On this holiday of Purim which begins at sunset today and ends with the fall of night tomorrow, the Jewish peoples of the world celebrate their salvation from genocide in 5th century Persia as written in the Book of Esther, and all of humankind may celebrate the triumph of love over hate, solidarity over division, and resistance over tyranny which it commemorates.
As we are confronted in the news with images of terrible violence and crimes against humanity in two wars which challenge our world order; the Israeli invasion of Gaza which has made America complicit in genocide and calls into question the idea of human rights, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a war of total destruction unlike anything Europe has seen since the Second World War which echoes its atrocities and uses thermobaric weapons as mobile crematoriums against civilians, I think of these things today in terms of the historical legacies of resistance to tyranny, slavery, wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and genocide.
How shall we defend the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine from the horrific war crimes of Netanyahu’s theocratic fascism of blood, faith, and soil and Putin’s mad imperial conquest, without ourselves becoming an empire?
The seduction of power begins with fear, especially overwhelming and generalized fear given forms of Otherness by authority in service to power; to find safety and security in becoming the arbiter of virtue. This too we must resist.
Moreover such strategies of force and control must always fail and come to ruin, for security is an illusion, and the use of social force creates its own resistance.
Never Again! is a phrase I have used often as a reply to tyranny and fascism, both in my writing and to my comrades personally as a call to total resistance without limits, and herein I wish to interrogate its meaning and consequences.
How can we use Never Again! as a principle of direct action which preserves and empowers the wellbeing and autonomy of others, without such action becoming a point of moral fracture, subversion of ideals, and the cascade failure of unequal power?
For myself the history of its use is connected to a category of my Defining Moments which I call Last Stands, the stories of which I have told many times. These include only moments in which I chose solidarity and refusal to submit over personal survival; refusing to step aside from the child behind me when ordered to surrender by the police bounty hunters in Brazil 1974, when soldiers set fire to the house Jean Genet and I were in, surrounded and unarmed, in Beirut 1982 when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, a forlorn hope at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola 1988 for the liberation from Apartheid, and numberless others beyond my accounting.
Last Stands are choices of refusal to surrender our humanity and universal human rights, our duty of care and stewardship of one another, regardless of the consequences as lines we cannot cross without becoming something less than human.
In the ongoing Gaza War and genocide of the Palestinians, this is also a refusal to abandon the cause of “freedom of faith for all humankind” as the legend on the monument of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s 1631 victory at the Battle of Breitenfeld which secured this right declares, the principle of a nonsectarian state on which America is founded and of the inherent right of independence and sovereign self-determination of all peoples, and solidarity with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth against force and control, state terror and tyranny, war and imperial conquest.
Among my personal role models in antifascism and revolution is the fictional character of Harry Tuttle played by Robert de Niro in the film Brazil, whose line “we’re all in this together,” echoes through forty some years of my life and adventures.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen, in the summer of 1974, to train with some fellow fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there, though later the venue was moved to Mexico. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy my age I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial and equestrian sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, from which I have never truly returned.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of white and patriarchal privilege, genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood, not because of language but of implicit systems of oppression. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears to prove the count. This was how the elites of Brazil had chosen to solve the problem of abandoned street children, fully ten per cent of the national population. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we do not challenge and defy tyranny and unjust systems.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and to obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a traumatic near death experience, similar to the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944 as written in The Instant of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 as written in The Idiot; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was reflexive and a decision of instinct beneath the level of conscious thought or volition, where the truths of ourselves written in our flesh are forged and revealed. Asked to let someone die to save myself, I simply said no. When thought returned to me from this moment of panic or transcendence of myself, I asked how much to let us walk away, whereupon he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, infamous for avenging his mother’s savage murder by killing his father and eating his heart, who had been arrested the previous year after a spectacular series of one hundred or more revenge killings of the most fiendish and monstrous of criminals, powerful men beyond the reach of the law or who were the law and who had perpetrated atrocities on women and children. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, with the words; “You are one of us, come with us” and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
“We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge”; so they described themselves to me, and this definition of solidarity as praxis or the action of values remains with me and shadows my use of the battle cry Never Again! As Shakespeare wrote in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, scene I; “If you wrong us, shall we not avenge?”
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
Second is the day when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for forty two years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire in 1918. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the second of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
Of the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein; this was where the system of Apartheid was broken. In a massive campaign involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, which was encircled by Apartheid forces. After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” The first is a universal Zulu battle cry, which asks the spirits of ones ancestors to awake and bear witness to the glorious acts of heroism one is about to perform. “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
And we were victorious, though the cost was terrible. No such costs are too great to bear compared to the costs of submission to slavery, commodification, falsification, and dehumanization; for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free, and this power of self-ownership as victory in the struggle for our humanity cannot be taken from us. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Long ago I lost count of Last Stands; these have become truths written in my flesh, and I bear such marks without number. As doubtless will those who now stand with Palestine, Ukraine, or any people under threat of annihilation.
In all of this what matters is that in refusal to submit to authority and to force we become Unconquered and free; this is victory as a condition of being which cannot be taken from us, much like the heroic Ukrainian soldier guarding a desolate island who refused to surrender to a Russian warship with the words; “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” Such a man cannot be conquered, and his immortal words speak for his whole nation.
The secret of force, power, and authority is that these things are hollow and fragile, and fail when met with disobedience and the simple refusal to believe and to submit.
How do we find the will to do these things, to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival?
The truth is we need nothing beyond ourselves and our moment of decision to do such things; no great universal principles, not even the negative space of a heroic figure to inhabit and perform before the stage of the world. All we need is this; that others who rely on us will die if we do not.
This is what makes us human, and its something we must continue to affirm no matter what the cost.
There may be one more thing that can help us in such moments of decision; if we remember who we are, and not how others imagine us.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
History, memory, identity; we are a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation across vast gulfs of time, like the shell of a fantastic sea creature.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We have begun to remember who we are, we Americans, after the long spell of falsification cast by Traitor Trump and his Fourth Reich propagandists; we have now called for a ceasefire in Gaza, after half a year of secretly arming Israel’s Gaza War at the orders of Genocide Joe. Europe too is reawakening as NATO coheres its resistance to the imperial conquest of Ukraine and to the threat of a Russian conquest of Europe. As yet America has done nothing to bring regime change to either outlaw nation, nor silenced the bombs, nor liberated Ukraine or Palestine, nor opened the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid; but all of this remains possible, if we all help as we can.
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom.
Here too, in a moment which parallels that of Spain in 1936 and Poland in 1939, we must say Never Again!
As I defined the phrase in my post of March 6 2022, How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; “I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
As written in the article The Persistence of Genocide at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University: “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces.”
As written by Emily Burack in the Jerusalem Post; “After a gunman took the lives of 17 students and staff at their high school in Parkland, Florida, students there launched a national campaign to promote gun control. They called for a major protest in Washington, DC, on March 24, and are encouraging similar protests and student walkouts across the country.
And they took a name for their campaign, #NeverAgain, that has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration.
Parkland junior Cameron Kasky is credited with coining the hashtag. A Twitter account for the movement, NeverAgainMSD, is described as “For survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting, by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas Shooting.”
Some supporters of the students’ efforts are put off by their use of Never Again. Lily Herman, writing in Refinery29, said “it’s very uncomfortable to watch a term you’ve used to talk about your family and people’s own heritage and history be taken away overnight.”
Malka Goldberg, a digital communications specialist in Maryland, tweeted, “When I saw they’re using #NeverAgain for the campaign it bothered me, b/c many Jews strongly [associate] that phrase w/ the Holocaust specifically. For a second it felt like cultural appropriation, but I doubt the kids knew this or did it intentionally.”
Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, is unfazed by the students’ use of the phrase. While some may object to the phrase Never Again being reappropriated for gun control, it “does not mean that reaction is appropriate or reasonable,” she told JTA.
While some have traced the phrase to the Hebrew poet Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem “Masada” (“Never shall Masada fall again!”), its current use is more directly tied to the aftermath of the Holocaust. The first usage of Never Again is murky, but most likely began in postwar Israel. The phrase was used in secular kibbutzim there in the late 1940s; it was used in a Swedish documentary on the Holocaust in 1961.
But the phrase gained currency in English thanks in large part to Meir Kahane, the militant rabbi who popularized it in America when he created the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and used it as a title of a 1972 book-length manifesto. As the president of the American Jewish Committee, Sholom Comay, said after Kahane’s assassination in November 1990, “Despite our considerable differences, Meir Kahane must always be remembered for the slogan Never Again, which for so many became the battle cry of post-Holocaust Jewry.”
For Kahane, Never Again was an implicitly violent call to arms and a rebuke of passivity and inactivity. The shame surrounding the alleged passivity of the Jews in the face of their destruction became a cornerstone of the JDL. As Kahane said, “the motto Never Again does not mean that ‘it’ [a holocaust] will never happen again. That would be nonsense. It means that if it happens again, it won’t happen in the same way. Last time, the Jews behaved like sheep.”
Kahane used Never Again to justify acts of terror in the name of fighting antisemitism. In the anthem of the Jewish Defense League, members recited, “To our slaughtered brethren and lonely widows: Never again will our people’s blood be shed by water, Never again will such things be heard in Judea.”
Later, however, Kahane’s violent call for action was adapted by American Jewish establishment groups and Holocaust commemoration institutions as a call for peace, tolerance and heeding the warning signs of genocide.
These days, when the phrase is used to invoke the Holocaust, it can be either particular or universal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tends toward the particular when he uses it to speak about the need for a strong Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust.
“I promise, as head of the Jewish state, that never again will we allow the hand of evil to sever the life of our people and our state,” he said in a speech at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp marking International Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010.
But Netanyahu has also used the phrase in its universal sense of preventing all genocides. After visiting a memorial to the victims of the Rwanda genocide in 2010, Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, wrote in the guestbook, “We are deeply moved by the memorial to the victims of one history’s greatest crimes — and reminded of the haunting similarities to the genocide of our own people. Never again.”
Then-President Barack Obama also used the phrase in its universal sense in marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2011. “We are reminded to remain ever-vigilant against the possibility of genocide, and to ensure that Never Again is not just a phrase but a principled cause,” he said in a statement. “And we resolve to stand up against prejudice, stereotyping, and violence – including the scourge of anti-Semitism – around the globe.”
That’s similar to how the US Holocaust Memorial Museum uses the phrase. In choosing the name Never Again as the theme of its 2013 Days of Remembrance, its used the term as a call to study the genocide of the Jews in order to respond to the “warning signs” of genocides happening anywhere.
And Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author who came to be associated with the phrase, also used it in the universal sense. ”Never again’ becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow … never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence,” the Nobel laureate wrote in 2012.
Never Again is a phrase that keeps on evolving. It was used in protests against the Muslim ban and in support of refugees, in remembrance of Japanese internment during World War II and recalling the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And now the phrase is taking on yet another life: in the fight for gun control in America.
Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Indiana University who is presently a visiting scholar at the Center for Jewish History in New York, told JTA, “For [Kahane], Never Again was not ‘this will not happen again because we will have a country’ but ‘we Jews will never be complacent like we were during the war.’ That is, for Kahane, Never Again was a call to militancy as the only act of prevention. In Parkland it is a call for gun control. In a way, a call for anti-militancy.”
So the dialectical forces of history have unfolded Never Again! Like an origami Moebius Loop toward Infinity, from the defense of victims as our duty of care for others to general principles of action. I am uncomfortable with such abstractions; for they begin again a recapitulation of the cycle of centralization of authority and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which makes genocides possible. Gott Mitt Uns; it is an ancient evil.
As Voltaire has written; “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue. To protect and defend others from harm, our universal human rights, and democracy as a free society of equals, yes. Resistance and solidarity in the struggle against tyranny and fascism, always, and by any means necessary.
But we must never legitimize the use of social force because some of us are less human than others. No matter where you begin in authorizing identities, normalities, or the tyranny of imposed ideas of virtue, with elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And now I will ask the same questions as in the beginning of my dialog herein, but I will reverse the order of the questions.
So, how can we use Never Again! as a principle of direct action which preserves and empowers the wellbeing and autonomy of others, without such action becoming a point of moral fracture and unequal power?
How shall we defend the peoples of Palestine and Ukraine from the horrific war crimes of Israeli and Russian imperial conquest and genocide, without ourselves becoming an empire?
As written by David Rieff in The Persistence of Genocide; “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces. “I think it was really the Communists who were behind it, but I am not sure,” Hilberg said in one of the last interviews he gave before his death in the summer of 2007. Since then, “Never Again” has become kind of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah.
At Buchenwald, the handmade signs were long ago replaced by a stone monument onto which the words are embossed in metal letters. And as a usage, it has come to seem like a final word not just on the murder of the Jews of Europe, but on any great crime against humanity that could not be prevented. “Never Again” has appeared on monuments and memorials from Paine, Chile, the town with proportionately more victims of the Pinochet dictatorship than any other place in the country, to the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda. The report of conadep, the Argentine truth commission set up in 1984 after the fall of the Galtieri dictatorship, was titled “Nunca Mas” — “Never Again” in Spanish. And there is now at least one online Holocaust memorial called “Never Again.”
Since 1945, “never again” has meant, essentially, “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
There is nothing wrong with this. But there is also nothing all that right with it either. Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency with which the phrase is used — above all on days of remembrance most commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes against humanity — and the reality, which is that 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, “never again” has proved to be nothing more than a promise on which no state has ever been willing to deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, himself a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had always imagined that he would return some day and tell his father’s ghost that the world had learned from the Holocaust and that it had become a “sacred duty” for people everywhere to prevent it from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the world actually learned anything, “there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.”
Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration’s National Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It asserts confidently that “The United States is committed to working with our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to ensure that the United States and the international community are proactively engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide.” And yet again, we are treated to the promise, “never again.” “In the event that prevention fails,” the report states, “the United States will work both multilaterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and — in certain instances — military means to prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities.”
Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this “proactive engagement” and “diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian mobilization” has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for many years in a country where America’s security interests and humanitarian relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its culmination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles, and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. The stark fact is that “never again” has never been a political priority for either the United States or the so-called international community (itself a self-flattering idea with no more reality than a unicorn). Nor, despite all the bluff talk about moral imperatives backed by international resolve, is there any evidence that it is becoming one.
And yet, however at variance they are with both geopolitical and geoeconomic realities, the arguments exemplified by this document reflect the conventional wisdom of the great and the good in America across the “mainstream” (as one is obliged to say in this, the era of the tea parties) political spectrum. Even a fairly cursory online search will reveal that there are a vast number of papers, book-length studies, think tank reports, and United Nations documents proposing programs for preventing or at least halting genocides. For once, the metaphor “cottage industry” truly is appropriate. And what unites almost all of them is that they start from the premise that prevention is possible, if only the “international community” would live up to the commitments it made in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in subsequent international covenants, treaties, and un declarations. If, the argument goes, the world’s great powers, first and foremost of course the United States, in collaboration with the UN system and with global civil society, would act decisively and in a timely way, we could actually enforce the moral standards supposedly agreed upon in the aftermath of the Holocaust. If they do not, of course, then “never again” will never mean much more than it has meant since 1945 — which, essentially, is “Never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
The report of the United States Institute for Peace’s task force on genocide, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, is among the best of these efforts. As the report makes clear, the task force undertook its work all too painfully aware of the gulf between the international consensus on the moral imperative of stopping genocide and the ineffectiveness to date of the actual responses. Indeed, the authors begin by stating plainly that 60 years after the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention and twenty years after it was ratified by the U.S. Senate, “The world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue.” To find ways to match words and “stop allowing the unacceptable,” Albright and Cohen write with commendable candor, “is in fact one of most persistent puzzles of our times.”
Whether or not one agrees with the task force about what can or cannot be done to change this, there can be no question that sorrow over the world’s collective failure to act in East Pakistan, or Cambodia, or Rwanda is the only honorable response imaginable. But the befuddlement the authors of the report confess to feeling is another matter entirely. Like most thinking influenced by the human rights movement, the task force seems imbued with the famous Kantian mot d’ordre: “Ought implies can.” But to put the matter bluntly, there is no historical basis to believe anything of the sort, and a great deal of evidence to suggest a diametrically opposing conclusion. Of course, history is not a straitjacket, and the authors of the report, again echoing much thinking within the human rights movement, particularly Michael Ignatieff’s work in the 1990s, do make the argument that since 1945 there has been what Ignatieff calls “A revolution of global concern” and they call a “revolution in conscience.” In fairness, if in fact they are basing their optimism on this chiliastic idea, then one better understands the degree to which the members of the task force came to believe that genocide, far from being “A Problem From Hell,” as Samantha Power titled her influential book on the subject, in reality is a problem if not easily solved then at least susceptible to solution — though, again, only if all the international actors, by whom the authors mean the great powers, the un system, countries in a region where there is a risk of a genocide occurring, and what they rather uncritically call civil society, make it a priority.
Since it starts from this presupposition, it is hardly surprising that the report is upbeat about the prospects for finally reversing course. “Preventing genocide,” the authors insist, “is a goal that can be achieved with the right institutional structures, strategies, and partnerships — in short, with the right blueprint.” To accomplish this, the task force emphasizes the need for strengthening international cooperation both in terms of identifying places where there is a danger of a genocide being carried out and coordinated action to head it off or at least halt it. Four specific responses are recommended, one predominantly informational (early warning) and three operational (early prevention, preventive diplomacy, and, finally, military intervention when all else has failed). None of this is exactly new, and most of it is commonsensical from a conceptual standpoint. But one of the great strengths of the report, as befits the work of a task force chaired by two former cabinet secretaries, is this practical bent — that is to say, its emphasis on creating or strengthening institutional structures within the U.S. government and the un system and showing how such reforms will enable policymakers to respond effectively to genocide.
However, this same presupposition leads the authors of the report to write as if there were little need for them to elaborate the political and ideological bases for the “can do” approach they recommend. Francis Fukuyama’s controversial theory of the “End of History” goes unmentioned, but there is more than a little of Fukuyama in their assumptions about a “final” international consensus having been established with regard to the norms that have come into force protecting populations from genocide or mass atrocity crimes. It is true that there is a body of such norms: the Genocide Convention, the un’s so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted by the World Summit (with the strong support of the Bush administration) in 2005, and various international instruments limiting impunity, above all the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court. And, presumably, it is with these in mind that the report’s authors can assert so confidently that the focus in genocide prevention can now be on “implement[ing] and operationalizing the commitments [these instruments] contain.”
It is here that doubt will begin to assail more skeptical readers. Almost since its inception, the human rights movement has been a movement of lawyers. And for lawyers, the establishment of black-letter international law is indeed the “end of the story” from a normative point of view — an internationalized version of stare decisis, but extended to the nth degree. On this account such a norm, once firmly established (which, activists readily admit, may take time; they are not naifs), can within a fairly short period thereafter be understood as an ineradicable and unchallengeable part of the basic user’s manual for international relations. This is what has allowed the human rights movement (and, at least with regard to the question of genocide, the members of the task force in the main seem to have been of a similar cast of mind) to hew to what is essentially a positivist progress narrative. However, the human rights movement’s certitude on the matter derives less from its historical experience than it does from its ideological presuppositions. In this sense, human rights truly is a secular religion, as its critics but even some of its supporters have long claimed.
Of course, strategically (in both polemical and institutional terms) the genius of this approach is of a piece with liberalism generally, of which, in any case, “human rights-ism” is the offspring. Liberalism is the only modern ideology that will not admit it is an ideology. “We are just demanding that nations live up to the international covenants they have signed and the relevant national and international statutes,” the human rights activist replies indignantly when taxed with actually supporting, and, indeed, helping to midwife an ideological system. It may be tedious to have to point out in 2010 that law and morality are not the same thing, but, well, law and morality are not the same thing. The problem is that much of the task force report reads as if they were.
An end to genocide: It is an attractive prospect, not to mention a morally unimpeachable goal in which Kantian moral absolutism meets American can do-ism, where the post-ideological methodologies (which are anything but post-ideological, of course) of international lawyers meet the American elite’s faith, which goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson if not much earlier in the history of the republic, that we really can right any wrong if only we commit ourselves sufficiently to doing so. Unfortunately, far too much is assumed (or stipulated, as the lawyers say) by the report’s authors. More dismayingly still, far too many of the concrete examples either of what could have been done but wasn’t are presented so simplistically as to make the solutions offered appear hollow, since the challenge as described bears little or no resemblance to the complexities that actually exist.
The calls for an intervention in Darfur reached their height after the moral imperative for intervention had started to dissipate.
Darfur is a good example of this. The report mentions Darfur frequently, both in the context of a nuts and bolts consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of various states and institutions such as the UN and the African Union, which have intervened, however unsatisfactorily, over the course of the crisis, and as an example of how the mobilization of civil society can influence policy. “In today’s age of electronic media communication,” the report states, “Americans are increasingly confronted in their living rooms — and even on their cell phones — with information about and images of death and destruction virtually anywhere they occur. . . . The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool for organizing broad-based responses to genocide and mass atrocities, as we have seen in response to the crisis in Darfur.”
The problem is not so much that this statement is false but rather that it begs more questions than it answers, and, more tellingly still, that the report’s authors seem to have no idea of this. There is no question that the rise in 2005 and 2006 of a mass movement calling for an end to mass killing in Darfur (neither the United Nations nor the most important relief groups present on the ground in Darfur agree with the characterization of what took place there as a genocide) was an extraordinarily successful mobilization — perhaps the most successful since the anti-Apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the activism of a small group of college students who in June 2004 had attended a Darfur Emergency Summit organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and addressed by Elie Wiesel, and shortly afterwards founded an organization called Save Darfur, the movement rapidly expanded and, at its height, included the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, right-wing evangelicals, left-leaning campuses activists, mainline human rights activists, and American neoconservatives. But nowhere does the task force report examine whether the policy recommendations of this movement were wise, or, indeed, whether the effect that they had on the U.S. debate was positive or negative. Instead, the report proceeds as if any upsurge in grassroots interest and activism galvanized by catastrophes like Darfur is by definition a positive development.
In reality, the task force’s assumption that any mass movement that supports “more assertive government action in response to genocide and mass atrocities” is to be encouraged is a strangely content-less claim. Surely, before welcoming the rise of a Save Darfur (or its very influential European cousin, sos Darfour), it is important to think clearly not just about what they are against but what they are for. And here, the example of Save Darfur is as much a cautionary tale as an inspiring one. The report somewhat shortchanges historical analysis, with what little history that does make it in painted with a disturbingly broad brush. Obviously, the task force was well aware of this, which I presume is why its report insists, unwisely in my view, that it was far more important to focus on the present and the future more than on the past. But understanding the history is not marginal, it is central. Put the case that one believes in military intervention in extremis to halt genocide. In that case, intervening in late- 2003 and early-2004, when the killing was at its height, would have been the right thing to do. But Save Darfur really only came into its own in late 2005, that is, well after the bulk of the killing had ended. In other words, the calls for an intervention reached their height after the moral imperative for such an intervention had started to dissipate. An analogy can be made with the human rights justification for the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Kenneth Roth, the head of Human Rights Watch, has pointed out, had this happened during Baghdad’s murderous Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, there would have been a solid justification for military intervention, whether or not Human Rights Watch would have agreed with it. But to intervene fifteen years later because of the massacre was indefensible on human rights grounds (though, obviously, there were other rationales for the war that would not have been affected by such reasoning).
If you want to be a prophet, you have to get it right. And if Save Darfur was wrong in its analysis of the facts relevant to their call for an international military intervention to stop genocide, either because there had in reality been no genocide (as, again, the un and many mainstream ngos on the ground insisted) or because the genocide had ended before they began to campaign for intervention, then Save Darfur’s activism can just as reasonably be described in negative terms as in the positive ones of the task force report. Yes, Save Darfur had (and has) good intentions and the attacks on them from de facto apologists for the government of Sudan like Mahmood Mamdani are not worth taking seriously. But good intentions should never be enough.
In fairness, had the task force decided to provide the history of the Darfur, or Bosnia, or Rwanda, in all their frustrating complexity, they would have produced a report that, precisely because of all the nuance, the ambiguity, the need for “qualifiers,” doubtless would have been of less use to policymakers, whose professional orientation is of necessity toward actionable policies. But when what is being suggested is a readiness for U.S. soldiers (to be sure, preferably in a multilateral context) in extreme cases to kill and die to prevent genocide or mass atrocity crimes, then, to turn human rights Kantianism against them for a change, it is nuance that is the moral imperative. Again, good intentions alone will not do. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la bete, Pascal said. Who wishes to act the angel, acts the beast.
History, in all its unsentimentality, is almost always the best antidote to such simplicities. And yet, if anything, the task force’s report is a textbook case of ahistorical thinking and its perils. The authors emphasize that, “This task force is not a historical commission; its focus is on the future and on prevention.” The problem is that unless the past is looked at in detail, not just conjured up by way of illustrations of the West’s failures to intervene that the task force hopes to remedy, then what is being argued for, in effect, are, if necessary, endless wars of altruism. To put it charitably, in arguing for that, I do not think the authors have exactly established their claim to occupying the moral high ground. If they had spent half the time thinking about history in as serious a way as they did about how to construct the optimal bureaucratic architecture within the U.S. government, then what the task force finally produced would have been a document that was pathbreaking. Instead, they took the conventional route, and, in my view, will simply add their well-reasoned policy recommendations to the large number that came before and, indeed, as in the case of the recent initiative of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies on the so-called Will to Intervene, have already begun to come after.
With the best will in the world, what is one to make of arguments made at the level of generalization of the following?
Grievances over inequitable distribution of power and resources appear to be a fundamental motivating factor in the commission of mass violence against ethnic, sectarian, or political groups. That same inequality may also provide the means for atrocities to be committed. For example, control of a highly centralized state apparatus and the access to economic and military power that comes with it makes competition for power an all-or-nothing proposition and creates incentives to eliminate competitors. This dynamic was evident in Rwanda and Burundi and is serious cause for concern in Burma today.
The fact is that, vile as they are, there is actually very little likelihood of the butchers in Rangoon committing genocide — their crimes have other characteristics. It is disheartening that the members of the task force would allow the fact that they, like most sensible people, believe that Burma is one of the worst dictatorships in the world, to justify their distorting reality in this way, when they almost certainly know better. And since they do precisely that, it is hard not to at least entertain the suspicion — whose implications extend rather further than that and beg the question of what kind of world order follows from the task force’s recommendations — that consciously or (and this is worse, in a way) unconsciously they reasoned that if they could identify the Rangoon regime as genocidal, this would make an international intervention to overthrow it far more defensible. If this is right, then, if implemented, the report (again, intentionally or inadvertently) would have the effect of helping nudge us back toward a world where the prevention of genocide becomes a moral warrant for other policy agendas (as was surely the case with Saddam Hussein in 2003, and was the case with General Bashir in Khartoum until the arrival of the Obama administration).
I write this in large measure because the task force’s description of why mass violence and genocide occur could be a description of practically the entire developing world. Analysis at that level of generalization is not just useless, it is actually a prophylactic against thought.
It gets worse. The authors write:
“It is equally important to focus on the motivations of specific leaders and the tools at their disposal. There is no genocidal destiny. Many countries with ethnic or religious discrimination, armed conflicts, autocratic governments, or crushing poverty have not experienced genocide while others have. The difference comes down to leadership. Mass atrocities are organized by powerful elites who believe they stand to gain from these crimes and who have the necessary resources at their disposal. The heinous crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, and Rwanda, for example, were all perpetrated with significant planning, organization, and access to state resources, including weapons, budgets, detention facilities, and broadcast media.
There are also key triggers that can tip a high-risk environment into crisis. These include unstable, unfair, or unduly postponed elections; high-profile assassinations; battlefield victories; and environmental conditions (for example, drought) that may cause an eruption of violence or heighten the perception of an existential threat to a government or armed group. Sometimes potential triggers are known well in advance and preparations can be made to address the risk of mass atrocities that may follow. Poorly planned elections in deeply divided societies are a commonly cited example, but deadlines for significant policy action, legal judgments, and anniversaries of highly traumatic and disputed historical events are also potential triggers that can be foreseen.”
I tax the reader’s patience with such a long quotation to show how expertise can produce meaninglessness. For apart from the mention of poorly planned elections — a reference to Rwanda that is perfectly correct as far as it goes — the rest of this does not advance our understanding one iota. To remedy or at least alleviate these vast social stresses, the task force recommends “effective [sic] early prevention”! The authors themselves were obliged to admit that, “Such efforts to change underlying social, economic, or political conditions are difficult and require sustained investment of resources and attention.” Really, you think? But about where these resources, as opposed to institutional arrangements, are to come from, they are largely silent, apart from emphasizing the need to target with both threats and positive inducements leaders thought likely to choose to commit such crimes. But the authors know perfectly well that, as they themselves put it, “early engagement is a speculative venture,” and that “the watch list of countries ‘at risk’ can be long, due to the difficulty of anticipating specific crises in a world generally plagued by instability.” Surely, people like Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen know better than anyone that such ventures are never going to be of much interest to senior policymakers, just as the global Marshall Plan that would be required to effectively address the underlying causes of genocidal wars is never going to be on offer.
To a great power, and to the citizens of great power, powerlessness is simply an unconscionable destiny. The task force report, with its strange imperviousness to viewing historical tragedy as much more than an engineering problem, is a perfect illustration of this. Unsound historically, and hubristic morally, for all its good intentions, the task force report is not a blueprint for a better future but a mystification of the choices that actually confront us and between which we are going to have to choose if we are ever to prevent or halt even some genocides. My suspicion is that the reason that the very accomplished, distinguished people who participated in the task force did not feel obliged to face up to this is because the report gives as much weight to the national interest basis for preventing or halting genocide as it does to the moral imperative of doing so. As the report puts it:
“ First, genocide fuels instability, usually in weak, undemocratic, and corrupt states. It is in these same types of states that we find terrorist recruitment and training, human trafficking, and civil strife, all of which have damaging spillover effects for the entire world.
Second, genocide and mass atrocities have long-lasting consequences far beyond the states in which they occur. Refugee flows start in bordering countries but often spread. Humanitarian needs grow, often exceeding the capacities and resources of a generous world. The international community, including the United States, is called on to absorb and assist displaced people, provide relief efforts, and bear high economic costs. And the longer we wait to act, the more exorbitant the price tag. For example, in Bosnia, the United States has invested nearly $ 15 billion to support peacekeeping forces in the years since we belatedly intervened to stop mass atrocities.
Third, America’s standing in the world — and our ability to lead — is eroded when we are perceived as bystanders to genocide. We cannot be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if we cannot take steps to avoid one of the greatest scourges of humankind. No matter how one calculates U.S. interests, the reality of our world today is that national borders provide little sanctuary from international problems. Left unchecked, genocide will undermine American security.
A core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others — in the U.S. government, across the United States, and around the world — that preventing genocide is more than just a humanitarian aspiration; it is a national and global imperative.”
Again, apologies for quoting at such length. but truthfully, is one meant to take this seriously? There is absolutely no evidence that terrorist recruiting is more promising in failed states than, say, in suburban Connecticut where the (very middle-class) Faisal Shahzad, son of a retired Pakistani Air Force vice-marshal, plotted to explode a car bomb in Times Square. Nor, in the U.S. case is there any basis for concluding that the main source of immigration is from places traumatized by war. To the contrary, most of our immigrants are the best and the brightest (in the sense not of the most educated but most enterprising) of Mexico, the Philippines, India, and China. The proportion of migrants from Sudan or Somalia is small by comparison. As for the costs of peacekeeping, are the authors of the report serious? Fifteen billion dollars? The sum barely signifies in the rubric of the military budget of the United States. And lastly, the report’s claim that the U.S. won’t be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if it doesn’t take the lead to stop genocide is absurd on its face. Not respected by whom, exactly? Hu Jintao in Beijing? Merkel in Berlin? President Felipe Calderon in Mexico City? To put it charitably, the claim conjures up visions of Pinocchio, rather than Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.
The report calls for courage, but courage begins at home. Pressed by Armenian activists at one of the events held to launch the report as to why they had both earlier signed a letter urging the U.S. not to bow to Armenian pressure and formally recognize the Armenian genocide, Secretary Cohen and Secretary Albright refused over and over again to characterize the Armenian genocide as, well, a genocide. It is true that the Armenian activists had come looking for a confrontation. But there can be little question that both secretaries did everything they could to avoid committing themselves one way or the other. “Terrible things happened to the Armenians,” Secretary Albright said, refusing to go any further. The letter, she explained, had been primarily about “whether this was an appropriate time to raise the issue.” For his part, Secretary Cohen, emphasized that angering the Turks while the Iraq war was raging could lead to Turkish reactions that would “put our sons and daughters in jeopardy.” And, in any case, the task force was not “a historical commission.”
This is a perfectly defensible position from the perspective of prudential realpolitik. The problem is that what the task force report constantly calls for is political courage. And whatever else they were, Secretaries Albright and Cohen’s responses were expedient, not courageous. There will always be reasons not to intervene — compelling pressures, I mean, not trivial ones. Why should a future U.S. government be less vulnerable to them than the Bush or Obama administrations? About this, as about so many other subjects, the task force report is as evasive as Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen were at the press conference at which the Armenian activists confronted them. Doubtless, they had to be. For the solutions they propose are not real solutions, the history they touch on is not the actual history, and the world they describe is not the real world.”
Schindler’s List: What The Girl In The Red Coat Represents, Explained
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Ben Kiernan
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Never-Again-From-a-Holocaust-phrase-to-a-universal-phrase-544666
https://www.hoover.org/research/persistence-genocide
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface),
Never Again! A Program for Survival, by Meir Kahane
Hostage, by Elie Wiesel
The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
The Trial of Socrates, by I.F. Stone
Invictus, by William Ernest Henley
The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński
The Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt
Robert De Niro as Harry Tuttle in Brazil
Hebrew
23 במרץ 2024 בפורים: למה אנחנו מתכוונים כשאנחנו משתמשים בביטוי; “לעולם לא שוב!”
בחג פורים זה שמתחיל היום בשקיעה ומסתיים עם סתיו הלילה מחר, חוגגים עמי העולם את ישועתם מרצח העם בפרס המאה ה-5 כפי שכתוב במגילת אסתר, וכל האנושות עשויה לחגוג את הניצחון. של אהבה על שנאה, סולידריות על פילוג והתנגדות על עריצות שהיא מנציחה.
כאשר אנו מתמודדים בחדשות עם תמונות של אלימות נוראה ופשעים נגד האנושות בשתי מלחמות המאתגרות את סדר העולם שלנו; הפלישה הישראלית לעזה שהפכה את אמריקה לשותפה ברצח עם ומעמידה בספק את רעיון זכויות האדם, והפלישה הרוסית לאוקראינה, מלחמת הרס מוחלט שלא דומה לשום דבר שאירופה ראתה מאז מלחמת העולם השנייה, המהדהדת את הזוועות והשימושים שלה. נשק תרמברי כמשרפות ניידות נגד אזרחים, אני חושב על הדברים האלה היום במונחים של המורשת ההיסטורית של התנגדות לעריצות, עבדות, מלחמות כיבוש ושליטה אימפריאלית ורצח עם.
איך נגן על עמי פלסטין ואוקראינה מפני פשעי המלחמה הנוראיים של הפשיזם התיאוקרטי של נתניהו של הדם, האמונה והאדמה והכיבוש האימפריאלי המטורף של פוטין, מבלי שעצמנו נהיה אימפריה?
פיתוי הכוח מתחיל בפחד, במיוחד פחד מוחץ ומוכלל הנתון בצורות של אחר על ידי סמכות בשירות לכוח; למצוא ביטחון ובטחון בהפיכתו לבורר המידות. גם לזה עלינו להתנגד.
יתרה מכך, אסטרטגיות כאלה של כוח ושליטה חייבות תמיד להיכשל ולהתקלקל, שכן ביטחון הוא אשליה, והשימוש בכוח חברתי יוצר התנגדות משלו.
לעולם לא שוב! הוא ביטוי שהשתמשתי בו לעתים קרובות כתשובה לעריצות ולפשיזם, הן בכתיבתי והן לחבריי באופן אישי, כקריאה להתנגדות מוחלטת ללא גבולות, ובזה אני מבקש לחקור את משמעותו והשלכותיו.
איך נוכל להשתמש ב- Never Again! כעיקרון של פעולה ישירה המשמר ומעצים את הרווחה והאוטונומיה של אחרים, מבלי שפעולה כזו תהפוך לנקודת שבר מוסרית, חתרנות לאידיאלים וכישלון מפל של כוח לא שוויוני?
עבורי, ההיסטוריה של השימוש בו קשורה לקטגוריה של הרגעים המגדירים שלי, שאני קורא להם עמודים אחרונים, שאת סיפוריהם סיפרתי פעמים רבות. אלה כוללים רק רגעים שבהם בחרתי בסולידריות ובסירוב להיכנע על פני הישרדות אישית; מסרב לזוז הצידה מהילד שמאחורי כשציידי הראשים של המשטרה קיבלו פקודה להיכנע בברזיל 1974, כאשר חיילים הציתו את הבית בו ז’אן ז’נה ואני היינו, מוקפים ולא חמושים, בביירות 1982 כשהשביע אותי בשבועה. של ההתנגדות, תקווה עזובה בקרב Cuito Cuanavale באנגולה 1988 לשחרור מהאפרטהייד, ועוד אינספור אחרים מעבר לחשבון שלי.
עמדות אחרונות הן בחירות של סירוב לוותר על האנושות שלנו וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, חובת הזהירות והניהול שלנו זה בזה, ללא קשר להשלכות כקווים שאנו לא יכולים לחצות מבלי להפוך למשהו פחות אנושי.
במלחמת עזה המתמשכת ורצח העם של הפלסטינים, זהו גם סירוב לנטוש את מטרת “חופש האמונה לכל המין האנושי” כאגדה על האנדרטה של ניצחונו של גוסטבוס אדולפוס משבדיה ב-1631 בקרב ברייטנפלד, שהבטיחה זאת. הימין מצהיר, העיקרון של מדינה לא עדתית שעליה מושתתת אמריקה ושל הזכות הטבועה לעצמאות והגדרה עצמית ריבונית של כל העמים, וסולידריות עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ נגד כוח ושליטה, מדינה טרור ועריצות, מלחמה וכיבוש אימפריאלי.
בין המודלים האישיים שלי לחיקוי באנטי-פשיזם ובמהפכה היא דמותו הבדיונית של הארי טאטל בגילומו של רוברט דה נירו בסרט ברזיל, שהשורה שלו “כולנו בזה ביחד”, מהדהדת לאורך ארבעים שנים מהחיים וההרפתקאות שלי.
תן לי לשים את זה בהקשר; ברזיל הייתה חווית הסולו הראשונה שלי בנסיעות חוץ, טסתי לסאו פאולו כשהייתי בן ארבע עשרה, בקיץ 1974, כדי להתאמן עם כמה סייפים אחרים לקראת המשחקים הפאן אמריקאים שתוכננו להתקיים שם, אם כי מאוחר יותר הועבר המקום ל מקסיקו. הייתה לי קצת פורטוגזית שיחה חדשה שלמדתי, הזמנה להתארח בביתו של ילד בגילי שהכרתי ממעגל טורנירי הסייף שאיתו יכולתי לגלות את השובבות המקומית, וחזיונות של מסיבות חוף.
אז נכנסתי לעולם של נימוסים חצרניים ומשרתים עם כפפות לבנות, מארחים אדיבים ומבריקים שהיו מאורות מקומיים וזרקו כדור פורמלי מפואר כדי להציג אותי, וחבר שאיתו חלקתי תשוקה מטורפת לספורט לחימה ולספורט סוסים. , אבל גם עולם של חומות גבוהות ושומרים חמושים.
המבט הראשון שלי מעבר לאשליה זו הגיע עם קולות של ירי רובה מהשומרים; כשהסתכלתי מהמרפסת שלי לראות מי תוקף את החזית
בשער גיליתי שהשומרים יורים לתוך קהל של קבצנים, בעיקר ילדים, שהסתערו על משאית שהובילה את אספקת המזון השבועית. באותו יום עשיתי את הטיול הסודי הראשון שלי מעבר לחומות, שממנו מעולם לא חזרתי באמת.
אילו אמיתות מסתתרות בחומות הארמונות שלנו, שמעבר להן אסור להביט? קל להאמין לשקרי הסמכות כשאדם חבר באליטה שבאינטרס שלה הם טוענים שהוא מחזיקים בכוח, ולא להטיל ספק במניעים ובעמדת הפריבילגיה של עצמו. קל להחריד להאמין בשקרים כאשר אנו הנהנים מהיררכיות של אחרות מוציאה מהכלל, מפערי עושר וכוח ואי-שוויון המיוצרים באופן מערכתי ומיוצרים נשק בשירות לשלטון, ומפריבילגיות לבנים ופטריארכליים, רצח עם, עבדות, כיבוש ואימפריאליזם.
תמיד שימו לב לאיש שמאחורי הווילון. כי אין סמכות צודקת, וכפי שדורותי אומרת בקוסם מארץ עוץ, הוא “רק זקן זקן”, והשקרים והאשליות שלו, הכוח והשליטה שלו, אינם משרתים אינטרסים מלבד שלו.
בהיותי נער אמריקאי נאיבי, הרגשתי שחובתי לדווח על התקרית; אבל בתחנת המשטרה התקשיתי להפוך את עצמי למובן, לא בגלל שפה אלא בגלל מערכות דיכוי מרומזות. הם חשבו שאני שם כדי להמר על המשמר שלי בתחרות חודשית מתמשכת שעבורה השוטר הכניס הכי הרבה ילדי רחוב; היה לוח גיר על קיר התחנה בשביל זה, וצנצנת עם אוזניים מתויגות כדי להוכיח את הספירה. כך בחרו האליטות של ברזיל לפתור את בעיית ילדי הרחוב הנטושים, עשרה אחוזים מהאוכלוסייה הלאומית. משחק הימורים נוסף שנקרא “הגדול”, היה בו השוטר בעט בבטן של הנערות ההריוניות ביותר ודורג בין עשרת גורמי המוות המובילים בברזיל עבור נערות מתבגרות, המתגוררות תמיד באזורי שכונות עוני המכילים את העניים והשחורים ביותר. אזרחים; זאת בעיר שהוקמה על ידי עבדים אפריקאים שנמלטו כרפובליקה חופשית.
למדתי הרבה בשבועות שלאחר מכן; מעל הכל למדתי מי אחראי לאי השוויון הללו; אנחנו כן, אם לא נאתגר את העריצות ומערכות לא צודקות ומתריסות אותן.
במהלך לילות הרפתקאותיי מעבר לחומות ופעולות כדי לעזור ללהקות הילדים הקבצנים ולחסום את ציד הראשים של המשטרה חוויתי חוויה טראומטית של כמעט מוות, בדומה להוצאות להורג המדומה של מוריס בלאנשו על ידי הנאצים ב-1944 כפי שנכתב ב” מיידי מותי ופיודור דוסטויבסקי על ידי המשטרה החשאית של הצאר ב-1849 כפי שנכתב ב”אידיוט”; נמלט מרדף דרך מערך מנהרות עם ילד פצוע בין היתר ונלכד בשטח הפתוח על ידי שני רובאי משטרה שתפסו עמדות אגפים וכיוונו אלינו בעוד המנהיג קרא להיכנע מעבר לעיקול של מנהרה. עמדתי מול נער עם רגל מעוותת שלא יכול היה לרוץ בזמן שהאחרים התפזרו ונמלטו או מצאו מקומות מסתור, וסירבתי לעמוד מהצד כשהצטוו לעשות זאת. זה היה רפלקסיבי והחלטה של אינסטינקט מתחת לרמה של מחשבה או רצון מודע, שבו האמיתות של עצמנו שנכתבו על בשרנו מזויפות ומתגלות. ביקשתי לתת למישהו למות כדי להציל את עצמי, פשוט אמרתי שלא. כשחזרה אלי המחשבה מרגע זה של בהלה או התעלות של עצמי, שאלתי כמה לתת לנו להתרחק, ואז הוא הורה לאנשיו לירות. אבל הייתה רק ירייה אחת במקום הפגנה של אש צולבת, והחטאה רחבה; היה לו זמן לשאול “מה?” לפני נפילה ארצה.
ואז גילו את עצמם המצילים שלנו, לאחר שהתגנבו למשטרה מאחור; המטאדורים, שאפשר לתאר אותם כאנשי משמר, כנופיית פושע, קבוצה מהפכנית, או שלושתם, שהוקמה על ידי הכונן והפושע הידוע לשמצה של ברזיל פדרו רודריגס פילו, הידוע לשמצה בכך שנקם את הרצח הפראי של אמו על ידי הריגת אביו ואכילת ליבו, אשר נעצר בשנה הקודמת לאחר סדרה מרהיבה של מאה רציחות נקמה או יותר של הפושעים המטומטמים והמפלצתיים ביותר, גברים חזקים מעבר להישג ידם של החוק או שהיו החוק ושעשו זוועות בנשים וילדים. לתוך האחווה האימתנית הזו התקבלתי, עם המילים; “אתה אחד מאיתנו, בואי איתנו” וברחובות סאו פאולו באותו קיץ לא עמדתי שוב לבד.
“אנחנו לא יכולים להציל את כולם, אבל אנחנו יכולים לנקום”; אז הם תיארו לי את עצמם, וההגדרה הזו של סולידריות כפרקסיס או פעולת ערכים נשארת איתי ומצללת את השימוש שלי בזעקת הקרב לעולם לא שוב! כפי שכתב שייקספיר ב”סוחר מוונציה”, מערכה שלישית, סצנה א’; “אם אתה טועה בנו, האם לא ננקום?”
מהרגע שראיתי את השומרים של משפחת האצולה שאיתם התארחתי יורים על קהל הילדים חסרי הבית והקבצנים רוחשים את משאית אספקת המזון בשער האחוזה, עירומים ושלדיים ברעב, מצולקים ונכים ומשובשים במחלות לא ידועות. לכל אדם שעבורם שירותי בריאות ותזונה בסיסית א
מחדש תנאים מוקדמים חופשיים ומובטחים של הזכות האוניברסלית לחיים, נואשים לקומץ מזון שיכול להיות עוד יום אחד של הישרדות; באותו רגע בחרתי בצד שלי, ועמי הם חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והנמחקים; כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון כינה עלובי כדור הארץ.
השני הוא היום שבו ז’אן ז’נה הוביל אותי למסלול חיי עם שבועת ההתנגדות בביירות בקיץ 1982.
חיילים ישראלים הציתו את הבתים ברחוב שלי וקראו לאנשים לצאת ולהיכנע. הם כיסו את עיניהם של הילדים של אלה שעשו זאת והשתמשו בהם כמגן אנושי.
לא היה לנו נשק אחר מלבד בקבוק השמפניה הריק שסיימנו זה עתה עם ארוחת הבוקר שלנו של קרפ תותים; שאלתי “יש רעיונות?”, והוא משך בכתפיו ואמר “לתקן כידונים?”
ואז הוא נתן לי עקרון פעולה שלפיו אני חי כבר ארבעים ושתיים שנה; “כשאין תקווה, אדם חופשי לעשות דברים בלתי אפשריים, דברים מפוארים.”
הוא שאל אותי אם אני מתכוון להיכנע, ואמרתי שלא; הוא חייך וענה, “גם אני לא.” וכך הוא השביע אותי לשבועה שהגה ב-1940 בפריז בתחילת הכיבוש עבור חברים שהוא יכול לאסוף, מנוסח מחדש מהשבועה שנשא כלגיונר ב-1918. הוא אמר שזה הדבר הטוב ביותר שהוא אי פעם. צָעִיף; “אנו נשבעים את נאמנותנו זה לזה, להתנגד ולא להיכנע, ולא לנטוש את חברינו.”
אז הפכתי להיות נושאת מסורת בת למעלה משמונים שנה וחיצפתי בסכסוך המפחיד והנורא ביותר שידע העולם, זמן קצר לפני שציפיתי להישרף בחיים בדוכן האחרון מבין רבים.
זה היה רגע הזיוף שלי, ההחלטה הזו לבחור במוות על פני כפיפות, ומאז שנפגעתי ממנו אני פעמון, מצלצל. וכמו פעמון החירות, אני פתוח לסבלם של אחרים ולפגמי האנושות שלנו. זו הייתה המתנה הגדולה ביותר שניתנה לי אי פעם, האמפתיה הזו שנושאת מפצע קדוש, ולעולם לא אפסיק את הקריאה לחירות, ולא אהסס לענות כפי שאני יכול לקריאה לסולידריות עם אחרים.
מבין קרב Cuito Cuanavale, הקרב הגדול ביותר שנלחם אי פעם באפריקה, עצום אפילו יותר מאל עלמיין; זה היה המקום שבו נשברה שיטת האפרטהייד. במערכה ענקית שכללה למעלה מ-300,000 חיילים מתנדבים קובנים בין דצמבר 1987 למרץ 1988, בתיאום עם כוחות אנגולה וילידים אחרים, מתנדבים בינלאומיים, ועם סיוע ויועצים סובייטים, הביסו את דרום אפריקה הגדולה והעדיפה בהרבה מבחינה טכנולוגית ואת UNITA והאמריקאית שלהם. בעלי ברית ושכירי חרב בקרב Cuito Cuanavale, בסיס צבאי אנגולי שדרום אפריקה לא הצליחה לכבוש בחמישה גלי תקיפות.
בעוד המחזה של הקרב האחרון הגדול הזה במאבק שחרור ארוך של עשרות שנים התגלגל, עשיתי שובבות מאחורי קווי האויב בשיח. כאן גיליתי יחידה אבודה, בעיקר זולו, שהוקפתה על ידי כוחות האפרטהייד. לאחר דיווח על מה שידעתי על האזור לקבוצת הפיקוד וכנס קצר במספר שפות, קם בחור זקן שעד כה שתק מצללי האוהל, שצורתו ללא חולצתו הראתה צלקת אימתנית ומרהיבה מציפורני אריה. , ואמר; “אנחנו מוקפים וחסרי מספרם בלי תחמושת וגרוע מכך, בלי מים, ואף אחד לא בא לעזור לנו. אנחנו חייבים לתקוף”.
הסמל חייך על כך כאילו ניתנה לו מתנה נפלאה, פסע החוצה ונתן את הפקודה שאם יתמזל מזלך לעולם לא תשמע; “תקן כידונים!”
והגברים שעומדים למות התפרצו בשירה. “אוסוטו! Umkhonto wami womile!” הראשון הוא קריאת קרב זולו אוניברסלית, המבקשת מרוחות אבותיו להתעורר ולהעיד על מעשי הגבורה המפוארים שעומדים לבצע. “החנית שלי צמאה”, זה האחרון.
וניצחנו, למרות שהמחיר היה נורא. אין עלויות כאלה גדולות מכדי לשאת בהשוואה לעלויות הכניעה לעבדות, סחורה, זיוף ודה-הומניזציה; כי בסירוב להיכנע אנו הופכים לבלתי נכבשים וחופשיים, ואי אפשר לקחת מאיתנו את הכוח הזה של בעלות עצמית כניצחון במאבק על האנושיות שלנו. כפי שכתב מקס סטירנר; “לא ניתן להעניק חופש; יש לתפוס אותו.”
מזמן איבדתי את ספירת היציעים האחרונים; אלה הפכו לאמיתות הכתובות על בשרי, ואני נושא סימנים כאלה ללא מספר. ללא ספק יהיו אלה שעומדים כעת לצד פלסטין, אוקראינה או כל עם שנמצא בסכנת השמדה.
בכל זה מה שחשוב הוא שבסירוב להיכנע לסמכות ולכפות אנו הופכים לבלתי נכבשים וחופשיים; זהו ניצחון כתנאי הוויה שאי אפשר לקחת מאיתנו, בדומה לחייל האוקראיני הגיבור השומר על אי שומם שסירב להיכנע לספינת מלחמה רוסית במילים; “ספינת מלחמה רוסית, לך תזדיין.” אדם כזה אי אפשר לכבוש, ודבריו האלמותיים מדברים בעד כל האומה שלו.
ט
סוד הכוח, הכוח והסמכות הוא שהדברים האלה חלולים ושבירים, ונכשלים כשהם נתקלים בחוסר ציות ובסירוב פשוט להאמין ולהיכנע.
איך אנחנו מוצאים את הרצון לעשות את הדברים האלה, לצאת מהחורבות ולעשות עוד עמדה אחרונה, מעבר לתקווה לניצחון או אפילו הישרדות?
האמת היא שאנחנו לא צריכים שום דבר מעבר לעצמנו ולרגע ההחלטה שלנו לעשות דברים כאלה; אין עקרונות אוניברסליים גדולים, אפילו לא המרחב השלילי של דמות גיבורה לאכלס ולהופיע לפני בימת העולם. כל מה שאנחנו צריכים זה זה; שאחרים שסומכים עלינו ימותו אם לא.
זה מה שהופך אותנו לאנושיים, וזה משהו שאנחנו חייבים להמשיך לאשר לא משנה מה המחיר.
יכול להיות שיש עוד דבר אחד שיכול לעזור לנו ברגעים כאלה של החלטה; אם נזכור מי אנחנו, ולא איך אחרים מדמיינים אותנו.
האם אנחנו לא הסיפורים שאנו מספרים על עצמנו, לעצמנו ולאחרים?
היסטוריה, זיכרון, זהות; אנחנו פרוכרוניזם, היסטוריה המתבטאת בצורתנו של האופן שבו פתרנו בעיות של הסתגלות על פני מפרצי זמן עצומים, כמו קונכייה של יצור ימי פנטסטי.
תמיד נשאר המאבק בין המסכות שאחרים עושים לנו, לבין אלה שאנחנו עושים לעצמנו. זו המהפכה הראשונה שבה כולנו חייבים להילחם; המאבק לבעלות על עצמנו.
התחלנו להיזכר מי אנחנו, אנחנו האמריקאים, אחרי התקף הארוך של הזיוף שהטילו הבוגד טראמפ ותעמולי הרייך הרביעי שלו; קראנו כעת להפסקת אש בעזה, לאחר חצי שנה של חימוש חשאי במלחמת עזה של ישראל בהוראת רצח העם ג’ו. גם אירופה מתעוררת מחדש כאשר נאט”ו מאחד את התנגדותה לכיבוש האימפריאלי של אוקראינה ולאיום של כיבוש אירופה הרוסי. עד כה אמריקה לא עשתה דבר כדי להביא שינוי משטר לאומה מחוץ לחוק, לא השתיקה את הפצצות, לא שחררה את אוקראינה או פלסטין, ולא פתחה את המצור הישראלי של סיוע הומניטרי; אבל כל זה נשאר אפשרי, אם כולנו נעזור ככל שנוכל.
ברגעים של ספק כמו זה קראתי שוב את המיתוס של סיזיפוס של קאמי, את הזקן והים של המינגווי, את Invictus של הנלי, I.F. משפט סוקרטס של סטון; מיתוסים, סיפורים, שירה והיסטוריה של הוד של ההתנגדות המקנה חופש. גם כאן, ברגע המקביל לזה של ספרד ב-1936 ופולין ב-1939, עלינו לומר לעולם לא ש
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