August 19, 2025 • 21 mins
In this episode, I explore the symbolism of World War II through the imagery of the Axis and the Allies. Beyond politics, these symbols reveal a deeper story about unity and multiplicity—the tension between the “one” and the “many.” I look at how the propaganda and narratives of that time shaped the post-war consensus we still live in today, and why those stories are now reaching their limits. My hope is to help you see how these patterns influence our culture and why finding balance is so important.
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/vLpEDlgEleg
Visit https://www.rapunzelbook.com to pre-order our new fairy tale story, Rapunzel and the Evil Witch.
NEW COURSE: Jubilees and the Nephilim, by Fr. Stephen De Young
- Register now: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/courses/jubilees-and-the-nephilim
- Course Length: 6 Weeks, 12 Hours
- Dates: Live classes are on Tuesday at 7 - 9 pm Central Time, starting August 19th through September 23rd, 2025
- Participants will be given access to lesson recordings.
- The course is hosted on the Symbolic World Circle Community platform. Sign up as a free member before making your purchase.
- Price: 180 USD, Involved patrons qualify for 10% discount.
Step into the strange and revelatory world of the Book of Jubilees, an ancient retelling of Genesis that shaped ancient Jewish thought and still echoes through Christian tradition. In this course, Fr. Stephen De Young guides students through the book’s expansion of biblical history, unveiling the significance of the fall of the angels, the rise of the Nephilim, and the heavenly origins of the feasts of the Old and New Testaments. Along the way, he'll explore how Jubilees reinterprets creation, demonology, and the prophetic structure of time, and why these themes mattered not only to Second Temple Judaism, but to later Christian understandings of the unseen world.
💻 Website and blog: http://www.thesymbolicworld.com
🔗 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanpageau
🔒 BECOME A PATRON: https://thesymbolicworld.com/subscribe
Our website designers: https://www.resonancehq.io/
My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/vLpEDlgEleg
Visit https://www.rapunzelbook.com to pre-order our new fairy tale story, Rapunzel and the Evil Witch.
NEW COURSE: Jubilees and the Nephilim, by Fr. Stephen De Young
- Register now: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/courses/jubilees-and-the-nephilim
- Course Length: 6 Weeks, 12 Hours
- Dates: Live classes are on Tuesday at 7 - 9 pm Central Time, starting August 19th through September 23rd, 2025
- Participants will be given access to lesson recordings.
- The course is hosted on the Symbolic World Circle Community platform. Sign up as a free member before making your purchase.
- Price: 180 USD, Involved patrons qualify for 10% discount.
Step into the strange and revelatory world of the Book of Jubilees, an ancient retelling of Genesis that shaped ancient Jewish thought and still echoes through Christian tradition. In this course, Fr. Stephen De Young guides students through the book’s expansion of biblical history, unveiling the significance of the fall of the angels, the rise of the Nephilim, and the heavenly origins of the feasts of the Old and New Testaments. Along the way, he'll explore how Jubilees reinterprets creation, demonology, and the prophetic structure of time, and why these themes mattered not only to Second Temple Judaism, but to later Christian understandings of the unseen world.
💻 Website and blog: http://www.thesymbolicworld.com
🔗 Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanpageau
🔒 BECOME A PATRON: https://thesymbolicworld.com/subscribe
Our website designers: https://www.resonancehq.io/
My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So some of you might have noticed I've been talking
more and more about the end of the World War
two consensus, about let's say, the mythology of World War
Two and how it founds our world. I've talked about
it on several podcasts if you haven't followed followed with
Benjamin Boyce, with Winston Marshall, with Ali Tabrizi, and you know,
I've also been talking about it on my own newsletters.
(00:23):
So if you want to hear more about my ideas
on that, you can look at in all these directions.
One of the reasons why I don't want to make
all these videos on my channel because I don't want
to make my channel about that. I think it's important
to talk about but I actually talk about this stuff
rather reluctantly because I don't like talking about politics. I'd
rather talk about religion and culture, and as we say,
(00:46):
politics is downstream from that.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
But now, because.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Of everything that's going on, it's important to talk about
some of the issues, and so I wanted to bring
up just two images, the image of even the structure
of World War two, as the Axis and the Allies,
and show that already in the way that we understand
the division of the war, the main division of the war.
We already have the structure of the World War two
(01:11):
consensus in there.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
This is Jonathan Pejel, Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
So, for those who have been following, we are about
to launch our new Rapunzel books very soon. We were
so excited to get this into people's hands that we
actually airshipped about a thousand copies and some people were
able to access those one thousand copies we sold. I
think it was nine hundred copies we had on sale.
We sold nine hundred copies in like twenty six hours,
(01:59):
and so I'm really excited to see how, you know,
people reading it and getting the first glimpses.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
We already have some reviews coming in.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
It was also a way for us to test our
new shipping service and our new distribution service, and we
couldn't believe it. People were getting their books. Some got
it on the same day that they ordered it. Other
people's got them one day two days later. And so
we're really happy to see this new distribution system work out.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
And so we decided that.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
The book is going to be launching explicitly in about
a month, but we decided to still do a pre
order for those who were interested, because I recorded an
audiobook version of the Rapunzel Book, and we also put
together a kind of worksheet to go through the story
with your kids, with your family, So we thought we
could offer that to those who were willing to pre
order the book. Those that already bought the first very
(02:51):
first one thousand copies were able to get in, and
so we wanted to extend that offer to those who
wanted to pre order, and so go to rapunzelbook dot
com and get your book.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I cannot wait.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
For people to read this because this is where the
story gets interesting. This is where the threads are going
to start to come together, and where the characters are
going to start to repeat. So get in on Tales
for once and ever. This is the third book. We've
still got a whole bunch coming. We've got three books
that are in production right now, and so yeah, excited.
(03:22):
This is the thing that gets me the most excited
is this fairy tale project. So thanks everybody, and go
get your book. You know, one of the things that
I've talked about for many times over and over is
that in some ways the modern world is a radicalization
of the question of.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
The one and the many.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
In some ways, this division I call it the separation
of heaven and Earth, where things move more and more
towards a kind of radical unity, which and the kind
of tyranny and control, which can be represented of course
as the bureaucratic state itself, as the nation state with
solid borders, as the move towards more and more cent
(04:00):
realized identities, whether it is ethnic identities that happen.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Of course in the modern age as well.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
And on the other side, which is more and more
of a kind of chaotic sense with the increase, of course,
chaotic in the sense of moving towards multiplicity or the
power of multiplicity. And in that sense you have democracies
in there. But you also have the revolutionary narrative in itself.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
You know, this idea that the many kind of.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Come up and take over or defeat the one because
the one is dangerous and tyrannical. And then on the
other hand you have this sense that we need more
and more state control and more and more unification, you know,
first at the state level and now at the kind
of world level, and those two narratives can play off
(04:47):
each other. This move in towards one and this move
in towards the Many as a type of deincarnation. What
you can see is that already in the structure of
World War Two, with the imagery of the access and
the Allies, it's already there, and it is already a
reflection of what's going to happen. And in some ways,
the World War two consensus, because of who won the war,
(05:10):
ended up setting up the structure for the next generation
of what it is that we tend to prioritize.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
We can start with the axis.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Of course, if you look at the symbolism of the axis,
an axis is a pole, right, an axis is a
vertical thing, or a vertical around which things turn. It
is in some ways the one itself. And this is
the imagery that was used. And if you look at
the imagery, the kind of iconography of the axis, you
(05:40):
see this focus on uniformity. If you think of the
of the regimes, you know, this image of the of
the uniform, you know, the Nazi uniform, these huge squares
of people walking like this image of the power of unity,
the power of one. And of course the swastika is
(06:01):
itself an image of the axis.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
You know, the symbol is going to get know at
the beginning of the.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Twentieth century suggested that the that the swastika was in
fact the Polaris star and what we call the little
dipper that is turning around that Polaris star. So if
you think about it's like a point with the crook,
and some of the older swastika is right, they have
a double crook that's similar to the to the to
(06:31):
the the little Dipper, the little bear, you know. And
so whether or not that's actually what the swastika is about,
the for sure that imagery of the swastika as being
a polar image would have been known by the people
who developed it in Germany. Whether it's polar, whether it's
(06:54):
solar as well, whether it is this idea of it's
like in.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Some ways the kind of solar wheel.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
All of these images are images of centrality and of
origin and of unity very very strongly, and so it
is quite normal that the axis looks the way it
does in the jury the Italians have the fascis, you know,
this idea of this bundle that is tied together really
strongly and represents the unity of the of the enterprise.
(07:23):
And how if we're bound into one, then that unity
is much stronger than the than the multiplicity. Right, if
you bind multiplicity together strongly, then it becomes extremely strong.
And of course the same with the sun in Japan. Right,
So the sun, the solar imagery in Japan, and the
axial and solar imagery in the in the swastika, the
(07:45):
faskis in Italy. All of these image just go together
in terms of these images of unity. And you know,
that's why there's such an emphasis on national unity, on
racial unity, on hierarchy, extreme hierarchy. All of this type
of imagery is there in the fascist imagery.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And now on the other side, which you have or
the allies, and so in the way.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
That the Allies ended up coming together, it's interesting because
if things had gone differently, like if the alliance between
Hitler and Stalin would have held in some ways, we
would have had a kind of authoritarian versus more democratic regime,
and that would have been the narrative structure. Right, So
(08:32):
you have authoritarianism and then you have this kind of
you could say.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Democratic idea.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
But because the Allies ended up allying themselves with the Communists,
with the Russians, what ends up happening is you really
have more of the one and the many, and so
now the revolutionary trope is the one that gets emphasized,
you could say, narratively, where it is possible to ally
(09:00):
ourselves with communists because we are both in some ways
anti anti anti hierarchy, right, anti hierarchy in the sense
of origin, and this kind of that type, the type
of imperial original imagery, and.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So they all of this goes together. And so if
you look at the.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Imagery of the allies, they don't have a kind of centralization.
It's represented in some ways as really a loose alliance
or a loose federation, which is what the United Nations
end up becoming, this idea of a federation of nations. Right,
So when you use the word federation, which you're suggesting,
is you're suggesting in some ways the power of the many,
the power of a kind of willful alliance, one that's
(09:44):
not dependent on a on a higher origin or on
something higher that's binding us together. And there's a kind
of flexibility in that, you know, there's a there's a
looseness to that, to that strength. And there's also a
tendency to emphasize the the individual, especially in terms of
Western Europe. And the United States, and so the image
(10:05):
becomes a kind.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Of ragtag.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
The ragtag army, right, this idea of an army of
difference becomes the type of imagery this used. And if
you think about it, all of our narrative since World
War Two, most of our narratives have been about that,
which is a loose ragtag group that defeats a unitary principle, right,
(10:30):
that defeats something that is too tyrannical, whether it's Star Wars,
whether it's even recently in the recent Marvel series.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Captain America has its Howling Wolves, which.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Were like a bunch of different people from different nations,
Like each person in his battalion represented a different nation,
and they're kind of all very very different, but their
difference and the strength of their difference is what makes
them flexible and have all these different qualities that are
able to join together rather loosely in order to defeat
(11:03):
this tyrannical, you know, authoritarian structure.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
And so this is of course.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
The story that we've been that we've been facing ever
since World War Two, which is that's the narrative. The
narrative is ragtag multiplicity against the tyranny of the one.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
But of course that is not the full story, right.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
You could tell another story, which is in some ways
that the ragtag group becomes chaotic, becomes subversive even to
its own means, and that you need some kind of authority,
return of the king style in order to re establish
a form of order. Those two stories are legitimate because
excess can come from both sides. But we've been pushing
(11:48):
this story very very strongly, and this is something that
this is going to be tough for some people to swallow.
But you know, the Rainbow Coalition stuff is downstream from
the Star Wars narrative. It's downstream from the idea of
the rebellion of this loose alliance of all these different
different groups of planets and all these different extraterrestrial races
(12:12):
that are all facing this kind of all dark clad
you know. Uh that's say European stock fascist imagery of
the empire, right. And so you know when the when
the kind of woke people said, and even in Marvel
(12:33):
and all of these movies, they said in some ways
that they're completely being coherent with stories that already been there,
Like the new Star Wars movie, they were a continuation
of something of an imagery that was already there the
original Star Wars movies, which was this ragtag alliance of
of diversity against unity. Now, the thing is that that
(12:55):
sometimes needs to happen.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
That sometimes is you could say.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
It's a normal narrative if it's if it has that
kind of reasonability to it. And like I've said, the
emphasis on federation and the emphasis on you know, an
equality of multiple people has been the strength of the
world since the end of World War two, and it
has worked and it has held us together. But if
you keep pushing in that direction, at some point you
(13:21):
reach its fringes and you reach it excesses, and then
you reach a kind of inverted storytelling. Right, the idea
where unity is bad, where identity is bad, where the
only possible identities are revolutionary identities. It's upside down stories.
It's women ruling over men, it's minorities ruling over those
(13:43):
that hold the nation or hold the name of the nation.
It's it's the idea of of migrants or immigrants being
more important, being more powerful, being more having more having
more value than those that are were.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
There in the first place.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And so you can see how if you push the
story which is a completely legitimate story. You end up
with a kind of a kind of excess which no
longer holds. And then that excess what it does is
it calls to the other side. And this is what
I've been warning you about, is that in someone's a
call to the other side, it calls for a form
(14:19):
of unity, it looks for to go back to, you know,
and then all the memes about the empire was right
in Star Wars, and that there's a lot of these
kinds of memes that appeared that's been appearing maybe since
twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, about how, in fact, you know,
maybe the other side was right. And the truth is
(14:41):
that we don't need to go all the way to
that direction, but we do need to be aware that
we're reaching the end of one story. Like the push
towards the image of loose federations fighting, let's say fighting,
unity is no longer applause because we're looking at our
(15:01):
world fall apart and we're seeing things crumble, and we
need to be able to reformulate unity. The danger is
that the way the unity will be reformulated might be tyrannical.
Either way that we go right, whether we go left,
or right, the unity might be tyrannical, whether it's a
kind of fascistic type nationalist identity, or whether it is
(15:25):
a globalist you know, technocracy. You know, these all of
these can lead towards forms of tyranny. What we really
need is to find the balance again and to reformulate
unity and multiplicity at every single level, at the local level,
at the family level, at the city level, at the
(15:46):
national level, so that we can avoid these movements towards
extreme unity and extreme multiplicity. But what I wanted mostly
for you to be able to see is to what
extent that imagery is already there. It was already there
right at the outset. And if you look at the
way that let's say, you could say, the way that
(16:08):
the the Gis are represented versus the way that we
tend to think of the Nazi officer right the SS
with their black uniforms, you know, and they're kind of
very very tight look and the gis, you know, kind
of loose everything out of falling apart with all the
stuff on them. You know, they look more like a
(16:31):
kind of chaotic adventure. And there's something seductive about that,
for sure. But you can see that the entire esthetic
of the Access versus the Allies. If you meditate on it,
you'll see that the fact that the Allies won then
established which narratives were permissible and which narratives were encouraged
until today. And they also are showing to what extent
(16:56):
they've run out, and so hopefully we can find a
solution that aren't excessive.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
So what's interesting when you look at the.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Way that the Axis and the Allies represent themselves is
you can see that we have in some ways the
perfect storm of symbolism, which is, and this is in
some ways where the story becomes the most powerful.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
That is, when if you have two opponents, those.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Two opponents actually recognize themselves to be something, and so
the Axis recognizes itself to be the strength of unity,
the strength of the One, and the Allies in some
ways recognize themselves as being this federation, loose federation of
people that are joining together voluntarily in order to fight something.
(17:42):
And so you have this perfect storm because on the
one hand, what you can do with the propaganda of
the war is you can emphasize the negative aspect of
the other side, and so what ends up happening is,
of course the Allies represent the Axis as being tyrannical,
(18:03):
as being monolithic, as being an excess of the one,
and that of course ramps up. Now the Axis was
already something like that, but what happens is that the
propaganda effort, the pressure of the narrative, ramps up the
stakes and makes the way that you represent the enemy
even more and more of what they are in the
(18:25):
negative sense, and the same for the other side.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Of course, the Axis.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Propaganda would emphasize the Allies as being degenerate, as being subversive,
as being chaotic, you know, as being mixed. Right, that
was also an important aspect of the you know, as
being confused in the sense of mixed. And so now
all of a sudden they've emphasized not the strength of
a kind of loose federation of people, but rather the
(18:52):
negative aspect of this that lose configuration. And that's when
you really have, let's say, a perfect storm. And the
propaganda effort and the narrative pressure is also what created,
in some ways, the World War two myth or the
post World War two consensus.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Consensus is that that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Propaganda, you know, that say, led to a story that
became necessary for winning the war, and a story that
then became necessary for holding things together after the war
had ended. And so it's not that the propaganda isn't
based on images that were true. Like I said, the
Axis and the Allies recognized themselves as being either image
(19:36):
images of the one or images of the many.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
But it is rather the you.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Could say, it is the desire to defeat the other
that creates the the type of pressure that makes the
other side into an absolute evil that has to be destroyed.
And then that that narrative pressure continues after the war
war has won, and that can help you understand why
in some ways it's kind of like a narrative virus
(20:04):
that keeps taking up more and more space. And that's why,
in some ways the imagery of unity after World War
Two just keeps getting pushed and pushed and pushed until
even normal images of unity like family or like nation,
or like heritage, all of these different things, unless it's revolutionary,
(20:25):
becomes an image of fascism that is of course untenable.
And that is one of the reasons why the pendulum
is tending or wants to swing back, hopefully not to
the completely to the other side, but is definitely swinging back.
As we speak and so I hope this was insightful
and that this brought you to think further on the
(20:47):
question of where we are and what's going on. And
thank you for your support of the symbolic World. If
you can, please sign up to the symbolic World dot com.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
You know you have all.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Kinds of advantages signing up, and it also is a
possibility of supporting us financially as well. And so thanks
everyone for your attention and I'll talk to you very soon.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
If you enjoyed these videos and podcasts, please go to
the symbolic World dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers
with perks. There are apparel in books to purchase. So
go to the symbolic World dot com and thank you
for your support.
So some of you might have noticed I've been talking
more and more about the end of the World War
two consensus, about let's say, the mythology of World War
Two and how it founds our world. I've talked about
it on several podcasts if you haven't followed followed with
Benjamin Boyce, with Winston Marshall, with Ali Tabrizi, and you know,
I've also been talking about it on my own newsletters.
(00:23):
So if you want to hear more about my ideas
on that, you can look at in all these directions.
One of the reasons why I don't want to make
all these videos on my channel because I don't want
to make my channel about that. I think it's important
to talk about but I actually talk about this stuff
rather reluctantly because I don't like talking about politics. I'd
rather talk about religion and culture, and as we say,
(00:46):
politics is downstream from that.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
But now, because.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Of everything that's going on, it's important to talk about
some of the issues, and so I wanted to bring
up just two images, the image of even the structure
of World War two, as the Axis and the Allies,
and show that already in the way that we understand
the division of the war, the main division of the war.
We already have the structure of the World War two
(01:11):
consensus in there.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
This is Jonathan Pejel, Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
So, for those who have been following, we are about
to launch our new Rapunzel books very soon. We were
so excited to get this into people's hands that we
actually airshipped about a thousand copies and some people were
able to access those one thousand copies we sold. I
think it was nine hundred copies we had on sale.
We sold nine hundred copies in like twenty six hours,
(01:59):
and so I'm really excited to see how, you know,
people reading it and getting the first glimpses.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
We already have some reviews coming in.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
It was also a way for us to test our
new shipping service and our new distribution service, and we
couldn't believe it. People were getting their books. Some got
it on the same day that they ordered it. Other
people's got them one day two days later. And so
we're really happy to see this new distribution system work out.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
And so we decided that.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
The book is going to be launching explicitly in about
a month, but we decided to still do a pre
order for those who were interested, because I recorded an
audiobook version of the Rapunzel Book, and we also put
together a kind of worksheet to go through the story
with your kids, with your family, So we thought we
could offer that to those who were willing to pre
order the book. Those that already bought the first very
(02:51):
first one thousand copies were able to get in, and
so we wanted to extend that offer to those who
wanted to pre order, and so go to rapunzelbook dot
com and get your book.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
I cannot wait.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
For people to read this because this is where the
story gets interesting. This is where the threads are going
to start to come together, and where the characters are
going to start to repeat. So get in on Tales
for once and ever. This is the third book. We've
still got a whole bunch coming. We've got three books
that are in production right now, and so yeah, excited.
(03:22):
This is the thing that gets me the most excited
is this fairy tale project. So thanks everybody, and go
get your book. You know, one of the things that
I've talked about for many times over and over is
that in some ways the modern world is a radicalization
of the question of.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
The one and the many.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
In some ways, this division I call it the separation
of heaven and Earth, where things move more and more
towards a kind of radical unity, which and the kind
of tyranny and control, which can be represented of course
as the bureaucratic state itself, as the nation state with
solid borders, as the move towards more and more cent
(04:00):
realized identities, whether it is ethnic identities that happen.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Of course in the modern age as well.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
And on the other side, which is more and more
of a kind of chaotic sense with the increase, of course,
chaotic in the sense of moving towards multiplicity or the
power of multiplicity. And in that sense you have democracies
in there. But you also have the revolutionary narrative in itself.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
You know, this idea that the many kind of.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Come up and take over or defeat the one because
the one is dangerous and tyrannical. And then on the
other hand you have this sense that we need more
and more state control and more and more unification, you know,
first at the state level and now at the kind
of world level, and those two narratives can play off
(04:47):
each other. This move in towards one and this move
in towards the Many as a type of deincarnation. What
you can see is that already in the structure of
World War Two, with the imagery of the access and
the Allies, it's already there, and it is already a
reflection of what's going to happen. And in some ways,
the World War two consensus, because of who won the war,
(05:10):
ended up setting up the structure for the next generation
of what it is that we tend to prioritize.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
We can start with the axis.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Of course, if you look at the symbolism of the axis,
an axis is a pole, right, an axis is a
vertical thing, or a vertical around which things turn. It
is in some ways the one itself. And this is
the imagery that was used. And if you look at
the imagery, the kind of iconography of the axis, you
(05:40):
see this focus on uniformity. If you think of the
of the regimes, you know, this image of the of
the uniform, you know, the Nazi uniform, these huge squares
of people walking like this image of the power of unity,
the power of one. And of course the swastika is
(06:01):
itself an image of the axis.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
You know, the symbol is going to get know at
the beginning of the.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Twentieth century suggested that the that the swastika was in
fact the Polaris star and what we call the little
dipper that is turning around that Polaris star. So if
you think about it's like a point with the crook,
and some of the older swastika is right, they have
a double crook that's similar to the to the to
(06:31):
the the little Dipper, the little bear, you know. And
so whether or not that's actually what the swastika is about,
the for sure that imagery of the swastika as being
a polar image would have been known by the people
who developed it in Germany. Whether it's polar, whether it's
(06:54):
solar as well, whether it is this idea of it's
like in.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Some ways the kind of solar wheel.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
All of these images are images of centrality and of
origin and of unity very very strongly, and so it
is quite normal that the axis looks the way it
does in the jury the Italians have the fascis, you know,
this idea of this bundle that is tied together really
strongly and represents the unity of the of the enterprise.
(07:23):
And how if we're bound into one, then that unity
is much stronger than the than the multiplicity. Right, if
you bind multiplicity together strongly, then it becomes extremely strong.
And of course the same with the sun in Japan. Right,
So the sun, the solar imagery in Japan, and the
axial and solar imagery in the in the swastika, the
(07:45):
faskis in Italy. All of these image just go together
in terms of these images of unity. And you know,
that's why there's such an emphasis on national unity, on
racial unity, on hierarchy, extreme hierarchy. All of this type
of imagery is there in the fascist imagery.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
And now on the other side, which you have or
the allies, and so in the way.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
That the Allies ended up coming together, it's interesting because
if things had gone differently, like if the alliance between
Hitler and Stalin would have held in some ways, we
would have had a kind of authoritarian versus more democratic regime,
and that would have been the narrative structure. Right, So
(08:32):
you have authoritarianism and then you have this kind of
you could say.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Democratic idea.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
But because the Allies ended up allying themselves with the Communists,
with the Russians, what ends up happening is you really
have more of the one and the many, and so
now the revolutionary trope is the one that gets emphasized,
you could say, narratively, where it is possible to ally
(09:00):
ourselves with communists because we are both in some ways
anti anti anti hierarchy, right, anti hierarchy in the sense
of origin, and this kind of that type, the type
of imperial original imagery, and.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
So they all of this goes together. And so if
you look at the.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Imagery of the allies, they don't have a kind of centralization.
It's represented in some ways as really a loose alliance
or a loose federation, which is what the United Nations
end up becoming, this idea of a federation of nations. Right,
So when you use the word federation, which you're suggesting,
is you're suggesting in some ways the power of the many,
the power of a kind of willful alliance, one that's
(09:44):
not dependent on a on a higher origin or on
something higher that's binding us together. And there's a kind
of flexibility in that, you know, there's a there's a
looseness to that, to that strength. And there's also a
tendency to emphasize the the individual, especially in terms of
Western Europe. And the United States, and so the image
(10:05):
becomes a kind.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
Of ragtag.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
The ragtag army, right, this idea of an army of
difference becomes the type of imagery this used. And if
you think about it, all of our narrative since World
War Two, most of our narratives have been about that,
which is a loose ragtag group that defeats a unitary principle, right,
(10:30):
that defeats something that is too tyrannical, whether it's Star Wars,
whether it's even recently in the recent Marvel series.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Captain America has its Howling Wolves, which.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Were like a bunch of different people from different nations,
Like each person in his battalion represented a different nation,
and they're kind of all very very different, but their
difference and the strength of their difference is what makes
them flexible and have all these different qualities that are
able to join together rather loosely in order to defeat
(11:03):
this tyrannical, you know, authoritarian structure.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
And so this is of course.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
The story that we've been that we've been facing ever
since World War Two, which is that's the narrative. The
narrative is ragtag multiplicity against the tyranny of the one.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
But of course that is not the full story, right.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
You could tell another story, which is in some ways
that the ragtag group becomes chaotic, becomes subversive even to
its own means, and that you need some kind of authority,
return of the king style in order to re establish
a form of order. Those two stories are legitimate because
excess can come from both sides. But we've been pushing
(11:48):
this story very very strongly, and this is something that
this is going to be tough for some people to swallow.
But you know, the Rainbow Coalition stuff is downstream from
the Star Wars narrative. It's downstream from the idea of
the rebellion of this loose alliance of all these different
different groups of planets and all these different extraterrestrial races
(12:12):
that are all facing this kind of all dark clad
you know. Uh that's say European stock fascist imagery of
the empire, right. And so you know when the when
the kind of woke people said, and even in Marvel
(12:33):
and all of these movies, they said in some ways
that they're completely being coherent with stories that already been there,
Like the new Star Wars movie, they were a continuation
of something of an imagery that was already there the
original Star Wars movies, which was this ragtag alliance of
of diversity against unity. Now, the thing is that that
(12:55):
sometimes needs to happen.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
That sometimes is you could say.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
It's a normal narrative if it's if it has that
kind of reasonability to it. And like I've said, the
emphasis on federation and the emphasis on you know, an
equality of multiple people has been the strength of the
world since the end of World War two, and it
has worked and it has held us together. But if
you keep pushing in that direction, at some point you
(13:21):
reach its fringes and you reach it excesses, and then
you reach a kind of inverted storytelling. Right, the idea
where unity is bad, where identity is bad, where the
only possible identities are revolutionary identities. It's upside down stories.
It's women ruling over men, it's minorities ruling over those
(13:43):
that hold the nation or hold the name of the nation.
It's it's the idea of of migrants or immigrants being
more important, being more powerful, being more having more having
more value than those that are were.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
There in the first place.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
And so you can see how if you push the
story which is a completely legitimate story. You end up
with a kind of a kind of excess which no
longer holds. And then that excess what it does is
it calls to the other side. And this is what
I've been warning you about, is that in someone's a
call to the other side, it calls for a form
(14:19):
of unity, it looks for to go back to, you know,
and then all the memes about the empire was right
in Star Wars, and that there's a lot of these
kinds of memes that appeared that's been appearing maybe since
twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, about how, in fact, you know,
maybe the other side was right. And the truth is
(14:41):
that we don't need to go all the way to
that direction, but we do need to be aware that
we're reaching the end of one story. Like the push
towards the image of loose federations fighting, let's say fighting,
unity is no longer applause because we're looking at our
(15:01):
world fall apart and we're seeing things crumble, and we
need to be able to reformulate unity. The danger is
that the way the unity will be reformulated might be tyrannical.
Either way that we go right, whether we go left,
or right, the unity might be tyrannical, whether it's a
kind of fascistic type nationalist identity, or whether it is
(15:25):
a globalist you know, technocracy. You know, these all of
these can lead towards forms of tyranny. What we really
need is to find the balance again and to reformulate
unity and multiplicity at every single level, at the local level,
at the family level, at the city level, at the
(15:46):
national level, so that we can avoid these movements towards
extreme unity and extreme multiplicity. But what I wanted mostly
for you to be able to see is to what
extent that imagery is already there. It was already there
right at the outset. And if you look at the
way that let's say, you could say, the way that
(16:08):
the the Gis are represented versus the way that we
tend to think of the Nazi officer right the SS
with their black uniforms, you know, and they're kind of
very very tight look and the gis, you know, kind
of loose everything out of falling apart with all the
stuff on them. You know, they look more like a
(16:31):
kind of chaotic adventure. And there's something seductive about that,
for sure. But you can see that the entire esthetic
of the Access versus the Allies. If you meditate on it,
you'll see that the fact that the Allies won then
established which narratives were permissible and which narratives were encouraged
until today. And they also are showing to what extent
(16:56):
they've run out, and so hopefully we can find a
solution that aren't excessive.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
So what's interesting when you look at the.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Way that the Axis and the Allies represent themselves is
you can see that we have in some ways the
perfect storm of symbolism, which is, and this is in
some ways where the story becomes the most powerful.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
That is, when if you have two opponents, those.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Two opponents actually recognize themselves to be something, and so
the Axis recognizes itself to be the strength of unity,
the strength of the One, and the Allies in some
ways recognize themselves as being this federation, loose federation of
people that are joining together voluntarily in order to fight something.
(17:42):
And so you have this perfect storm because on the
one hand, what you can do with the propaganda of
the war is you can emphasize the negative aspect of
the other side, and so what ends up happening is,
of course the Allies represent the Axis as being tyrannical,
(18:03):
as being monolithic, as being an excess of the one,
and that of course ramps up. Now the Axis was
already something like that, but what happens is that the
propaganda effort, the pressure of the narrative, ramps up the
stakes and makes the way that you represent the enemy
even more and more of what they are in the
(18:25):
negative sense, and the same for the other side.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
Of course, the Axis.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Propaganda would emphasize the Allies as being degenerate, as being subversive,
as being chaotic, you know, as being mixed. Right, that
was also an important aspect of the you know, as
being confused in the sense of mixed. And so now
all of a sudden they've emphasized not the strength of
a kind of loose federation of people, but rather the
(18:52):
negative aspect of this that lose configuration. And that's when
you really have, let's say, a perfect storm. And the
propaganda effort and the narrative pressure is also what created,
in some ways, the World War two myth or the
post World War two consensus.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Consensus is that that.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Propaganda, you know, that say, led to a story that
became necessary for winning the war, and a story that
then became necessary for holding things together after the war
had ended. And so it's not that the propaganda isn't
based on images that were true. Like I said, the
Axis and the Allies recognized themselves as being either image
(19:36):
images of the one or images of the many.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
But it is rather the you.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Could say, it is the desire to defeat the other
that creates the the type of pressure that makes the
other side into an absolute evil that has to be destroyed.
And then that that narrative pressure continues after the war
war has won, and that can help you understand why
in some ways it's kind of like a narrative virus
(20:04):
that keeps taking up more and more space. And that's why,
in some ways the imagery of unity after World War
Two just keeps getting pushed and pushed and pushed until
even normal images of unity like family or like nation,
or like heritage, all of these different things, unless it's revolutionary,
(20:25):
becomes an image of fascism that is of course untenable.
And that is one of the reasons why the pendulum
is tending or wants to swing back, hopefully not to
the completely to the other side, but is definitely swinging back.
As we speak and so I hope this was insightful
and that this brought you to think further on the
(20:47):
question of where we are and what's going on. And
thank you for your support of the symbolic World. If
you can, please sign up to the symbolic World dot com.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
You know you have all.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Kinds of advantages signing up, and it also is a
possibility of supporting us financially as well. And so thanks
everyone for your attention and I'll talk to you very soon.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
If you enjoyed these videos and podcasts, please go to
the symbolic World dot com website and see how you
can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers
with perks. There are apparel in books to purchase. So
go to the symbolic World dot com and thank you
for your support.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.