Terrible and strange is our undiscovered country; both of myriad possible futures and of our imaginal nations, and all a ground of struggle and a Wilderness of Mirrors, lies, illusions, falsification and rewritten histories, silence and erasure, alternate realities and Rashomon Gate Events.
All of our creations of human being, meaning, and value, and we along with them, ephemeral and in constant processes of change. And under existential threats by systems of oppression and unequal power, which include fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness.
To make an idea about kinds of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with ideas of authorized national identity, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of January 21 2024, In Germany And Throughout Europe, the Return of Fascism Creates Its Own Resistance As Polarization Begins the Fracture of the State; An ancient terror emerges from the shadows to consume us all once again, as Nazi revivalists in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and elsewhere join their American counterparts in a vast and ambiguous multifront war against democracy, human rights, and western civilization.
But the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, as we have witnessed this past week in the mass actions against the Alternative für Deutschland fascist party in Germany, and a hero has risen to defend our humanity, the magnificent Carola Rackete.
This we celebrate, but must also give caution of the dangers of ideological fracture and the polarization of the state which makes a wishbone of nations by their most extreme elements. We can study its effects and consequences in real time as they unfold before us in America, and in elections globally.
It is also recapitulating the ideological fracture and division of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which removed the only blocking force for the rise of fascism; this process also destroyed the Students For A Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and other organizations of liberation struggle in America, under constant assault from the F.B.I. and other institutions of state terror and counter-revolution which used assassinations and infiltration and subversion to remove leadership and set group members against each other with false rumors of disloyalty.
Such counter-revolution waged against the liberty of the people as theft of citizenship is a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, and there is but one reply to this strategy of marginalization, division, silencing and erasure, dehumanization and the repression of dissent; solidarity.
Let us stand with those who stand with us, and with those who share our interests in allyship. Come what may.
Because we are now waging the Last Stand Against Fascism, among all humankind and throughout the world, and the price of our failure is too terrible to contemplate.
Let us give to fascism and tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2022, A Rising Tide of Fascism in Europe; With the electoral victory of the alt-right in Italy, a rising tide of fascism now threatens all of Europe; Nazi revivalism has a staging ground and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe in Orban’s Hungary, LePen’s Nationalists in France and Vox in Spain are the unquestionable opposition to their governments, Sweden just elected a similar party of Nazi origins, and the new government of England has at best turned back the clock to the ideology and policies of the Thatcher era and at worst displays alarming cues of fascist dog-whistles which portend far worse horrors and depravities to come.
Such are the times we live in, wherein an enemy we have fought for a century returns to seize its birthplace at the centennial of Mussolini’s March on Rome, as European political and social systems and institutions destabilize and begin transformational change from both the mechanical failures of their internal contradictions as terminal stage capitalism consumes the worlds resources and centralizes wealth and power to hegemonic elites, oligarchs which have become a quasi-aristocracy, and the carceral states of force and control which they create. Civilization itself is falling, but will such change be catastrophic or a rebirth of humankind as a free society of equals wherein democracy and our universal human rights are victorious; comes now an age of tyranny or Liberty?
Where do we go from here?
As I wrote in my post of September 23 2021, When Things Fall Apart and the Center Cannot Hold, Embrace Change; Transformative change and the forces of Chaos lie at the heart of our universe, a reality and medium of being characterized by illusion and impermanence, as its central motive principal.
Chaos is a forge of creation which endlessly generates contradictions and paradoxes as the forking points of universes, of multiplicities and relative truths, a wellspring of life and the realization of unknowns but also of our darkness born of attachment to externalities and that which is by its nature ephemeral and transitory, and moreover a world filled with falsifications of ourselves, echoes and reflections like the distorted images in funhouse mirrors which multiply into infinity as a theft of our uniqueness and our souls.
The trauma of death and of life disruptive change, and our immersion in a sea of grief, despair, and terror; when the anchorages and truths we cling to have shifted and cast us adrift into topologies of the unknown, when we dare to look behind the curtain and the figures of our faith are revealed to be lies and instruments of our subjugation, when these existential threats and crises of hope, trust, and faith combine as they have this past year with the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, how shall we answer our nothingness?
To this I say, how can we not embrace Chaos and transformative change, when it is endless and ongoing, and challenges us to live in the eternal now? Why fix and react wholly to its negative aspects as death and destruction, when it offers us equally possibilities of liberation from order and authority, self-creation, autonomy, and unknowns to explore, and a space of free creative play?
Here is Yeats great and visionary poem The Second Coming, written in the wake of three successive mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Here we must ask the great question of Lenin and Tolstoy, which set up the current paradigm of our civilization as dyadic revolutionary and conservative forces; What is to be done?
As I wrote in my post of July 17 2023, The World is Mad. And It is On Fire;
The world is mad. And it is on fire.
These existential threats are interdependent faces of a single problem, albeit a Gordian Knot of complex, nuanced, relative and shifting truths, meanings, and values; unequal power.
And both sets of causes and effects which chase each other round in recursion, like the iconic Gahan Wilson cartoon of gleeful devils in pursuit of each other entitled One Damn Thing After Another, are not symptoms of natural processes of change but consequences of political decisions we have made about how to be human with each other.
Extinction and the destruction of earth’s ecosystems and ability to support life is parallel and interdependent with the global subversion of democracy and the dawn of an age of tyrants and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
We cannot work toward solutions to extinction and fascist tyranny separately; they must be taken together as a whole.
I write now in reference to an article by Robin McKie in The Guardian entitled, “World experiences hottest week ever recorded and more is forecast to come: There is a good chance that the month of July will see the highest global temperatures for (the past) 120,000 years.“
Yes, but not for the millennium to follow; it just becomes unsurvivable from here. What creatures in some distant future will sift the dead sands of our world for clues to what doomed it, and why?
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
Because we have failed to purge our destroyers from among us, to seize power and control of our destiny from those who would enslave us and steal our future; elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege now locked in a death spiral of terminal stage capitalism as war on nature and subjugation and commodification of our labor which creates benefits for the few who can buy our time at the cost of dehumanization of the many and the extinction of us all.
We must abandon our addiction to power and its ephemeral, transitory, ultimately meaningless and destructive material signs and vanities, and our reliance on fossil fuels as a strategic resource of dominion and hegemony which is consuming us like a poison or cancer, and the whole twisted project and inverted values of civilization not as a conversation and questioning of ourselves and our universe but as systems of oppression and control of nature; and instead embrace the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Max, trailer for the film with John Cusack
The Master of Go, by Yasunari Kawabata, Edward G. Seidensticker (Translator)
EU elections 2024: how did key countries vote and what does it mean?
European elections: Paris and Berlin – not Brussels – will feel heat of far right’s gains, by Jon Henley
Why is the far-right vote surging in the European elections?
In thrall to Viktor Orbán and the hard right, Europe is facing its moment of truth, by Simon Tisdall
EU elections: earthquake in France and a rightward policy lurch? Our panel responds
Europe is beset by global threats. How will a destabilised EU cope with them?
By Nathalie Tocci
Three possible outcomes of Macron’s shocking snap election, by Jon Henley
My Europe, a retrospective
First, America’s partner in Revolution and founding democracy;
France
July 14 2023 A Legacy of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for All Humankind: Bastille Day
July 1 2023 In Marseille and Throughout France, a Test of Competing Futures and Ideas of Human Being, Meaning, and Value; A Free Society of Equals Versus Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and Liberty Versus a Carceral State of Force and Control
April 25 2022 Victory For Democracy Versus Fascism in France
November 24 2020 The Revolution Goes Ever Onward: France’s Gilets Jaunes
And now, the crucible of our humanity;
Ukraine
April 20 2024 Anniversary of My Speech to the Volunteers At Warsaw, and of the Reorganization of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine For Liberation Struggle in Russia in the Wake of Our Escape From Mariupol
February 24 2024 Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Symptom, Consequence, and Trigger Event of the Fall of Human Civilization In Recursion
December 16 2023 Solidarity With Ukraine: EU Membership and American Aid
August 24 2023 The Unconquerable Human Will to Freedom: Ukraine’s Independence Day in the Shadow of War
September 14 2023 Victory Ukraine: the Liberation of the Black Sea and Crimea Begins
Spain
April 26 2024 Guernica: the Horror of War
February 24 2021 Echoes of the 1936-1939 Civil War in Barcelona: Free Speech and Independence Ignite a Revolt
July 22 2023 The Ghosts of Our Possible Futures; In Spain’s Elections, Democracy and Fascism Play For the Soul of Europe
Italy
April 25 2024 Liberation Day Italy: Lessons from History for Antifascists, Revolutionaries, Truthtellers, and Bearers of the Promethean Fire Which Is Democracy
September 25 2022 Italy Chooses a Future Under the Shadows of Fascist Terror and Tyranny
August 23 2023 Anniversary of the 1922 Founding of Antifa: the Barricades of Parma and the Antifascist Resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo
Ireland
February 4 2024 Sinn Féin Victorious in Seizing the Government of Northern Ireland; Hope For a United Ireland Free from British Colonial Rule is Rekindled
April 24 2024 An Irish Song of Liberty: the 1916 Easter Rebellion
Portugal
March 14 2024 In Portugal’s Election, Darkness Gathers
April 25 2024 50th Anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution
Greece
February 6 2023 In Greece, Birthplace of Democracy and Our Global Civilization, An Ancient Terror Re-Emerges From the Shadows of Our History Like a Plague of Fear and Hate: the Return of Fascism and Nazi Revivalism With the Golden Dawn
Netherlands
November 26 2023 Like the Spreading Tracks of Leprosy, the Netherlands Choose Fascism
Poland
October 23 2023 Victory Poland Turns the Tide of Fascism in Europe
August 7 2023 A Legacy of Resistance: Anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising
August 31 2023 Anniversary of Poland’s 1943 Warsaw Uprising and 1980 Solidarity Revolution
Hungary
August 9 2022 America’s Republican Party Chooses a Vision for the Future: Orban’s Hungary
May 21 2022 The World the Fourth Reich Wants to Condemn Us To: Orban’s Hungary
March 31 2020 Democracy Falls in Hungary
Germany
July 10 2022 A Celebration of Solidarity and the Fall of the Berlin Wall and a Gathering of the International Resistance in the Berlin Autonomous Zone
January 16 2024 Anniversary of the Assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, Visionary and Icon of Our Future Possibilities of Becoming Human
And last, the monster we have escaped at our origin in founding democracy;
Britain
May 6 2023 Britain’s Rituals of Subjugation to King Charles Visited By the Grim Reaper, Foretelling Doom to the Monarchy At the Heart of a Diseased and Leprous Empire
September 8 2022 Apex Predator of the British Empire Dies; Where are the Celebrations, the Fireworks, the Dancing in the Streets?
Torch of Liberty 
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