#16 – God’s Socialist, pt. 6: No Driver At The Wheel
The Martyrmade Podcast
This was originally intended to be part of the previous episode, but I decided to break them up.
#15 – God’s Socialist, pt. 5: The Wounded King
The Martyrmade Podcast
This episode begins where the ’60s end, when the radicalism of that decade crash headlong into the diminishing expectations of 1970s America. The Weather Underground veers off toward its explosive climax. As the idealism of the student movement is shunted into self-help fads and therapy sessions, what remaining energy of the radical left is drained into increasingly bizarre and violent channels.
#14 - God's Socialist, pt. 4: Sex, Drugs & Revolution
The Martyrmade Podcast
#13 – God’s Socialist, pt. 3: Head North, Then Turn Left
The Martyrmade Podcast
#12 - God's Socialist, pt. 2: What Child Is This?
The Martyrmade Podcast
#11 - God's Socialist: Prologue
The Martyrmade Podcast
This is the first episode of a series exploring Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. This episode is only a prologue, a few stories and ideas to serve as a backdrop for everything to come. The next episode will be along in the next few weeks, and every few weeks after that until we figure out why over 900 people committed suicide in a South American jungle in 1978.
#10 - Anything That Moves - The My Lai Massacre (w/History on Fire)
The Martyrmade Podcast
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#9 – Sacrifice & Oppression at the Dawn of Tyranny
The Martyrmade Podcast
“Mexica ‘beliefs’ have been discussed confidently enough, but academics being natural theologians, usually at an unnaturally abstract pitch. My interest is not in belief at this formal level, but in sensibility: the emotional, moral, and aesthetic nexus through which thought comes to be expressed in action, and so made public, visible, and accessible to our observation.”
#8 - How to Serve Man - Sacrifice & Cannibalism, pt. 1
The Martyrmade Podcast
Who’s hungry?
#7 - Approaching the Aztecs - A Drunken Introduction
The Martyrmade Podcast
In which I take a break from banging out my human sacrifice episode to check in with my patient listeners.
“Mexica ‘beliefs’ have been discussed confidently enough, but academics being natural theologians, usually at an unnaturally abstract pitch. My interest is not in belief at this formal level, but in sensibility: the emotional, moral, and aesthetic nexus through which thought comes to be expressed in action, and so made public, visible, and accessible to our observation.”
-Inga Clenninden | Aztecs: An Interpretation
Human sacrifice is not a human universal. The institution emerges at a specific stage of human sociopolitical development, and recedes when the transition is complete. Rarely found among nomadic hunter-gatherers, ritual homicide is also nearly absent in archaic civilizations (except for a few residual instances such as royal burials). But human beings didn’t make the leap from nomadic foragers to pyramid builders overnight. Nestled between was a transitional stage, when newly-settled people faced the monumental task of ditching the ancient kinship system, sacrificing their freedom to kings, and reorganizing themselves into the first states. This fraught transition was imposed by violence, as primitive egalitarianism was replaced by class oppression, and human sacrifice was employed to define social boundaries and to stave off panic with brutal acts of self-assertion. Kings gloried in their total freedom, the less fortunate were terrorized into submission, and the gods looked on with dripping fangs and growling stomachs.
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