In the case of Christa Pike we find a signpost of the depths of our depravity as a nation, a measure of how far we have Fallen, and of the peril of our historical moment as we balance on the edge of an Age of Tyrants.
To be clear, I wholly approve of vengeance, I just don’t like states having the power of life and death over their citizens.
When law replaces justice, none of us are safe.
As the Matadors said to me in Sao Paulo Brazil 1974 when they rescued me from execution by a police death squad for helping the abandoned street children they were bounty hunting to pretty up the neighborhoods of the elites; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
I am a monster who hunts other monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality. But when we authorize others to do so for us and institutionalize justice as law and order, we hand the power over all our lives to the state and its enforcers, police and other security services, and centralize power to Authority as carceral states of force and control. So our need for security becomes subversive of itself, and the social use of force a path of tyranny.
All states are embodied violence.
Law serves power, Order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.
I believe our right to life to be nonexclusionary and inviolable; all human beings possess this right as an inherent condition of being, and it cannot be abrogated in any case whatever, even that of monsters. It is the first of all rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, thereby making the American state legitimate only so far as it functions as a guarantor of our rights; both a right of citizens and of human beings, which are parallel and interdependent kinds of rights. Under the founding law of the land, the state can not kill anyone.
Among a great many things, this means that arming the police and granting them the power to use deadly force is a criminal and treasonous act, as is the Patriot Act that militarized policing as a counter-terrorism force, created a surveillance state, and launched a new imperial phase of American history. This horrifically compounded existing systems of oppression which include policing as an institution of white supremacist terror founded in slave catching mercenaries before the Civil War, and the effects of prison as an instrument of the re-enslavement of black people as bond labor.
And the whole trajectory of historical degeneration from a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights to tyranny and state terror as enforcement of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege reinforced by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil has as a sign of its terminal condition the death penalty.
We are become a culture of death, buying security with our subjugation to the state. But security is an illusion, though an immensely profitable one, and nothing can be worth surrendering our rights and our humanity. As our founding words proclaim; “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, not life or liberty.
Let us abandon the social use of force; end the death penalty and disarm the police.
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled
Christa Pike’s botched execution is a reminder of the horror of the death penalty: Lethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is; “hrista Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.
The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein.
In Pike’s case, her lawyers argued, the lethal injection protocol was likely to fail again.
She also had vein issues, they said; if she was subjected to an ordeal like Carruthers’, in which prison officials punctured their prone prisoner more than a dozen times over the course of an hour in an attempt to administer the drug, Pike’s history of trauma, which is lengthy and acute, would serve to make the experience unconstitutionally torturous.
Pentobarbital, the drug that was set to be used to kill Pike, also risked a needlessly painful death.
“The drug supposedly burns very bad,” Pike said in a taped interview just weeks before her scheduled execution. “And so that sounds scary to me because they used the word Draino in speaking about this drug, and the thought of suffocating and drowning on my own bodily fluid and blood isn’t very appealing to me.”
It was to avoid this ordeal that Pike requested to be hanged by the neck until dead instead. Her request was denied. From the execution chamber during Tennessee’s failed attempt to kill her, witnesses said that they could hear Pike complaining about a burning pain in her arm, which felt, she said, like it was about to burst.
After nearly a week of being unconscious and intubated at a Nashville hospital after her failed execution attempt, Pike is now awake and talking. Her arms are severely injured from her execution attempt and not fully usable, but she’s still shackled to her hospital bed anyway. She still remains “foggy” from the effects of the state-administered overdose, and it’s unclear whether she will recover full cognitive function as doctors assess the state of her brain damage.
But she remembers the moments when Tennessee tried and failed to kill her. She is reportedly very angry.
We should be angry, too. In our name, a woman was tortured.
In many death penalty cases, there are real questions about the factuality of a condemned person’s guilt or the fairness of their trial and appeals process.
That is less true in Pike’s case: there is no factual doubt that in 1995, when she was 18, Pike, now 50, lured her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area, and with an accomplice, Pike’s 17-year-old boyfriend, tortured her for about half an hour before finally killing her by smashing her skull in with a piece of concrete. Slemmer’s mother has been a particularly vocal advocate for Pike’s execution, and is reportedly furious that her daughter’s killer has survived.
The wishes of victims and their families should be crucial to what our understanding of justice means. No one knows better the meaning and significance of violence than the people who it is inflicted on.
But it is also true that Pike’s criminal trial did not take into account factors in her life that might have explanatory, if not mitigating, power – such as the reality that she committed murder at the end of a childhood that had been marked by horrific, repeated, and severe sexual and physical violence.
And it is true, too, that when we assess what justice looks like, we must ask not only what would be most meaningful and satisfying for victims but also what best reflects our values and meets our obligations as a state. By that metric, the death penalty has always failed. It does not mete out justice so much as lower the collective community to the level of its worst perpetrators.
Lethal injection used to be a way for us to deny this. The protocol was developed in the US and first adopted for executions in the late 1970s. It was meant to replace older methods of state killing, such as gas chambers, electric chairs and firing squads, offering what was positioned as a more dignified and civilized, and supposedly less painful, way of murdering a human being.
What lethal injection did instead was medicalize the death penalty’s brutality, allowing its proponents a kind of polite denial of what the punishment actually is.
Pike shows us what it really is. It is violent, brutal and cruel. It is painful, no matter how much medical science is used to deny or obscure this; it is superfluous and contrary to the needs of justice, and it degrades those who engage in it.
For a long time, I thought of the death penalty as dangerously final, opening up the possibility of innocent people irretrievably lost, of mistakes that can’t be taken back. And it is true that this happens: America has executed innocent people.
But Pike’s experience shows us that this is not the end of execution’s horror. There is something worse.
Tennessee has issued a temporary moratorium on executions, and the governor has called for a review of what went wrong in Pike’s execution. But he should know what went wrong: the problems with the lethal injection protocol, as well as with the death penalty more broadly, were not mysteries even before the state of Tennessee failed to kill Pike.
It is still possible that Pike will have to fight not to be sent back to the execution chamber again. And this is another harm of the death penalty: the repetitiveness of its injustice, the way it keeps us from learning from our mistakes.
Rarely do we get a second chance to do right by someone like Pike. The state of Tennessee should not get a second chance to try to kill her.”
Calls grow for US death penalty halt after ‘torturous’ botched execution of Christa Pike: Pike alive but in critical condition as experts call ordeal that unfolded in Tennessee ‘unimaginably barbaric’
Here is my finest interrogation of the social use of force, written as I worked through my decision to join the fight at Mariupol
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
On this terrible day a Rashomon Gate Event of fracture and disruption began the collapse of world order and possibly of civilization itself as we degenerated from throwing words to throwing stones and abandoned the principle of our universal human rights born in the Enlightenment and which is the fundament from which all democracy was built, like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand collapsed the system of alliances which held the system of monarchy and aristocratic privilege together and triggered the First World War.
In Palestine and Lebanon, our taxes buy the deaths of children. And their mothers, among other civilian noncombatants.
My estimate of the Palestinian dead one year ago was 800,000, around one third of the population; this from the witness of my own eyes, having fought in liberation struggle throughout this terrible war of terror against hope, hate against love, and steel against flesh.
Among all of the negation of our truths which Israel’s War Against Humanity has wrought, here are two truths which emerge from the legacies of our unfolding history we will never again be able to unsee or to avoid confrontation with; there is no right of defense against a people you are Occupying, and no moral equivalence between the violence used by a slavemaster and the violence used by a slave to break his chains.
In the face of mass protests throughout America and the world, met with repression of dissent and propaganda by the state and both our political parties in a Great Wall of Silence, we persist in refusing to de escalate the conflict using the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of Israel to end a genocide in which we are complicit.
America has abandoned our principles of universal rights and our duty of care for others, and any pretense to morality or legitimacy as a democracy; this was among the many goals of Black Saturday, and both Israel and America took the bait.
Sadly, we have no party of opposition to speak for the dead innocents of this conflict, for both the Republican and Democratic Parties are willing to abandon our universal rights in favor of their own wealth and power, and this has always been true. There is only one rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.
As I wrote on this day in 2024 during the fury of our Presidential elections; Where the Party of Treason and Tyranny is an enthusiastic sponsor of autocracies and state terror globally including Israel, the Democratic Party has maintained a strategic silence regarding our complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity, refusing to acknowledge it as a historical fact or the peace movement which drove Genocide Joe out of nation’s election, at a critical Defining Moment of our nation and with the future of democracy at stake, but replaced him with an overseer of the carceral state who wishes to rain doom upon the helpless migrants at our border and on the Palestinians whose nation is a Bantustan of slave labor and a concentration camp Occupied by an enemy to whom only their fellow Jews are truly human.
I’m calling her Kommandant Kamala, as the salvation of both the Israelis and the Palestinians as equals and fellow human beings never became the center of her campaign, rather than enforcement of our dominion at our border and in our colony of Israel.
Traitor Trump is worse than either Genocide Joe or Kommandant Kamala, for he believes in nothing and wishes only to amass wealth by building a riviera of casinos for elites on the bones of a people.
The first rule of American politics is; nobody messes with the grift.
In America, both our political parties betrayed us and abandoned the idea of our universal human rights, which was among the primary goals of Netanyahu when he committed this atrocity in collusion with Hamas. Sadly there was nothing new in this, not in seventy years of Israeli tyranny and terror sponsored by American taxes, vast military aid, and impunity conferred by our diplomatic cover and permission. No velvet glove, just the iron fist.
Of course this is due to the nature and dynamics of power, and the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which act to centralize power to authority and subjugate slave castes through fear, thought control, and violence. All states are embodied violence, and in this democracies are proving no better than tyrannies.
We have changed so little since the Pharaohs and priest-kings of the first city-states set themselves above all others as interpreters and spokesmen of the gods, and hired brutal thugs with aristocratic titles to keep the slaves at their work. I was hoping we were better than that.
Civilization falls with the derelict antiquity of Israel and a Holy Land long abandoned by any merciful god, consumed by The Nothing we have summoned with the rain of death and terror, as our capacity for empathy withers under forces of degradation and dehumanization. Soon we too will become nothing, like the children we murder from a sanitized remove, for whom we feel no pity, mercy, or compassion, as they are not white and therefore beyond the circle of belonging and otherness on which our elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege are constructed.
The enemies of liberty wish to enslave us through divisions of ethnicity, faith, and historical national identity, categories of authorized identity largely constructed by elites in service to power, and through strategies of commodification, falsification, and dehumanization, to hollow out the values of democracy through subversion and capture of our ownership of ourselves and of human being, meaning, and value. This too we must Resist.
This has been a terrible two years as our humanity becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror; that which unites us as human beings has been shattered, and we are captive in the strange reflected images of its discontiguous surfaces. But we need not let this stand.
Among the first questions which confront us in bringing a Reckoning to any systems of oppression, tyranny and carceral states of force and control, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, subjugation to hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege, and violations of our universal human rights is that of just cause or casus belli; who is responsible for these crimes against humanity?
Within days of Black Saturday I was at the scene hunting the perpetrators, and what I found was a nest of vipers. What happened was a set of recursive and interdependent causes allied in a primary event of fracture and disruption which remain occluded still; including a coup within Hamas against its leadership, especially those targeted for assassination later by Israel on a false claim of having ordered the attack, by a Hamas faction opposed to peace in conspiracy with Netanyahu’s regime perpetrated this tragedy, but not alone.
Several other groups, at least two of whom are nominally enemies of each other, a criminal syndicate with no political ideology whatever, plus a IDF Recon team, Sayaret Shaked as I knew it in Lebanon long ago or a successor force, which specializes in committing atrocities against Islamic groups while disguised as Arabs to sow division, were in the lead elements of the attack force, and joined quickly by opportunists of various kinds.
Within days the special operations forces of several nations were in the mix, including allies of Palestine from the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq as well as Russian intelligence and special operations forces, possibly with some of their African allies including Sudan’s RSF which would mean Emirati involvement. This means Hamas cannot free all the hostages, because some are held by groups beyond their control including Israeli agents.
But there is more, much more; an unknown third party infiltrated both Israeli and Palestinian organizations to play them off against each other for purposes I cannot guess but are obviously inimical to both, and to global peace and security. This is a long game, and our opponent as yet remains in the shadows.
Who has both the skill and the motive to do this? Cui bono?
Netanyahu benefits, because this keeps him in power and gives him a causus belli for the imperial conquest and dominion of the Middle East and the Final Solution of the Palestinians; and his key ally Trump benefits in our election by staining the armour of Biden and Harris with cruelty and complicity in genocide, and in dividing the Left vote through ideological fracture, though both are trapped by decades old policies and alliances much as the belligerents of World War One were trapped in a system of alliances and set piece strategies which ensnared them with the assassination of the Archduke and brought the utter collapse of the old world of the aristocracy it was designed to protect, and kept in check by the vast wealth and political power of AIPAC and other cabals of wealth and power, and both Trump and Netanyahu benefit by making the idea of human rights meaningless, as does Trump’s puppetmaster Putin and other tyrants of the Fourth Reich or otherwise.
But the legitimacy of Israel and America are a cost no one in either nations governments or intelligence and special operations communities would trade for these wins, and though the Fourth Reich, by which I mean a network of descendants of actual Nazis who have infiltrated the American state and others for seventy years, of which Trump is a figurehead and the de facto Fuhrer, clearly has the Long Game plans, the resources, and the genius, evil though it may be, to do this, no Nazi would ever help the Zionist state of Israel become an empire. This leaves the Russian FSB and its other intelligence agencies and Spetznaz forces, both of which I know from long experience of operating with them globally prior to the Fall of the Soviet Union, also with both the patience or vision, resources, and skill to do this, which may have been developing for decades; but Russia is committed to advancing her ally Iran’s dominion of the Middle East, which makes her the primary enemy of Israel and the Arab-American Alliance, and we have fought savage proxy wars in Syria and elsewhere to prove it.
No, our nemesis and the true perpetrator of Black Saturday is not Russia or Iran, nor the Fourth Reich, and only partially Trump and Netanyahu equally with the jihadist faction of Hamas which I believe to originate with its blood enemy and rival for control of Gaza Al Qaeda; we face an unknown enemy willing to engineer a genocide to advance its mysterious goals, and all I can tell you about them is that they are far from done with us.
The identification, exposure, and destruction of this unknown enemy and countering its interventions in human history is now my primary long range goal. Though we must also combat and bring a Reckoning for fascism and the black tide of identitarian nationalism and tyranny which threatens to engulf us, which is related to our unknown enemy in ambiguous ways.
We live in interesting times.
Where are we at now?
A major objective of the attack was to spike the peace and solidarity with Palestine movements in Israel. Its a major reason why the Netanyahu regime conspired in the attack and why it targeted peaceniks. The result is an Israel without a Left, and a casus belli for the conquest of her neighbors and the centralization of power to the state. Many elements created the tragedy, but service to power was the reason Israel opened the gate, literally, and sent an IDF recon unit disguised as Arabs to provoke atrocities. This was authorized personally by Netanyahu and others at the top command of the state.
None of this can minimize the crimes of others involved, but neither Hamas, Israeli agents inside Hamas, al Qaeda, Iranian allied elements, nor Assad regime agents and Russian intelligence and special operations forces, all of whom were involved, are responsible alone. Hezbollah and others cheered them on afterward, but Lebanon had nothing to do with it, and factionalized as she is may not be capable of foreign adventurism of this kind; Israeli has certainly worked hard to ensure it.
Of the actual perpetrators, we have liberated Syria and brought a Reckoning to the Russian directed and Iranian connected component of this crime, the al Qaeda organization in Palestine was nearly wiped out by Hamas before the event, some of which actions I participated in, and conflicts with Iranian forces in Yemen destroyed their regional threat, and many of the individual perpetrators, both Israeli and others, are now dead from fighting each other or from internal conflicts. This leaves the Israeli regime and high command, who must be tried for war crimes and publicly brought to justice to restore the international rule of law and the idea of human rights on which democracy depends, and their terrible campaign of racist and theocratic genocide and imperial conquest and dominion to be ended through Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction. In the end there will be peace only when there is justice, and I believe we must create a future secular state of United Israel and Palestine in which all citizens are equal.
Let us return to First Principles with a simple question; Who is suffering and in need of mercy? It is a similar question to the one I ask to determine when and how to use force and violence, Who holds power?, but with a very different direction as to the unfolding of our future.
Here in a Holy Land divided by the sectarian particulars of how to be human together in accord with the will of the Infinite as universal brotherhood and love, crimes which define the limits of the human are perpetrated against our most innocent, utterly powerless, and incapable of threatening anyone; children. Children whom the enemy of our humanity, the state of Israel and its sponsors including America, either brutalize and kill with glee in the hysteria of power or refuse to see and recognize in silence and complicity. And our history surfaces one figure to represent all of the children sacrificed to power and hate, and doomed by the complicity of silence.
I ask you now, all of humankind, to abandon the path of our dehumanization and renounce genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest and dominion, and crimes against humanity.
I ask, I beg, I demand; I ask you in the name of Anne Frank.
As I wrote in my post of October 10 2024, Black Saturday: A Nation Divided Against Itself In Service To Power By Weaponized History, Faith, Race, and National Identity; Palestine Versus Israel, Liberation Struggle Versus Imperial Colonial Occupation, Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it synonymous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror. I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the Nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
But the purposes of Israel in collaborating with Hamas in this crime against their own citizens are very different, and it remains to be seen which of these futures will become real; a free and independent Palestine as Hamas wishes, or a Middle Eastern Sparta and an Empire of Greater Israel as the Netanyahu regime wishes.
In either case, the Rashomon Gate is open, and we must write our own future stories or others will write them for us.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of Occupation and soon genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
In this the perpetrators of Black Saturday have offered moral equivalence to Israel, and Israel has taken the bait. Which of them will be harmed more by this is in question, especially regarding internal Israeli society and the state, but both will be harmed greatly.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with defense of those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized to authority as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals? Why must we be each other’s jailers, and not each other’s liberators?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not with her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
Here is the memorial I wrote for my friend, assassinated in Gaza by an Israeli sniper during the fighting in 2021; June 21 2022, We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human; Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system.
This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities”
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.
The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Living Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who 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 thirty nine 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. 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 my 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 with its iconic crack, 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.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful, quick and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to Israeli authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run or profited from betrayal; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Through a Lens, Darkly: The Anniversary of 2026
‘Neither war nor peace’: Palestinians in Gaza on existing amid disease, despair and ruins
Negotiating the Interface Between Bounded Realms, a Study in Film and Literature: the Anima or Inner Woman of my Platonic Ideal Versus the Ghosts of Memory of a Lost Friend
How I remember our meeting, betrayed and standing together against the world: Mr & Mrs Smith final gunfight scene
How I imagine her now:
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes Montage to Britney Spears’ version of Bobby Brown’s My Perogative
Enola Holmes Montage to Fifth Harmony’s That’s My Girl
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
أكتوبر 2026: نتحول إلى مرآة مكسورة في يد “هوبغوبلن” (كائن أسطوري مؤذٍ) – “السبت الأسود”
في هذا اليوم الرهيب، اندلع حدثٌ مفصلي -يشبه في طبيعته “حادثة بوابة راشومون”- اتسم بالتصدع والاضطراب، مُطلقاً شرارة انهيار النظام العالمي وربما الحضارة ذاتها؛ إذ انحدرنا من مرحلة التراشق بالكلمات إلى التراشق بالحجارة، وتخلينا عن مبدأ حقوق الإنسان العالمية -الذي وُلد في عصر التنوير وشكّل الركيزة الأساسية التي قامت عليها الديمقراطية برمتها- تماماً كما أدى اغتيال الأرشيدوق فرديناند إلى انهيار شبكة التحالفات التي كانت تحفظ تماسك النظام الملكي والامتيازات الأرستقراطية، مما أشعل فتيل الحرب العالمية الأولى.
7 أكتوبر 2025 نصبح مرآة مكسورة لغول
في فلسطين ولبنان، تشتري ضرائبنا موت الأطفال. وأمهاتهم، من بين المدنيين غير المقاتلين الآخرين.
من بين كل إنكار حقائقنا الذي أحدثته حرب إسرائيل ضد الإنسانية، هناك حقيقتان تنبثقان من إرث تاريخنا المتكشف لن نتمكن أبدًا من تجاهلهما أو تجنب المواجهة معهما؛ لا يوجد حق للدفاع ضد شعب تحتله، ولا يوجد تكافؤ أخلاقي بين العنف الذي يستخدمه سيد العبيد والعنف الذي يستخدمه العبد لكسر سلاسله.
في مواجهة الاحتجاجات الجماهيرية في جميع أنحاء أمريكا والعالم، والتي قوبلت بقمع المعارضة والدعاية من قبل الدولة وكلا حزبينا السياسيين في جدار الصمت العظيم، نستمر في رفض تصعيد الصراع باستخدام مقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات على إسرائيل لإنهاء الإبادة الجماعية التي نحن متواطئون فيها.
لقد تخلت أمريكا عن مبادئنا المتعلقة بالحقوق العالمية وواجبنا في رعاية الآخرين، وأي تظاهر بالأخلاق أو الشرعية كديمقراطية؛ وكان هذا من بين الأهداف العديدة للسبت الأسود، وقد ابتلعت كل من إسرائيل وأمريكا الطُعم.
حيث يعتبر حزب الخيانة والاستبداد راعيًا متحمسًا للأنظمة الاستبدادية والإرهاب الدولي على مستوى العالم بما في ذلك إسرائيل، فقد حافظ الحزب الديمقراطي على صمت استراتيجي فيما يتعلق بتواطؤنا في الإبادة الجماعية والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، رافضًا الاعتراف بها كحقيقة تاريخية أو حركة السلام التي طردت جو من الانتخابات ولكنها استبدلته بمشرف على الدولة السجنية التي ترغب في إنزال الدمار على المهاجرين العاجزين على حدودنا وعلى الفلسطينيين الذين تعتبر دولتهم بانتوستانًا للعمل القسري ومعسكر اعتقال يحتلها عدو لا يعتبره سوى إخوانهم اليهود بشرًا حقيقيين.
إنني أطلق عليها لقب القائدة كامالا، ما لم يكن خلاص الإسرائيليين والفلسطينيين باعتبارهم متساوين وبشراً مثلها يصبح محور حملتها، بدلاً من فرض هيمنتنا على حدودنا وفي مستعمرتنا إسرائيل.
وبالطبع يرجع هذا إلى طبيعة القوة وديناميكياتها، والقوى المتكررة للخوف والقوة والعنف التي تعمل على تركيز القوة في يد السلطة وإخضاع طبقات العبيد من خلال الخوف والسيطرة على الفكر والعنف. إن كل الدول تجسد العنف، وفي هذا لا تختلف الديمقراطيات عن الطغيان.
لقد تغيرنا قليلاً منذ وضع الفراعنة والملوك الكهنة في دول المدن الأولى أنفسهم فوق كل الآخرين كمترجمين ومتحدثين باسم الآلهة، واستأجروا بلطجية وحشيين يحملون ألقاباً أرستقراطية لإبقاء العبيد في عملهم. كنت أتمنى أن نكون أفضل من ذلك.
إن الحضارة تنهار مع سقوط فلسطين ولبنان، حيث تذبل قدرتنا على التعاطف تحت قوى الإهانة والنزعة الإنسانية. وسرعان ما نصبح نحن أيضاً لا شيء، مثل الأطفال الذين نقتلهم من مكان معقم، والذين لا نشعر تجاههم بالشفقة أو الرحمة أو التعاطف، لأنهم ليسوا من ذوي البشرة البيضاء وبالتالي خارج دائرة الانتماء والاختلاف التي بنيت عليها هيمنتنا النخبوية على الثروة والسلطة والامتياز.
إن أعداء الحرية يرغبون في استعبادنا من خلال الانقسامات العرقية والإيمانية والهوية الوطنية التاريخية، ومن خلال استراتيجيات التسليع والتزوير والنزعة الإنسانية، لتفريغ قيم الديمقراطية من خلال التخريب والاستيلاء على ملكيتنا لأنفسنا وللوجود البشري والمعنى والقيمة. وهذا أيضاً يجب أن نقاومه.
لقد كان هذا عاماً رهيباً حيث أصبحت إنسانيتنا مرآة مكسورة؛ لقد تحطم ما يوحدنا كبشر، وأصبحنا أسرى للصور المنعكسة الغريبة لأسطحه المتفرقة. ولكن لا ينبغي لنا أن ندع هذا الأمر قائماً.
من بين الأسئلة الأولى التي تواجهنا في محاسبة أي أنظمة قمع واستبداد ودول سجنية تعتمد على القوة والسيطرة، وفاشية الدم والإيمان والأرض، والخضوع للنخب المهيمنة القائمة على الثروة والسلطة والامتياز، وانتهاكات حقوق الإنسان العالمية، هو السؤال عن السبب العادل أو ذريعة الحرب؛ من المسؤول عن هذه الجرائم ضد الإنسانية؟
بعد أيام من السبت الأسود، كنت في مكان الحادث أطارد الجناة، وما وجدته كان عشًا من الأفاعي. ما حدث كان مجموعة من الأسباب المتكررة والمترابطة المتحالفة في حدث أساسي من الانقسام والاضطراب الذي لا يزال مخفيًا حتى الآن؛ بما في ذلك الانقلاب داخل حماس ضد قياداتها، وخاصة أولئك المستهدفين بالاغتيال لاحقًا من قبل إسرائيل بناءً على ادعاء كاذب بأنهم أمروا بالهجوم، من قبل فصيل حماس المعارض للسلام بالتآمر مع نظام نتنياهو الذي ارتكب هذه المأساة، ولكن ليس وحده. هناك العديد من المجموعات الأخرى، اثنتان منها على الأقل أعداء ظاهريًا، وعصابة إجرامية ليس لها أيديولوجية سياسية على الإطلاق، بالإضافة إلى فريق استطلاع تابع لجيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي، أو فرقة شاكيد أو قوة خليفة، والتي تتخصص في ارتكاب الفظائع ضد الجماعات الإسلامية بينما تتخفى في هيئة عرب لزرع الانقسام.
ولكن هناك المزيد، المزيد والمزيد؛ فقد تسلل طرف ثالث غير معروف إلى كل من المنظمات الإسرائيلية والفلسطينية لتأليبهما ضد بعضهما البعض لأغراض لا أستطيع تخمينها ولكنها معادية لكليهما وللسلام والأمن العالميين. هذه لعبة طويلة، ولا يزال خصمنا في الظل حتى الآن.
من لديه المهارة والدافع للقيام بذلك؟ من المستفيد؟
نتنياهو يستفيد، لأن هذا يبقيه في السلطة ويعطيه سببًا للحرب من أجل الغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على الشرق الأوسط والحل النهائي للفلسطينيين؛ ويستفيد حليفه الرئيسي ترامب في انتخاباتنا من تلطيخ درع بايدن وهاريس بالقسوة والتواطؤ في الإبادة الجماعية، على الرغم من أن كلاهما محاصر بسياسات وتحالفات عمرها عقود من الزمان ويخضع لسيطرة الثروة الهائلة والقوة السياسية للجنة الشؤون العامة الأمريكية الإسرائيلية، ويستفيد كل من ترامب ونتنياهو من جعل فكرة حقوق الإنسان بلا معنى.
لكن شرعية إسرائيل وأمريكا هي تكلفة لا يمكن لأحد في حكومات الدول أو مجتمعات الاستخبارات والعمليات الخاصة أن يتاجر بها من أجل هذه الانتصارات، وعلى الرغم من أن الرايخ الرابع، الذي أعني به شبكة من أحفاد النازيين الفعليين الذين تسللوا إلى الدولة الأمريكية وغيرها لمدة سبعين عامًا، والتي يعد ترامب زعيمها والزعيم الفعلي لها، لديه بوضوح خطط طويلة المدى والموارد والعبقرية، مهما كانت شريرة، للقيام بذلك، فلن يساعد أي نازي دولة إسرائيل الصهيونية على أن تصبح إمبراطورية. وهذا يترك جهاز الأمن الفيدرالي الروسي ووكالات الاستخبارات الأخرى وقوات سبيتزناز، أيضًا مع الصبر أو الرؤية والموارد والمهارة للقيام بذلك، والتي ربما كانت تتطور لعقود من الزمن؛ ولكن روسيا ملتزمة بتعزيز هيمنة حليفتها إيران على الشرق الأوسط، وهو ما يجعلها العدو الأول لإسرائيل والتحالف العربي الأميركي، وقد خاضنا حروباً بالوكالة وحشية في سوريا وأماكن أخرى لإثبات ذلك.
لا، إن عدونا الحقيقي والجاني الحقيقي لأحداث السبت الأسود ليس روسيا أو إيران، ولا الرايخ الرابع، بل ترامب ونتنياهو بشكل جزئي ومباشر على قدم المساواة مع الفصيل الجهادي حماس الذي أعتقد أنه نشأ مع عدوها اللدود ومنافسها على السيطرة على غزة القاعدة؛ نحن نواجه عدواً مجهولاً على استعداد للهندسة لإبادة جماعية لتعزيز أهدافه الغامضة، وكل ما يمكنني أن أخبرك به عنهم هو أنهم بعيدون كل البعد عن الانتهاء منا.
نحن نعيش في أوقات مثيرة للاهتمام.
دعونا نعود إلى المبادئ الأولى بسؤال بسيط؛ من يعاني ويحتاج إلى الرحمة؟ إنه سؤال مشابه للسؤال الذي أطرحه لتحديد متى وكيف نستخدم القوة والعنف، من يملك السلطة؟، ولكن باتجاه مختلف تمامًا فيما يتعلق بتطور مستقبلنا.
هنا في أرض مقدسة مقسمة حسب التفاصيل الطائفية لكيفية أن نكون بشرًا معًا وفقًا لإرادة اللانهائي كأخوة وحب عالميين، تُرتكب جرائم تحدد حدود الإنسان ضد أبريائنا، وعجزنا التام، وغير قادرين على تهديد أي شخص؛ الأطفال. أطفال يعذبهم ويقتلهم عدو إنسانيتنا، دولة إسرائيل ورعاتها بما في ذلك أمريكا، بسرور في هستيريا القوة أو يرفضون رؤيتهم والتعرف عليهم بالتواطؤ. ويبرز تاريخنا شخصية واحدة تمثل كل الأطفال الذين ضحوا بالسلطة والكراهية، وحُكم عليهم بالموت بتواطؤ الصمت.
أطلب منكم الآن، كل البشرية، التخلي عن مسار نزع الإنسانية عنا والتخلي عن الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي وحروب الفتح والسيطرة والجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
We celebrate the beginning of the Halloween season, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, with our new national holiday of amok time, Mad Hatter Day.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a myth into which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes cast themselves so disastrously.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast interrogates this myth of idealizations of authorized masculinity and femininity as Freudian horror and Sadeian transgression. But it is also a primary myth of reimagination and transformation which signposts the inherent fluidity of identities of sex and gender.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love is a madness, but it is a madness which bears redemptive and transformational power, and a force of liberation which can return to us our true selves and allow us to transcend the limits of our form and inhabit the imaginal spaces of others.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the matrix of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
As I wrote in my celebration of Lewis Carroll, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday January 27; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”, but only those I claim or create myself; this is my faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for this primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes the mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae or seed of becoming human which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in magic, a special form of seeking hidden realms of wonder behind the mirage of the world as performed in my father’s underground theatre as a form of Surrealist ceremonial magic and like a Frankenstein’s monster made of unlike parts, our family faith and history which combines voodoo, werewolf mythology, and bent versions of Grimm’s fairytales from our Bavarian origins with his Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs’ Chaos magic which assimilated medieval ceremonial magic, Crowley, and Lovecraft into Bataille’s Acephale cult of Nietzsche, both related to a love of languages and the occult as hidden systems of meaning. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered by my senior year on my failure to teach myself to read Kabbalah, as I discovered it is written not in Hebrew but in languages I could find no one to converse with or learn from, Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the occult, the iconography of Surrealism, the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake, Korzybski’s General Semantics, and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, paradigms in which secret worlds lay behind this one which operate by different laws as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of our own, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. Herein the inherent human power of reimagination is deployed as a strategy of revolution against overwhelming force and tyranny.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Kobo Abe takes tea at the Mad Hatter’s of an afternoon; Gogol has set his words on fire and is made of a holy light which is used in place of a chandelier, Kafka elicits squeals of delight from Alice with his hideous Gregor Samsa form, Klimt’s giant apelike Typhoeus and his daughters Madness, Illness, and Death run amok in ecstatic Bacchic dance with the Triple Goddess Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance while Lovecraft tries to put something with tentacles back in its box.
There is always an empty chair for you.
Here follows some things I have written for the Festival of the Mad Hatter, which I celebrate as a three week Orphic vision quest which begins the month of Halloween, in three stages of one week celebrating madness as love, transgression, and vision.
This week I celebrate madness as love, with all of its redemptive and transformational power, and perform acts of love as solidarity in resistance and liberation struggle where ever men hunger to be free.
This is my special madness, this loyalty to and solidarity with my fellow human beings in revolutionary struggle against systems of oppression and tyranny, of commodification, falsification, and dehumanization; but the world is also mad, and my path is to place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
I write to you from a hell of nightmares, death, atrocities, and terror dreamed by an Israel which defines the limits of the human and has become, in reproducing the conditions her people once escaped, a museum of private Holocausts.
Here and elsewhere I Resist tyranny and terror to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
No matter where you begin with divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with the subversion of our equality and the abandonment of our principle of universal human rights, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices we make about how to be human together.
In the end, all that matters is what you do with your fear, and how you use your power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2021, Of Love and Desire as Forces of Autonomy and Liberation; In my previous journal entry of yesterday I provided a brief outline of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test as a tool of discovery and description of the processes of masculinity and femininity as interdependent aspects of a whole personality, in the context of gender identity and performance.
So we come to the final category of our interest here, sexual orientation. The most important thing to know about human sexuality as a dimension of experience is that it involves the whole person. Whereas a personality test can tell you who you are, and who others are or wish to represent themselves as, it cannot tell you who or what you desire. Desire remains ambiguous, and that is its great power as a force of liberation and autonomy.
The second is that desire is uncontrollable as the tides, an inherently anarchic and chaotic force of nature which is nonvolitional and for which we cannot be held responsible, unlike our actions toward others.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must claim our truths and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won and both purchased with horror, pain, grief, life, and far too often that of others and not my own, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous in the sense that we are animals which can enjoy all pleasure and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the Violation of Normality and its taboos, the Transgression of the Forbidden, or the Defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, for whatever you imagine as the most extreme transgressions in any direction becomes a boundary of the Forbidden which I guarantee you others have violated and exceeded, and also implies moral judgement when it is impolite to ick someone else’s yum and is moreover an illusion in a universe where good and evil do not exist beyond our actions toward others, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life. He saw me, Genet did, and set me free to create and discover my true self on the path of the Resistance.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
Herein I cite a marvelous article by Babette Babich, professor of philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. Of her exploration of the kinds of love, she writes in The Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books; “I was trying to go beyond the four in question, to xenia, the rights of a guest, a key notion for a political theorist. It refers to the love of the stranger, which is crucial today in an age of migrant crises and which entails the hospitality we owe the guest. The principle of hospitality is important in the Bible, where Abraham hosts strangers who turn out to be Jehovah and his angels. It is also related in Greek myth, where an old couple, Philémon und Baucis, sacrifice all they have to host two vagabonds, offering kindness to gods in disguise: Zeus and Hermes, the god who mediates all encounters between the mortal and the divine.
The classical list, as C.S. Lewis and others detail it, is: storgē, love of the home or the family; philia or friendship, which we hear in philosophy as love of wisdom; eros which is what we’re most interested in — taking us back to the #metoo movement, including questions of men and women in love. (One of the reasons we continue to find Alan Rickman’s betrayal of Emma Thompson in the 2003 Love, Actually so disquieting is that this is a compound betrayal of storgē/philia/eros.) — And then there is agapē, a pure, specifically selfless love, in contrast to eros, which is anything but selfless. Agapē is anticlimactic, and even St. Augustine, praying for grace, prayed to be perfect but, as he famously wrote, not yet.
The hierarchy of kinds of love mirrors — to tell a fanciful, proto-evolutionary story — the story of our lives. We’re born into storgē, family love, the love of home and hearth. That can be conflicted to be sure, as Robert Frost reminds us: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’
Thus, we’ve just gone through the holiday season dedicated to storgē, as also reflected in Love, Actually and the 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life. Philia, friendship, is included in marriage, as well as at school. Then, there is the theme of love matters at university, and eros—hence, the connection to St. Valentine’s day. Finally, some of us reach agapē, pure love, love for its own sake, love of god especially.
I emphasized, as Plato and Augustine do, that we all want love, and it is love that draws us upward as Goethe notes, improving everything about the world and about ourselves. I also pointed to the sharper, darker sides of love: that it can break us, or bend us down, to use Hölderlin’s language for love’s near and future danger to us.
Falling in erotic love is like falling into a maelstrom of intoxication, and there are always low points: the Greek poet, Anacreon compares it to being knocked flat by a blacksmith’s hammer, as Anne Carson cites him in her book, Eros, the Bittersweet. ‘Sweetbitter’ is the Greek glukúpikron in Sappho’s poem to Eros: a word order inverting our English convention and so much truer to life: glukú sweet, pikron, bitter. Thus, the Greeks emphasized the negativity or visceral disaster that is the impact of love. As Archilochus writes: it rips your lungs out. Actually.
And we’re all for it: we long for it, we want it. Eros undoes us, and the same lyric where we encountered the word, glukúpikron, we find lusimélēs, limbs dissolved, mingling one into another. The song originally recorded by the Big Bopper, Chantilly Lace in 1958, and featured in several films, including the 1973, American Graffiti, rhymes the intoxication effected by Chantilly, her walk, her laugh — the Greeks have the same enthusiasms — and the results that ‘make the world go round,’ transforming the singer, unhinging him, lusimélēs, the modern poet’s phrase make me feel real loose, indeed, make me act so funny, make me spend my money, punctuated. And that is the point of it: that’s what I like.
Eros is dangerous, Plato tells us. He is the oldest god, he is the youngest god, and everything about him is dyadic, despite, or more accurately, because of the dangers. Michel Foucault wrote about dietetics and strategies that might enhance the positive and reduce the negative, but, in the end, Cupid’s arrow is an engine of death, and talking of that takes us to Freud.
I looked to philia to highlight what love actually does, and I spoke of Nietzsche on love as a hermeneutic tactic along with one of Fordham’s teachers from a few decades before my time, Dietrich von Hildebrand, because, in addition to ideals closer to agapē, he spoke of intentio benevolentiae to highlight the generosity Nietzsche emphasized. This is the generosity we can bring to everything we want to understand whether books, events, or people.
When we love, we give the other the benefit of the doubt, cut them all kinds of breaks. When we fail to love, we lack generosity and what is more, we are prone to resentment, disdain, anger. Love is about generosity. It is about not minding faults, and the love of wisdom, philosophy, is or can be, beyond analytic anger, hermeneutically generous in the same way: faults and all.”
A few days ago the old comms network of the Yellow Vest movement reactivated and mobilized tens of thousands of protesters in the largest sustained mass action in France since the Marseille protests of 2023 of which I was a witness and participant, having traveled to ”put out the fire with gasoline” as David Bowie teaches us, for when Chaos beckons with its siren call I cannot but answer with my own.
The Year of the Barricades is upon us once again, as it was in 1871, 1940, and 1968; what true son or daughter of France or of the Revolution anywhere on this earth will refuse to join in solidarity with the people now fighting in the streets for the liberty of us all?
Vive le revolution!
As written in Crimethinc, in an article entitled French Youth Take the Streets against a Bleak Future; “This past week, thousands of teenagers have taken the streets of France, clashing with police as they demonstrate against the deplorable conditions in their high schools and a rapidly collapsing future. This is a promising sign, shifting attention from the seemingly unstoppable rise of the extreme right to the question of what people can do on a grassroots basis to defend themselves. Our correspondents in Paris explore the situation in detail.
Another unprecedented summer of record heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires throughout Europe underlines the desperate situation we are all facing today, while politicians of all stripes and their techno-industrial sponsors continue to turn a blind eye, forcing us down the path to catastrophe in the name of progress.
Hoping to turn the page on these environmental disasters, the French government has hurriedly shifted focus to other priorities. The coming months represent a crucial transition for Emmanuel Macron and his government, as they will bring Macron’s second term to a close, opening a new political era in France. Candidates are already battling to succeed Macron in power at the beginning of May 2027.
In the midst of this political spectacle, during an increasingly menacing surge in the popularity of the National Rally (formerly, the National Front), the extreme-right party, it is especially meaningful that teenagers have started to organize at a grassroots level to defend themselves. This organizing gained momentum last week, when blockades of high schools, demonstrations, and riots erupted across France, taking everyone by surprise.
Licensed to Kill?
Since Macron was elected President for the first time in May 2017, the political discourse in France has been even more dominated by an emphasis on authoritarian and far-right ideologies in terms of security, immigration, and economic and social issues.
This political shift towards an even more aggressive form of governance has led to increasing state violence targeting the social movements and uprisings that have emerged since. From the eviction of the ZAD at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2017 to the riots following the murder of Nahel in 2023, not forgetting the Yellow Vest sequence and the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown experimental doctrines, we have experienced a headlong plunge into a world of surveillance, repression, and loss of individual freedoms. This has become today’s new normal.
It was in this already suffocating context that last July, the French government decided to vote on a new bill giving police officers more latitude to use their firearms without consequences—a demand that the far right has promoted for years. If voted through, this legislation could set a dangerous precedent, as it would establish “a presumption of ‘legitimate use of arms’ by police and gendarmes ‘in the exercise of their duty’.”
In other words, not only will police officers be able to freely use their weapons if in any situation they claim to fear for their lives or the lives of others, but authorities will no longer have to prove that the officers acted within the framework of the law, as they are required to do today. It will be up to the victims and their families to provide evidence that the use of firearms was not justified. We can already see how this new law represents a legislative tool enabling law enforcement agents, and therefore, the state, to cover up future murders.
Unwilling to let such a law pass without resistance, political opponents and radicals, who had rightly rebranded this law the “license to kill,” decided to organize massive demonstrations and events throughout France on the weekend of September 18 to 20. Thousands of people took part in these protests in different major cities alongside traditional leftist politicians, rights groups such as Amnesty International and the League of Human Rights, and various lawyers and magistrates’ unions.
In the meantime, another call for action reusing all the codes of the Yellow Vest movement spread online. The origins of this call remain obscure, as some national newspapers have raised the possibility that AI-generated accounts had flooded social media platforms with this rumor on purpose. Nevertheless, media and politicians began commenting on this potential resurgence of the Yellow Vest movement due to the rise of fuel prices and the overall increase of living costs. Rumor or not, the call to take the streets on October 17, 2026 has spread and only the future will tell us if people’s desperation and anger will be able to give birth to another inspiring moment.
Growing Frustrations…
Since mid-September, another form of discontent has been slowly spreading within another part of society. Tired of their working conditions, some high-school students decided to block access to their schools in order to make their voices heard. During the early stages of what became a national movement a few days later, only a few high schools were blocked here and there. This did not create any real impact or worry the authorities.
Among the students’ various demands, we can summarize the following points:
Reduce the number of students per class.
For years now, the number of students per class has gradually increased to the point that it is not unusual for a teacher to have an average of between 30 to 35 students in a classroom. This is impacting the capacity for every single student to learn at their own pace.
Reduce the number of school hours per week.
Even if France is known for having numerous and long school breaks throughout the year, students usually spend a long day at school—sometimes from 8 am until 6 pm—adding up to 28 or 35 hours of teaching per week, depending on the high school level and options.
Improve high school infrastructure.
Just like the state’s territorial management, high schools reproduce social inequalities. Some high schools located in rich districts have no infrastructure issues, while high schools located in low-income areas are falling apart. For example, some high schools have constant bathroom issues, some have no heat during winter and no proper insulation, some have roofs that leak when it rains.
Put an end to “ParcourSup.”
“ParcourSup” is the name of an online platform that students have to use during their final year to list what they would like to do after the school year. Created in 2018, this platform allows students to list their “wishes” and apply to different post-secondary education options such as universities, colleges, vocational and trade schools, and the like. Run by algorithms, this platform has been criticized since its implementation for the opacity of the criteria according to which it fulfills or thwarts students’ wishes. The platform creates considerable stress and competition among students, as those with better grades can be accepted more easily while the others might find no options whatsoever after high school, proving once more that this form of computerized selection increases social disparities and inequalities.
Engage more substitute teachers to maintain continuity in learning.
Students have been complaining that when one of their teachers is sick, there is often no substitute teacher available to take over in order to assist them in continuing to learn. This creates situations in which students sometimes don’t have a teacher for weeks in a specific discipline, even if it will be part of their national high school diploma exam.
All the previous points made by students are the direct result of years of educational restructuring, public spending cuts, and neo-liberal reforms. More and more, public schools are managed like private companies and forced to compete with one another to be more efficient.
This is not to say that without public spending cuts and neo-liberal reforms, the school system would be desirable. Under capitalism, the school system is a tool for the state to coerce us, to crush our individuality, to subdue our rebellious spirits and desires in order to reduce us to a docile workforce that can be exploited for the rest of our lives.
…Burst into Flames
By Monday, September 28, word had finally spread among students to coordinate actions on a larger scale. Early that morning, students started blocking the entrances of their schools, creating makeshift barricades out of whatever they could find nearby and in some cases by setting trash containers ablaze. Some of these blockades might have been the initiative of student unions or small political organizations, but in other cases, these actions were clearly personal initiatives on the part of small groups of highly motivated individuals. Viral images on social media likely helped to spread the word, creating a domino effect among teenagers: “Look at what the other high school is doing. Let’s do it, too!” This first day of action set the tone for the rest of the week as the movement spread beyond Paris and its suburbs.
The following day, while teachers, health care workers, firefighters, and other people from the public sector went on strike and demonstrated by the thousands in various cities against the next government budget cuts and in favor of better wages and working conditions, high-school students increased the pressure by protesting in front of some 400 schools throughout France, fully blockading approximately 40 of them.
Without hesitating, Laurent Nuñez, the current Interior Minister and former Prefect of Police of Paris from 2022 to 2025, decided to repress this emerging movement via brute force. Police were sent to high schools to crush the blockades and disperse the crowds of teenagers. Unsurprisingly, this strategy provoked confrontations between high-school students and heavily equipped police forces.
During the clashes, police used numerous tear gas canisters and shot rubber bullets at students while groups of teenagers and young adults resisted by throwing stones, bottles, fireworks, and other projectiles. By the end of the second day of actions, more than 400 individuals had been arrested across France, with two thirds of those arrests leading to police custody, according to official sources.
Nevertheless, the brutal repression didn’t undermine the determination of the students, who decided to continue the movement, blocking the schools on a massive scale on Wednesday, September 30. Clashes with law enforcement continued to escalate while blockades and other actions spread to numerous major cities, forcing the Interior Minister to officially recognize that same night that despite his repressive strategy, the student movement was gaining momentum and expanding. On September 30, police arrested 625 individuals during the clashes. The first evidence of police brutality circulated online, as at least three students were severely injured by police ammunition.
On Thursday, October 1, the students continued to organize. For the first time since the beginning of the movement, some university students decided to join the struggle—even if they were not as numerous and determined to act as their younger accomplices. Fully 900 demonstrations, riots, and blockades took place all around France. Authorities reported arson attempts both outside and inside some buildings; due to some extensive fire damage, a high school in Nantes will remain closed for a whole month. That day, students were able to shut down at least 160 high schools and to block access to 30 universities. This intense day of action resulted in almost 2000 new arrests, raising the total number of students arrested and detained since the beginning of the week to nearly 3000.
Defending Power at Any Cost
That night, the government realized that its inability to control student unrest was drawing it towards another political crisis.
In order to regain control of the situation, the authorities made several hasty decisions:
The current Prime Minister called a crisis cabinet meeting for the following day to discuss possible plans and strategies to put an end to this unrest, on the grounds that the situation had shifted from a student movement characterized by school blockades to an unruly situation of urban violence.
The Minister of Education announced publicly that 400 high schools would be closed on Friday for “safety reasons,” either because the safety of the working personnel and students could not be assured, or simply on account of property damage. Students who can’t go to their schools will be following their classes online. In doing this, the government is reusing some of the strategies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic in a different context.
The Minister of Education also announced that, the following day, he would meet with student unions and political organizations to hear their demands and find collective solutions in order to end the crisis. By meeting so-called spokespersons, the government wants to weaken the movement by dividing “good” students with legitimate requests from “rioters” and “violent individuals.”
The Interior Minister presented law enforcement agencies with an official list of all the high schools considered “high risk” by its intelligence services. In Paris alone, there were 13 high schools on this list. This suggests that the government has identified potential threats to the reigning order and is preparing to do everything in its power to neutralize these threats.
The Minister of Justice gathered attorneys general in order to discuss the proper legal response to adopt in order to prosecute all the students in custody. It is highly possible that the government will try to process these cases as fast as possible in courts, requesting harsh legal repercussions in order to make an example of these brave young individuals.
Nonetheless, all these announcements barely curbed the momentum of student unrest. Actions, blockades, and clashes with police continued across the country on Friday, October 2 before a well-deserved weekend.
After a full week of political unrest involving intense property destruction, confrontations with law enforcement, and repression, and while the first trials were getting underway, political leaders of every stripe sought to use this situation to their own advantage, reaffirming their various positions.
While Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right party National Rally, emphasized the supposed need to create a new “anti-rioter” law in order to repress those who commit property destruction and resist police, the Macron government criticized the “violence” that took place and played on the classic dichotomy between “good ways of protesting” and “unforgivable ways of protesting”—while at the same time accusing the so-called “far-left” statist party of being responsible of all these events.
On Sunday, October 4, the government officially announced that the following day, more than 400 high schools in France would remain closed as security conditions still could not be assured. The Minister of Education declared that “24 schools had been burnt or ransacked and 78 education staff members injured” since the beginning of the movement.
What Now?
Right now, information is flooding media outlets about the events of Monday, October 5. So far, it is estimated that almost 1000 individuals were arrested today, 589 schools experienced protests or blockades—240 schools in the Paris region alone—and 65 law enforcement agents were injured during confrontations with demonstrators. This suggests that the movement is not slowing down.
We are deeply saddened to learn that on October 5, in Lens, a 15-year-old boy lost his hand after picking up a stun grenade that law enforcement officers used to attack protesters. One of the three teenagers injured last week suffers from a broken jaw, having been shot point blank with a grenade launcher. Currently, the 14-year-old boy can’t open his mouth, as all his bottom teeth were knocked out by the impact and all his upper teeth are broken. Another 16-year-old teenager injured last week lost an eye after an officer shot him in the face with a rubber bullet.
Unfortunately, as the government is not willing to back down and wants to regain control by any means necessary, police violence will only continue to escalate. More and more serious injuries are likely to occur in the next days of confrontations. So far, according to official sources, 215 students have been injured since the beginning of the movement, as well as 85 educational staff members and—supposedly—715 law enforcement officers. These figures are skewed to over-represent police: the state does not distinguish “offensive” injuries such as bruised knuckles from inflicted injuries, while most demonstrators who are injured do not dare to seek treatment for their wounds or, if they do, conceal the fact that they were injured by police violence. Injuring and mutilating people both physically and psychologically is the only solution the state has found to preserve the fragile illusion of order. The police and the government are not here to protect us.
Since the beginning of the student unrest, 5060 people have been arrested, including 4406 minors and 654 adults. As of today, 1802 individuals are facing charges: 1483 minors and 319 adults. Of those, 14 are in pre-trial detention—10 adults and 4 minors.
Right now, people are holding their breath on the eve of the Third Act of this high school movement. On Tuesday, October 6, there is another call to join students in the streets. Several sectors are already planning a variety of blockades elsewhere in France in solidarity.
No one can predict what will happen next or if the current political unrest will continue to gain momentum, reinventing and extending itself until October 17, the next day that there is a national call to take the streets. No one knows if the movement will find its resources to survive the brutal state and police repression that it is experiencing.
All we know for certain is that nothing is written in advance. The courage of the students taking part of this movement should inspire all of us to act now and to continue to push forward in order to fight against all odds for a better world!”
As I wrote in my post of November 17 2021, The Revolution Goes Ever Onward: France’s Gilets Jaunes; This month marks the anniversary of three years of revolution and the Gilets Jaunes protests in France; one which has been met with repression and a shift in the government of France not toward liberation, but toward a brutal police state of force and control.
The Yellow Vest movement emerged with a new precariat as a response to globalization, privatization, worsening economic conditions, and government complicity in the systemic mechanical failures of our civilization from its internal contradictions as we enter the terminal phase of capitalism. Historical forces sweep all before like an unstoppable tide, but like the fall of previous civilizations ours is dying because the final causes are often political decisions.
This means that there is yet hope; we can still change our future from an age of tyranny to one of liberty and a free society of equals.
As with all tyrannies, dissent and resistance become pretexts for the militarization of the police through the counterinsurgency model of policing and the escalation of force and state terror, the universalization of surveillance, and the centralization of power to authority and a carceral state which serves the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites.
Herein we see the globalization of tyranny which employs the strategy of Trump’s numerous coup attempts in 2020 to provide a causus belli for the federal occupation of Democratic cities by having police provocateurs and deniable forces of white supremacist terror disrupt the Black Lives Matter protests with violence and looting. The parallels between America under Trump and France are alarming, but illuminating as well.
Such historical progression from liberty to tyranny is not unique but universal; the nature of states is service to elites, law serves power, fear becomes reaction, and the centralization of power to authority creates tyranny. Here is the origin of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; not in personal sin, unfitness, or the innate depravity of man in the absence of restraining force and control but in systemic inequality.
Tyranny is born of overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power, using the lies and illusions of propaganda, false histories, and alternate realities to divide and conquer its citizens by making some of us complicit in the subjugation of the others through hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness, thus creating fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Other nations have proven less resilient to this subversion of democracy; among them France, which I would have thought impossible. Consider the cultural shift necessary to transform a nation in which protest is enshrined and valorized in the national identity as a patriotic duty to one wherein police brutalize protesters rather than embrace them as comrades in the cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the universal Rights of Man are become contingent on their service to authority. I’d have said the same of us, once.
France is fallen, but like America with our electoral repudiation of Trump and fascism, may yet rise again.
As written by the philosopher Alain Badiou in his Verso Books blog; “That there are numerous reasons for this revolt, and that the movement may therefore be regarded as legitimate, is something I grant without hesitation. I am aware of the depopulation of rural areas, the sad silence of abandoned streets in small and even medium-sized towns; the continuous removal for masses of people of public services, which are gradually being privatized: health centres, hospitals, schools, post offices, train stations, telephones. I know that pauperization, initially creeping and then accelerated, is affecting sections of the population that forty years ago still enjoyed almost continually increasing spending power. I am well aware that material existence is becoming a headache for whole families, especially for many women, who are highly active in the yellow vests movement.
In short, in France there is a very high level of discontent on the part of what we might call the labouring part of the middle class, provincial in the main and with a modest income. The yellow vests movement is a significant representation of this discontent in the form of active, vehement revolt.
For those willing to attend to them, the historico-economic reasons for this uprising are perfectly clear. Moreover, they explain why the yellow vests date the onset of their woes to forty years ago: crudely, the 1980s, which marked the onset of a long capitalist-oligarchical counter-revolution, incorrectly dubbed ‘neo-liberal’ when it is liberal full stop. Which means: a return to the savagery of nineteenth-century capitalism. This counter-revolution occurred in response to the ten ‘red years’ – roughly 1965–75 – whose French epicentre was May 68 and whose global epicentre was the Cultural Revolution in China. But it was considerably accelerated by the collapse of the global enterprise of communism in the USSR and then China: nothing on a world scale now opposed capitalism and its profiteers, in particular the trans-national oligarchy of billionaires, wielding unlimited power.
Meanwhile, from the 1980s to the present France’s situation has gradually deteriorated. This country is no longer what it was during the trente glorieuses of post-war reconstruction. France is no longer a strong world power, a conquering imperialism. Today, it is frequently compared to Italy or even Greece. Competition is causing it to fall back everywhere; its colonial rent is on its last legs and requires innumerably military operations in Africa, which are costly and uncertain, to maintain it. In addition, as the cost of working-class labour power is much lower in Asia, for example, large factories are gradually being relocated abroad. This massive deindustrialization entails a sort of social degradation extending from whole regions, such as Lorraine and its steelmaking or the North of textile factories and coal mines, to the Parisian suburbs, abandoned to property speculation on the countless wastelands left behind by ruined industries.
The consequence of all this is that the French bourgeoisie – its dominant oligarchy, the shareholders of the CAC 40 – can no longer maintain a politically servile middle class on the same footing as before, notably before the 2008 crisis. That middle class was an almost constant historical support of the electoral pre-eminence of the various right wings – a pre-eminence directed against the organized workers of the great industrial concentrations, tempted by communism between the 1920s and the 1980s and 90s. Hence the current uprising by a significant popular section of this middle class, which feels it has been abandoned, against Macron, who is the agent of local capitalist ‘modernization’ – meaning: tightening the screw everywhere, economizing, imposing austerity, privatizing without any of the consideration that still existed thirty years ago for middle-class comfort in exchange for their consent to the dominant system.
The yellow vests, pleading their all too real pauperization, want to be paid a high price for this consent once again. But this is absurd precisely because Macronism results from the fact that the oligarchy, firstly, has had less need of middle-class support, which was expensive to finance, since the communist danger disappeared; and secondly, no longer has the resources to pay for an electoral domestic staff on the same scale. And it therefore has to shift, under the cover of ‘indispensable reforms’, towards an authoritarian politics: a new form of state power will serve as a support for lucrative ‘austerity’, extended from the popular class of the unemployed and workers to the lower strata of the middle class. And this for the benefit for the real masters of this world – namely, the principal shareholders of the major groups in industry, commerce, raw materials, transport and communications.
In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx had already examined this kind of conjuncture and referred, in essence accurately, to what are today’s yellow vests. He wrote this: ‘The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.’
They strive all the more bitterly today because the French bourgeoisie is no longer in a position, given the turn taken by globalized capitalism, to maintain, let alone increase, their spending power. It is true that the yellow vests ‘fight against the bourgeoisie’, as Marx puts it. But they do so to restore an old, outdated order, not to invent a new social and political order, whose names have been ‘socialism’ or, above all, ‘communism’ since the nineteenth century. For close on two centuries anything that was not more or less defined in accordance with a revolutionary orientation was quite rightly regarded as pertaining to capitalist reaction. In politics, there are only two main roads. We must absolutely return to this conviction: two ways in politics, only two, and never a ‘democratic’ dusting of pseudo-tendencies under the leadership of a self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ oligarchy.
These general considerations enable us to revert to the concrete characteristics of the yellow vest movement. Its spontaneous characteristics so to speak – those not attributable to interventions external to the main current of the uprising – are indeed ‘reactionary’ as Marx puts it, but in a more modern sense: we might term the movement’s subjectivity a popular individualism mobilizing personal anger at the new forms of servitude imposed by the dictatorship of Capital today.
As written by Andre Kapsas in Jacobin; “When the gilets jaunes revolt began on November 17, 2018, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to barricades and roundabouts across France, police had initially seemed overwhelmed. “I thought it was the revolution,” says Youri, sitting with a group of fellow leftist activists from Montreuil, eastern Paris. His comrade Julien remembers a Paris deserted by the police: “There was no more state, the street was ours, not a cop in sight; we could roam through the whole city, we thought we were hallucinating.”
But if in the very first days of the movement the authorities vacillated, before long they turned to crude repression. Week after week over the next year and more, the gilets jaunes took to the streets — and the police met them with increasing brutality. “Only” one person was killed, but hundreds were left with serious, even permanent, injuries; over eleven thousand people were arrested; and at least several hundred are still in jail. Through their response, French authorities introduced new norms of judicial repression — both dramatically and permanently restricting the room for democratic protest.”
The police forces’ violent reaction was completely disproportionate,” lawyer Arié Alimi tells me over the phone — emphasizing that the gilets jaunes mostly attacked objects, while the police attacked people. For seventeen years an ardent defender of victims of police brutality, he talks with indignation about the “thousands and thousands of people injured, with considerable physical and psychological traumas.” Advocacy officer on civil liberties at Amnesty International, Anne-Sophie Simpere agrees, describing the police reaction as “illegitimate, unnecessary, and completely disproportionate.” She calls the events in December 2018 a rapid “intensification of previously existing, worrying trends in the policing of demonstrations” — citing the use of weapons and a switch from crowd control to aggressive arrests that cause serious injuries.
According to the “Désarmons-les” (“Let’s Disarm Them”) collective, French police maimed almost as many people in the first six months of the gilets jaunes movement as they had in the last twenty years. The main serious injuries were eyes being put out (twenty-four) and hands torn off (five), mostly because of the massive use of weapons classified as war weapons, such as flash-balls and sting-ball grenades. Zineb Redouane, an eighty-year-old woman, was also killed by the police, as a tear gas grenade exploded during a protest in Marseille; in her final hours, she claimed that she had been targeted on purpose. Another 284 head injuries were reported among protesters as well as journalists, who were also often attacked by police.
Another major urban center of the movement was Toulouse, southwest France, where Pascal Gassiot took part in almost all demonstrations as a member of the independent “Observatory of Police Practices.” He tells me that “the level of violence was extremely high, with a striking asymmetry in the police response.” Despite wearing recognizable clothing and standing to one side, observers were attacked twenty-seven times by police in Toulouse; four of them ended up in the hospital, including Gassiot himself. “There is absolutely no doubt that they were doing it on purpose,” he tells me: “I was filming a protester being charged over nothing, and I didn’t see the [Brigade anti-criminalité] coming in, with one of them tackling me to the ground.” With his head cracked open and two broken ribs, Gassiot had to be taken to the emergency room. He nonetheless soon returned to his work.
For Gassiot, the police violence obeyed the political strategy of a government full of “class contempt” for rural, lower-middle-class, and poor protesters. “They thought they’d strike a good blow on their mug, and these plebs would go back in their hole,” he sarcastically notes. A veteran radical left activist, the sixty-five-year-old has no doubt that “police violence is on a level unseen since the 1970s, worse than May ’68″ when France was on the brink of revolution. “It was like the war in Algeria, but without the dead,” he says — drawing parallels with the state violence of sixty years ago, when police killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Algerians and French communists on the streets of Paris during the colonial war in Algeria.
Bringing the War Home
The infamous Brigade anti-criminalité (BAC) best illustrates this gradual importation of methods of colonial policing into the French mainland, moving first into the banlieues — the working-class suburbs heavily populated by people with a migrant background — and finally extending them across the whole population. As Alimi stresses, it was a former senior civil servant in the colonies who set up these brigades in Paris and its suburbs in the early 1970s. “The BAC were brigades created specifically for Algerian migrant populations,” he explains.
In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics.
Alimi invokes the long history of police violence against the workers’ movement, saying that we should properly speak of “contemporary police violence, with new methods.” For him, “the working-class suburbs were a laboratory for new practices of police repression introduced by the BAC, with new arrest techniques, permanent control, racial profiling, and new weapons like the flash-balls and grenades. . . . The poor migrant populations were guinea pigs for those methods, that then spread to political activists, social movements, and now to protesters in city centers.” The main architect of this shift was Nicolas Sarkozy, interior minister when he replaced neighborhood police with intervention units like the BAC in 2003, before becoming president in 2007.
In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics. Simpere speaks of “very repressive laws that allow almost anyone, including peaceful demonstrators, to be arrested, often ‘preventatively.’” More specifically, she points out the use of two vaguely defined laws that she considers contrary to international law: one punishing the “preparation of group violence,” under which many people with protective gear like goggles have faced judicial persecution; and one forbidding “contempt toward police forces,” used more than twenty thousand times in 2019 alone. She cites the case of protesters in Narbonne prosecuted for this offense, simply because they had a banner denouncing the severe injuries caused by flash-balls.
In early December 2018, the authorities started to widely disregard their own laws. Alimi calls it “state illegality,” a concept he plans to elaborate in an upcoming book: “The state itself becomes criminal,” he explains, “as its representatives decide to deliberately violate the law to prevent the expression of civil liberties.” In addition to mass preventive arrests and illegal searches, he names the case of a state prosecutor calling on his substitutes to keep people in custody for the maximum length in order to prevent them from demonstrating, despite having no evidence against them. “France shifted from a justice system that punishes actions to a justice system that punishes intentions,” he says.
This judicial repression has led to unprecedented numbers of arrests, with more than eleven thousand detained and more than three thousand convicted. “The courts were working like a production line,” recalls Gassiot, “with speedy trials on Mondays for those arrested on Saturdays.” Alimi counts about seven hundred to eight hundred gilets jaunes currently in jail — and he has himself defended many of those arrested. “They have been victims of an incomparable judicial violence and discrimination; they’ve been treated like animals,” he says. Unusually for France, even people with no criminal records were sentenced to jail time. “They were lower-middle-class people endangered by poverty; they were simply trying to keep their head above water, but they were pushed down — and drowned.”
Police Impunity
This swift and merciless justice against the gilets jaunes contrasted with the lack of judicial reaction to police brutality. Despite the thousands of acts of violence against protesters — many of them proven by solid video evidence — the available information reveals that only seven police officers have been convicted. All of them received suspended sentences, with no discharge. Simpere describes the cases as “largely symbolic,” expressing her “serious doubt that there will be sentences corresponding to the seriousness of injuries.” Alimi is less diplomatic, calling the few convictions “crumbs thrown to the people to calm popular anger.”
Alimi goes further, stressing the whole systemic structure enabling police impunity in France. He says it starts with police officers and their hierarchy “who never acknowledge any act of violence and put into place a set of dissimulation measures every time there is any violence, including the systematic faking of official reports.” He then goes on to point out the lack of judicial independence in France, where “prosecutors are under the authority of the Justice Ministry, and see themselves as protecting public order, which leads them to protect the police.” This translates into prosecutors lying and blocking inquiries, among other things, by reacting more than thirty days after events, once footage from public cameras has already been erased.
Despite facing this “judicial wall,” Alimi says that amateur videos are changing the game. His team has imported techniques from groups like Black Lives Matter, making online calls for videos and witnesses. “Those videos have shattered the administration’s lies and have revealed dissimulation techniques.” As for judges, Alimi also points out that some are starting to recognize the need for real investigations into police work, but he says that it is too early to make an honest appraisal of investigations into police violence against the gilets jaunes. “We will know in two to three years,” he says, “then we can make a final assessment of those investigations, and maybe even talk about a transformation of the approach to police violence.”
As I wrote in my post of 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; Revolt against racist police terror is met with brutal repression of dissent and becomes a gateway to Revolution in France in an echo and reflection of America’s Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, in the wake of the French police murders of nonwhite boys so very like the murder of George Floyd and countless others in America.
In the streets of Marseille and throughout France tonight, we fight for a nation which has forgotten its heart.
And if France cannot reclaim her heart as a bastion of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity and a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights throughout the world and for all humankind, we are all truly lost.
Here as in many theatres of liberation struggle and across vast chasms of time I have answered the question of who I am with the words; I am the Revolution. Among the things I mean by this is that I think of myself as a Jacobin in terms of political identity, and an inheritor and steward of revolutionary struggle. Here in Marseille, the legacies of this history and the questions of who is human and who a citizen, of unequal power in a free society of equals divided against itself by race, gender, faith, and class as nationalist identity politics in serve to the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites bears special and unique meanings and existential threats to our future and our humanity.
I cannot imagine this but in terms of the great film Casablanca and the iconic song La Marseillaise, the national anthem of France first proposed by Robespierre in 1790 as the battle hymn of the revolutionaries of Marseille had become that of the Revolution itself.
I wonder now, what would those revolutionaries think of France today, as vilified and destitute underclasses protest for their universal human rights of liberty and equality under the law of the nation which established them as a new world order and centuries ago seized power from that of kings and priests?
In Marseille, where the Marseillaise was born as a hope for the future of humankind, and where now that hope is reborn in streets of fire with the glorious resistance of the reviled others of a fallen empire whose ghettos rise to defy the carceral state and systems of dehumanization, and make claim to the promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
I believe the revolutionaries of 1790 who created La Marseillaise would recognize themselves in those of Marseille today. The question which remains is, is France still the nation which they founded and dreamed?
How would Humphrey Bogart’s antifascist character Rick Blaine in Casablanca regard the protests? How would Camus and the heroes of the Resistance of the Second World War judge their counterparts today?
Who now are the Occupation, with guns and badges to enforce an imagined racial superiority and the caste privilege of hegemonic elites? And who now the Resistance, who place their lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased?
We who identify ourselves as Antifa and the Resistance on the one hand and as the Revolution on the other and claim membership in this history will be judged by these two interdependent and parallel sets of motivating, informing, and shaping forces; the legacies of the American and French revolutions which birthed democracy and human rights, and of the civilizational struggle against the Nazis and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which aspires to realize our ideals as a free society of equals.
In this Defining Moment and Rashomon Gate Event, we each of us must choose; who do we want to become, we humans? What futures shall we win for our possibilities of becoming human? A world of masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!
As written by Rokhaya Diallo in The Guardian, in an article entitled France has ignored racist police violence for decades. This uprising is the price of that denial; “Since the video went viral of the brutal killing by a police officer of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot dead at point-blank range, the streets and housing estates of many poorer French neighbourhoods have been in a state of open revolt. “France faces George Floyd moment,” I read in the international media, as if we were suddenly waking up to the issue of racist police violence. This naive comparison itself reflects a denial of the systemic racist violence that for decades has been inherent to French policing.
I first became involved in antiracist campaigning after a 2005 event that had many parallels with the killing of Nahel. Three teenagers aged between 15 and 17 were heading home one afternoon after playing football with friends when they were suddenly pursued by police. Although they had done nothing wrong (and this was confirmed by a subsequent inquiry) these terrified youngsters, these children, hid from the police in an electricity substation. Two of them, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, were electrocuted. The third, Muhittin Altun, suffered appalling burns and life-changing injuries.
Those boys could have been my little brothers, or my younger cousins. I remember the sense of incredulity: how could they simply lose their lives to such terrible injustice? “If they go in there [to the power plant], I don’t fancy their chances of making it” were the chilling words spoken by one of the police officers as he watched this horrific event play out.
France was ablaze for weeks with the rioting that followed – the worst in years. But just as now, with the death of Nahel, the initial media and political reaction in 2005 was to criminalise the victims, to scrutinise their past, as if any of it could justify their atrocious deaths. As if responsibility for their tragedy lay in their own hands. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, sullied the memory of young people whose fear had led to their death with the remark: “If you have nothing to hide, you don’t run when you see the police.”
The numbers of cases of police brutality grow relentlessly every year. In France, according to the Defender of Rights, young men perceived to be black or of north African origin are 20 times more likely to be subjected to police identity checks than the rest of the population. The same institution denounced the absence of any appeal against being checked as a form of systemic police discrimination. Why would we not feel scared of the police?
In 1999, our country, the supposed birthplace of human rights, was condemned by the European court of human rights for torture, following the sexual abuse by police of a young man of north African origin. In 2012 Human Rights Watch said: “the identity check system is open to abuse by the French police … These abuses include repeated checks – “countless”, in the words of most interviewees – sometimes involving physical and verbal abuse.” Now, after the death of Nahel, a UN rights body has urged France to address “profound problems of racism and racial discrimination” within its law enforcement agencies.
Even our own courts have condemned the French state for “gross negligence”, ruling in 2016 that “the practice of racial profiling was a daily reality in France denounced by all international, European, and domestic institutions and that for all that, despite commitments made by the French authorities at the highest level, this finding had not led to any positive measures”. More recently, in December 2022, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination denounced both the racist discourse of politicians and police ID checks “disproportionately targeting certain minorities”.
Despite such overwhelming findings, our president, Emmanuel Macron, still considers the use of the term “police violence” to be unacceptable. This time, Macron has unequivocally condemned an act that he called “unacceptable” – which is significant. Yet I fear that the focus is being placed on an individual police officer instead of questioning entrenched attitudes and structures within the police that are perpetuating racism. And not a single one of the damning reports and rulings has led to any meaningful reform of the police as an institution.
Worse, a law passed in 2017 has made it easier for police to resort to the use of firearms. Officers can now shoot without even having to justify it on the grounds of self-defence. Since this change in the law, according to the researcher Sebastian Roché, the number of fatal shootings against moving vehicles has increased fivefold. Last year, 13 people were shot dead in their vehicles.
Nahel’s death is another chapter in a long and traumatic story. Whatever our age, many of us French who are descended from postcolonial immigration carry within us this fear combined with rage, the result of decades of accumulated injustice. This year, we commemorate the 40th anniversary of a seminal event. In 1983, Toumi Djaïdja, a 19-year-old from a Lyon banlieue, became the victim of police violence that left him in a coma for two weeks. This was the genesis of the March for Equality and Against Racism, the first antiracist demonstration on a national scale, in which 100,000 people took part.
For 40 years this movement has not stopped calling out the violence we see targeted at working-class neighbourhoods and more broadly black people and people of north African origin. The crimes of the police are at the root of many of the uprisings in France’s most impoverished urban areas, and it is these crimes that must be condemned first. After years of marches, petitions, open letters and public requests, a disaffected youth finds no other way to be heard than by rioting. It is difficult to avoid asking if, without so many uprisings in cities across France, Nahel’s death would have garnered the attention it has. And as Martin Luther King rightly said: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
As written by Break Through News; “Mayor of Saint-Denis Bally Bagayoko protects a line of French students from police as they attack the protesters.
France is seeing its largest student protests in decades, with youth demanding government action on teacher shortages, dilapidated classrooms, and overcrowded conditions. Entering their third week, the demonstrations have broadened into wider public outrage over general government austerity and budget cuts”
November 17 2021 The Revolution Goes Ever Onward: France’s Gilets Jaunes
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
5 octobre 2026 – Vive la Révolution ! Les barricades sont de retour en France
Il y a quelques jours, l’ancien réseau de communication du mouvement des Gilets jaunes s’est réactivé et a mobilisé des dizaines de milliers de manifestants lors de la plus vaste action de masse soutenue en France depuis les manifestations de Marseille en 2023 — auxquelles j’ai assisté et pris part, m’y étant rendu pour « éteindre le feu avec de l’essence », comme nous l’enseigne David Bowie ; car lorsque le Chaos lance son chant de sirène, je ne peux m’empêcher d’y répondre par le mien.
L’Année des barricades est de nouveau là, comme en 1871, 1940 et 1968 ; quel véritable fils ou quelle véritable fille de France — ou de la Révolution, où que ce soit sur Terre — refuserait de faire preuve de solidarité envers ce peuple qui lutte aujourd’hui dans la rue pour la liberté de nous tous ?
Vive le Revolution!
1er juillet 2023 A Marseille et dans toute la France, une épreuve de devenirs et d’idées concurrentes de l’être humain, du sens et de la valeur ; Une société libre d’égaux contre les fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol et la liberté contre un état carcéral de force et de contrôle
La révolte contre la terreur policière raciste se heurte à une répression brutale de la dissidence et devient une porte d’entrée vers la Révolution en France dans un écho et un reflet des manifestations américaines Black Lives Matter de 2020, à la suite des meurtres par la police française de garçons non blancs si similaires au meurtre de George Floyd et d’innombrables autres en Amérique.
Dans les rues de Marseille et de toute la France ce soir, nous nous battons pour une nation qui a oublié son cœur.
Et si la France ne peut pas reprendre son cœur de bastion de la Liberté, de l’Egalité et de la Fraternité et garante de la démocratie et de nos droits humains universels dans le monde et pour toute l’humanité, nous sommes tous vraiment perdus.
Ici, comme dans de nombreux théâtres de lutte de libération et à travers de vastes abîmes de temps, j’ai répondu à la question de savoir qui je suis avec les mots ; Je suis la Révolution. Parmi les choses que je veux dire par là, c’est que je me considère comme un jacobin en termes d’identité politique, et un héritier et intendant de la lutte révolutionnaire. Ici à Marseille, les héritages de cette histoire et les questions de qui est humain et qui est citoyen, de pouvoir inégal dans une société libre d’égaux divisée contre elle-même par la race, le sexe, la foi et la classe comme politique identitaire nationaliste au service de la la richesse, le pouvoir et les privilèges des élites hégémoniques ont des significations spéciales et uniques et des menaces existentielles pour notre avenir et notre humanité.
Je ne peux pas l’imaginer mais en termes du grand film Casablanca et de la chanson emblématique La Marseillaise, l’hymne national de la France proposé pour la première fois par Robespierre en 1790 alors que l’hymne de guerre des révolutionnaires de Marseille était devenu celui de la Révolution elle-même.
Je me demande maintenant, que penseraient ces révolutionnaires de la France aujourd’hui, alors que des sous-classes vilipendées et démunies protestent pour leurs droits humains universels de liberté et d’égalité en vertu de la loi de la nation qui les a établis en tant que nouvel ordre mondial et qui, il y a des siècles, ont pris le pouvoir de celui de rois et prêtres?
À Marseille, où la Marseillaise est née comme un espoir pour l’avenir de l’humanité, et où maintenant cet espoir renaît dans les rues de feu avec la glorieuse résistance des autres vilipendés d’un empire déchu dont les ghettos se dressent pour défier l’État et les systèmes carcéraux de déshumanisation et revendiquer la promesse de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité.
Je crois que les révolutionnaires de 1790 qui ont créé La Marseillaise se reconnaîtraient dans ceux de Marseille aujourd’hui. La question qui demeure est la suivante : la France est-elle toujours la nation qu’ils ont fondée et rêvée ?
Comment le personnage antifasciste de Humphrey Bogart, Rick Blaine à Casablanca, considérerait-il les manifestations ? Comment Camus et les héros de la Résistance de la Seconde Guerre mondiale jugeraient-ils aujourd’hui leurs homologues ?
Qui sont maintenant l’Occupation, avec des fusils et des badges pour imposer une supériorité raciale imaginaire et le privilège de caste des élites hégémoniques ? Et qui maintenant la Résistance, qui mettent leur vie en balance avec tous ceux que Frantz Fanon appelait Les Misérables de la Terre, les impuissants et les dépossédés, les réduits au silence et les effacés ?
Nous qui nous identifions comme Antifa et la Résistance d’une part et comme la Révolution d’autre part et revendiquons notre appartenance à cette histoire serons jugés par ces deux ensembles interdépendants et parallèles de forces motivantes, informatrices et façonnantes ; l’héritage des révolutions américaine et française qui ont donné naissance à la démocratie et aux droits de l’homme, et de la lutte civilisationnelle contre les nazis et les fascismes du sang, de la foi et du sol qui aspirent à réaliser nos idéaux en tant que société libre d’égaux.
Dans ce moment déterminant et l’événement Rashomon Gate, chacun de nous doit choisir; qui voulons-nous devenir, nous les humains ? Quels avenirs allons-nous gagner pour nos possibilités de devenir humains ? Un monde de maîtres et d’esclaves ou une société libre d’égaux ?
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité !
17 novembre 2021 La révolution continue : les gilets jaunes de la France
Ce mois-ci marque l’anniversaire de trois ans de révolution et des manifestations des Gilets Jaunes en France ; un qui a rencontré la répression et un changement dans le gouvernement de la France non pas vers la libération, mais vers un état policier brutal de force et de contrôle.
Le mouvement des gilets jaunes a émergé avec un nouveau précariat en réponse à la mondialisation, à la privatisation, à la détérioration des conditions économiques et à la complicité du gouvernement dans les défaillances mécaniques systémiques de notre civilisation à partir de ses contradictions internes alors que nous entrons dans la phase terminale du capitalisme. Les forces historiques balaient tout avant comme une marée imparable, mais comme la chute des civilisations précédentes, la nôtre est en train de mourir parce que les causes finales sont souvent des décisions politiques.
Cela signifie qu’il y a encore de l’espoir ; nous pouvons encore changer notre avenir d’une époque de tyrannie à une époque de liberté et d’une société libre d’égaux.
Comme pour toutes les tyrannies, la dissidence et la résistance deviennent des prétextes pour la militarisation de la police à travers le modèle de police contre-insurrectionnel et l’escalade de la force et de la terreur d’État, l’universalisation de la surveillance et la centralisation du pouvoir à l’autorité et à un État carcéral qui sert le richesse, pouvoir et privilège des élites hégémoniques.
Ici, nous voyons la mondialisation de la tyrannie qui utilise la stratégie des nombreuses tentatives de coup d’État de Trump en 2020 pour fournir un causus belli à l’occupation fédérale des villes démocrates en faisant en sorte que des provocateurs policiers et des forces déniables de la terreur suprémaciste blanche perturbent les manifestations de Black Lives Matter avec violence et pillage. Les parallèles entre l’Amérique sous Trump et la France sont alarmants, mais aussi éclairants.
Une telle progression historique de la liberté à la tyrannie n’est pas unique mais universelle ; la nature des États est au service des élites, la loi sert le pouvoir, la peur devient réaction et la centralisation du pouvoir à l’autorité crée la tyrannie. Voici l’origine du mal dans l’Anneau wagnérien de la peur, du pouvoir et de la force ; pas dans le péché personnel, l’inaptitude ou la dépravation innée de l’homme en l’absence de force restrictive et de contrôle, mais dans l’inégalité systémique.
La tyrannie est née d’une peur écrasante et généralisée armée par l’autorité au service du pouvoir, utilisant les mensonges et les illusions de la propagande, de fausses histoires et des réalités alternatives pour diviser et conquérir ses citoyens en rendant certains d’entre nous complices de l’assujettissement des autres à travers des hiérarchies d’appartenance et d’altérité exclusive, créant ainsi des fascismes de sang, de foi et de terre.
D’autres nations se sont montrées moins résistantes à cette subversion de la démocratie ; parmi eux la France, ce que j’aurais cru impossible. Considérez le changement culturel nécessaire pour transformer une nation dans laquelle la protestation est inscrite et valorisée dans l’identité nationale comme un devoir patriotique envers une nation dans laquelle la police brutalise les manifestants plutôt que de les considérer comme des camarades pour la cause de la liberté, de l’égalité et de la fraternité, et de l’universel. Les droits de l’homme sont devenus subordonnés à leur service à l’autorité. J’aurais dit la même chose de nous, une fois.
La France est tombée, mais comme l’Amérique avec notre répudiation électorale de Trump et du fascisme, elle peut encore se relever.
Comme l’écrit le philosophe Alain Badiou dans son blog Verso Books ; « Qu’il y ait de nombreuses raisons à cette révolte, et que le mouvement puisse donc être considéré comme légitime, c’est quelque chose que j’accorde sans hésiter. Je suis conscient du dépeuplement des zones rurales, du triste silence des rues abandonnées dans les petites et même moyennes villes ; la suppression continue pour des masses de personnes des services publics, qui se privatisent progressivement : centres de santé, hôpitaux, écoles, bureaux de poste, gares, téléphones. Je sais que la paupérisation, d’abord rampante puis accélérée, touche des couches de la population qui, il y a quarante ans, bénéficiaient encore d’un pouvoir d’achat en augmentation quasi continue. Je suis bien consciente que l’existence matérielle devient un casse-tête pour des familles entières, notamment pour de nombreuses femmes, très actives dans le mouvement des gilets jaunes.
Bref, il y a en France un très haut niveau de mécontentement de la part de ce qu’on pourrait appeler la partie laborieuse de la classe moyenne, majoritairement provinciale et aux revenus modestes. Le mouvement des Gilets jaunes est une représentation significative de ce mécontentement sous la forme d’une révolte active et véhémente.
Pour ceux qui veulent bien y assister, les raisons historico-économiques de ce soulèvement sont parfaitement claires. De plus, ils expliquent pourquoi les gilets jaunes datent le début de leurs malheurs d’il y a quarante ans : grossièrement, les années 1980, qui ont marqué le début d’une longue contre-révolution capitaliste-oligarchique, surnommée à tort « néo-libérale » alors qu’elle est libérale pleine arrêter. Ce qui veut dire : un retour à la sauvagerie du capitalisme du XIXe siècle. Cette contre-révolution s’est produite en réponse aux dix « années rouges » – environ 1965-1975 – dont l’épicentre français était mai 68 et dont l’épicentre mondial était la Révolution culturelle en Chine. Mais elle a été considérablement accélérée par l’effondrement de l’entreprise mondiale du communisme en URSS puis en Chine : plus rien à l’échelle mondiale ne s’opposait désormais au capitalisme et à ses profiteurs, en particulier l’oligarchie transnationale des milliardaires, au pouvoir illimité.
Parallèlement, des années 1980 à nos jours, la situation de la France s’est progressivement dégradée. Ce pays n’est plus ce qu’il était pendant les trente glorieuses de la reconstruction d’après-guerre. La France n’est plus une puissance mondiale forte, un impérialisme conquérant. Aujourd’hui, elle est fréquemment comparée à l’Italie ou même à la Grèce. La concurrence la fait reculer partout ; sa rente coloniale est à bout de souffle et nécessite d’innombrables opérations militaires en Afrique, coûteuses et incertaines, pour la maintenir. De plus, comme le coût de la force de travail de la classe ouvrière est beaucoup plus faible en Asie, par exemple, les grandes usines sont progressivement délocalisées à l’étranger. Cette désindustrialisation massive entraîne une sorte de dégradation sociale s’étendant de régions entières, comme la Lorraine et sa sidérurgie ou le Nord des usines textiles et des mines de charbon, à la banlieue parisienne, abandonnée à la spéculation immobilière sur les innombrables friches laissées pour compte par les industries en ruine.
La conséquence de tout cela est que la bourgeoisie française – son oligarchie dominante, les actionnaires du CAC 40 – ne peut plus maintenir une classe moyenne politiquement servile sur le même pied qu’avant, notamment avant la crise de 2008. Cette classe moyenne était un soutien historique quasi constant de la prééminence électorale des différentes droites – prééminence dirigée contre les ouvriers organisés des grandes concentrations industrielles, tentés par le communisme entre les années 1920 et les années 1980 et 1990. D’où le soulèvement actuel d’une importante frange populaire de cette classe moyenne, qui se sent abandonnée, contre Macron, qui est l’agent de la « modernisation » capitaliste locale – c’est-à-dire : serrer la vis partout, économiser, imposer l’austérité, privatiser sans de la considération qui existait encore il y a trente ans pour le confort des classes moyennes en échange de leur adhésion au système dominant.
Les gilets jaunes, plaidant leur trop réelle paupérisation, veulent une nouvelle fois se faire payer au prix fort ce consentement. Mais c’est absurde précisément parce que le macronisme résulte du fait que l’oligarchie, d’une part, a eu moins besoin d’un soutien bourgeois, qui coûtait cher à financer, depuis que le danger communiste a disparu ; et d’autre part, n’a plus les moyens de payer un personnel de maison électoral au même barème. Et elle doit donc basculer, sous couvert de « réformes indispensables », vers une politique autoritaire : une nouvelle forme de pouvoir d’État servira de support à une « austérité » lucrative, étendue de la classe populaire des chômeurs et des ouvriers aux couches inférieures de la classe moyenne. Et ce au profit des vrais maîtres de ce monde, à savoir les principaux actionnaires des grands groupes de l’industrie, du commerce, des matières premières, des transports et des communications.
Dans le Manifeste communiste, rédigé en 1848, Marx avait déjà examiné ce genre de conjoncture et fait référence, en substance avec justesse, à ce que sont les gilets jaunes d’aujourd’hui. Il écrit ceci : « La petite bourgeoisie, le petit industriel, le boutiquier, l’artisan, le paysan, tous ceux-là luttent contre la bourgeoisie, pour sauver de l’extinction leur existence comme fractions de la classe moyenne. Ils ne sont donc pas révolutionnaires, mais conservateurs. Bien plus, ils sont réactionnaires, car ils essaient de faire reculer la roue de l’histoire.
Ils luttent d’autant plus âprement aujourd’hui que la bourgeoisie française n’est plus en mesure, compte tenu de la tournure prise par le capitalisme mondialisé, de maintenir, et encore moins d’augmenter, son pouvoir d’achat. Il est vrai que les gilets jaunes « luttent contre la bourgeoisie », comme le dit Marx. Mais ils le font pour restaurer un ordre ancien et dépassé, non pour inventer un nouvel ordre social et politique, dont les noms sont « socialisme » ou, surtout, « communisme » depuis le XIXe siècle. Pendant près de deux siècles, tout ce qui n’était pas plus ou moins défini selon une orientation révolutionnaire était à juste titre considéré comme relevant de la réaction capitaliste. En politique, il n’y a que deux routes principales. Il faut absolument revenir sur cette conviction : deux voies en politique, deux seulement, et jamais un saupoudrage « démocratique » de pseudo-tendances sous la houlette d’une oligarchie « libérale » autoproclamée.
Ces considérations générales permettent de revenir aux caractéristiques concrètes du mouvement des gilets jaunes. Ses caractéristiques spontanées pour ainsi dire – celles qui ne sont pas attribuables à des interventions extérieures au courant principal du soulèvement – sont bien « réactionnaires » comme le dit Marx, mais dans un sens plus moderne : on pourrait qualifier la subjectivité du mouvement d’individualisme populaire mobilisant la colère personnelle. aux nouvelles formes de servitude imposées par la dictature du Capital.
As written by Break Through News; “Mayor of Saint-Denis Bally Bagayoko protects a line of French students from police as they attack the protesters.
France is seeing its largest student protests in decades, with youth demanding government action on teacher shortages, dilapidated classrooms, and overcrowded conditions. Entering their third week, the demonstrations have broadened into wider public outrage over general government austerity and budget cuts”
November 17 2021 The Revolution Goes Ever Onward: France’s Gilets Jaunes
One day she will dip me for the last time, and let go, and I will be forever falling in rapture and the embrace of the stars from whose hearts the atoms of our bodies are born, gladly lost among endless chasms of darkness and light as we always are and ever shall be, part of eternity and the ineffable though sometimes in life we lose our awareness of our universality and immersion in the Infinite; but not today.
Brushes with Death which we survive come as reminders of who and what we truly are, the salt of the sea in our veins, the history of myriads of lives written in our form and encompassing all that has come before in our evolution, and which inform, motivate, and shape our possibilities of becoming human. We are individuals who play our parts and are gone only in terms of our surfaces, but beath our masks and our performances of self on the stage of history we ride the momentum of vast waves of oceanic consciousness, and to this I do not fear return.
We are ephemeral things, we humans, shaping each other’s lives in a Brownian motion we call fate to rob life’s randomness of its power over us, and to bring meaning to our empty storm and fury. Where some might find the indifference of the universe to our lives threatening, and the vacuity of a universe utterly free of being, meaning, or value beyond our own fragile humanity, I find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness.
Beyond this Veil of Tears lie countless universes to explore, though we may glimpse it only in momentary lightning flashes of illumination which free us from the limits of our form.
And so we must say yes to the pain of life as well as its pleasures, for there is no escape from the pain of being human, and yes to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world though the great mission of being human is to bring healing to them, yes to our monstrosity though we fight to the last and with all that we are and have against its actions and consequences when they manifest in the real world.
This I say not frivolously but days after spending seven hours in the emergency room, written while struggling with bouts of pain like being on fire, and with awareness that I or any of us may die at any moment without warning and often for no reason at all.
There is nothing to be concerned about on my behalf and no cause for alarm, friends, as yet again, and perhaps hideously, I walk away from dancing with Death with no lasting harm; I mention this incident only to warrant that I am no sighing Byronic figure, a stock character type created in Wolfgang von Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and interrogated in Faust, to which Byron wrote Child Harold’s Pilgrimage and Manfred respectively in direct reply, lamenting imaginary woes from a position of immense privilege without self awareness that the pathology of disconnection and the hollowing out of our humanity are costs of that privilege. Though at my best I may claim similarities with Byron as he chose to place his life in the balance with the people of Greece in their glorious struggle for liberation, as these past months I have been fighting with Ansar Allah in Yemen for the liberation of Palestine and elsewhere for justice as I see it, as I have across the last forty four years in revolutions and resistance movements throughout the world, where ever men hunger to be free.
And like Ahab, I have no intention of giving up the fight for our humanity against Authority and those who would enslave us and steal our souls; “”Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.”
It has ever been thus with me; I remain the boy who recited Henley’s poem Invictus to a high school assembly on the first day of his Freshman year, to introduce myself and set the terms of struggle between us. I think of it now in terms of a friend I lost in a glorious doomed attempt to break Mandela out of prison on Robbin Island in March of 1982, because it was Mandela’s favorite poem as well as one I adopted as a personal life mission statement at the age of fourteen.
Let us claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, by any means necessary, and rise from the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory of even survival.
There is a line in the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spoken by Sean Connery which goes; “Old tigers, sensing the end, they’re at their most fierce. And they go down fighting.” I have so chosen, but this is not what I ask of you. Friends, you must live to find a better future than we have the past; reimagine us, what it means to be human and how we choose to be human together, and through action make it real. Let our lives be monuments to the unconquerable human spirit and beacons of hope in the darkness, let us become fulcrums and change the balance of power in the world, let us discover and create Beauty, joy, and love to balance the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Lord Byron in his autobiographical novel Manfred, addressing Authority as he chooses death before subjugation;
“The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark,
The lightning of my being, is as bright,
Pervading, and far-darting as your own,
And shall not yield to yours, though coop’d in clay!”
With Dylan Thomas let us rage against the dying of the light.
As I wrote in my post of December 26 2021, Reflections During the After Party; As the festivities of a wonderfully out of control after party swirl around me with raucous and dissonant sounds and the silent hungers, unanswerable pain, and strange desires of our guests press upon me like living brands, I sit among my ghosts, dreaming their dreams, both those they lived and those yet to be realized.
On such occasions as this, surrounded by feasts and family, I am also surrounded by chasms of darkness, loneliness, disconnection, and the voices and presences of the dead which interpenetrate my flesh with the shadows of their histories, literally in the case of our genetic code as transforms of messages about how to shape ourselves to the material world and its imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle to become human.
We are bearers of stories, made of memories and histories which echo back through the numberless unknown lives of our ancestors as an unfolding of human intention and poetic vision, prochronisms or histories expressed in our form of how we have solved problems of adaptation like the shells of fantastic sea creatures, songs which reverberate through our lives as epigenetic informing, motivating, and shaping forces which are not unique to us but part of an immense and incomprehensible wave of the limitless possibilities of becoming human, which can seize us with dreams of being, meaning, and value we ourselves cannot imagine.
Such is the power of vision as reimagination and transformation, and the nature of our persona and identities as performances in a theatre of which, as Shakespeare teaches us, all the world is a stage. What is important is to ask, whose stage is it? In whose story do we perform our lives? For these questions direct us not to the subjugation to authority of learned helplessness, but to seizures of power and revolutionary struggle.
How answer we the terrible pronouncement in MacBeth,
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness and the legacies of our history? I have but one reply; to gather and cherish my trauma and pain, and make something beautiful with it. Thus may we stand against the darkness, and remain unconquered.
My answer to the suffering of the world is to give voice to the voices which have been stolen from us, the numberless generations of the silenced and the erased.
Welcome and embrace your pain and the terror of our nothingness as sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Dance your demons before the stage of the world; go ahead, frighten the horses.
Forge great beauty from the flaws of your humanity and the brokenness of the world, and wield it as an instrument of reimagination and transformation in glorious change.
All true art defiles and exalts.
What is death? I once told my mother, after returning from long moments most sincerely dead after the police grenade whose force wave hurled me from my body on Bloody Thursday 1969 and my vision of our myriad possible futures as I stood outside of time; “Don’t be afraid. Death is nothing; nothing but awakening from an illusion.”
Of late I have begun to think of death as a defining negative space within the dark mass of the Absurd of all the things we have not claimed as ours and all the hopes and dreams we have not made real by our actions. As I wrote in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so he must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in the wake of my mother’s death from cancer, over a year ago now, On the Wisdom of Our Darkness and the Brokenness of the World; Grief, despair, and fear, the trauma of loss, the torment of loneliness, and the guilt of survivorship; the realm of our darkest and most negative passions immerses us in atavistic states with totalizing and tidal force.
Life disruptive events can destabilize identity and realign personality, transform meanings and values, send shockwaves through our network of relationships, shift our worldview and unmoor us from the anchorages of our ideological paradigms and historical contexts.
Such traumas confront us with the unfiltered face of our shadow self as a healing process, a transformative journey filled with dangers but also with the limitless possibilities of rebirth. As redirections of our momentum disruptive events force reflection and redefinition of ourselves as intentional choice; among them the death of a loved one is surely the most terrible.
Overwhelming and painful as they may be, our negative emotions have adaptive value or we wouldn’t have developed them. How then do they help us survive? What is their purpose?
Grief, especially but not exclusively, connects us with other people, opens us to the pain of others, and brings us to a renegotiation of the terms of ourselves and our lives.
We are bound together by the flaws of our humanity, by our brokenness and our pain, by the fragile nature of our lives and our vulnerability to disruptive events.
The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as societies united in the cause of our survival, wherein the costs are shared among distributed resources. This is the origin of altruism; humans are designed to help each other. Each of us is marked by our nature as our brother’s keeper.
Far from wholly destructive, our darkness can be growth oriented and creative; destruction may be read as liberation and Chaos as the adaptive potential of a system.
Our darkness whispers, embrace your passion and your true self, and be reborn.
Passions of both light and darkness can act as warning buoys as we navigate into the future and the unknown; they can also illuminate and provoke us to abandon the known and discover new possibilities. Joy and sorrow, as with all our myriad passions, come as balanced pairs which help us process events by leveraging change.
Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
In a world such as ours, under imposed conditions of struggle wherein everything in life is more powerful than we are, death and the flaws of our humanity, vast and ancient systems of oppression and the brokenness of the world, how are we to live?
Among the last words shared between Jean Genet and I in Beirut 1982 were these; I asked him; “Now that I know the world is a lie, how am I to live?”
To which he replied; “Live with grandeur.”
Live with grandeur, friends.
As I wrote in my post of May 24 2026, The True and False Crows: a Fable for Memorial Day Weekend; A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here also is a fable for Memorial Day and the sacred dead of war, at whose table I have eaten many times now.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, O my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true story and identity which I have tried to leave a record of here in my journal Torch of Liberty, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
Here is our Beauty as Keats defined it in his famous quote; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” With this quote I reply to all direct questions asking me to identify my faith, especially by men with badges and guns for official documents, though in Islamic nations I preface it with a quote from his near parallel Rumi; “”Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Postscript
Thank you for sharing this journey with me; your friendship has brought me joy, as I hope mine has to you. As the summer of 2025 ended I was reminded of our mortality and the limits of our form as an imposed condition of struggle, of the flaws of our humanity and the ephemeral and impermanent nature of our lives.
I dreamed of a cat Dolly and I once shared our home with named Bunny; we saw someone throw her out of a car window driving past the animal shelter near our home, and stopped. I opened my door and said; “Do you want to come home with us? We have lots of food” and she jumped right up into my lap and started purring. We had some lovely years together before she got sick, and after treatments she seemed to recover a bit, and spent a glorious day running in the park, chasing butterflies and climbing trees, but died in the night.
Sometimes you only get one good day, and you never know when that will be.
Make each of your days glorious, find your joy, and chase your dreams.
Invictus, recited by Morgan Freeman in honor of Nelson Mandela
Do not go gentle into that good night’ by Dylan Thomas, recited by Martin Sheen
The Great Conversation of Goethe and Byron, a reading list
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
On Schopenhauer’s Reply to Nietzsche, a retrospective of my writing on Beauty and my Ars Poetica
In my sixth decade of life, I find myself like Schopenhauer increasingly needing Beauty as a sustaining force of resilience and a balance for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
January 29 2026 Curating a Casual to Business Casual Wardrobe Built Around Odd Jackets: An Experiment Toward Scientia Vestiaria, a Science of Vestments As Artifacts of Material and Social Culture As Identity, Membership and Belonging, Power and Authority
My Life As A Martial Artist, Part One: Healing From Trauma, Empowerment, and An Instrument of Self-Construal, Seizure of Identity, and the Reimagination of Myself; the Uses of Martial Arts and An Inquiry Into the Origins of My Own
Institutionalized sexual terror and state tyranny in the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights and the primary freedom of bodily autonomy were challenged in a mass action on October Second of 2021 throughout America, organized by the Women’s March and coordinated with the riveting testimony in Congress of three of our representatives who have had abortions, Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal, and Barbara Lee.
There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
We continue to hold such national marches each and every year until we are all truly equal under the law as guaranteed by our Constitution and in our society, as we perform our stewardship of each other as co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, the right of self ownership of our own bodies and of access to healthcare as a precondition of the right to life first among them.
We can triumph over this wave of theft of our liberty which seeks to redefine the relationship of individuals to the state and render citizenship meaningless if we act in solidarity with coordinated mass action and legislative process. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me in 1982 in Beirut by Jean Genet goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As reported by CNN; “Abortion rights activists are gathering at more than 600 marches across the US, holding placards and banners that read, “My mind, my body, my choice” and “Legal abortion for health and life,” as they demand reproductive freedoms.
The “Rally for Abortion Justice” marches follow the anti-abortion bill in Texas that bans abortions after six weeks — before many women know they have conceived — with no exceptions for rape or incest.
The Supreme Court, which returns Monday, denied a request to block the Texas measure, and activists now fear it will empower other states to follow suit.
“Simply put: We are witnessing the most dire threat to abortion access in our lifetime,” the Women’s March website reads.
The Women’s March is organizing the rallies in partnership with more than 90 groups, including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a nonprofit that provides reproductive health care, and the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization.”
As written by Candice Norwood in The 19th; “Beyond Texas’ abortion law, state lawmakers have introduced hundreds of restrictive bills over the last several years. In December, the Supreme Court will hear a case out of Mississippi that directly targets Roe v. Wade. During the committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Judy Chu spoke about her bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, that would codify the right to abortion access.
“I’m so proud that last week the House took the historic step of passing the legislation,” Chu said. “In fact, it was the first affirmative abortion rights bill in nearly 25 years, and it shows the American people that we will not abandon them.”
As written by Emma Specter in Vogue; “Democratic representatives Cori Bush (Mo.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), and Barbara Lee (Calif.) about their own abortions.
“In the summer of 1994, I was raped, I became pregnant, and I chose to have an abortion,” said Bush, explaining that she lived through an experience of sexual assault while on a church trip at age 17. “To all the Black women and girls who have had abortions and will have abortions, we have nothing to be ashamed of.” Jayapal noted that she sought out her own abortion when she was a young mother of a sick child attempting to deal with postpartum depression; her doctor told her that carrying a second child to term would be risky for both her and the baby. “I very much wanted to have more children, but I simply could not imagine going through that again,” Jayapal told the panel. Lee’s pregnancy occurred before abortion was even legal in the U.S., so her mother sent her to a friend in Texas who arranged for a “back alley” procedure at a clinic in Mexico. “A lot of girls and women in my generation didn’t make it—they died from unsafe abortions,” she said. “In the 1960s, unsafe septic abortions were the primary killer of African American women.”
Hopefully, as Democrats seek to codify Roe v. Wade, the rest of this country’s predominantly male lawmakers can be as courageous in protecting women’s reproductive rights as Bush, Jayapal, and Lee were in discussing their own extremely personal experiences with abortion.”
As I wrote in my post of September 5 2021, State Theft of Freedom as Bodily Autonomy: Case of the Texas Abortion Ban; Texas has outlawed all abortion, the Supreme Court has failed to overrule Texas and uphold freedom as our right of bodily autonomy, and patriarchs of Gideonite fundamentalist organizations of sexual terror and subversion of religious freedom are mobilized to enforce it.
This in parallel with Texas’ theft of voting rights and citizenship from nonwhite persons as institutionalized white supremacist terror.
Texas is our Heart of Darkness. We must liberate the peoples of Texas from the grip of Patriarchy and white supremacy and a legislature of subversion of democracy and of fascist state tyranny and terror.
And the most horrific thing in all of this is that Texas is not an abnormality in American politics, merely the most extreme and clearly evil example of a general condition, our dehumanization and subjugation by elites through the weaponization of fear and the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich.
I call for the abolition of the Republican Party as an organization of treason and racist and sexual terror, the proscription of its members from holding or running for any public office, the nationalization of its assets, and the revocation of citizenship and exile of its members and representatives on the grounds that there are no conditions in which the rest of us will be safe if those who would enslave us are not purged from the herd.
Perhaps Afghanistan will welcome them as refugees; Republican ideas about women and racial tribalism would fit right in with that of the Taliban, one ethnic theocratic group among many. Actually, I wonder if they are really the same people as the Taliban whom they resemble, and just trade their cowboy hats for wool Pakol berets when they fly back and forth.
Let them go elsewhere and enslave each other, but we must not allow them to enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2021, Systemic Failures of Unequal Power: the Case of Abortion; To an article in the Washington Post calling out the Texas abortion ban as a canary in the coal mine for legislating away our freedoms, I commented; “There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.”
I received a reply; “There is no freedom without personal responsibility.” This claim was supported by references to abortion as demonic child sacrifice, somewhat beyond the scope of reasonable argument.
Here is my refutation to ideas of personal responsibility:
I do not believe in the idea of the innate depravity of man on which our legal system is based as an extension of the doctrine of original sin, or its formulation by Freud as a polymorphosly perverse human nature which must be controlled rather than celebrated and explored, all versions of the Talmudic concept of the yetzer hara, the evil impulse; humans without the restraining force of law do not devolve to atavisms of ruthless barbarism and become dehumanized, but instead become prosocial and mutually interdependent so long as power is not the only thing which has meaning nor fear and its children force and control the only means of exchange.
Nor do I believe in law and order; law serves power and order appropriates; chaos autonomizes.
There is no just authority.
I believe in history, and in justice as revolutionary struggle.
I find the origins of evil not in an evil impulse to be controlled, but in the systems and structures of unequal power; hence responsibility is not personal but social and belongs to us all.
Fear is a co-equal origin of evil, for it is overwhelming and generalized fear coupled with submission to authority which allows fear to be weaponized in service to power, through divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite membership and belonging. Hence arise fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the centralization of power and the immunity of authority in a totalitarian carceral state of force and control.
There is no basis for trying anyone for a crime, when we should be seeking to redress the interdependent, relational, recursive, and holistically distributed causes of our failure which produced it.
Crime is a symptom of the failure of social systems, not of the unfitness or degeneracy of individuals whose choices are the products of forces they are the victims of; clearly perpetrators share in the responsibility for their actions, though not exclusively. They are simply the last domino to fall in a cascade failure of unequal and unjust initial conditions, and we must change those conditions to restore the balance.
Crime is an illness of unequal power. Perpetrators are also victims; this does not imply moral equivalence between victims and their abusers. We must heal the flaws of our humanity, rather than punish transgression which centralizes power to an authoritarian carceral state of prisons and police.
It is not the perpetrator who must answer to us, but we who must answer for them.
If the purpose of government is to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves, then justice negotiates and guarantees that no person’s liberty infringes on that of any other.
What are the realistic alternatives to the social use of force? Processes of healing and restorative justice provide models and solutions; therapy not punishment, schools and hospitals not prisons. We all bear sacred wounds which can open us to the pain of others, and it is how we respond to the brokenness of the world and to the flaws, wounds, and pain of others which defines us. We humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. If a tribe comes together to meet the challenges of its members actions and consequences for the lives of others when they are signs of trauma and crisis or harmful to others, to engage in healing process and restore the balance of power, we become a social organism which can heal itself, without the social use of force or vilification.
And we can bring the redemptive power of love as healing and revisioning to bear on the issues we face in the world which are more terrible still, and which will require a united front of diverse and unlike persons to find answers. Let us discover our best selves in our kindness to others.
The question we must ask is not if a thing is good or evil, but why it exists.
Abortion is a symptom of our failure to confront and dismantle patriarchy; it is a fracture point of a flawed system which acts to relieve pressure, avoid change, and maintain unequal and unjust elite hegemonic power. Change the balance of power, giving women full control of their sexuality, and equality of social agency in general, and much of the nonmedical need for abortion vanishes; a solution I much prefer to the tyranny and state terror of enforcing other people’s ideas of virtue.
Patriarchy is a special form of faith weaponized in service to power, and male dominion and control over women looks to Abrahamic faith for an apologetics of tyranny.
As I wrote in my post of March 4 2020, Supreme Court Hears Access to Abortion Case; A Louisiana law which requires a doctor to have admitting privileges in a hospital within 30 miles has been used to deny access to abortions, one of a whirlwind of such laws designed to transfer the rights of self-governance and bodily autonomy from women to the state and the Patriarchy.
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom and dehumanization as a means of enslavement, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life before breath or natural birth. Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually sacrosanct and legally persons. Haircuts are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
Find or Organize an event for October 18 No Kings Day
Eight years ago today the state of Saudi Arabia, its head of state Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his criminal conspirators Saud al-Qahtani and Ahmed al-Assiri, assassinated the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi to silence his sacred calling to pursue the truth and to give witness, a crime against humanity for which the show trial of his killers ended with implicit exoneration of its masterminds and the sacrifice of their pawns to avoid sanction for this horrific crime of state terror and tyranny.
It is a crime in which America is complicit as a conspirator after the fact, though Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his minions and collaborators may well have known beforehand and abetted the murder of a journalist by their principal ally in the region other than Israel, key to our global empire and hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege through partnership with Saudi Arabia and allied states, a Sunni polity which includes the Emirates though they have long contested dominion of African and other spheres of influence with the Saudi and often are openly at war with each other, in control of oil as a strategic resource and in the war in Iran and Yemen.
Herein I signpost that the conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and the Iranian Dominion is coextensive, parallel, and interdependent with both of the two other major ongoing wars in this region and the world; the Gaza War and the Israeli-American genocide of the Palestinians and the imperial conquest and dominion to create a Greater Israel as, in Netanyahu’s words, “a Middle Eastern Sparta” which bears elements of the antique Sunni-Shia conflict as it pits the Arab-America Alliance versus Iran and her client states Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and formerly Syria before we liberated her from Putin’s grasp, and the Third World War as Russia attempts to reclaim her former empire, Iran being Russia’s principal ally. From the Arab perspective, they fight a war of survival against a pincer movement to conquer the whole of the Arabian peninsula, hammered by Shia forces in Yemen and Lebanon, and they use both Israel and America as dogs of war.
My first thought upon hearing of this assassination was that if I were an Iranian agent, I could think of nothing which might drive a wedge between America and Saudi Arabia more effectively than this; the violation of one of our last ideals combined with the political assassination of a man under our protection, living in America and working for our finest and most iconic institution of truth, The Washington Post.
Because the assassination also spiked the Crown Prince’s social reforms and movement toward Westernization, it may as easily be attributed to reactionary forces within the Saudi kingdom, which once infamously included al Qaeda.
Though the geopolitics of this are interesting in terms of regional conflicts and the great game of empires between Iran and Russia versus the Arab-American Alliance and our proxy state Israel, what concerns me here is more primary; the foundational necessity of a free press, free speech, rights of dissent, and freedoms of information to the project of democracy as a free society of equals, and as a balance to the falsification and theft of the soul of propaganda and tyranny.
Our world is a Wilderness of Mirrors, distorted funhouse images, rewritten histories, filled with surfaces which capture and reflect, in which the witness of history and the sacred calling to pursue the truth must be beyond the power of the state, the elite, or of anyone to silence and erase, or we become forgeries of ourselves and shadow puppets of authority. Our authenticity and uniqueness, our ownership of ourselves, is put at risk and in question by propaganda and thought control, repression of dissent, dehumanization, and subjugation.
We need what Foucault called truth tellers, not merely as guarantors of our liberty, but also of our humanity and the inviolability of our souls.
Of the silencing of dissent in service to the authority of the state and of the tyranny of force and control I have written often, for it touches upon the origins of evil and the centrality of fear, power, and force as an engine of violence, inhumanity, dehumanization, and the theft of the soul.
Herein I find another purpose in defining the nature of truth, and of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth. And this provides us with a yardstick against which to measure the legitimacy of the state; the test of a government is its transparency, its tolerance of dissent as a feature of democratic process, the degree to which it upholds freedom of speech and of access to information, and its reverence for objective and testable truth as a keystone of freedom.
As I wrote in my post of September 8 2020, A War of Truth and Lies for the Dominion of Humankind: the Khashoggi Murder Trial Ends, and With It the Legitimacy of the Saudi Dynasty; A farcical show trial attempts to obscure the brutality and arrogance of unjust power of the Saudi monarchy as its proxies destroy Yemen to deny Iran a fortress on the Arabian Peninsula and a port with which to interdict oil shipping to the West. That the beneficiaries of American imperialism have given tacit approval for the Saudi murder of Khashoggi is entirely due to the purpose of the Arab-American Alliance in protecting our hegemony of world power through control of oil as a strategic resource, without which any nation ceases to function. The same mutual interests of wealth and power now protect the Saudi regime of feudal aristocratic privilege, its head of state Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his criminal conspirators Saud al-Qahtani and Ahmed al-Assiri.
In this one gruesome crime of murder and dismemberment to silence the sacred calling to discover truth the Saudi regime has revealed the lie at its heart; it serves its own wealth and power, and exploits and dehumanizes those who fall within its dominion rather than protecting them. As the protection of pilgrims as seekers of truth is the justification for its existence and hegemony of power over access to sacred sites, this reveals the falseness of its legitimacy and exposes their true nature as an aristocracy of state terror and crimes against humanity.
They have lied; not to forge peace, nor as a ruse of war, nor to safeguard the amity of relations between husband and wife, the three canonical exceptions in Islam to the injunction to give truthful witness in all things, but to protect personal wealth and power and to escape responsibility for a horrific crime.
There are possible interpretations and constructions of the idea of the state under Islamic law and in a culture built on verbal contracts, in which a trial wherein the agents of unjust power, state terror, and murder are held responsible for the crimes of those who commanded them while the mighty escape justice is without force of law and abrogates the authority of the government and its leadership to act as the nation’s Head of Islam. This voids all treaties, subverts all authority to make laws and especially to operate courts, and frees all citizens from obligation to abide by its pronouncements and decrees.
In Hadith 54, Truthfulness, as written by Al-Bukhaari (6094) and Muslim (2607), Abdullah ibn Mas’ud (may Allāh be pleased with him) gave this witness; “The Prophet ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) said, “Truthfulness leads to righteousness and righteousness leads to Paradise. A man will keep speaking the truth and striving to speak the truth until he will be recorded with Allāh as a siddeeq (speaker of the truth).”
What interests me in this today is the ideology of Islam as the path of becoming a Speaker of the Truth; I think of its parallels with Socratic method on which democracy is founded as a means of questioning authority which reveals and discovers hidden truths through reason, of Foucault’s truthtelling as a development of parrhesia, and of the idea of journalism as a sacred calling in pursuit and witness of truth. To be a journalist, a whistleblower, or a citizen protesting and calling out injustice is to be a pilgrim, and all such pursuit and witness of truth is an absolute right and a sacred duty.
In choosing the path of tyranny and evil perpetrated for personal gain rather than the path of mercy and compassion for others, the Saudi monarchy has sacrificed its purity of purpose and become an instrument of the evil impulse in the struggle between good and evil within and for the soul of humankind.
As I wrote in my post of October 2 2019 Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Jamal Khashoggi, Champion of Truth and Freedom; The House of Saud claims the throne of Arabia on the basis of its historical protection of the Pilgrimage and its holy places; ask then, how have they respected the house of the Infinite, our bodies, in this? How does the silencing of dissent fulfill the commandment to the faithful to learn throughout one’s entire life, no matter the source or where it leads? Or honor the sacred contract of one’s words? How can we trust the words of those who would keep the words of others from us? In the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the royalty of Saudi Arabia has discredited itself and its reign.
In the words of his fiancée Hatice Cengiz writing in Time; “I can see that the day Jamal was killed was not simply the murder of a journalist. It was also the murder of fundamental values: human rights, the international rule of law, the norms of diplomacy.”
As I wrote in my post of July 16 2022, America Chooses Power Over Principle: Biden’s Fist Bump With Tyranny; Or, Toadying to Tyrants: a Song of America; What is this human rights and democracy? Balanced against our hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, our systemic patriarchy and white supremacy, our global imperial dominion?
Nothing, it seems, only the lies and illusions of those who would enslave us.
What does this mean? First, that Biden may have handed the next election to Trump, or rendered the differences between them meaningless. Second, that in sacrificing the moral high ground for the wealth required to maintain the state, the man we chose as our President and entrusted with the Restoration of America may have just signaled its incipient fall and robbed our democracy of its meaning and value.
Odd, that; normally it’s the enemies of the state who stage performances of its delegitimation and subversion, as I have many times as a maker of mischief for tyrants. Perhaps we should reconsider Biden’s true motives, purposes, and role in the Fourth Reich’s plans to enslave us all to a tyrannical carceral state which embodies violence, repression of dissent, and authorized versions of the truth, of our history, and of ourselves.
As the line spoken by the antifascist hero Lt Aldo Raine goes in Inglorious Basterds, “I can’t abide it. Can you abide it?”
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled What was Joe Biden thinking when he fist-bumped the Saudi Crown prince?; “Biden came to office determined to take a firmer line with the strongmen and autocrats beloved by Donald Trump. He had a particular enmity towards Prince Mohammed, the ambitious 36-year-old who deposed his uncle to become next in line as king, waged a ruinous war in Yemen, and locked up or killed his critics.
On the campaign trail, in the aftermath of the gruesome murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”. He has since refused to speak to the crown prince directly, liaising instead with his ailing father, King Salman. Shortly after arriving in the White House, Biden released US intelligence findings – suppressed by Trump – which concluded that Prince Mohammed approved the operation targeting the Washington Post journalist at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
When the US president brought up Khashoggi with the de facto Saudi ruler on Friday, the prince reportedly hit back, accusing Washington of hypocrisy by not investigating the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh, and for allowing the abuse of inmates at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
Yet Riyadh has been one of Washington’s closest strategic partners for decades for a reason that no US president can ignore. Biden has heard the siren song of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves: the war in Ukraine has unleashed chaos in global oil markets, and he can no longer refuse the call.”
For myself; this is far more simple and direct, for we are captives now of an allegory from the dawn of history, in Genesis 25:29-34, wherein our universal human rights as a birthright inherent to our humanity have been sold for us by our betrayer, as did Esau for a mess of pottage.
America has abdicated its role as a guarantor of our universal human rights, which leaves the United Nations as a court of final appeal. Here follows the PEN America letter to the United Nations which you may sign in the link below
Dear Secretary-General Guterres,
As writers, journalists, artists, and Members of PEN America and the Authors Guild, we write to express our grave concern about the apparent horrific murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist, Washington Post contributor, and U.S. resident who disappeared in Istanbul on October 2 after entering the Saudi Arabian consulate. If true, the murder of a journalist inside a diplomatic facility would constitute nothing less than an act of state terror intended to intimidate journalists, dissidents, and exiled critics the world over. The United Nations has rightly recognized the importance of ensuring the safety of journalists and fighting impunity for those who attack them with the publication of the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity, endorsed in 2012. In the spirit of that initiative, we respectfully call on you to immediately authorize an independent, international investigation into Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance and apparent murder.
Since his disappearance, Turkish authorities have claimed to have evidence suggesting that Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered inside the consulate, and that the operation was likely carried out by a team including individuals very close to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, making it look extremely likely that the Crown Prince was behind Khashoggi’s assassination. After weeks of denying any involvement in his disappearance, on October 19 Saudi Arabia admitted that Khashoggi was killed inside the consulate, claiming his death was the result of a “fight” during attempts to detain him. Global leaders have responded to the details of this admission with significant skepticism. More recently, Saudi authorities have said the murder was “premeditated,” though the details and culpability remain unclear.
The violent murder of a prominent journalist and commentator on foreign soil is a grave violation of human rights and a disturbing escalation of the crackdown on dissent in Saudi Arabia, whose government in recent years has jailed numerous writers, journalists, human rights advocates, and lawyers in a sweeping assault on free expression and association. It is also yet another data point in a global trend that has seen an increasing number of journalists imprisoned and murdered for their work. As writers and journalists ourselves, we fear the potential chilling effect of this trend, at a moment when the work of all those who would speak and expose the truth has never been more important.
The UN Plan of Action states: “The safety of journalists and the struggle against impunity for their killers are essential to preserve the fundamental right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” and goes on to say that attacks on journalists “[deprive] society as a whole of their journalistic contribution and [result] in a wider impact on press freedom where a climate of intimidation and violence leads to self censorship.” It is imperative that the United Nations send a clear, unquestionable message that a human rights violation of this gravity will not go without consequence.
We therefore respectfully call on you to immediately authorize an independent, international investigation into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi that would lay the groundwork for identifying and holding accountable the perpetrators of this grievous crime.”
Arabic
2 أكتوبر 2025 الذكرى الرابعة لاغتيال خاشقجي ، الشهيد في الدعوة المقدسة للسعي إلى الحقيقة
قبل أربع سنوات ، اغتالت اليوم دولة السعودية ، رئيسها ولي العهد الأمير محمد بن سلمان ومتآمريه المجرمين سعود القحطاني وأحمد العسيري ، صحفي الواشنطن بوست جمال خاشقجي لإسكات دعوته المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة و للإدلاء بالشهادة ، وهي جريمة ضد الإنسانية انتهت من أجلها المحاكمة الصورية لقتله بتبرئة ضمنية من مدبريها والتضحية ببيادقهم لتجنب العقاب على هذه الجريمة المروعة المتمثلة في إرهاب الدولة واستبدادها.
إنها جريمة تتواطأ فيها أمريكا كمتآمر بعد وقوعها ، على الرغم من أن مهرج الإرهاب ، الخائن ترامب وأتباعه والمتعاونين معه ربما يكونون قد عرفوا مسبقًا وحرضوا على قتل صحفي على يد حليفهم الرئيسي في المنطقة ، مفتاح إمبراطوريتنا العالمية وهيمنة الثروة والسلطة والامتياز من خلال الشراكة مع المملكة العربية السعودية في السيطرة على النفط كمورد استراتيجي وفي الحرب في اليمن لمواجهة الغزو الإيراني لشبه الجزيرة العربية والهيمنة على الشرق الأوسط.
أول ما خطر في بالي عندما سمعت بهذا الاغتيال هو أنني لو كنت عميلاً إيرانياً، فلن أستطيع التفكير في أي شيء قد يدق إسفيناً بين أمريكا والمملكة العربية السعودية بشكل أكثر فعالية من هذا؛ انتهاك أحد مُثُلنا الأخيرة جنبًا إلى جنب مع الاغتيال السياسي لرجل تحت حمايتنا، يعيش في أمريكا ويعمل في أرقى مؤسسات الحقيقة وأكثرها شهرة، واشنطن بوست.
على الرغم من أن الجغرافيا السياسية لهذا الأمر مثيرة للاهتمام من حيث الصراعات الإقليمية واللعبة الكبرى للإمبراطوريات بين إيران والتحالف العربي الأمريكي ، فإن ما يقلقني هو أكثر أهمية ؛ الضرورة الأساسية للصحافة الحرة وحرية التعبير وحرية الإعلام لمشروع الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر متساوٍ ، وكتوازن لتزوير وسرقة روح الدعاية والاستبداد.
عالمنا عبارة عن برية من المرايا ، وصور مسرحية مشوهة ، وتاريخ مُعاد كتابته ، مليء بالأسطح التي تلتقط وتعكس ، حيث يجب أن تكون شهادة التاريخ والدعوة المقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة خارجة عن سلطة الدولة ، أو النخبة ، أو من أي شخص أن يصمت ويمحو ، أو نصبح مزيفين لأنفسنا ودمى في الظل للسلطة. إن أصالتنا وتفردنا ، وملكيتنا لأنفسنا ، معرضة للخطر والتساؤل عن طريق الدعاية والتحكم في الفكر ، وقمع المعارضة ، ونزع الصفة الإنسانية ، والقهر.
نحن بحاجة إلى ما أسماه فوكو بقول الحقيقة ، ليس فقط كضامنين لحريتنا ، ولكن أيضًا لإنسانيتنا وحرمة أرواحنا.
عن إسكات المعارضة في خدمة سلطة الدولة واستبداد القوة والسيطرة الذي كتبته كثيرًا ، لأنه يمس أصول الشر ومركزية الخوف والسلطة والقوة كمحرك للعنف ، اللاإنسانية ونزع الصفة الإنسانية وسرقة الروح.
هنا أجد هدفًا آخر في تعريف طبيعة الحقيقة ، والصحافة على أنها دعوة مقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة. وهذا يوفر لنا معيارًا نقيس على أساسه شرعية الدولة ؛ إن اختبار الحكومة هو شفافيتها ، وتسامحها مع المعارضة كميزة للعملية الديمقراطية ، ودرجة دعمها لحرية التعبير والوصول إلى المعلومات ، وتقديسها للحقيقة الموضوعية والقابلة للاختبار باعتبارها حجر الأساس للحرية.
كما كتبت في مقالتي بتاريخ 8 سبتمبر 2020 ، حرب الحقيقة والأكاذيب للسيطرة على البشرية: انتهاء محاكمة خاشقجي ، ومعها تنتهي شرعية الأسرة السعودية ؛ تحاول محاكمة استعراضية هزلية التعتيم على وحشية وغطرسة السلطة الظالمة للمملكة السعودية ، حيث يقوم وكلائها بتدمير اليمن لحرمان إيران من حصن في شبه الجزيرة العربية وميناء لمنع شحن النفط إلى الغرب. إن منح المستفيدين من الإمبريالية الأمريكية موافقة ضمنية على مقتل خاشقجي السعودي يعود بالكامل إلى هدف التحالف العربي الأمريكي في حماية هيمنتنا على القوة العالمية من خلال السيطرة على النفط كمورد استراتيجي ، والذي بدونه تتوقف أي دولة عن القيام بذلك. وظيفة. نفس المصالح المتبادلة للثروة والسلطة الآن تحمي النظام السعودي ذي الامتياز الأرستقراطي الإقطاعي ، ورئيس الدولة ولي العهد الأمير محمد بن سلمان ومتآمريه المجرمين سعود القحطاني وأحمد العسيري.
في جريمة القتل البشعة هذه وتقطيع الأوصال لإسكات الدعوة المقدسة لاكتشاف الحقيقة ، كشف النظام السعودي الكذب في قلبه. إنها تخدم ثروتها وسلطتها ، وتستغل وتجرد من يقعون في نطاق سيطرتها وتجردهم من الإنسانية بدلاً من حمايتهم. بما أن حماية الحجاج كباحثين عن الحقيقة هي تبرير لوجودها وهيمنتها على الوصول إلى الأماكن المقدسة ، فإن هذا يكشف زيف شرعيتها ويكشف طبيعتها الحقيقية كأرستقراطية لإرهاب الدولة والجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
لقد كذبوا. عدم إقامة السلام ، ولا كخدعة للحرب ، ولا للحفاظ على صداقة العلاقات بين الزوج والزوجة ، والاستثناءات الكنسية الثلاثة في الإسلام للأمر بإعطاء شهادة صادقة في كل شيء ، ولكن لحماية الثروة الشخصية والسلطة و الهروب من المسؤولية عن جريمة مروعة.
هناك تفسيرات وإنشاءات محتملة لـ i بعد وقت قصير من وصوله إلى البيت الأبيض ، أصدر بايدن نتائج المخابرات الأمريكية – التي قمعها ترامب – والتي خلصت إلى أن الأمير محمد وافق على العملية التي تستهدف صحفي واشنطن بوست في القنصلية السعودية في اسطنبول.
عندما أثار الرئيس الأمريكي خاشقجي مع الحاكم السعودي الفعلي يوم الجمعة ، ورد أن الأمير رد ، متهما واشنطن بالنفاق بعدم التحقيق في مقتل الصحفية الفلسطينية الأمريكية شيرين أبو عقله ، والسماح بإساءة معاملة النزلاء في سجن أبو عقل. سجن غريب.
مع ذلك ، كانت الرياض من أقرب الشركاء الاستراتيجيين لواشنطن منذ عقود لسبب لا يمكن لأي رئيس أمريكي تجاهله. سمع بايدن نغمة الإنذار لاحتياطيات النفط الهائلة في المملكة: لقد أطلقت الحرب في أوكرانيا العنان للفوضى في أسواق النفط العالمية ، ولم يعد بإمكانه رفض المكالمة “.
لنفسي هذا أكثر بساطة ومباشرة ، لأننا الآن أسرى قصة رمزية منذ فجر التاريخ ، في تكوين 25: 29-34 ، حيث تم بيع حقوق الإنسان العالمية لدينا باعتبارها حقًا موروثًا متأصلًا في إنسانيتنا من قبل خائننا. ، كما فعل عيسو في فوضى الطهي.
The Dissident film trailer
No accountability 5 years after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
قبل ثلاث سنوات ، اغتالت اليوم المملكة العربية السعودية ، رئيس دولتها ولي العهد الأمير محمد بن سلمان ومتآمريه المجرمين سعود القحطاني وأحمد العسيري ، صحفي الواشنطن بوست جمال خاشقجي لإسكات دعوته المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة و للإدلاء بالشهادة ، وهي جريمة ضد الإنسانية انتهت من أجلها المحاكمة الصورية لقتله بتبرئة ضمنية من مدبريها والتضحية ببيادقهم لتجنب العقاب على هذه الجريمة المروعة المتمثلة في إرهاب الدولة واستبدادها.
إنها جريمة تتواطأ فيها أمريكا كمتآمر بعد وقوعها ، على الرغم من أن مهرجنا من الإرهاب ، الخائن ترامب ، وأتباعه والمتعاونين معه ربما يكونون قد عرفوا مسبقًا وحرضوا على قتل صحفي على يد حليفهم الرئيسي في المنطقة ، مفتاح إمبراطوريتنا العالمية وهيمنة الثروة والسلطة والامتياز من خلال الشراكة مع المملكة العربية السعودية في السيطرة على النفط كمورد استراتيجي وفي الحرب في اليمن لمواجهة الغزو الإيراني لشبه الجزيرة العربية والهيمنة على الشرق الأوسط.
على الرغم من أن الجغرافيا السياسية لهذا الأمر مثيرة للاهتمام من حيث الصراعات الإقليمية ولعبة الإمبراطوريات الكبرى بين إيران والتحالف العربي الأمريكي ، فإن ما يقلقني هو أكثر أهمية ؛ الضرورة الأساسية للصحافة الحرة وحرية التعبير وحرية الإعلام لمشروع الديمقراطية كمجتمع حر متساوٍ ، وكتوازن لتزوير وسرقة روح الدعاية والاستبداد.
عالمنا عبارة عن برية من المرايا ، وصور مسرحية مشوهة ، وتاريخ معاد كتابته ، مليء بالأسطح التي تلتقطها وتعكسها ، حيث يجب أن تكون شهادة التاريخ والدعوة المقدسة لمتابعة الحقيقة خارجة عن سلطة الدولة ، أو النخبة ، أو من أي شخص أن يصمت ويمحو ، أو نصبح مزيفين لأنفسنا ودمى في الظل للسلطة. إن أصالتنا وتفردنا ، وملكيتنا لأنفسنا ، معرضة للخطر والتساؤل عن طريق الدعاية والتحكم في الفكر ، وقمع المعارضة ، ونزع الصفة الإنسانية ، والقهر.
نحن بحاجة إلى ما أسماه فوكو بقول الحقيقة ، ليس فقط كضامنين لحريتنا ، ولكن أيضًا لإنسانيتنا وحرمة أرواحنا.
This October we celebrate the 62nd anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, in which students challenged and triumphed over the gatekeepers of authorized identities and access to power in our society, the hierarchs of the university system. Today marks the first mass protests as Freedom Rider and former grad student Jack Weinberg refused to show his identification to police while manning a Congress of Racial Equality table, and was held in a police car for thirty two hours without water as a form of torture and possibly attempted state murder while three thousand students surrounded the vehicle and climbed atop it as a speaker’s podium; but the struggle for freedoms of speech and of the press, the right to expose and protest injustice and of freedom of information, the right to test, witness, and tell truths, neither begins nor ends with the courage of the people in mass action throughout that pivotal fall semester on a university campus, but belongs to all of us, everywhere and at all times, as a common legacy of humankind.
Among the transformations of meaning and value won for us by the students who risked their futures to win a better future for all of us is the championing and valorization of our rights of free speech and of protest which informed and enervated all subsequent movements for social justice as a liberating force, a reclaiming of education as a Platonic Ideal and democratizing force which derives from the Greek educatus, meaning to bring forth rather than to stuff in facts and obedience to authority, the seizure of power by students as the owners of their own public institutions, structures, systems, processes, and outcomes and products of education from hegemonic forms of elite membership and power in the academic sphere as the key means of producing citizens needed for democracy and a public life of co-ownership of our government, and finally the revisioning of education as both truth telling and witness as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
There is a demonstration I performed every year on the first day of Forensics class at Sonoma Valley High School which I call Becoming a Fulcrum, and which you may find relevant to our work in electoral process and revolutionary struggle; “This is a fulcrum” I would say, placing an object on my desk, and placing an oblong object across it, “it balances a lever. When your parents ask you what you are learning in Forensics, tell them you are learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
For the best explication of why democracy matters, why the idea of a free society of equals lies at the heart of our liberty and of human being, meaning, and value, why it is the one thing we must never abandon or lose hope of making real, read I.F. Stone’s magisterial The Trial of Socrates. For each of us stands in the shadow of Socrates and must face with him the choice between submission to authority and freedom, regardless of its cost.
As described by the co leader of the Free Speech Movement in his book Hal Draper’s Berkeley: The Student Revolt, with an introduction by Mario Savio; “In a dynamic conflict, there is not merely a majority and a minority: the opposition is not a homogeneous whole. A section may be neutralized, dropping opposition altogether, without coming over to the active side. Another section, while remaining in opposition, may be so infected by uncertainty — so tacitly impressed by the appeal of the position which it formally opposes — that its opposition is enervated in practice. Just as a given force exercises a leverage proportional to its distance from the fulcrum, so a fighting force exercises a leverage in conflict which is proportional not simply to its numbers but also to the strength of its convictions and the firmness of its followers.”
In the immortal words of Mario Savio that began a generational reimagination and transformation of America and our civilization; “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Mario Savio’s Put Your Bodies Upon the Gears speech of December 2 1964
Charlie Chaplin’s The Factory
50th Anniversary Free Speech Movement UC Berkeley, film by Diane Sharp
Free Speech and Our Universities As a Forge of American Democracy, a retrospective of my writing
December 11 2023 What is Hate Speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who Decides What Is Permitted, and How Shall We Enforce Limits On Each Other’s Freedoms? Case of the Repression of Dissent By Universities Beholden to Special Interest Money
In a monstrous reflection of the CIA’s parallel Operation Condor throughout Latin America and the coup in Chile that replaced Allende with Pinochet, on this day sixty one years ago the CIA launched its loathsome Jakarta Method of imperial conquest and dominion in an inaugural coup of our puppet tyrant Suharto in the Indonesian Anti-Communist Purge.
It is a history which is now being rewritten by Suharto’s former son in law and key ally, Prabowo, elected just two years ago to restore Suharto’s kleptocratic and terrorist regime.
This is a signal identifier of tyranny; the rewriting of history, the replacement of truths and the witness of history with lies and illusions, misdirection and red herrings, authorized identities and alternate realities, strategies of tyranny and state terror and of the subversion of democracy and theft of the soul we should all be familiar with from the ridiculous and horrific crimes and propaganda of the Trump regime and his infamous Tongue of Lies, instrument of the demon he worships Moloch the Seducer.
As Trump now deploys the lie that his white supremacist terror force ICE and its campaign of ethnic cleansing is about crime rather than race, among his many lies in service to power and the manufacture of consent for a police state, the Occupation of our cities, and the theft of meaningful citizenship, so Prabowo now deploys an authorized version of national history and identity, so very like the Mayflower story Trump used to falsify the 1619 hypothesis and erase the history of slavery in America, as silence and erasure of the people of Indonesia’s long decades of heroic resistance to enslavement by ruling cliques and castes and subjugation by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This we must resist, where ever falsification raises its ugly head and opens wide it jaws, through witness, solidarity, and the pursuit of truth. As Wednesday says to Principal Weems, a collaborationist Authority, in the telenovela, in summary of Foucault’s idea of truth telling; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
As written by Michael G. Vann in Jacobin, in an article entitled Indonesia’s Rulers Are Whitewashing the Crimes of Suharto; “orking in the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith obediently repeated the INGSOC slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
While I can’t confirm that Fadli Zon, Indonesia’s minister of culture, has read George Orwell’s 1984, it seems likely that he would have at least encountered it during his high school education in Texas or on his path to a PhD in Russian literature. In any case, his record in President Prabowo Subianto’s increasingly authoritarian administration has been shockingly Orwellian. Nowhere is this more evident than in his previously secret project to revise Indonesia’s official national history.
Originally set for release on August 17, 2025, a “gift” to mark eighty years of Indonesian independence, the planned ten-volume oeuvre will radically distort the historical record. Fadli’s project will consign significant contributions from women, ethnic minorities, and left-wing political movements to a memory hole, along with acts of treason and horrific human rights violations committed by prominent right-wingers.
Rehabilitating Suharto
Apro-regime student organizer under the Suharto dictatorship that held power from 1966 to 1998, styling itself as the “New Order,” the bespectacled Fadli now occupies the office of minister of culture and is one of Indonesia’s more polarizing figures. Known for his populist theatrics, far-right nationalism, and Sinophobia, Fadli has long flirted with historical mythmaking.
Now, with the launch of his controversial project to “revise” Indonesia’s national history curriculum and state-supported narratives, he is attempting something far more dangerous. It amounts to the rejection of more than twenty-five years of democratic reforms and increased academic freedom, and a return of the Suharto dictatorship’s propaganda machine. The project comes as political analysts, civil society organizations, and activists are raising the alarm about the government’s increasingly repressive actions.
Known for his populist theatrics, far-right nationalism, and Sinophobia, Fadli Zon has long flirted with historical mythmaking.
Although Fadli has framed the initiative as a corrective effort to decolonize Indonesian historiography and purge it of alleged foreign distortions, it is, in fact, a thinly veiled crusade to rehabilitate the New Order legacy, demonize the Left, and entrench a narrow ethnonationalist and patriarchal vision of Indonesia’s past. In the process, it threatens to undo decades of hard-won efforts by progressive historians, civil society actors, and survivors of state violence to foster a more inclusive and democratic understanding of Indonesian history.
Bonnie Triyana, a historian and member of parliament for the opposition Democratic Party of Struggle, has expressed alarm that major events, including human rights violations, were missing from the drafts that he had seen. He stated that such a project should be an open process involving a wide range of historians and academics, rather than a government-commissioned effort. Triyana accused Fadli’s work of lacking transparency.
Avi Warman Adam, recently retired Research Professor of Socio-Political History at the National Research and Innovation Agency, has written extensively about the political engineering of history under the New Order dictatorship and has built historiography from the perspective of the victims. The respected senior scholar has condemned the project as a politically motivated whitewashing of history to promote President Prabowo’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Adrian Perkasa, a young postdoctoral researcher currently at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, is concerned that the project will marginalize women’s history and exclude ethnic and regional minorities in its Java-centric narrative.
Yosef Djakababa of Jakarta’s International Relations Department Universitas Pelita Harapan noted that the outline of Fadli’s project leaves out the 1958–61 PRRI–Permesta Rebellion. Originally a putsch led by disaffected colonels in Sumatra and Sulawesi against the Javanese-dominated central government in Jakarta, the movement set up the rival Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia with CIA backing, challenging Sukarno.
Sumitro Djojohadikusumo was a central leader who secured American funds for the rebels and served a minister in the treasonous regime. After over thirty thousand civilians and soldiers died in insurrection, he fled into exile. When Suharto seized power in 1966, he returned as the dictator’s chief economic strategist, running the so-called Berkeley Mafia and opening the country for US investment. The fact that he was President Prabowo’s father likely accounts for Fadli’s omission of this major event.
Ghosts of the New Order
It should come as no surprise that Fadli’s revisionist campaign places the 1965–66 anti-communist massacres at its center. These events, in which upwards of a million alleged leftists and Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) sympathizers were slaughtered and a larger number imprisoned, tortured, and raped, remain one of the bloodiest and least accounted-for episodes of the twentieth century.
For decades, the Suharto regime’s narrative, which claimed that the PKI had attempted a coup of its own and that the ensuing purges were necessary to preserve the nation, was officially enshrined as truth. In arguably the world’s most successful propaganda campaign, the New Order propagated its official history in school curricula, a robust collection of monuments and museums, feature films, and the naming of streets and airports across the archipelago — an imprint that remains to this day.
It should come as no surprise that Fadli’s revisionist campaign places the 1965–66 anti-communist massacres at its center.
Following Suharto’s fall in 1998, this version of history came under intense scrutiny. Investigative journalists, historians, and survivors unearthed troves of evidence revealing the scale of the killings, the complicity of Western powers, and the orchestration of violence by the military and militias.
Works like Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, as well as The Jakarta Method by journalist Vincent Bevins, introduced Indonesia’s hidden genocide to a global public. While Westerners such as Oppenheimer and Bevins have the privilege to engage with this dangerous history without facing serious danger, many Indonesian scholars, activists, and artists have risked their physical safety to correct the historical record. The mainstream consensus seemed to be making room for this dark history.
But now, with Fadli’s project, we are witnessing a state-backed attempt to reverse that process of reckoning. His newly formed National Historical Reconciliation Council is stacked with pro-military academics, Suharto apologists, and conservative Islamic figures. It has already begun publishing white papers that downplay the scale of the violence and reassert the PKI’s guilt. In recent speeches, Fadli has rationalized the killings as a necessary cleansing to protect the Republic.
A “Patriotic” Curriculum
The most immediate impact of Fadli’s campaign will be felt in classrooms. Drafts of the new national curriculum obtained by Tempo and other independent outlets reveal a wholesale revision of the standard account of Indonesian history. The revolutionary contributions of left-wing organizations like Lekra (the Institute of People’s Culture) and the labor movement are minimized or excised entirely. The new framework recasts the role of Sukarno, once revered as the architect of a pluralistic and independent Indonesia, in ambivalent tones, presenting him as an indecisive figure whose flirtation with communism nearly doomed the nation.
In their place, the new curriculum lionizes Suharto and the military, portraying them as disciplined saviors who preserved unity in the face of Marxist anarchy. The anti-colonial struggle is reinterpreted through a lens of martial valor and cultural resilience, obscuring the complex alliances among secular nationalists, communists, and Islamic modernists that actually defined the independence movement.
The new curriculum lionizes Suharto and the military, portraying them as disciplined saviors who preserved unity in the face of Marxist anarchy.
Even more troubling are the changes to the understanding of colonialism. Fadli’s committee emphasizes precolonial harmony and “Asian civilizational values,” suggesting that European imperialism was an unfortunate but morally clarifying event that strengthened Indonesian identity.
This historical fantasy erases the brutal extraction of wealth and the dehumanization of indigenous peoples that underpinned Dutch rule. It also whitewashes Indonesia’s precolonial history by presenting it as a romantic fantasy of cooperation and downplays Indonesia’s postcolonial entanglements with global capitalism and Western military power.
Nationalism as Cultural Weapon
Fadli and his defenders claim that his project is a necessary corrective to “liberal bias” in historical scholarship. When grilled at a House of Representatives hearing in July, he asserted that his goal was “not to forget history, but to ensure that it serves as a constructive lesson,” and called for a focus on the “positive” side of Indonesian history.
But this argument rings hollow. Since when has Indonesia’s national curriculum ever leaned left? Even during the Reformasi period, teaching about the massacres of 1965 remained taboo. Survivors were still harassed, blacklisted, and stigmatized, and there were no significant state reparations. The truth, insofar as it emerged at all, came from grassroots efforts: oral history projects, independent documentary films, and university seminars held outside official frameworks.
What Fadli offers is not a “national” history but a hegemonic one: a state-sponsored myth of eternal unity, righteous violence, and ethnic authenticity. In this, he follows a pattern familiar across the Global South, where right-wing populists — from Narendra Modi in India to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines — have wielded history as a weapon to silence dissent and reassert patriarchal, militarized visions of the nation.
Fadli’s invocation of “cultural sovereignty” is similarly suspect. Far from resisting foreign influence, his revisionist project aligns neatly with the interests of international capital and the Indonesian oligarchy. By vilifying the Left and glorifying military order, the revised history paves the way for more authoritarian governance and deeper collusion between the state and extractive industries. This is not about decolonizing history — it is about recolonizing it in the name of capital and control.
Erasing the People’s Memory
One of the more insidious aspects of the project is its effect on collective memory. If Fadli’s curriculum is implemented, an entire generation of Indonesian students will grow up learning a sanitized, nationalist version of their country’s past. This is a story that erases the poor, the landless, the laboring masses, and the women of Gerwani, the world’s largest feminist organization in the early 1960s, who were raped and murdered in 1965.
There is widespread concern that Fadli will try to eliminate the history of the 1998 violence against democracy activists and ethnic Chinese in the dying days of Suharto’s New Order. Prabowo, who was a general at the time, was dishonorably discharged for his role in kidnapping, torturing, and disappearing activists. In June, Fadli suggested that the well-documented mass rape of Chinese women in 1998 was merely a “rumor.” Bonnie Triyana and his colleague Mercy Chriesty Barends challenged him on this dangerous historical denial in a committee hearing a few weeks later.
This is a theft of memory, and with it the possibility of justice. Without historical truth, there can be no meaningful reconciliation. Without acknowledgement of past crimes, the victims and their descendants are condemned to perpetual silence.
And yet, as history shows us, silence can be broken. If there is a silver lining to this dark chapter, it lies in the growing resistance to Fadli’s efforts. A coalition of progressive historians, student groups, and cultural workers has begun organizing teach-ins and publishing counter-textbooks online. Survivors’ organizations are holding public vigils and reading the names of the disappeared. International solidarity networks are amplifying the alarm.
Hopefully they will seize this moment not only to oppose Fadli’s revisionism but to advance a radical vision of Indonesian history: one that centers the struggles of workers, peasants, women, and indigenous communities; one that tells the truth about imperialism, militarism, and genocide; one that equips the next generation to fight for a more just and democratic future.
History is not a dead archive. It is a battlefield, and right now that battle is underway in Indonesia. What is at stake is not merely the past, but the possibilities of the future”.
As I wrote in my post of February 28 2024, Return of the Empire of Demons: Darkness Gathers in Indonesia; Of the legacies of our history from which we must emerge, none are more terrible than those of colonial occupation and its consequences in the social use of force and violence to win security by becoming the arbiters of virtue.
Of the legacies of our history which we must hold close and remember lest we be falsified, silenced, and erased, none are more valuable as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of becoming human than those of seizures of power against tyrants, hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege, and those who would enslave us than our songs of liberation struggle and its costs.
Memory, history, identity; there are stories which we must free ourselves from and those we must claim as ours, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Indonesia has just elected Prabowo as its new President, the apex predator of a political dynasty created by American and British anti-communist purges and a spectacular and bloody coup nearly sixty years ago, which became a blueprint for similar games of counter-revolution, imperial conquest, and dominion as The Jakarta Method.
Beyond the epigenetic trauma of the capture of the state by oligarchs and proxies of distant colonial empires, like the dancing figures in a shadow puppet theatre of an Empire of Demons, the new leader of Indonesia is personally a commander of death squads implicated in war crimes, the brutal repression of dissent, and ethnic cleansing within his own nation and against ethnic minorities and independence movements in Timor and Papua. Yet he won a free election by the people he committed atrocities against; the adoration of the masses can be measured in blood.
In Indonesia’s elections, tyranny and democracy, fear and love, despair and hope, division and solidarity play for the kingdom of our hearts and the dreams of the future we struggle to make real, and I hope that Shakespeare’s words in Henry V still remain true; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
As written by Thomas B. Pepinsky in Journal of Democracy, in an article entitled Why Indonesia’s Democracy Is in Danger; “Millions of voters in Indonesia, the world’s third-most-populous democracy, went to the polls on February 14 to choose their next president and members of parliament. Although the full results will not be known until early March, early counts show Prabowo Subianto handily defeating his two challengers for a first-round victory. His Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) is in a close race for second in the parliamentary contests. The Prabowo campaign is claiming victory; as he declared to his supporters on the evening of election day, “We should not be arrogant, we should not be proud, we should not be euphoric, we still have to be humble, this victory must be a victory for all Indonesian people.”
From a distance, this was a normal Indonesian election cycle, with three viable presidential tickets and an array of new and established parties vying for seats in parliament. Campaigning was peaceful, with televised presidential debates, rallies that appealed to the country’s massive youth vote, and colorful banners and posters displayed throughout the archipelago. But for many Indonesians, the voting itself was just one important milestone in an election that had already shaken the foundations of Indonesia’s constitutional order. Prabowo, who serves as minister of defense under incumbent president Joko Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi), is a former general who rose to prominence under Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime (1966–98). Prabowo’s campaign has tested Indonesia’s electoral laws and upended the norms of its presidential politics. With his dominance at the polls and the dwindling confidence in Indonesia’s political and judicial institutions to check executive authority, the outlook for Indonesian democracy in the coming years is grim.
Prabowo faced two opponents in this year’s contest: Ganjar Pranowo, a former governor of Central Java, and Anies Baswedan, a former governor of Jakarta. Jokowi, who is broadly popular but term-limited after two five-year terms in office, threw his support behind Prabowo, most significantly because he nominated the president’s son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his running mate. Prabowo, with his wide name recognition, substantial campaign war chest, and boost from the president, polled far ahead of Ganjar and Anies throughout the campaign.
The three presidential candidates represented competing visions for Indonesian politics and society. Prabowo hails from an elite family who rose to prominence in the early independence period, and his brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo is one of Indonesia’s wealthiest and most prominent businessmen. Prabowo was once married to Suharto’s daughter Titiek, although they are long divorced, and he was a key ally of Suharto’s at the end of his reign. Under Suharto, Prabowo rose through the military’s ranks to become commander of the army’s special forces. In that capacity, he was directly involved in human-rights abuses during Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste (1975–99) and complicit in the violent events surrounding Suharto’s downfall in May 1998. Although he was dishonorably discharged from the military, Prabowo’s campaign invoked his military legacy and recent record as defense minister to portray him as a strong nationalist leader who prioritizes order, stability, and national greatness.
Prabowo ran unsuccessfully against Jokowi in 2014 and 2019, drawing on these same narratives and images, while also making appeals to conservative Muslims and religious identitarians. In 2024, it was Anies who focused on that segment of the electorate, while Ganjar appealed to the same pluralist and progressive constituency whom Jokowi had won. Ganjar, the chosen candidate of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which supported Jokowi in 2014 and 2019, was especially popular among non-Muslim voters wary of Anies’s religious agenda, especially after Anies embraced Islamists in his campaign against a popular Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta in 2017. Ganjar did not, however, inherit Jokowi’s popularity, especially among young Indonesians; opinion polls showed young people to be squarely behind Prabowo and his 36-year-old running mate, Gibran.
Millennials and Gen Z now make up more than half the electorate, and they are simply not old enough to remember Prabowo’s contentious rise and subsequent disgrace.
Given all this, the 2024 contest followed established patterns in the country’s politics. Religion and identity have been important cleavages in Indonesian politics since the independence period, and voters have mobilized around these cleavages in recent elections too. Even Prabowo’s candidacy is nothing new: In addition to running and losing in 2014 and 2019, he was active in the 2004 and 2009 elections as well.
In truth, most of the challenges facing Indonesian democracy long predate the current moment. They include the continued political dominance of the country’s wealthy elite, many of whom can trace their fortunes to the Suharto era or before; the oversized legislative coalitions required to govern in a multiparty presidential system, incentivizing legislative parties to collude rather than compete and minimizing the effectiveness of the rump parliamentary opposition; gross inequalities that produced marked differences in the quality of democracy across Indonesia; antipluralist and illiberal social forces; a military that remains stubbornly unwilling to cede full control of politics to civilian forces; high levels of official corruption; dynastic politics; and electoral clientelism and vote buying that distort representation and partisan politics from the local level on up.
Nevertheless, citizens have participated in free, fair, and competitive multiparty elections since 1999. Indonesians have witnessed several peaceful rotations of executive power, and elections have been hard-fought contests in which powerful challengers have conceded defeat, albeit sometimes begrudgingly. Indonesia’s civil society is robust and active, print media is largely open and often critical, and many political parties compete for popular support. As in any consolidated democracy, there is broad agreement that elections are the sole legitimate route to political power: They are, to quote Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, “the only game in town.” The risk of a catastrophic breakdown of representative institutions is low, as is the threat of violence of the type that rocked Indonesia during the turbulent 1960s.
But democratic consolidation requires that the rules of the game be known and fixed rather than malleable and subject to change at the whim of elites. Indonesian democracy is not as consolidated as its repeated elections have suggested. The trends have been worrisome for the past decade, with the 2024 election only deepening fears and the country looking more and more like a clear case of democratic backsliding. Jokowi has, for example, used the legal means at his disposal to clamp down on challenges to his authority of any variety.
During the 2024 election campaign, democratic decline accelerated because of decisions taken by ruling elites, especially the president himself—the first being his embrace of Prabowo as his chosen successor. Until now, presidents in post–New Order Indonesia have remained above electoral politics, a norm buttressed by legal limitations on presidents’ campaigning. Jokowi, however, openly stumped for Prabowo and Gibran, challenging longstanding interpretations of what a sitting president is allowed to do. Jokowi claims that presidents may campaign if they do not use state resources, as the letter of the law reads. But Anies and Ganjar say that Jokowi did just that, using state institutions such as the military and police—which ought to be neutral arbiters of the law, and which ought to show no partisan or political favoritism—against Prabowo’s opponents.
A more direct blow to Indonesian democracy arrived in October 2023, when the country’s Constitutional Court issued a stunning ruling about Gibran’s eligibility to run for vice-president. According to the Indonesian constitution, the minimum age for presidential candidates is 40. Gibran will be only 37 on inauguration day, and therefore ineligible to run under any regular interpretation of the constitution. But in October, the Constitutional Court handed down an opinion by Chief Justice Anwar Usman (who happens also to be Jokowi’s brother-in-law) which held that the age limit did not apply to any candidate who had previously served in a regional elected office, thereby allowing Gibran, who is mayor of Surakarta (known as Solo), to register as Prabowo’s running mate.
Although the public outcry against this decision was swift and substantial, and Anwar was subsequently found guilty of violating the court’s ethics code and demoted, Gibran’s candidacy was unaffected. The plain implication is that Indonesian constitutional law does not constrain elites seeking to circumvent it. Few would have seriously argued that Indonesian law treats the wealthy and powerful the same as it does regular Indonesians. Still, the Constitutional Court’s brazen decision to intervene on behalf of a sitting president’s son was shocking, and further proof that powerful interests with ties to state institutions and the country’s authoritarian past still direct the course of its politics.
For this reason, it is important to separate Prabowo the individual from the politics surrounding his campaign. Prabowo’s history, political style, and personality are worrisome: He has a famously short temper, and his actions over the years inspire little confidence in his commitment to democratic institutions, to liberal values such as freedom of speech and conscience, or to the rule of law. Although he does not have the crassness or brashness of a Rodrigo Duterte or Javier Milei, it is hard to predict how he will react to unfavorable news or to any legitimate democratic challenge. But like Duterte and other world leaders, Prabowo’s politics replace a commitment to law and order with a preference for order over the law. For the many observers who believed that it was Prabowo’s 2014 defeat that allowed Indonesian democracy to survive, his victory in 2024 is a harbinger of the country’s democratic decline.
But Indonesian democracy is more than just the attitudes and values of its political leaders. Presidents shape democratic politics, but they do not determine what democracy is. Democracy in Indonesia, as in any other country, is a political system that emerges from the actions of elites, the masses, and social groups together—working through established institutions, following norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance, and peacefully resolving legitimate political differences through the orderly rotation of power via free and fair elections. Institutions matter, but they are not self-directing; laws matter, but only when they are applied faithfully and in accordance with constitutional procedures and governing norms. Anwar, as chief justice, made his fateful decision on behalf of the Constitutional Court, the guardian of the constitution, for the benefit of Jokowi and his family as well as Prabowo himself.
So it is unsurprising that in the final days before the election, Prabowo’s opponents feared that other state institutions, such as the armed forces and the electoral commission, would be similarly vulnerable to political manipulation on election day. Given that Prabowo’s campaign, which worried about a possible unified anti-Prabowo ticket in a second round, predicted a single-round victory, the other campaigns were afraid that electoral and security institutions might tilt the first-round balloting in Prabowo’s favor so as to avoid a runoff.
Although it is still early, there is no evidence of any systematic irregularities. But representatives from the Anies and Ganjar campaigns are pledging to investigate the electoral process nevertheless, claiming that the election was marred by “structural, systematic and massive fraud.” Worryingly, Anies has been reported to authorities for commenting on a film released on February 11 that alleges the electoral process was subject to manipulation by Prabowo backers.
In November 2023, just after the Constitutional Court’s decision, Indonesian journalist Goenawan Mohamad sat for an interview on KompasTV, a mainstream news channel. Known as a sharp-witted critic and thoughtful political analyst with decades of experience, Goenawan described the Indonesian state as “broken” (rusak). Although his use of this word received wide attention, less noted was what he used rusak to modify: not politics or elections or institutions, but the state (negeri) itself. And the term negeri refers to more than just the state in a formal sense. It connotes something closer to the state and society together—the country, its institutions, and its people. Goenawan was describing not just a crisis of democracy, but a crisis of Indonesia.”
As written in The Guardian’s Editorial entitled Prabowo’s win is dismal news for democracy; “When Joko Widodo took power in Indonesia 10 years ago, his victory brought relief as well as celebration. It was not merely that the former Jakarta governor was the first president to be elected from outside the political or military elite. It was also that he defeated ex-general Prabowo Subianto, who had attacked direct elections and said that he would take the country in a more authoritarian direction. There was every reason to take that threat seriously. Mr Prabowo was dismissed from the military – and barred from entering the US – due to allegations of the abduction and torture of activists by men in his unit, though he has always denied involvement.
Yet now, as the president leaves office, Mr Prabowo is set to replace him – thanks in large part to his former rival’s (unofficial) support. With 205 million voters and 820,000 polling stations spread across the thousands of islands in the world’s fourth most populous nation, completing the final tally could take weeks. But Mr Prabowo, currently defence minister, enjoys a commanding lead in “quick counts” by independent polling firms, which have proved accurate in previous contests. That suggests he will not face a runoff.
Having reached his two-term limit, the president – known to all as Jokowi – is leaving office with enviably high popularity ratings and a track record that includes steady economic growth, infrastructure development, slowed deforestation (though the country has fallen short of targets) and healthcare improvements. But he has also overseen a democratic backsliding. When he first took office, some supporters voiced concern that his principles might even hinder his ability to get things done. In reality, he has not only proved adept at making deals with the old elites but has undermined key institutions and strengthened restrictions on freedom of speech. The final straw, for many of his enthusiastic early supporters and reportedly for cabinet colleagues, has been his electoral manoeuvring.
Jokowi said he was neutral. But it was plain that he had thrown his weight behind Mr Prabowo rather than his own party’s candidate, Ganjar Pranowo. His 36-year-old son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, ran as Mr Prabowo’s vice-president, despite being four years short of the usual minimum age for the role, thanks to a handy ruling from the constitutional court. The chief justice happens to be married to the president’s sister. Many of those who once supported Jokowi have concluded that his priority is his legacy.
Mr Prabowo also benefited from his improbable rebranding from fiery would-be strongman to a cuddly, cat-loving grandfather figure, aided by social media. Half the country’s electorate is under 40; many voters do not remember his past or the days of military dictatorship under his father-in-law, Gen Suharto.
Those who do predict that “winter is coming”. Some suggest that the new president may conclude that he does not need outright autocracy, but can achieve what he wants within the current system. A better cause for optimism may be that Jokowi’s tenure saw the largest student protests since democracy’s return in 1998, prompted by his weakening of the anti-corruption commission and other harsh new laws. His political trajectory is further evidence that the work of defending reform and rights cannot rest on the shoulders of a single leader. But Indonesian democracy appears to have plenty of defenders, including among the young. There is every sign it will need them.”
As written by Rebecca Ratcliffe and Richaldo Hariandja in The Guardian, in an article entitled Winter is coming’: activists’ fears as Prabowo Subianto likely wins Indonesia election: Former son-in-law of late dictator Suharto was discharged from military over alleged abuses dating back to 1980s; “The presumed election victory of Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto – a former army general with a history of alleged involvement in torture and disappearances – marks a dark chapter in the country’s history, activists have warned, while vowing not to give up their fight for justice.
Prabowo, 72, a former special commander under the Suharto dictatorship, is the apparent winner of Indonesia’s presidential election after unofficial counts gave him a strong lead. On Wednesday night he told supporters that his win would be a “victory for all Indonesians”.
The results have provoked fear among activists, however, that accountability for past atrocities will fade even further under Prabowo, and that his future government will have little regard for human rights.
“Winter is coming, whatever the name,” said Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty International Indonesia. “But the fight must go on … all of the perpetrators have to be brought to justice.”
Prabowo, a former son-in-law of Suharto, was a longtime commander in the Kopassus special forces, but was discharged from the military after Kopassus soldiers kidnapped and tortured political activists in 1998.
Of 22 activists kidnapped that year, 13 are still missing. Prabowo always denied wrongdoing and has never been charged in relation to the allegations, though several of his men were tried and convicted. Prabowo was previously banned from entering the US.
Prabowo is also accused of involvement in rights abuses in Papua and Timor-Leste, including a 1983 massacre in which hundreds of people, most of them men, were killed in the Timorese village of Kraras. He has denied the allegations.
Muhammad Isnur, head of the Legal Aid Institute Foundation of Indonesia (YLBHI), said the election of Prabowo may be “too painful” for the families of those who disappeared in 1998, who are still fighting for justice.
“The result is as we predicted. But we are still disappointed,” he said.
Prabowo had maintained a lead in pre-election surveys after rebranding himself as a cuddly grandpa-like figure and securing the tacit support of the outgoing president, Joko Widodo, whose son ran alongside Prabowo for the vice-presidency. The incumbent president, who is known as Jokowi, was accused of unfairly boosting Prabowo’s campaign in order to safeguard his legacy and establish a dynasty.
“Too many intricate enabling conditions and manipulations have shown the involvement of Jokowi in the election. He had mobilised everything. That’s why the result is predictable,” said Muhammad. Jokowi’s office has denied that he sought to interfere in the election.
Academics, journalists and civil society groups should prepare for the worst, Muhammad said. “We need to be aware of every risk that could happen to us in the future and try to make a list of mitigations. We need to be prepared.”
In the runup to the election, Prabowo was the only presidential candidate who did not attend a press freedom event and did not respond to a questionnaire by Human Rights Watch on key rights issues facing Indonesians.
As results emerged on Wednesday, Veronica Koman, a human rights lawyer living in exile in Australia, wrote on Twitter/X: “Many Indonesians are saying that they want to leave the country because Prabowo is winning – similar phenomenon to US citizens when Trump was winning. The big difference is … ours is out of FEAR.”
How is the Prabowo regime doing, one year after taking office?
The streets are quiet, the initial student riots having wound down as the iron fist was wisely withheld and the expected purges, repression of dissent, and open battles between state forces and the democracy movement never materialized, or at least not as mass action. This is an unequivocal win both for the people of Indonesia and for the viability of the state as well as for Prabowo personally.
Prabowo opened his Presidency with a mainly successful wolf diplomacy tour of his neighbors, both to secure foreign trade and to take a leading role in defending the region from Chinese dreams of imperial conquest, and he has a shiny new aircraft carrier to do it with. This is gunboat diplomacy, but flipped as anticolonial struggle with China cast in the former role of the Dutch Empire whose crimes are told as part of every child’s education since Independence. And by god someone must, so my plaudits for this as well.
By far the most damning charge which may be laid at his door is that West Papua is not yet free and there is still fighting between its independence forces and the Indonesian army; this is an evil not of his making, but he has thus far ignored a strategic opportunity to promote Indonesia to the world as a safe and just place to do business by standing with and not against liberation forces rather than continue a colonialist posture on this question. A victory here would be his announcement of a process of transition to full sovereignty and independence for West Papua, just as Indonesia won from the Dutch.
This will not happen without carrots offered by the international community; the historical momentum must give any national leader who contemplates political fragmentation of the state pause, especially as he confronts a hostile superpower in China, just as it did Gandhi during the heroic struggle to hold India together after Independence, a struggle which killed him and when it failed unleashed the countless horrors of Partition. And Gandhi did not have an empire greedily eyeing its neighbors as does Prabowo, but one in retreat as it began to fall. But such things need not unfold as the Partition of India did, if pursued with caution. The great question in this is, who will back Indonesia’s play as it enters the arena at high noon against a bandit king?
Thus far, I count two wins and a lost opportunity for Prabowo. The possible futures which may unfold from this beginning are promising and problematic at once; then there are two crucial if less spectacular policies of his which will ripple outwards in their consequences unpredictably like the movement of water when stones are cast into a pool, the impacts of state capitalism as the Prabowo regime nationalizes sectors of the economy under a foreign managerial bureaucracy which reproduces the American advisors of the infamous Suharto regime he is heir to, and the political effects of infiltration and reorganization of institutions of the state by military officers which threatens subversion of democracy and the regeneration of Suharto’s totalitarian regime as a junta.
These economic and political threats are existential but unrealized, and with such threats also come opportunities. Let us hope that in Indonesia we are not fated to repeat the horrors of the past, and may yet escape the legacies of our history. Of our histories there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
May peace be upon us all.
Position Among the Stars film trailer
The Act of Killing film trailer
The Year of Living Dangerously film trailer
Grabbed Land, Silenced Justice
The Persecution of Environmentalists and Indigenous Leaders in Indonesia
Always I have admired the great and gentle wisdom of sea creatures who build shells of Beauty in which to move through time, and then abandon these precious artifacts of their history and uniqueness when they are outgrown. That we should follow their example in the ongoing reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our ideas of the world, of how we choose to be human together, and of the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value bears both adaptive value and liminal force, and we must choose carefully how we will represent ourselves if we are to shape our own evolution.
Maps are a ground of struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, and like the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, the most important question to ask of a map is; Whose map is this? Who decides how we will imagine ourselves and create spaces to grow into?
The United Nations has recently replaced the venerable Mercator projection map of the world, useful in navigation and centered on Greenwich like our time zones but which distorts and misrepresents land masses to magnify Europe and also valorize and authorize colonialism and empires of whiteness, with a new map which represents true comparative sizes of continents as a decolonizing tool.
As to my own relationship with maps, since childhood they have held numinous power for me as I spent hours pouring over them and imagining myself into the possible worlds they represented, as stories with which I was interwoven as I grew up. Maps have always functioned as Dream Gates for me, doors to imaginal realms which reflected my secret fears and desires in ways which made such into things I could grapple with and learn from, a way of making our darkness visible and seizing its power. This technique, so very much like the mandalas I studied decades later as a Dream Navigator of the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana Order of monks in Kathmandu, I also deployed with intention in creating a Dream Gates wall on one entire wall of my bedroom from the sixth grade, mainly Hieronymus Bosch prints but including Surrealist images from seventh grade when my parents allowed me to run amok on my onesies all over Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and the Haight in San Francisco during the fading glory of the counterculture Psychedelic era.
Greatly do I cherish places which do not obey the laws by which others seek to cage us and limit our possibilities of becoming human; and even as a child I understood instinctively the sacredness of violations of normality and transgression of the Forbidden as seizures of power in self-construal.
Let us seek the unknown places on our maps of becoming human, the blank spaces marked Here Be Dragons, and among the Dragons live in wonder and the joy of total freedom.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2020, Bringing Down the Monuments of Racist Loathsomeness; Monuments exert power and influence as narratives of authorized identities and a mythic iconography of public spaces.
Whose story gets to be told? Who chooses the stories we will live within? To whose benefit will our lives be thereby shaped?
When we cast down the monuments of our subjugation we enact our liberation from history as a colonizing force and dethrone those who would enslave us.
In question are all of these things, but one thing above all; the ownership of ourselves. If we are to be at liberty to discover and create ourselves as autonomous individuals in a free society of equals, to be free of the ideas of other people, we must free ourselves from the iron grip of history.
Let the nightmares of unequal power, dehumanization, and divisions of exclusionary otherness be forgotten and abandoned among the atavisms of barbarism, violence, and authoritarian force and control.
Let us forge a better future, one which empowers and celebrates diversity and the possibilities of human being and meaning yet undreamed.
As written by Oliver Holmes, Ana Lucía González Paz and Pablo Gutiérrez in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘A map is never neutral’: meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias. Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display; “Three cartographers have spoken of their astonishment at the UN’s near-universal adoption of a map they created to more accurately show the sizes of Africa and Europe, even though they have received a few complaints from some disgruntled diplomats.
The creators of the Equal Earth projection aimed to provide an alternative to the dominant 16th-century Mercator display, which critics have long faulted for giving the impression that northern hemisphere nations are larger than they are – and therefore subtly reinforcing perceptions of where global strength lies.
“It has been a very busy week for me,” said Tom Patterson, a renowned US national parks cartographer who has had to virtually come out of retirement after being inundated with questions from governments on details of the new projection.
The UN general assembly voted this month to adopt the new map, which more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa. It is hoped the projection will gradually replace Mercator on school walls and government websites.
Put forward by Togo, the proposal was hugely successful, with 164 countries voting in favour. The only “no” vote came from the US, whose UN representative, Yaryna Ferencevych, said resolutions such as the “correct the map” effort were “barnacles on our work here”. The US is one of the countries that appears smaller on the new projection. It also makes Greenland – a territorial prize Donald Trump has openly coveted as a “big beautiful piece of ice” – seem significantly less dominant.
Six other nations abstained from the vote, and Patterson said he had been contacted by diplomats from government embassies in Washington DC looking for clarification.
Japan asked for a revision because it said the map made the disputed Kuril Islands appear to belong to Russia by putting them in the same shade of yellow. Ukraine also abstained, as Russian-occupied Crimea was a different colour to the rest of the country. Ukraine’s representatives at the UN said this opened a “Pandora’s box” and violated international law.
The cartographers see these objections as stemming from something of a misunderstanding. The map voted on at the UN is simply a mathematical projection of the land and sea, without human-made borders or shading. The confusion arose due to a website run by Patterson that offers free Equal Earth projections. He had annotated these with geopolitical lines and the names of countries, and has been rushing this week to update them, including switching colours and changing spellings, such as Turkey to Türkiye.
“I view the Equal Earth maps as living documents and am grateful for the many helpful suggestions that I have received,” he said.
Patterson developed the new projection in 2018 with a California-based software engineer, Bojan Šavrič, the “maths wizard” of the trio, and Bernhard Jenny, an associate professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Jenny said people generally believed maps were accurate representations of the Earth, but that logic breaks down because we live on a curved surface. This creates a problem, as a sphere cannot easily be transformed into a flat rectangle.
“It’s like the orange peel analogy,” said Jenny. “You have to tear it and stretch it, and it’s not possible to flatten it out … so you have to make compromises.”
One global map, called the Goode homolosine projection, looks strikingly like a ripped-up orange peel. Its main problems are that it is not very pleasing to the human eye and not very easy to use for navigation – something the flawed Mercator excels at, because north is always up.
For Jenny, cartography is about aesthetics as well as science. “We cartographers say cartography is the art and science of making maps. So it’s kind of the combination of the two.”
Equal Earth is not the first attempt to address Mercator’s shortcomings. Several other projections were developed in the past century, including the Gall-Peters model, which shows the true relative sizes of land masses, but which often appears oddly elongated, almost like the continents are drooping. Jenny said: “There was a lot of backlash from cartographers who said: ‘Well, it looks like clothes are hung up to dry.’”
There are always compromises when making maps. Spend any amount of time with a cartographer and what might seem like fundamental truths quickly break down. “Which way is up?” or “Where is the centre” are not simple questions for cartographers – ancient Islamic maps had a south-up orientation, which put the holy city of Mecca in the eyeline. A London-centric worldview has long dominated how world maps are presented, with Greenwich in the centre.
“You have to make compromises,” said Jenny. The Equal Earth map, for example, would not be useful for getting around, as countries on the edges are squeezed. In fact, if any country had a claim to be upset, it could be New Zealand, which is stretched and distorted, and on the edge of the map.
“A map is never neutral,” said Jenny. “So you cannot please everyone.”
Šavrič, who worked on the mathematical formula, said he never imagined eight years ago that the trio’s research would be discussed at the highest levels.
“What pleases me more is that this creates a valuable opportunity to strengthen map literacy and raise awareness that there is no single map projection capable of providing a completely ‘true’ representation of the world,” he said. “Every map projection involves trade-offs. I particularly appreciate that the [UN] resolution does not completely ban the Mercator projection or mandate a single replacement for all maps.”
Jenny was also thrilled, watching on from Australia. “It’s kind of a cartographer’s dream, right?” he said. “The fact that the UN is debating map projections for an entire hour is already totally thrilling for cartographers, and then it was our map projection. I mean, what else can you ask for?”
He does, however, have a hunch that another factor helped the Equal Earth map: the power of a good name. “I think, definitely, that you know what it is immediately,” said Jenny. If they had called it the “Šavrič-Patterson-Jenny projection”, he joked, maybe it would not have done so well.”
I would like to make an actual atlas and map of my travels, if there exists a map one can add routes and at locations open windows of photo archives and stories; til then this is what I can offer:
November 16 2025 Defining Moments Part Three: A Library of Possible Selves Through My Languages and An Atlas of Myself
The most fun thing about this is the free editing tools, so you can rename things. I would add the Autonomous Zones and other nonstate areas. The first thing I would do with this as a teacher is to have children map their own neighborhood with places where things they want to remember happened, they share and compare in groups, because this is how maps are made, but by nations.
I would use Denis Woods’ Everything Sings as the class text.
And I would then have students share and compare their maps, and in teams present to the class on the questions; what is alike, and what is different?
Finally I would ask for a personal essay on maps as a ground of struggle; what happens if something is erased from your map by someone else? Or rewritten in a hostile way?
Drawn in Winkel Tripel projection with distortions minimized unlike other World maps (e.g. Greenland is shown the same size as Argentina, not South America)
