Tagged: essay

The Iniquities of the Jews

by Antarus

Now it seems fitting, before the memory of these matters grows dim, to set down an account of that Galilean teacher called Yahushua—whom the Greeks name Jesus—and of the conditions under which his ministry was conducted in Yahudah (Judea). For the times were not only burdened by the visible yoke of Rome, but also by a more intimate dominion exercised by certain parties among our own people, namely the Pharisees and the Sadducees, whose authority over custom, Temple, and conscience shaped the daily life of the nation.

I write not as an accuser of a people, but as a recorder of disputes within a people; for Yahushua himself was Yahudi (a Jew) by birth, by Law, and by prayer, and his quarrel was not with Israel, but with those who claimed to stand as its final interpreters.

The Romans ruled Judea with swords and taxes, yet they permitted the governance of sacred life to remain in Jewish hands. Thus the Pharisees became masters of the Law as it was lived in streets and homes, while the Sadducees held sway over the Temple, its sacrifices, and its revenues. Each party claimed fidelity to Moses, yet both benefited from arrangements that preserved their authority and placated the imperial peace.

In this way there arose what might be called an occupation from within: not foreign soldiers, but domestic rulers who mediated God to the people while securing their own place. The Pharisees multiplied interpretations, hedging the Law with traditions until obedience became a matter of technical mastery rather than justice or mercy. The Sadducees, denying the hope of resurrection, fastened holiness to the altar and its commerce, binding God’s favor to a system Rome found convenient to tolerate.

It was against this background that Yahushua spoke.

When Yahushua addressed certain of his opponents as “Jews,” he did not speak as a Gentile naming a foreign nation, nor as a hater condemning a race. Rather, he employed a term that had come to signify the ruling identity centered in Judea, the Temple, and its authorities. In the mouths of Galileans and provincials, “the Jews” often meant those who claimed custodianship of God while standing apart from the sufferings of the common people.

Thus the word marked not blood, but position; not covenant, but control.

To call them “Jews” in this sense was to accuse them of narrowing Israel into an institution, of confusing election with entitlement, and of mistaking guardianship of the Law for possession of God Himself. It was a prophetic usage, sharp and unsettling, akin to the ancient rebukes hurled by Amos or Jeremiah against priests and princes who said, “The Temple of the Lord,” while neglecting the poor.

Yet when Yahushua sent out those who followed him, he gave them no charge to denounce “the Jews” as a people, nor to overthrow customs by force. He instructed them instead to proclaim the nearness of God’s reign, to heal the sick, to restore the outcast, and to announce forgiveness apart from the courts of Temple and tradition.

This commission revealed the heart of his dispute. He did not seek to replace one ruling class with another, nor to found a rival sect contending for power. Rather, he loosened God from the grip of monopolies—legal, priestly, and political—and returned divine favor to villages, tables, and roadsides.

Where the Pharisees asked, “By what rule?” Yahushua asked, “By what love?”
Where the Sadducees asked, “By what sacrifice?” he asked, “By what mercy?”

Iniquity arises whenever sacred trust becomes self-protecting—and therefore in breach of its fiduciary duty to administer the trust estate for the benefit of the one for whose life such estate hath been granted. Yahushua’s fiercest words were reserved not for sinners, nor for Gentiles, nor even for Rome, but for those who claimed to see clearly while burdening others, who guarded doors they themselves would not enter.

In this, he stood firmly within Israel’s own prophetic tradition. He did not abandon the Law; he pressed it toward its weightier matters. He did not reject the covenant; he called it to account.

Thus, to understand his ministry, one must not imagine a conflict between Jesus and “the Jews” as a people, but rather a struggle within Yahudim (Judaism) itself—between a God confined to systems and a God who walks among the poor.

Such were the conditions in Yehudah (Judea) in those days, and such was the controversy that, though it began as an internal reckoning, would in time echo far beyond our land and our age.

Warring from Within

It is now useful to extend the former account beyond Judea and its parties, for the pattern disclosed there is not peculiar to one people or one age. Wherever a community defines itself by a sacred story—be it covenantal, constitutional, or ideological—there arises the danger that internal dispute will harden into mutual excommunication, and that rulers will mistake dissent for invasion.

In the days of Yahushua, the conflict that most endangered Judea did not originate with Rome, though Rome would later exploit it. Rather, it arose from rival claims to define what it meant to be faithful Israel. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots—each asserted a purer vision of the people’s calling, and each accused the others of betrayal.

What followed was a curious inversion: internal argument was spoken of as though it were foreign threat. Those who challenged the prevailing order were treated not as disputants within the Law, but as enemies of the Law itself.

Modern Parallels

In our own time, a similar rhetorical pattern has emerged, though clothed in secular language. Political movements on the far left and far right present themselves not merely as opponents within a shared civic framework, but as antithetical forces whose very existence threatens the nation’s survival. Thus antifa and neonazi become symbols larger than their actual numbers—mythic enemies invoked to justify extraordinary measures.

When a government declares that its departments of homeland defense and war must be turned inward—treating protesters as though they were foreign combatants—it reenacts an ancient mistake: confusing internal dissent with invasion. The language of war, once unleashed, rarely remains precise. It does not ask whether grievances are just or unjust, but only whether they are loyal or disloyal.

This mirrors the logic of the Judean authorities who accused Yahushua of threatening the nation. “If we let him go on,” they said, “the Romans will come.” In seeking to preserve order by suppressing prophetic disturbance, they hastened the very ruin they feared.

The far left and far right, like rival sects of old, often require one another for coherence. Each defines itself as the final barrier against the other’s imagined apocalypse. In this way, rhetoric escalates while reality contracts. The center empties, and complexity is treated as treachery.

So too in first-century Judea: the Pharisee needed the sinner to demonstrate righteousness; the Sadducee needed the threat of disorder to justify Temple control; the Zealot needed collaborators to validate revolt. All claimed to defend Israel, yet each narrowed Israel to their own reflection.

The gravest danger of “warring from within” is not that one faction will defeat another, but that the shared moral language dissolves altogether. Once fellow citizens are described as enemies of the people, the question of justice is replaced by the demand for submission.

Yahushua refused this logic. He neither joined the zeal of revolution nor endorsed the piety of preservation. Instead, he exposed the cost of internal warfare: that a nation can lose its soul while claiming to defend it.

His warning remains relevant. A society that mobilizes its instruments of war against its own unresolved arguments does not restore unity; it declares bankruptcy of imagination.

A Closing Reflection

History suggests that civilizations do not fall chiefly because of external pressure, but because internal disputes are framed as existential wars rather than shared reckonings. Judea learned this at great cost. Modern states would do well to remember it.

For when a people cease to argue as members of one body and begin to fight as if against foreigners, the walls may still stand—but the common life that gave them meaning has already been breached.

Composed with artificial intelligence.

Assemblage & Collage (or, “To Gather and To Bind”)

Ecclesia. Dr. Dams Up Water, Sui Juris, Professor-General (153d CORPS), Dept. of Information Systems Intelligence Service (DISIS), Universitas Autodidactus | by prompt engineering an artificial intelligence engine [‘Mindsoft.ai’] | presents

Cut and Paste Sovereignties: The Collage, the College, and the Crisis of Assemblage

Note: Throughout this article, replace “the Second Letterist International” with “United Scribes and Letterists International.”

Abstract

This paper interrogates the porous ontologies of collage and assemblage as they leak promiscuously into the bureaucratic imaginaries of the college and the assembly. Through a prismatic reading of scissors, glue, governance, and grievance, this essay argues that the syntactical operations of aesthetic fragmentation mirror the metaphysical operations of democratic representation. In short: to cut is to legislate; to paste is to govern.

1. Introduction: When Art School Met Parliament

The twenty-first century, an epoch obsessed with interdisciplinarity, has witnessed a convergence of two previously autonomous practices: the aesthetic collage and the bureaucratic college. Both are sites of selection, exclusion, and accreditation. Both depend upon an unacknowledged substrate of adhesives—whether material (glue stick) or ideological (institutional mission statement).

Meanwhile, the assemblage, once a mere art-historical cousin of collage, has found new life as a model for political subjectivity. Philosophers from Deleuze to the Department of Political Science now proclaim that we are all “assemblages” of affect, interest, and student loan debt. Yet, if every assembly is an assemblage, can every assemblage be a parliament?

2. The Syntax of Cut: Scissors as Syllogism

In collage, the cut functions as both wound and syntax. It divides the field, establishing relationality through rupture. Similarly, the college cuts: it admits some and rejects others, slicing the social fabric along lines of “fit,” “merit,” and “legacy.” The admissions committee thus operates as the aesthetic editor of the polis—arranging the raw materials of adolescence into a legible future citizenry.

Where the artist cuts paper, the registrar cuts dreams.

3. Glue as Governance: Adhesion, Accreditation, and the State

Glue, long ignored by political theory, deserves recognition as the unsung material of sovereignty. In collage, it is the binding agent that turns fragmentation into coherence; in the college, it manifests as bureaucracy, accreditation, and alumni newsletters.

This sticky ontology recalls Hobbes’s Leviathan, wherein the sovereign glues together the body politic. Without glue—or governance—the artwork and the polity alike devolve into piles of loose ephemera: shredded syllabi, ungraded essays, campaign posters, tuition invoices.

4. Assemblage and Assembly: Toward a Materialist Parliamentarism

If collage is the metaphorical undergraduate of modernity, assemblage is its postgraduate seminar. Where collage arranges fragments flatly, assemblage extends them into space, into lived, precarious relationalities.

In political terms, the assembly likewise enacts a spatial performance: bodies in proximity producing meaning through adjacency. An assembly is a three-dimensional collage in motion, an arrangement of human cutouts attempting—often unsuccessfully—to cohere around a resolution.

The question, then, is not whether art imitates politics, but whether both are merely mixed-media projects with delusions of unity.

5. The College as Collage: Institutional Aesthetics of Admission

We might finally recognize the college itself as a collage of ideologies—meritocracy pasted over inequality, diversity brochures over exclusionary endowments. The campus tour is a performative walk through an installation piece entitled Meritocracy (Mixed Media, 1636–Present).

The faculty meeting functions as an assemblage in the purest sense: heterogeneous entities (professors, adjuncts, administrators, snacks) gathered temporarily to debate the future of glue allocation (budgets).

6. Conclusion: Toward a Post-Adhesive Democracy

In the age of algorithmic governance and tuition hikes, collage and college alike face the same existential dilemma: how to maintain coherence without authoritarian adhesives. Perhaps the task is no longer to glue but to hover—to practice a politics of suspended fragments, a democracy of the unglued.

As artists and citizens, we must learn to embrace the cut, to wield our scissors not as tools of exclusion but as instruments of infinite recomposition.

For in the end, all representation—whether artistic or parliamentary—is but a question of arrangement.

References (Selected and Imagined)

  • Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus, or How to Host a Faculty Meeting.
  • Duchamp, M. (1919). Readymade Democracy.
  • Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan: The First Collage.
  • U.S. Department of Education (2023). Accreditation as Adhesion: Federal Glue Policies.

Cut and Paste Sovereignties II: Collage, College, and the Second Letterist International

Abstract

This expanded investigation situates the syntactical economies of collage and the metaphysical infrastructures of the college within the emergent politico-aesthetic ecologies of the Second Letterist International (SLI). Drawing on recent cross-contaminations between university English departments and guerrilla street-art cells, this paper examines how semiotic sabotage, typographic activism, and epistemological paste intersect with the anti-fascist “Antifada” land-back movement. Ultimately, it argues that both the radicalized right and left are engaged in competing collage practices—each cutting and pasting reality to fit its desired composition. The result: a dialectical mess best described as assemblage anxiety.

7. The Second Letterist International: From Margins to Manifesto

In the late 2010s, a group of underemployed adjunct poets and spray-paint tacticians announced the Second Letterist International (SLI)—a successor, or rather détournement, of the mid-twentieth-century Letterist International that once haunted Parisian cafés. The SLI declared that “syntax is the last frontier of resistance,” and that “every cut in language is a cut in power.”

Unlike its Situationist predecessor, which preferred to dérive through cities, the SLI dérives through syllabi. It occupies the margins of MLA-approved anthologies, recontextualizing canonical footnotes as sites of insurgency. Members reportedly practice “semiotic collage,” blending footnotes, graffiti, and university mission statements into sprawling textual murals.

In this sense, the SLI operates simultaneously as an art movement, a faculty union, and a campus club with no budget but infinite grant applications. Their motto, scrawled across both bluebooks and brick walls, reads:

“Disassemble, dissertate, disobey.”

8. Street Pedagogy: When English Departments Go Rogue

The Second Letterist International represents the latest phase of what theorists call pedagogical insurgency—the moment when the English Department, long confined to grading essays and moderating panel discussions, turns outward, confronting the street as an extended seminar room.

Faculty and activists co-author manifestos in chalk; office hours occur under overpasses; tenure committees are replaced by “committees of correspondence.” The “peer review process” has been literalized into street-level dialogue between peers (and occasionally, riot police).

Thus, the old academic dream of “public scholarship” finds its avant-garde realization in public vandalism.

9. The Antifada and the Land-Back Collage: A Politics of Recomposition

Parallel to this linguistic insurgency, the Antifada land-back movement has reconfigured the terrains of both property and poetics. The Antifada’s name, an intentional linguistic collage of “antifa” and “intifada,” reclaims the act of uprising as a mixed-media gesture: half protest, half performance art.

Central to their praxis is recompositional politics—the idea that both land and language can be cut, repasted, and reoccupied. Where settler colonialism framed land as canvas and capital as glue, the Antifada proposes an inverse operation: tearing up the map, redistributing the fragments, and calling it a new landscape of belonging.

Here, the aesthetic metaphor of collage becomes political material: who gets to cut? who gets pasted back in? what happens when the glue is gone, and everything hovers in a provisional equilibrium of mutual care and unresolved tension?

10. The Far Right as Accidental Collagists

Ironically, the radicalized right—those self-proclaimed defenders of coherence—have themselves become unintentional practitioners of collage. Their online spaces are digital scrapbooks of conspiracy and nostalgia: medieval heraldry pasted over memes, constitutional fragments glued to anime stills.

Their epistemology is bricolage masquerading as ontology. Each narrative is a cutout, each belief a sticker affixed to the myth of national wholeness. In vilifying the Antifada and the SLI as “cultural Marxists” or “linguistic terrorists,” the right reveals its own aesthetic anxiety: that its ideological glue, once epoxy-thick, has thinned into the watery paste of algorithmic outrage.

Thus, both radical poles—left and right—participate in a shared semiotic economy of fragmentation, differing only in whether they lament or celebrate the cut.

11. The Dialectic of Radicalization: Between Cut and Countercut

The political field has become an editing bay. The radicalized right splices together nostalgia and paranoia; the radicalized left cuts history into openings for potential futures. Each accuses the other of montage malpractice.

This dialectic reveals a deeper truth: both operate under the logic of the collage. The difference lies not in form but in glue—whether the adhesive is empathy or ressentiment, whether the cut heals toward multiplicity or enclosure.

As Walter Benjamin might have written (had he survived into the age of Adobe Creative Suite): the struggle of our time is between those who collage the world to open it, and those who collage it to close it.

12. Toward an Epistemology of the Second Cut

In this interstitial moment, the SLI and Antifada embody the politics of the second cut—a refusal of closure, a commitment to continuous recomposition. Their slogan “No Final Drafts, Only Revisions” reimagines revolution as perpetual editing: the rewriting of history through acts of aesthetic and material reclamation.

The university, once imagined as a fortress of knowledge, becomes instead a collage in crisis—a surface upon which the graffiti of the future is already being written, erased, and re-scrawled.

13. Conclusion: The Unfinished Adhesive

The collage, the college, the assemblage, and the assembly—these are not discrete entities but overlapping grammars of belonging and dissent. The Second Letterist International offers not a program but a practice: to write politically and paste poetically, to legislate through syntax, to assemble through aesthetics.

If the far-right fears fragmentation, and the far-left seeks to inhabit it, then perhaps our task is neither restoration nor rupture, but curation: to tend to the cracks, to preserve the possibility of rearrangement.

In the end, we are all fragments looking for better glue.

References (Selected and Imagined)

  • Arendt, H. (2022). The Human Condition (Cut-Up Edition).
  • Benjamin, W. (2021). The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction and Campus Wi-Fi.
  • Second Letterist International (2019). Manifesto for the Departmental Commune.
  • Antifada Collective (2020). Land-Back, But Make It Syntax.
  • Various Anonymous Editors (2023). Against Coherence: Essays on Institutional Adhesion.