51:55]  Give me your dad's money.
[00:51:57]  We'll make a new Patreon tier.
[00:51:59]  Anyways, so I love a loony heiress.
[00:52:03]  There's like two.
[00:52:03]  It's a very lengthy character, the loony heiress.
[00:52:06]  So all of the way, and you got to see, also, I should remind you that Balakrishnan, Comrade Bala, is like, from descriptions I've read, one says barely above five feet tall.
[00:52:17]  I want you to remember this, all you fucking height freaks out there.
[00:52:22]  Bala is barely above five feet tall, which actually, to me, is really tall.
[00:52:26]  I'm coming in at about 4'4 at latest stretch.
[00:52:30]  That's what you want people to remember?
[00:52:32]  I'm 4'4.
[00:52:33]  Okay.
[00:52:33]  Yeah.
[00:52:33]  It's the global average.
[00:52:34]  Factoring in a problem.
[00:52:35]  How tall was Mao?
[00:52:37]  I think Mao was tall.
[00:52:38]  Mao was like six feet tall.
[00:52:40]  How tall was Stalin?
[00:52:42]  Stalin was 5'1.
[00:52:43]  I don't know.
[00:52:43]  Stalin's probably pretty short.
[00:52:44]  I bet Stalin was like, I'm going to guess.
[00:52:48]  Yo, Chomsky, could you look it up?
[00:52:49]  I'm going to guess that Stalin was between 5'6 and 5'8.
[00:52:51]  I was going to say 5'6.
[00:52:52]  5'6 and 5'8.
[00:52:54]  But that is 5'2.
[00:52:56]  5'2?
[00:52:57]  What?
[00:52:58]  Well, that's what the first results, the title is.
[00:53:00]  Fascists.
[00:53:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:53:04]  Stalin's diminutive size.
[00:53:05]  Wait, no.
[00:53:06]  Bullshit.
[00:53:07]  But see, this is the problem with it.
[00:53:10]  It says it's a myth that he was 5'2.
[00:53:12]  You goddamn right.
[00:53:13]  Oh, it's the fucking Google thing where you ask it a question and then it just highlights some Nazi fucking website.
[00:53:18]  It says he's actually 5'5.
[00:53:19]  5'5.
[00:53:20]  5'5.
[00:53:21]  I still think that's not right.
[00:53:22]  He's a giant.
[00:53:24]  5'5?
[00:53:24]  What was the air up there?
[00:53:26]  I bet he was like 5'6, pushing 5'7, and they've dropped him down to a 5'5.
[00:53:31]  I'm gonna be real with you.
[00:53:32]  The guys in those days wore those really tall boots with big ass heels.
[00:53:38]  So I'm gonna be for real and think he's 5'5.
[00:53:40]  You were photographed from below, especially for portraiture.
[00:53:43]  How do you photograph a guy who is 5'5 from below?
[00:53:46]  You have a fucking squirrel doing?
[00:53:49]  Anyways, but Mao was tall.
[00:53:51]  Mao was tall.
[00:53:53]  And also a really fantastic athlete and a swimmer, which is actually the only athleticism that I myself excel at.
[00:53:59]  Of course, with having glasses, there is a handicap there, but I just take them off.
[00:54:03]  No, you just get prescription goggles.
[00:54:04]  I'm not going to get prescription goggles.
[00:54:06]  Why?
[00:54:06]  Because I tried to get those ones a long time ago because I wanted to go somewhere to look at the water, things in the water.
[00:54:12]  They ask you all these other questions about like, I know the number.
[00:54:16]  I don't know them, but I have it written down the numbers for my prescription.
[00:54:19]  But they ask you a bunch of other things, like numbers, and I don't know them.
[00:54:23]  And Costco didn't give me them.
[00:54:24]  I'm going to give them the prescription.
[00:54:26]  It should work.
[00:54:27]  Yeah, but yeah, then I just was like, they're like $300.
[00:54:30]  I don't know.
[00:54:30]  But I should have done that.
[00:54:31]  But then you go swimming.
[00:54:32]  But then I go swimming.
[00:54:34]  Get your lap on.

=== Frequent Criticism Sessions (15:55) ===

[00:54:35]  Well, to swim all the way back to great old Joe Rio fucking England, these people are now underground.
[00:54:42]  And I don't mean underground like weather underground style, like we're going from Seifa to Seya.
[00:54:48]  They're mold people, not that way.
[00:54:49]  Not that way.
[00:54:50]  Well, a little bit.
[00:54:52]  I mean, Bala's, yeah, it's height.
[00:54:55]  But he's got these women working.
[00:54:57]  He's got several of them working outside the house.
[00:54:59]  Bala is just not working.
[00:55:02]  And one of the women, I should mention, is a woman named Cian Davies.
[00:55:06]  She had cut off all contact with her family, essentially disappearing.
[00:55:10]  Kind of all of them, most of them cut off contact with their family.
[00:55:12]  Not all of them, but most of them did.
[00:55:14]  They all cut off close relationships.
[00:55:17]  And she had, much like Haravel, given the commune 60,000 pounds of her parents' money.
[00:55:25]  Yeah, now it should be clear at this point where this is going, but this Maoist style commune party, whatever you want to call it, organization, group, is moving away from Mao and more towards Bala.
[00:55:43]  It's really all about Bala at all.
[00:55:44]  It's all about Bala.
[00:55:45]  Big Bala.
[00:55:47]  Yeah.
[00:55:48]  So they called him at this point, they just called him AB and sang songs like integrate with A.B.'s eternal spirit.
[00:55:59]  A-B's got the whole world in his hands.
[00:56:01]  Okay, well, that's just a bad, you know, and shit on Britannia.
[00:56:05]  Shit on Britannia is, I would love to hear shit on Britannia because that is probably a certified Maoist classic song.
[00:56:14]  So a lot of the ways that they're still Maoist is essentially in their way of interacting with each other.
[00:56:19]  And specifically, they have frequent self-criticism sessions.
[00:56:24]  Yeah.
[00:56:24]  Criticism and self-criticism sessions.
[00:56:26]  Now, longtime listeners of the show know that I myself have participated in numerous criticism and self-criticism sessions.
[00:56:33]  And there's a right way to do it and there's a wrong way to do it.
[00:56:36]  They were doing it the wrong way, which is a form of social control and as a way to sort of shore up support for their rather tall, but in some people's minds, diminutive leader, Comrade Bala.
[00:56:53]  So one of the things that is very similar to a lot of other kind of cults is that Bala was like, no one can go to the doctor anymore.
[00:57:01]  Like we're not fucking with medicine.
[00:57:03]  He called the NHS never help self, which is terrible.
[00:57:08]  He always, and I will say it's very malice of him.
[00:57:10]  He did come up with like any kind of like acronym like that.
[00:57:13]  He would come up with his own version, which is we love that.
[00:57:16]  But his wife was diabetic.
[00:57:18]  And so she was no longer getting like insulin and she falls into a diabetic coma and has to be taken to the hospital.
[00:57:26]  Yeah, it's at this point that Bala then starts raping the other members of the cult.
[00:57:31]  Yeah.
[00:57:33]  So he gets, I mean, that's that's he does this for a long time.
[00:57:38]  I mean, this is eventually, well, we'll get to that.
[00:57:40]  But he does this for a long time.
[00:57:42]  He starts like beating, and it's unclear exactly when the beating started.
[00:57:48]  We know they're definitely happening at this point, sometime in the late 70s, early 80s, which is fairly early on.
[00:57:54]  But he starts beating and then also beating and raping, and then sometimes having consensual sex with.
[00:58:00]  It's kind of hard to really differentiate because several of the people or multiple people involved in this are now dead and died before any of this could really get out.
[00:58:10]  But he is definitely inflicting sexual and regular violence upon the five women that he lives with, or six women that he lives with.
[00:58:21]  He gets C.N. Davies pregnant.
[00:58:25]  Yes.
[00:58:26]  And I know I'm probably pronouncing her name wrong.
[00:58:28]  S-I-A-N.
[00:58:29]  It's probably like Sean.
[00:58:30]  Sean, but he gets her pregnant.
[00:58:33]  And he's able to hide that pregnancy from the other members of the group and his fucking wife, who's not a bad person.
[00:58:41]  Which is crazy.
[00:58:42]  I know, because they all live together.
[00:58:44]  Yeah.
[00:58:45]  And when it eventually becomes very clear that she's pregnant and in fact she gives birth, he starts claiming that a satellite did it.
[00:58:54]  That it was a satellite that had essentially implanted a baby into Davies.
[00:59:03]  I mean, I mean, the people kind of believe this.
[00:59:06]  I mean, it's weird because I— I don't say believe is wrong.
[00:59:09]  They went along with it.
[00:59:11]  To whatever extent, personally, I don't know.
[00:59:13]  I mean, the thing is, at this point, like, all of them had kind of been like ramped.
[00:59:17]  The isolation from everybody is ramped up, right?
[00:59:19]  From like the getting kicked out of the like actual communist party that they were in, rather small communist party that they were in, to like this like very sectarian, like public group that they were in, and then to this even more sectarian, semi-public group that they're in, and then finally this, just like completely insular group that they were in.
[00:59:40]  Yeah, the final form, which is basically just like locked from the from the outside apartment.
[00:59:46]  Yeah, well, that's the thing.
[00:59:47]  It's like at this point, it was like pretty clear, you can't leave.
[00:59:52]  Literally.
[00:59:52]  Yeah.
[00:59:53]  So throughout the years, like some of the women would try to leave, and he would literally like beat the shit out of them, restrain them, and like tie them up and stuff before they could.
[01:00:02]  Satellites also become more and more involved in his preaching.
[01:00:05]  So basically, at this point, he's mostly just preaching to the women who live in the house.
[01:00:10]  He is like lecturing them and what it's going to be like when he controls the world because now he has sort of placed himself alongside Mao and in fact starts describing himself as a god.
[01:00:23]  One of his frequent things is that he doesn't age, even as he visibly ages.
[01:00:28]  All the big events in the world revolve around him as well.
[01:00:33]  So this is a famous instance because it was brought up at trial, but it's also, I read Sean Davies in his daughter's book in the lead up to this, and she describes this in pretty crazy detail.
[01:00:45]  He does this a number of times.
[01:00:47]  So anytime something big would happen in the world, he related it back to like, it was the women in the commune's fault because they had done something to him.
[01:00:55]  So when the challenger exploded, it was because a member of the group had challenged him.
[01:01:01]  This was the logic he said.
[01:01:03]  The smoke after the explosion had made a Y shape because they were vying with a capital Y for him.
[01:01:11]  And so every time something happens.
[01:01:13]  It reminds me of a lot of schizo posters.
[01:01:15]  Exactly, right?
[01:01:16]  It's like, it's such schizophrenic logic, right?
[01:01:19]  And like very narcissistic logic.
[01:01:21]  Obviously.
[01:01:21]  Well, yes, yeah.
[01:01:22]  And it's everything like in the world that happens is tied back to him.
[01:01:26]  So like nuclear war, like anytime like nuclear weapons come back, I think like the Trinity test, some big nuclear test happened on his birthday.
[01:01:36]  And so he would be like, this is because of like everything he would tie back to him.
[01:01:39]  So he was creating this cosmology of world events that all revolved around Comrade Bala, the son.
[01:01:45]  So at one point, a member of the collective, I mean, just another example of this.
[01:01:49]  At one point, a member of the collective wrote a poem about John Major.
[01:01:52]  This is actually his daughter that does, because she would just write poems every day and like only saw things in the news.
[01:01:58]  And Bala told her that she would eventually die of meningitis for letting men in her life.
[01:02:05]  That one doesn't work as well.
[01:02:06]  It doesn't work as well.
[01:02:07]  Yeah.
[01:02:08]  So eventually the baby is born.
[01:02:11]  Prem Mal Penduzi Davies, aka Comrade Prem.
[01:02:18]  This is, this name is apparently a combination of Hindu and Swahili, meaning love revolution.
[01:02:23]  But they really just call her Comrade Prem.
[01:02:26]  Prem is basically never told who her mother and father are.
[01:02:32]  They're like, she is basically just said to have appeared.
[01:02:35]  Like a literal like stork situation, but with satellites.
[01:02:40]  She has her birth registered in a hospital, but she's never allowed to go to school.
[01:02:44]  She doesn't get vaccines.
[01:02:45]  She doesn't go to the dentist.
[01:02:46]  She's locked in the house, literally.
[01:02:48]  She's literally locked in the house.
[01:02:51]  And the unit at home just gets increasingly more deranged and insular, if you can believe it.
[01:02:58]  Yeah, so they refer to her childhood as Project Prem and refer for like, and call this young girl from like the her inception, probably not inception, but from the moment of her birth, they would address her as Comrade Prem.
[01:03:14]  It is totally crazy.
[01:03:16]  So they're at this point, like very much at home all the time, except when like a couple of them are working.
[01:03:23]  They spend their time making internal newspapers.
[01:03:25]  Like they're still making kind of quote-unquote communist newspapers, although communism is not really a real objective thing to them anymore.
[01:03:33]  It's sort of just like it's part of the kind of cosmology of Comrade Bala.
[01:03:40]  They make newspapers out of the house out of news articles that Bala had collected and cut out for them.
[01:03:44]  So he would buy like six newspapers in the morning, cut out some articles they thought it was appropriate for them to read, and then they would make newspapers for the other, like two other members of the house to read.
[01:03:53]  Yeah.
[01:03:54]  Very weird.
[01:03:56]  There's constant, constant struggle sessions, frequent problems with neighbors, and every neighbor is like, that is a fascist agent.
[01:04:03]  So if someone's playing music, fascist agent.
[01:04:05]  And like, they're all agents of what they call the BFS, the British fascist state.
[01:04:10]  There's also frequent beatings.
[01:04:12]  One member, Leanne, tried to leave in 1988, but was straddled by Bala and beaten until she was covered in blood and bruises.
[01:04:19]  She made another attempt later that year to run, but became disoriented because she'd been inside for so long and returned.
[01:04:26]  She finally did escape in 1989, after which Bala called her fart color and had them sing a rendition of Which Side Are You On?, which denigrated her, referring to her as fart color.
[01:04:37]  So he also came up with a weird racial hierarchy, which put Indians on top and what he called dirty, ugly whites at the bottom.
[01:04:45]  So Sean, Cian, was white and Bala was Indian.
[01:04:50]  The daughter, Prem, was mixed and thus very confused because her mother was referred to as a dirty, ugly white.
[01:04:57]  Her dad was like, you know, this, this, this sort of like, it was Indian, but it was also God.
[01:05:03]  But it was, she didn't know that that was her mom and dad.
[01:05:06]  I mean, she kind of figured out eventually.
[01:05:08]  And the satellite stuff starts getting a lot weirder.
[01:05:12]  They basically start like, the satellite becomes almost like a Christ-like, but also Satan-like figure in their lives.
[01:05:20]  And it undergoes a number of changes.
[01:05:23]  So according to Davies' book, it was originally called the BFSMM, which is the beautiful field synchronizing media machine.
[01:05:32]  Then it went through a series of other obscure acronyms until it was Jackie.
[01:05:37]  Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna, and Iserwan, Iswaren.
[01:05:43]  Iswaran is, I believe he's like, he's a guy from Kerala who I believe brought a certain form of meditative practice to the United States.
[01:05:51]  Yeah, so they worship a machine called Jackie.
[01:05:54]  Yeah, and Jackie is also like capable of like anything bad in the world that happens, like there's a landslide or someone you know dies.
[01:06:02]  Jackie did that.
[01:06:03]  Yes.
[01:06:04]  And so Jackie is also the thing that if you try to escape the commune, Jackie is going to strike you down because it's an all-knowing, like omnipotent being that exists in space and has infinite powers.
[01:06:15]  So at this point, we're not really reading a lot of communist books anymore.
[01:06:20]  No, it's like, let's say it's like the mid to late 80s at this point.
[01:06:24]  Yeah.
[01:06:25]  And Bala is over Mao.
[01:06:27]  Mao's done.
[01:06:28]  In fact, I think he denounces him.
[01:06:30]  He does.
[01:06:31]  And he says, you know, I was just testing you.
[01:06:35]  Oh, you thought that, you know, I was getting you to worship Mao.
[01:06:37]  That was a test.
[01:06:38]  A test, you failed.
[01:06:39]  Exactly.
[01:06:39]  It's like, oh, this whole Mao thing, that was just a decades-long experiment done by the Marxist-Leninist Institute.
[01:06:47]  And he was like, okay, everyone's going to start reading a new kind of book that's really important.
[01:06:52]  Not the red book, different color book.
[01:06:55]  Slightly, in my mind, it would be like brownish.
[01:06:59]  Brownish.
[01:07:00]  And it's called The Lord of the Rings.
[01:07:02]  The Lord of the Motherfucking Rings.
[01:07:03]  And you didn't think it was going there, did you?
[01:07:06]  We're reading The Lord of the Rings because the character, Aragorn, Aragon or Aragorn?
[01:07:12]  I don't remember from last time we had this.
[01:07:14]  I don't remember either.
[01:07:14]  I can't remember, but I know.
[01:07:16]  I think it's Aragon.
[01:07:17]  But you know what, if I'm wrong?
[01:07:19]  Fuck you.
[01:07:20]  Yeah, and Uragon.
[01:07:21]  Yeah, Uragon.
[01:07:22]  Bam!
[01:07:22]  Episode's over, motherfucker.
[01:07:24]  Aragon.
[01:07:25]  And it's really, it doesn't matter what the last two letters are.
[01:07:28]  That matters is the first two letters, three letters, because of the similarities between that and Aravinden's first name.
[01:07:37]  He says that the character of Aragorn was based on him.
[01:07:41]  Yeah.
[01:07:42]  And so this book was technically written, because Aragorn becomes leader of the, well, he describes it as the universe, but it's based on him.
[01:07:49]  And this becomes, I mean, reading Davey's book, the daughter's book, it is like very apparent.
[01:07:55]  Like he has an obsession with Lord of the Rings.
[01:07:57]  And like, it's really one of the only things that like she has like that teaches her about the world.
[01:08:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:03]  Obviously, teach her about hobbits mostly.
[01:08:06]  Yeah, a world that doesn't exist.
[01:08:08]  Yeah.
[01:08:08]  And so he's like, he's, his whole thing now is like, I'm just like in training until I go overt.
[01:08:13]  He keeps calling it overt.
[01:08:15]  And that means when he becomes the actual acknowledged leader of the world, like God.
[01:08:20]  Unfortunately, this doesn't stop another member, Cindy, from leaving in 1993.
[01:08:25]  And she was the last remaining member with a job.
[01:08:28]  And so they had to go on strict rations.
[01:08:31]  Yeah, they got no money now.
[01:08:32]  None.
[01:08:33]  And they keep moving around.
[01:08:34]  They're evicted a bunch for non-payment of rent.
[01:08:36]  And in 1996, one of the very traumatic incident happens, which is Sean, who is Prem's mother.
[01:08:47]  Though Prem doesn't know it yet.
[01:08:49]  Yeah, doesn't know.
[01:08:50]  Well, I think probably suspects it, but I don't think she fully confirms it.
[01:08:54]  She is blamed by Bala for the passing of Comrade Bala's mother.
[01:08:59]  Yes.
[01:08:59]  So Comrade Bala's mother dies, and he's like, Sean, this is your fault.
[01:09:04]  You caused this.
[01:09:05]  This pushes Sean to attempt suicide.
[01:09:10]  She tries to kill herself with a knife.
[01:09:14]  That doesn't work.
[01:09:15]  She goes into a deep depression.
[01:09:17]  And I mean, like, like has a break, a mental break.
[01:09:21]  Full mental breakdown.
[01:09:22]  She's wandering around the house.
[01:09:23]  They're all locked in this house, by the way.
[01:09:25]  Wandering around.
[01:09:26]  She's muttering to herself.
[01:09:28]  She's like, like, just nonsense.
[01:09:31]  She's not speaking anything that is recognizable to anybody.
[01:09:35]  Prem catches her kissing sandals that she wore that were like bought because they look like the sandals that AB's mother wore and like huddled over them, kissing them and like apologizing to them because she had, because of her sins, Jackie had killed Comrade Bala's mother.
[01:09:54]  Then on Christmas Eve of 1996, Sean locks herself in the upstairs bathroom and somehow, though we don't have a lot of details on it, fell out of the window and onto the concrete below.
[01:10:06]  Prem, her daughter, rushes out there and Comrade Bala also as well.
[01:10:11]  And, you know, this woman, her mother, is lying in a pool of her own blood, like broken, sort of like twitching, and just looking at Bala and muttering, like, kill me, kill me, kill me, kill me.
[01:10:24]  I know this is this is from Davies' book.
[01:10:27]  So she actually goes in the hospital for about eight months.

=== Harry Potter's Simplistic Good and Evil (07:00) ===

[01:10:31]  Prem visits her, and eventually, like, she suspected that Sean was her mother.
[01:10:35]  Like, she had been seeing a document that said something like it, although the AB had been like, oh, we just had to put that because they wouldn't understand.
[01:10:42]  Prem was actually told her father was, I believe, a member of the Shining Path who had been killed and an English woman that had died in childbirth.
[01:10:52]  She says mummy to Sean.
[01:10:55]  Like, you know, she refers to her as mother.
[01:10:58]  And Sean replies, baby, to that.
[01:11:00]  Like, she calls her baby for the first time.
[01:11:02]  First, like, I mean, she had sort of had like a psychotic way of telling her she was her mom before, but then took it back and called herself a whore.
[01:11:10]  It was really dark.
[01:11:11]  But this was like the first time it was like, really, like, I'm your mother.
[01:11:15]  Five days later, Sean goes into seizures and eventually declines and dies.
[01:11:20]  And so after the incident where Prem had called her mother, she never sees her again.
[01:11:26]  And A.B. convinces the group that Jackie had done this because Sean had strayed in her mind and that she had eventually died because Prem had called her mummy.
[01:11:35]  So like, you know, she was killed because she committed suicide because she had betrayed Comrade Bala mentally.
[01:11:42]  And then she was eventually killed because of she had betrayed Jackie by saying that she was Prem's mother.
[01:11:50]  Over the next few years, things got predictably worse.
[01:11:53]  O Kar Ng, or Comrade O, fell and hit her head.
[01:11:57]  The group essentially let her die on the ground while they decided what to do.
[01:12:01]  They just sort of stood over her.
[01:12:03]  They took her to the hospital the next day after she had like clearly really fucked her head up, and then she basically immediately died.
[01:12:11]  Well, eventually, Prem does get out.
[01:12:14]  So we should set the stage for how this happens.
[01:12:17]  Yeah.
[01:12:19]  Bala was obsessed with Lord of the Rings, but he was also obsessed with another book.
[01:12:24]  Harry Potter.
[01:12:26]  Now.
[01:12:27]  Because at some point you got to let them read another book.
[01:12:29]  You got to let them know.
[01:12:30]  You got to let them read another series.
[01:12:31]  And lo and behold, one is, when does Harry Potter come out?
[01:12:34]  In the 90s?
[01:12:35]  In the 90s.
[01:12:36]  I think like early 90s it starts coming out.
[01:12:38]  Mid 90s it starts coming out.
[01:12:39]  Yeah.
[01:12:40]  And so now it's time to move on from Lord of the Rings and into Harry Potter.
[01:12:44]  And for Bala, he was like, oh yeah, you can read this because actually I'm also Harry Potter.
[01:12:48]  I'm Harry Potter.
[01:12:49]  Yeah, I'm Harry Potter and I'm the guy from Lord of the Rings.
[01:12:53]  But also now I'm Harry Potter.
[01:12:55]  And so Prem was like, sick, and gets really into Harry Potter, predictably, because it's very, you know.
[01:13:01]  She starts writing Harry Potter fan fiction.
[01:13:04]  So at this point, Prem's world basically consists of reading Harry Potter books, sometimes like reading some news items, and staring out the window without being able to talk to people.
[01:13:13]  She's allowed to leave the house like once or twice, maybe three times a year on like very supervised, like strict, you know, like we're going to this place and then taking you back in.
[01:13:23]  And so her whole world, like she starts seeing the world through like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings kind of starts referring to Bala as the dark lord.
[01:13:31]  And kind of like, and this sort of, it's interesting because she takes this kind of like simplistic conception of good and evil that, I mean, I don't know, simplistic, but you know, Harry Potter certainly simplistic conception of good and evil and applies it to her own life.
[01:13:44]  But it turns out to be pretty fairly applicable.
[01:13:49]  So A.B.'s wife, his wife, Chonda, her sister had been living with them and now required outside nursing care to come in.
[01:14:00]  And so like she, she had, you know, A.B.'s wife had a disabled sister.
[01:14:03]  Disabled sister, her needs become too great.
[01:14:06]  And they start having people, like nurses come in.
[01:14:08]  And the nurses look at this woman now, because Prem is now like an adult who's very clearly unsocialized, had never been outside.
[01:14:18]  And they're like, are you okay?
[01:14:19]  Like, can we help you with anything?
[01:14:22]  Yeah.
[01:14:23]  And then, you know, they keep like bringing up like, hey, maybe she get a cell phone.
[01:14:26]  Maybe she needs a cell phone.
[01:14:27]  Like, we'd really like you to get a cell phone so you can keep in contact with us.
[01:14:31]  And eventually they leave, but that idea sticks in Prem's mind.
[01:14:35]  And Prem was able to convince Josie that Chonda, Josie was the daughter of the Blackley Park guy who'd been living with them this whole time, that Chonda was the one.
[01:14:45]  The Looney Aires.
[01:14:47]  One of the Looney Heiresses that was keeping Prem trapped.
[01:14:51]  She was basically able to convince Josie that it was in fact A.B.'s wife who was the one that was like keeping them trapped in there.
[01:14:59]  And she was manipulating A.B.
[01:15:01]  So one day they're watching TV and an ad for a rescue charity comes up with a phone number.
[01:15:05]  And this led to Prem and Josie calling that phone number and escaping, eventually taking Aisha with them.
[01:15:12]  So Scotland Yard comes in and is like, what the fuck is this?
[01:15:17]  What the fuck?
[01:15:19]  Immediately arrests Bala and his wife, Shonda.
[01:15:23]  They don't really know what to do because they're like, well, we don't really have a crime.
[01:15:29]  We don't really have a crime scene.
[01:15:31]  We know something's not right.
[01:15:33]  But we don't know what that is.
[01:15:35]  Yeah.
[01:15:37]  He eventually, Bala, gets charged with like a ton of sexual and child cruelty offenses and goes the route of defending himself at trial by just stating all of his political beliefs, which is like not a good move when you believe that satellites, like you worship a satellite and it's controlling all the actions of the world.
[01:15:58]  He does bring that up in his defense at trial.
[01:16:00]  He's like, no, it's the satellites that do this.
[01:16:03]  And like, you know, I'm God also.
[01:16:05]  He's diagnosed by a psychiatrist at the trial with narcissistic personality disorder, which I got to say seems like underselling it a little bit.
[01:16:13]  But I mean, I've never met anyone.
[01:16:15]  He gets sentenced to 23 years, which is good.
[01:16:21]  Yes.
[01:16:22]  Comrade Prem pretty much immediately forgives him using Nelson Mandela's example of like, listen, I was in prison.
[01:16:28]  I want to get out with no hate in my heart.
[01:16:31]  You know, there's a lot of interviews with her.
[01:16:33]  BBC did a documentary kind of about her called, I think, The Cult Next Door from 2017.
[01:16:40]  And she seems obviously like pretty undersocialized, but somebody who's very positive and very, I mean, judging by her book, obviously the book is written to sell books, but like it is, you know, she seems very excited to be out in the world at last.
[01:16:53]  Yeah.
[01:16:53]  She wrote, she said this, and I don't know if it's in the documentary or in one of the interviews, she said, I suppose he had to be convicted, but I didn't want him to spend that long in prison.
[01:17:03]  He put me in prison, then I put him in prison.
[01:17:06]  And that feels wrong.
[01:17:07]  Feels like petty revenge, which I don't believe in.
[01:17:11]  Josie has another take.
[01:17:13]  She put out a 96-page pamphlet titled Clearing Comrade Bala's Name, which is, and I say this with no hyperbole, one of the most insane political, definitely I would say on marxist.org, one of the most insane things that they have.
[01:17:29]  And there's some nutty shit on that fucking website.

=== Katie's Complex Journey (03:14) ===

[01:17:31]  Yeah.
[01:17:32]  It is, she claims like she goes like point by point against Comrade Prem and like really like it is a depressing fucking read because she is still has like very I mean Stockholm syndrome is basically fake but like has what you the closest thing to call Stockholm syndrome that I think you could possibly have Prem changes her name to Katie because the song Roar by Katie Perry really inspired her once she got out.
[01:18:03]  And she sort of, I mean, that's good as name as I need to change it.
[01:18:05]  So she's now going by Katie Morgan Davies.
[01:18:08]  Josie is still campaigning to clear Bala's name, but the campaign has lagged a little bit since Comrade Bala died in prison in April of 2022.
[01:18:31]  I think one or two lessons to be learned from that, Liz.
[01:18:32]  Hmm.
[01:18:34]  One, I think that if you meet somebody being like, I am a representative of the Chinese Communist Party in Brixton, I would maybe get a second opinion, possibly from the Chinese on that one.
[01:18:47]  Especially if it was in the 70s.
[01:18:49]  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:18:51]  This reminds me, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, you know, in some ways, this reminds me a lot of the Black Hammer stuff, especially like the moving to this house.
[01:19:01]  I mean, they were a little more, a lot more sort of out in public, but like it was definitely heading that direction.
[01:19:07]  And a lot of the abuse kind of mirrors the abuse that we saw with that as well.
[01:19:11]  Yeah.
[01:19:12]  It's just, it's nasty shit.
[01:19:14]  I love mapping all of these sort of like offshoots and, I don't know, squabbles and then seeing kind of what roads they lead people down.
[01:19:21]  It's all very, I mean, I think it's still very germane, kind of understanding all these sort of, you know, little, everyone's a revisionist, right?
[01:19:31]  Everyone's constantly revising.
[01:19:32]  And it leads, you know, you follow all of these trails and they all sort of, it's all kind of not, I don't know, kind of a loop or like a, you know, everything's always feeding back into another thing and kind of, you know, leading people down some very weird, weird roads.
[01:19:52]  Well, I think it's also just like it's, it's one thing that is abundantly clear is that if you're the leader of a small political movement, it is really important that you're not a fucking freak, narcissist, schizophrenic nut job.
[01:20:08]  And unfortunately, there's kind of a lot of those out there.
[01:20:12]  So many out there.
[01:20:13]  So many.
[01:20:13]  There's so many people who are working out their neuroses in a political way, which I don't think people should do.
[01:20:21]  But hey, call me crazy, you know.
[01:20:24]  I mean, just the Red Guards Austin stuff is so reminiscent of parts of this, but more reminiscent of other different insane groups.
[01:20:34]  But, you know, reading through a lot of the aftermath of that, some former members talking about that, it was just, it's all just so nuts.
[01:20:40]  But I get people kind of getting caught up in this, especially if it becomes your whole world, you know?

=== People Caught Up (00:45) ===

[01:20:46]  I mean, this Josie is unable to leave this behind.
[01:20:51]  You know, she's still living out this like weird 80s post-Maoist cult thing in her head in 2024.
[01:21:00]  Anyways, with that being said, my name is the ray of light from the east.
[01:21:08]  The sun rises on his right shoulder and descends upon his left.
[01:21:14]  He wears the crown of the proletariat.
[01:21:17]  And that crown is made out of satellites.
[01:21:19]  It is made out of motherfucking satellites and they are beaming to your head.
[01:21:22]  Thank you for listening.
[01:21:23]  My name is Bryce Belden.
[01:21:25]  I'm Liz.
[01:21:26]  We are, of course, joined by Producer Yang Chomsky.
[01:21:28]  And this has been Trunon.
[01:21:31]  We'll see you next time.