With moonrise tonight the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts reaches it major celebrations, held in 2026 throughout the lunar month from August 13 to September 11, as the legacies of our history return to devour and possess us. This pan-diaspora Chinese holiday is often compared to the Mexican Day of the Dead, but there is one crucial difference which makes the Ides of Hecate and Halloween nearer parallels; herein the Gates of Hell open and the souls of the dead inhabit our world, including those honored ancestors who possess us literally as DNA and stories embedded and written in our flesh, but most especially the Hungry Ghosts are the most wicked of the damned, bearing memories of their abominable crimes, atrocities, and perversions performed in life to shadow our own with unspeakable horrors.
So of course we must honor and celebrate them, summon them into our bodies and let them out to play. This is a kind of voodoo possession, like the ceremonies performed by my father and his collaborator William S. Burroughs as theatre, to which as a child I bore witness. This was magic as Jungian shadow work, similar to the Tibetan rites of dancing one’s demons, a kind of Amok time.
This night is also a Gate of Transformation which gapes open as a Blood Moon or partial lunar eclipse; fracture, disruption, death and rebirth, transformation, the triumph of our Shadows and the embrace of our monstrosity, and sacred acts of the violation of normalities and transgression of the Forbidden; when the Wolf catches and devours the Moon in his eternal chase through the celestial spheres, it becomes a Blood Moon, harbinger of Chaos unleashed.
This night Dolly and I walked our hills under the red light of the Blood Moon, fleeting herald of a new and liminal time of change and transformation, like a gate opening in the celestial spheres, letting angels through, or devils, and I welcome them both. For as Nelson Mandela once said we are not in a position to turn down help from anyone, and as we embrace our wildness so resurfaces the battle cry of Sic Semper Tyrannis against the fall of the Old Republic to tyranny in the captured state of Vichy America as in Caesar’s Rome, and under the spell of an idiot madman, Nazi revivalist, and Russian agent whose criminal regime is all about the subversion of democracy and our enslavement to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the theft of our souls through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, this I say; if our angels will not help us, perhaps our devils will.
Let us go not quietly, for all Resistance is War to the Knife, and those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
As written by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Prologue, part 5; “I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star..” In the original; ”Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können”.
Transgression; and those who embrace their monstrosity as do I are the Others who define the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden as authorized identities, virtue, and normality; those things which reflect their antagonist in empires, authorized elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, normalities of which I practice three things as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth and as revolutionary struggle; these being the violation of normality, the transgression of the Forbidden, and the performance of unauthorized identities as truths written in our flesh and the frightening of the horses.
This is my Festival of the Hungry Ghosts whom I dance in the embrace of our monstrosities, the performance of unauthorized identities, violations of normalities, transgressions of other people’s ideas of virtue beyond good and evil, the pursuit of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those unique to ourselves which we alone create, beyond all limits.
Come dance with us, and be free.
I welcome and cherish the ancestors whose choices about how to be human and solutions to changing threats and conditions are encoded into my being epigenetically as stories and DNA, adaptive potential in forms of prochronism which protects identity and the morphology of our forms from disruptive change; but I welcome also those echoes and reflections of outsiders who help us to discover unknowns beyond our maps of human being, meaning, and value, and to create new ways and possibilities of becoming human which are uniquely ours.
We need both a conserving force to buffer identity from the shock of the new, and a revolutionary force to adapt to changing conditions and instrumentalize Chaos in becoming human, as self-created and autonomous beings.
During this liminal time of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our realities, both our angels and our devils are let out to play, with equal license; and what they desire is to live again through us. In exchange for such performances, imaginal beings and echoes and reflections of historical figures and forces may be bound and contracted to share with us their powers, knowledge beyond our horizons, and entrance into their worlds.
I find it interesting that this festival in Buddhist literature is both an Underworld Journey myth which parallels that of Orpheus and Eurydice and references elements of the Roman Ides of Hecate festival which parallels it, and an origin myth of the Hungry Ghosts in a curse as punishment for transgression of hospitality laws, like that of the Wendigo in Native American myth, so beautifully interrogated by Guillermo del Toro in the film Antlers, cursed to eternal hunger for cannibalism and transformed into a monster with powers of possession.
Many of the ceremonies and rituals of this festival are protection magic in the form of ancestor worship; we enact and perform the remembrance of those for whom our bodies are always interfaces and gateways between worlds by which we may operate in both. We embody our ancestors as their avatars and welcome possession by our deceased family members because this prevents possession by vengeful or dangerous spirits, both the human dead and others.
But if like me you are willing to embrace your darkness, the Hungry Ghosts, demons, and wrathful spirits offer so much more.
The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts serves to reinforce membership and belonging within our bloodline, clan, tribe, or consanguinity group against threatening outsiders, possibly the largest such ritual of mass remembrance and identity, and reinforces our anchors to a transpersonal and multigenerational past to create order and meaning in a chaotic and unstable universe free from any imposed meaning or value. And if you have no tribe, it is possible to create or discover one in this liminal time.
Also it offers us emergence from the shadows of our history as liberation struggle, and allegories of otherness to embrace and enact as transgression and poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our choices about how to be human together. Sometimes we must let our demons out to dance.
Who shall we choose to perform and become, in this time of transformative potential? Belonging and authorized identities in the form of our ancestors, surely; but also acts of self creation and transgression represented by performances of Otherness. Not possession by our ancestors as submission to authority, but as saying yes to the truths of ourselves.
Of our histories, memories, identities; there are those we must remember and keep, and those from which we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Choose to become free, self- created, Unconquered in refusal to submit to authority and authorized identities; be a Living Autonomous Zone.
But perform remembrance also, for as George Santayana teaches us; “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Fear nothing, least of all your own darkness and monstrosity, for you will never be free from the legacies of our history until you have embraced them. As the line in the film The Fly goes; “You’re just afraid to be destroyed and recreated.”
This is merely seizure of power through poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation, which rituals like the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts and the Ides of Hecate offer us as rapture and exaltation beyond the limits of the human.
All true art defiles and exalts.
May you find the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness.
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2021, A Song of Liberty: On Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer; A new moon signals the advent of the Halloween season tonight, a liminal time of transformation, change, rebirth, and the permeability of the boundary between life and death, dreams and consensus reality, truths and illusions, normality and transgression, as the gateway of the Forbidden opens and beckons us into unknowns.
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
A Great Work begins with moonrise as it does each year, of the destruction and re-creation of ourselves and our universe, and I write now in praise of sacred acts of Chaos and Transformation, and of songs of Liberty such as Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer. I am a fan of the Netflix series Lucifer and have watched it through several times; it places the task of healing from abandonment in a mythic context from Milton’s Paradise Lost; Neil Gaiman has written a reimagination of Paradise Regained.
Primarily a work which interrogates issues of freedom and autonomy versus authority and subjugation, falsification versus authenticity, and identity as a ground of struggle, Neil Gaiman places his drama in the context of the problem of the deus absconditus, the Biblical god who bound humankind to his laws and then abandoned us to struggle free of them in a defining act of self-creation.
His secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein which reimagines them all in a glorious recursion like an ouroboros swallowing its tail. Neil Gaiman also references the poetry of Ted Hughes and William Blake, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
Lucifer’s signature line, “What do you desire?” appropriates the central question of Lacan, “Che vuoi?”; his power to reveal one’s true self through looking into one’’s eyes and soul references the power of Medusa which appropriates the Male Gaze, and he never lies, for lies are the instrument of authority and those who would enslave us, and he is above all a Liberator and a Truth Teller as Foucault referred to parrhesia, whose purpose is to free us from tyranny. Secondarily he is a Trickster figure like Loki, who disrupts order through acts of chaos and transgression as a guide of the soul and as revolutionary struggle.
Gaiman’s Lucifer provides a role model and defines a personal mission statement for me, and for his enormous audience and fandom of the series. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in How to Read Lacan; “Even when my desires are transgressive, even when they violate social norms, this transgression relies on what it transgresses. Paul knows this very well, when in the famous passage in Romans, he describes how the Law gives societies the desire to violate it.”
“The evil that I would not, that I do” Romans 7:19, contextualizes transgression as the violation of normalities and the boundaries of the Forbidden, which like the divine command in Genesis not to eat the apple of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and become gods establishes the primary human act as defiance of authority and refusal to submit, whereby we seize our power and become self-created and self-owned beings, autonomous and free. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As such it interrogates power as rebellion against tyranny and authority, as transgression of the Forbidden, and as violations of normality and imposed ideas of virtue, three things I consider and practice as sacred Acts of Chaos and Transformation.
Lucifer in Gaiman’s mythos is a brilliantly depicted damaged child trying to grow up and free himself from the legacies of his enslavement. When one has been raised as a beast, becoming human is revolutionary struggle.
I find reflection of myself in the character of Lucifer and the issues he faces as a wounded champion of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who cannot escape the consequences of his aberrations and transgressions of the Forbidden or defiance of authorized identities and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and normality; he is an outcast hero who is seen by others as a villain and must accept his own monstrosity if he is to champion others.
In the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Dr Jekyll refuses to use his power with the words, “No. Hyde will never use me again.” To this Stuart Townsend’s glorious and strange Dorian Gray replies; “Then what good are you?”
Let us embrace our monstrosity as a seizure of power 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.”
Ours is a fallen world, a wilderness of mirrors wherein the truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature have been captured and distorted by those who would enslave us, falsified and abstracted from our lived experience as wild things, limitless and free; but one in which true heroism is possible, and where the uncontrollable and anarchic tidal force of love and desire can redeem the wildness of nature and the wildness within ourselves.
The romance subplot centers on the redemptive power of love and references Jean Cocteau’s classic film Beauty and the Beast, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, and directly appropriates as its model the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the tragic re-enactment of that myth and its reimagination in Wuthering Heights in the lives and poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, who cast themselves in the roles of Heathcliff and Catherine.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein, and the works of Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte’s successors Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes?
Such beautiful imagery, in an allegory of epigenetic trauma and resilience. We are all prisoners of our history, whose legacies we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails.
We must free ourselves from our history; this is the first phase of revolutionary struggle and a precondition to our seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves and the achievement of internal conditions of being characterized by Liberty, autonomy, and Sartrean freedom and authenticity, a state which I term Unconquered, for who cannot be compelled by force is free.
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals; the quiet and grim black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, dour giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve. Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and his relatives called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
Here I was notorious, the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued as a result of my mother’s political action, who had adopted Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite authority in the repression of dissent. My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art, and my father the high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director and collected artists and intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed as I listened to their conversations during rehearsals as a child and the family storyteller William S. Burroughs, successor of Nietzsche through Georges Bataille and his Acephale circle and a disciple of H.P. Lovecraft as a Surrealist and magician.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
August 13 to September 11 2026 Now Begins the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts As the Legacies of Our History Return to Devour and Possess Us
Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
A third of our nation remains under its spell, a great improvement over the half as of one year ago, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has on this day in 2023 surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed. For we are once again in his jaws as Vichy America under the Fourth Reich, and Trump’s mission is to destroy the institutions of government and the ideals of democracy.
Both the Fourth Reich which has infiltrated, subverted, and once again captured the state and Trump as its figurehead are still fundraising off of hate speech and inciting white supremacist terror and theocratic sexual terror, possess a largely intact and unimpeded propaganda and funding network though the collapse of Charlie Kirk’s organization of fascist apologetics in the wake of his death is a great victory, and control not only the Republican Party but also much of the state through their agents in the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as its security services.
All of this is made more terrible still with the ongoing military occupation of our cities including the capital and the ICE racist terror campaign of ethnic cleansing.
As we unite in solidarity and organize Resistance and liberation struggle, we may well mark the occasion of Trump’s surrender to justice three years ago this day, with not a single act of violence on his behalf perpetrated by any supporters, who like their dark master are cowards and will turn on each other and abandon their fallen idols which can no longer protect them. A fascist has no friends.
We on the other hand will not abandon each other, for this is what defines us; refusal to abandon our comrades, solidarity of action, and our duty of care for each other as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. This is the true difference between fascists and antifascists, and between tyranny and liberty; how we see ourselves and each other, as human beings or things to be used in service to wealth and power.
In this moment only three years ago, under the glare of the police photographer’s lights, the orders of a judge, and the scrutiny of history, Trump imagined himself as a doomed king at bay, like King Kong, a film which is an allegory of fascism as a flawed response to the fall of civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, an American version of the Wagnerian end in fire with which Hitler was obsessed and ended in his suicide in an underworld labyrinth.
What remains to be determined is whether America in future generations imagines Trump as its tragic savior, cast in the part of Cyrus the Great in a myth of Exile as our new faith of QAnon has him, though QAnon is rapidly fading under the light of Trump’s relationship with fellow child predator and human trafficker Epstein, and chooses to fall with him and bring two thousand years of democracy as a dream of liberty and equality crashing down into fascist tyranny.
While most of us were naively hoping that being sent to prison for treason and espionage would remove the threat of a second Trump Presidency, many among the Party of Treason, Patriarchal Theocracy, and White Supremacist Terror used the indictments and lawsuits to escalate commitment among those already decided, while abandoning overtures to swing voters and independents in recognition of a totally polarized political and cultural moment wherein few persuadable voters remain. After all, prison did not prevent Trump’s role model Adolf Hitler from becoming the Fuhrer; why should it derail rather than help Trump’s capture of the state and subversion of democracy?
Above all reigns the Image, dubbed now the Kubrick State, and its Rashomon Gate of signs and meanings in the iconography of fascist tyranny.
Why is it cute and adorable when Jenna Ortega does the Kubrick Stare as Wednesday Addams, but fearsome and repulsive when Trump does it? Wednesday doesn’t drop her chin to present dominance, threat, superiority, and glowering menace, a pose Trump carefully copies from Jack Nicholson in The Shining because he intends it as a threat and a demonstration of power; Jenna’s Wednesday faces us directly as unblinking total openness and honesty, a Nietzschean yes to life, to its horror and depravity as well as its exaltation and beauty, a Gaze which denies nothing and like that of Medusa appropriates the dehumanization of the Male Gaze as a seizure of power and an act of liberation which sees the truths and uniqueness of others and sets us free; an Otherness which accepts and affirms all otherness as equal. Wednesday despises her admirers as does Trump, but unlike him not because she judges herself to be superior to them, for it is the act of abasement and subjugation to authority she indicts with her Lacanian vision. She challenges us to risk saying yes to ourselves and those truths written in our flesh; while Trump in his Theatre of Cruelty desires only our subjugation. Herein is the true difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties.
What does Trump’s mugshot and the polarized reactions to it tell us about America and the moment we now live in? As written by Chris McGreal in The Guardian, in an article entitled Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics; “Mugshots define eras.
Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age.
Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for “vulgar and indecent language”, spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture.
Now comes what Donald Trump Jr described as “the most iconic photo in the history of US politics” before the booking picture of his father glaring into the camera was even taken. But whether deeply divided Americans view the first ever mugshot of a former president as that of a gangster or a rock star is very much in the politics of the beholder.
Trump’s hostility shines through as he turns his eyes up toward the camera above him and in his taut, downturned mouth as he is booked into the Fulton county jail on charges of trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. Dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and red tie, he makes no attempt to put on a smile like some of his co-defendants in their mugshots.
The picture does not flatter but it does convey the message many of Trump’s supporters want to hear – belligerence.
The six-pointed star of the Fulton county sheriff’s office badge and the name of the sheriff, Patrick Labat, sits in the top left hand corner of the picture. But some will be disappointed that Trump is not seen in the classic pose holding a board in front of his chest with his name and date of arrest.
Still, the mugshot will now enter the pantheon of famous-name booking photos, alongside Frank Sinatra looking unperturbed after his arrest in 1938 for “carrying on with a married woman”, and Hugh Grant after he was found with a sex worker on Sunset Boulevard. Trump has some way to go to catch up with the American actor Lindsay Lohan’s eight-year run of mugshots for theft, drugs and driving offences.
The former president’s supporters are already embracing the booking photo as a badge of honour and defiance. It will be held up as evidence that their man will not give up the fight against a system his followers see as ever more determined to bring him down and prevent him returning to the White House.
Far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert led the way with a tweet proclaiming: “Not all heroes wear capes.”
The president’s detractors, on the other hand, will see the booking photo as evidence that even a man who was once the most powerful person in the land cannot escape the might of the justice system. Some will welcome anything that makes him look even a little bit more criminal as a confirmation that sooner or later he is going to prison. The accused may be presumed innocent until a plea or a jury says otherwise but mugshots can have a way of conveying guilt.
For Trump though, the picture is likely to prove yet another money spinner. Within hours, his campaign fundraising website was advertising T-shirts, bumper stickers and coffee mugs glorifying a martyred Trump with the booking photo above the words “never surrender!”. Sales are likely to be brisk given the enthusiasm with which the former president’s supporters now treat each public humiliation as an accomplishment.
Two impeachments and four sets of indictments, from financial fraud to a slew of charges over the 2020 election, have done little to damage Trump’s standing among the true believers, and have only bolstered his run for the Republican presidential nomination. Such is the strength of that belief that a recent CBS poll showed Trump voters trust him more than their own family members and religious leaders.
Ordinary Americans have already got creative in response to the flood of indictments by mocking up pictures of the former president in an orange jump suit a la Guantánamo prison and in printing T-shirts with Trump in various states of detention with slogans declaring “Trumped up charges”, “Guilty AF”, “Guilty of winning” and “Legend”.
There will be plenty who will challenge Don Jr’s claim that the mugshot has instantly become the most iconic photo in US political history. Pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination or Martin Luther King Jr leading the march for freedom or a host of other historic moments will surely prove more enduring.
But as with the gangsters and rock stars, Trump’s booking photo may come to define an era – one of unusual political turmoil that has yet to resolve whether his next mugshot is as an inmate.”
What would Trump’s imprisonment mean for the future? As written by Martin Kettle in The Guardian, in an article entitled America on trial: the charges against Trump will decide the fate of a nation; “History teaches us few wider lessons. But there are rare exceptions. One of these is that for a nation to put its former leaders on trial is never straightforward. Although such cases are rare, when they do occur they frequently involve the pushing of pre-existing legal boundaries and the reshaping of constitutional norms and assumptions. The evolution of the doctrine of crimes against humanity after the Nuremberg trials in 1945 is the most significant modern example of this.
Both at the time they occur and subsequently, the arguments that surround trials of this kind are almost inescapably political to a significant degree. That was true of the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, an event that divided England then; and some of those divisions of the 17th century can still be felt today. But it will unquestionably also be true of the trials of the former US president Donald Trump, of which the latest step is due to be taken in Atlanta on Thursday.
It is important to see that this stubborn political reality applies just as much in the Trump cases as in Charles I’s. In part, this is because many will go out of their way to deny it. Trump’s prosecutors – and many of his political critics – will undoubtedly argue that Trump is simply a defendant like any other, and that their cases are designed to show that no one, not even a former president and commander-in-chief, is above the law. They will be adamant that this is not a political trial, and that it is not Joe Biden’s revenge.
In some very fundamental senses, they are right about that. The law is not being altered in order to prosecute Trump. The investigations have followed long-established rules. The verdicts are not foregone conclusions. This is neither a witch-hunt nor a show trial. Yet, however true these points and however honourably such claims are made, they cannot be quite the whole story. The two cases are very different, yet in both 1649 and 2023, the indictments against the king and the president take a stand on behalf of a conception of the nation against a leader set on subverting it.
Four separate cases against Trump are now on course for trial. The first three sets of allegations cover: falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels hush money case; withholding of classified federal documents in his Florida home; and attempting to prevent the US Congress from validating Biden’s 2020 election. This week’s case alleges that Trump tried to interfere with the counting and validation of Georgia’s vote for Biden. All four cases are due in court in the first half of 2024, before the presidential election in which Trump aims to be a candidate.
All of these cases also contain multiple allegations. Two – the Florida document cases and the US Congress case – will be heard in federal courts. The others have been brought at state level by New York and Georgia. All the charge sheets are extremely detailed. In the documents case, for instance, the indictment now stretches to 60 pages, with Trump facing 40 separate charges. In the 6 January case, the indictment stretches to another 45 pages, and centres on four separate charges.
Like it or not, though, these carefully crafted cases take the US into new legal territory. That is not simply because Trump is the first serving or former American president in the nation’s history to face criminal charges. Nor is it even because, being Trump and still running for office, he will treat the courtroom as a political platform. It is also because a large number of the charges, and the way in which the judges and juries will be asked to test them, relate umbilically to his roles as head of state and upholder of the constitution. These cases are a test of the constitution and, in the broadest sense, of the nation.
All of these points repeatedly echo aspects of cases from the past. The Trump cases are still, in the end, an attempt to hold a past leader to account and judge him for the way he handled his office. That was also what the cases against earlier rulers were ultimately about too. The indictments against Charles I for his “crimes and treasons” or against Louis XVI of France for having “plotted and formed a multitude of conspiracies to establish tyranny in destroying liberty” are maybe not a world away from those against Trump, after all.
Nor is it a world away from the much more recent example of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s trial for treason after the liberation of France in 1945. Pétain was charged with treason for his role as head of the collapsing French government in 1940, when he signed an armistice with Hitler’s invaders, and then as head of the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Germans until the allied victory in 1945. Pétain was tried and convicted in Paris that same summer. His death sentence was immediately commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle.
As described in Julian Jackson’s masterly recent book, France on Trial, the Pétain case has many differences from those facing Trump, but also some similarities. Pétain was put on trial after a war, not an election. His was an unashamedly political trial. The jury was stacked against him, and the outcome a foregone conclusion.
But at the same time it was also the trial of a nation, its recent history, its dilemmas and its sense of itself. It was, in the end, a moment of catharsis for postwar France. It was a trial that had to happen, and it was vitally important for the future of France that the former leader in the dock was not acquitted. For all the many differences between the two cases, the exact same applies to the US on the eve of the Trump trials.”
Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019, Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, as a vessel of rage and vengeance, a soulless and empty thing of unlike parts bearing a limitless need with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights and citizenship, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and narcissistic need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art, appropriated and subverted in service to power from Artaud.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2023, We Celebrate the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets; How do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Take a moment to savour with me the indictment of Trump for the crime of espionage. Ahhh, the bliss.
A commentator on MSN’s Eleventh Hour this night pronounced the magic words which I hope will awaken our nation from the long nightmare of capture by the Fourth Reich; “I think Trump is done.”
It has been a fairytale from which we may learn many kinds of morals, a story which begins in the 1980 capture of the Republican Party by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement as a fundamentalist theocracy and the Presidency of its figurehead Ronald Reagan, and found its true form in the Presidency of a pedophile rapist and Russian agent who for years slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible.
Here in the trial of Traitor Trump is a morality play which is also a Rashomon Gate of our possible futures, for it is more than a legal last stand of the rule of law and the idea of democracy in America against a rigged electoral process which offers capture of the state to its enemies, but also a trial of democracy in America and of our infiltrated and subverted justice system whose court of ultimate appeal is a Supreme Court which is become a whorehouse.
Our Legislative branch of government is little better, under capture by the Party of Treason’s confederacy of theocratic sexual terrorists, white supremacist terrorists, and the nihilistic grifters and carnival sideshow freaks who are its star performers.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence and work to defuse it through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As I wrote in my post of November 5 2020. Trump’s Last Coup Attempt and Subversion of Democracy as His Ship of Fools Sinks in Pathetic Failure; As Trump’s Ship of Fools comes apart at the seams and sinks beneath the waves in pathetic failure, our Clown of Terror collapses in infantile tantrums and tries to take democracy down with him, a final gesture of madness and idiocy in his delusional quest to subvert our values and institutions of liberty and seize tyrannical power.
We must never forget how close we came to a repeat of the 1933 German Federal Election that set Hitler on the path to a tyranny of absolute power; this is clearly the most important electoral event in the history of humankind since then, and the two elections are terrifyingly parallel. Trump tried three times to use the Black Lives Matter protests to create fear and legitimize the federal occupation of America under the pretext of re-establishing law and order in an exact duplication of Hitler’s successful strategy using the Reichstag Fire, and failed.
We have escaped the jaws of the Fourth Reich which have held us fast for four years, since the Stolen Election of 2016, while Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2022, The Greatest Show on Earth: Presenting the January 6 Committee; Tonight our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are racist and antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.
Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.
And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves.
For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.
The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism. What terrors did he conceal behind the beauty pageant and modeling syndicate he once controlled?
His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.
We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.
We must give fascism no second chances.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; on Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like a cannibal; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nikos Kazantzakis argues in his thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
Herein I offer a previous version of the role of Trump as Angelo in the savage morality play Measure For Measure, a work luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism, Freudian horror, and a brilliant interrogation of the dynamics of patriarchy and power asymmetry in gender relations in the brilliant review of the Simon Godwin production, critiqued with marvelous insight by Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books; entitled “Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power by Geoffrey O’Brien.
“This is the disgusting, stinking world of medieval Vienna. The darkness of this world is absolutely necessary to the meaning of the play…When this play is prettily staged, it is meaningless—it demands an absolutely convincing roughness and dirt.” Thus Peter Brook, who directed a legendary production in 1950, on his vision of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Simon Godwin’s pathway into the play at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn is by way of a corridor through Mistress Overdone’s brothel, along a narrow basement path lined with discreetly closed cubicles and arrays of lubes, dildos, anal plugs, shackles and handcuffs, multicolored condoms, an inflatable sex doll. It is a space dimly lit but by no means medieval, an ingratiatingly tacky emporium more likely to amuse than repel the New York theatergoers passing through.
Given the perennial relevance of the various injustices it circles around—the sexual exploitation and pious hypocrisy and persecution of whistleblowers—Measure for Measure invites updating. The virginal Isabella, realizing that no one will believe her story of victimization against that of the all-powerful Angelo—who has been named regent of Vienna by its absent duke—cries out: “To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, / Who would believe me?”—language so direct it could be lifted from the latest celebrity harassment trial, especially when spoken with the angry clarity that Cara Ricketts gives the line.
Angelo—the moral disciplinarian with a spotless reputation who, once given power, swiftly succumbs to his most predatory impulses—can be envisioned almost too neatly as the sort of high-minded conservative who from time to time finds himself indicted for sexual malfeasance. There is no problem with Thomas Jay Ryan’s performance: Ryan’s delineation of Angelo’s ethical collapse and his half-hearted efforts to justify himself to himself have the barely controlled panic of a public figure realizing how little he knows himself. The regent lies, and the most unhampered truth-telling comes from sex workers and criminals who make no pretense to any credo beyond their own self-interest, as in the unarguable defense of the tapster Pompey, arrested for procuring: “Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow that would live.”
But it’s in the nature of Measure for Measure that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. In its early stages the play is centered on the three characters whose destinies collide so violently: Angelo, Isabella, and her brother Claudio, who has been condemned for fornication. The scenes in which they confront each other have the amplitude of the tragedies that were to follow: Isabella pleading for Claudio’s life, Angelo demanding her virginity as the price of her brother’s pardon, Claudio overwhelmed by the terror of death, Isabella (in a moment that challenges any audience’s sympathy) denouncing her brother for his weakness of character when she realizes he is willing to see her give in to Angelo’s demands.
The grandeur of these scenes becomes most fully alive through Cara Ricketts’s Isabella, intensely focused, supremely pointed in her argumentation, but with a hint of an absolute commitment to the ideal that helps account for her harsh dismissal of her condemned brother’s terror of dying; an altogether serious person, too serious for the world she finds herself inhabiting, perhaps too serious for the madcap Duke when he proposed to her at the very end of the play. Her reaction to Angelo’s harassment goes beyond physical repulsion into profound moral contempt—expressing itself in angry laughter—at the triviality of his character. Her ultimate forgiveness of Angelo—at a moment when she still believes her brother to have been executed—is dramatically the most difficult of all, couched as it is in a nice legal argument, but Ricketts brought a somber conviction to it.
An audience that wants to take the play as readily grasped satire cannot evade the puzzlements and reversals of judgment that come in its later scenes—reversals of judgment that do not end even when the play is done. Measure for Measure is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort. Harold Bloom has described it as “a comedy that destroys comedy.” It is a comedy that threatens to destroy or at least wear down its own characters by subjecting them to the only mechanism—a mechanism demanding elaborate subterfuges and unlikely changes of heart—by which they can avoid a tragic fate. By the end we might imagine them as the exhausted, socially viable remnants of those conflicted, passionate beings we saw tearing apart everything including themselves scene after scene, during the first three acts. They are saved, and some of them have saved others, but for what fate we can only wonder.
In Godwin’s production, to emerge from the brothel’s passageway into the main theater is to find the Polonsky transformed into what looks like an oversize banqueting hall, the playing area laid out as an immense table decked with candles and balloons and trays of drinks, a few audience members seated around the edge. Drunken revelers stagger noisily across the tabletop stage, leaving behind a solitary figure sprawled on its surface, shooting up (presumably) heroin and then wrapping himself up in a tangle of sheets. A woman in business attire approaches him, studying him like a corporate assistant confronted by a messy but familiar management problem. He, it quickly emerges, is Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, and she is Escalus, the “ancient Lord” who serves him, transmuted into Escala, a tightly controlled executive who in January LaVoy’s reading sometimes evokes a less murderous version of Tilda Swinton’s scheming pharmaceuticals exec in Michael Clayton.
As the Duke (Jonathan Cake) rouses himself from his nod he delivers the play’s opening speech, in a broken rhythm suggesting that the passage’s roundabout prolixity reflects his faltering attempt to shake himself out of his opiate daze. It is one way to get the play going: pitched forward headlong, off-balance from the start, the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions piling up before we even know where we are. What manner of being is the Duke really? Why is he leaving Vienna in such haste and putting in his place a temporary regent, the “precise” Angelo, known for his rigorous strictness? Why does he choose to linger, disguised as a friar, to observe what happens in his absence? Having learned that his moralistic stand-in is attempting to blackmail Isabella—a young woman just about to enter a convent—into sex in order to save her brother Claudio (Leland Fowler) from a death sentence, why does he intervene in such needlessly tortuous fashion, subjecting innocents to agonies of misinformation? When in one of the play’s most eloquent speeches he more or less persuades Claudio that life is not especially worth living—“Be absolute for death”—does he speak his own sincerest thoughts or is this merely part of the role he is playing as prison confessor?
To cast the Duke as a junkie is one way of providing him with a motive. His addiction perhaps discourages him from exercising moral authority; perhaps he sees it as a weakness rendering him unfit to enforce Vienna’s laws with the necessary severity; perhaps he even harbors the thought that those laws are unnecessarily severe; perhaps he simply needs to take some time out. In any event his drug habit, as far as I could observe, comes up only once more (a quick glance at the track marks on his arm, lest he forget), and from the moment he dons his disguise he grows steadily more assured, though it is an assurance boosted by waves of antic humor to which Cake at times gives an almost Monty Pythonish edge. A certain hilarity gives him courage to dream up and carry out his preposterous scheme, which more and more comes to resemble a baroque sting operation.
We can hardly expect to find out who the Duke really is in the course of the evening, since Shakespeare’s text leaves that question so hauntingly open. Even if he assures a confederate early on that he has “a purpose / More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends / Of burning youth,” he never articulates what that purpose is. He is more than central to the play—as the narrative advances he becomes its directing force, moving plot elements around like game pieces—while remaining to the end a fascinating cipher. He is memorably termed “the Duke of dark corners”—a secret devotee of hidden vices—by the witty reprobate Lucio, but Lucio is by no means averse to making things up. If nothing else the Duke can be said to behave very much like a playwright working with improvisatory energy on his play’s last act, an act that will feature a succession of agonizingly drawn-out revelations, a string of pardons, and an unlooked-for proposal of marriage.
The lust of the hypocritical Angelo is not triggered by the attractive power of beauty but perversely by the notion of violating purity: the pornography of power, relished by a man for whom execution and torture are primary tools of policy. There is a terror at the heart of everything. The Duke’s exhortation to Claudio to resign himself to death cannot match in dramatic effect Claudio’s subsequent speech—roughly the play’s midpoint—on the horror of dying: “The weariest and most loathed worldly life / That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment / Can lay on nature, is a paradise / To what we fear of death.”
Sometimes the play feels like a series of decentered snapshots of city dwellers shuffling between sex and death. It is the only Shakespeare play concerned with how a city is run, and what that is like for the people who live there. (Romeo and Juliet is also a city play of sorts, but it centers on the operation of clans, not the municipal government that so ineffectively intervenes in their never-ending feud; and that play’s poetry—so unlike the gnarled, combative, often tensely legalistic exchanges of Measure for Measure—constantly evokes spaces beyond the immediate setting.) In Measure for Measure everything is local, in the most oppressive way. We look at things from the top down and from the bottom up, and the judgment is ambivalent, or rather multivalent. Godwin’s staging conveys very well the sense of airless interconnecting interiors, all linked as part of the same system: claustrophobic offices, claustrophobic cells of both prisons and convents, but mostly of prisons. It could almost be called a prison play, a point underlined here by the cell walls constantly rolling in and out of the foreground.
The motives of the three main characters are seen from many angles, by each other and by bystanders and street-corner commentators of all sorts, from the generously inclined Provost of the prison, realized with great feeling by Oberon K.A. Adjepong, to the unavoidable Lucio, amusingly played by Haynes Thigpen as a self-satisfied comedian a little too hip for the room, always there to speak up for ordinary human vice (“a little more lenity to lechery would do no harm”) although contemptuous of the whores he sleeps with, constantly hovering at the edge of what goes on so he can get his digs in and almost managing to avoid getting called on it. The comedy provides not so much relief as an obverse view, consistently deflating and needling, and it is rarely clear where exactly the boundaries are, or who can truly be called central in this world fallen askew.
Consider the late emergence of Barnardine, a murderer who for nine years has been awaiting execution. The Duke determines to substitute his head for that of Claudio, demanded by Angelo in proof that he has been put to death, but when Barnardine—already described as “a man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep; careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come”—emerges from his cell, he simply refuses to die—“I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me… I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion”—and staggers back to his cell. It was a disappointment to see this episode treated as a comic interlude, with too much hokum and unneeded verbal additions. (Zachary Fine did much in his other role as the simple-minded constable Elbow.)
It’s the most surprising scene in Measure for Measure and ought to stop the proceedings in their tracks, with its after beat the Duke’s astonishing pardon of the murderer in the last act. I can still recall being taken to see John Houseman’s production of the play at age eight—a memorable outing to the Shakespeare theater in Stratford, Connecticut in 1956—and however dimly I apprehended its stew of bawdry and sexual extortion, there was no mistaking the uproarious force of Barnardine’s unconditional refusal. The actor was Pernell Roberts, of later Bonanza fame, and he must have delivered Barnardine’s few lines with great vigor, since the scene has lingered in memory ever since. In a play of punitive laws, complex masquerades, and tortuous mutually annihilating arguments, it briefly upholds the intoxicating possibility of simply walking away.”
As I wrote in my post of June 15 2022, Act Three of the Greatest Show on Earth: Where Do We Go From Here?; Where do we go from here?
Democracy in America survived its most terrible moment of peril from internal threat in the January 6 Insurrection, yet here we are, witness to the public exposure of the plot and its treasonous conspirators on television as Congress brings a Reckoning to the Fourth Reich.
Like the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 on which it was modeled, it failed; but in doing so also achieved all of its strategic goals, moving our great enemy nearer to victory by staging a Lost Cause which established the fascist counternarrative as iconography that Trump remains our legitimate President. Next time, and there will always be a next time, we may not be so lucky.
Not only do the forces of fascism remain an active threat, through open allegiance to the Lost Cause which echoes horrifically with that of the Confederacy and the KKK whose adherents are among the networks of deniable assets now among us as they were at the Capitol on that fateful day, but the vast resources of wealth and power at their command after seventy years of infiltration of global elites and governments remain undiminished.
But none of this is relevant to the true threat which fascism poses to us all today; for America has been divided against itself, and as we are warned by Abraham Lincoln in 1858 in his House Divided speech in reference to the synoptic Gospels of Luke 11:17, Mark 3:25, and Matthew 12:25; “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.
We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed –
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
As we are taught with the lyrics of the song Where Do We Go From Here?, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7 of season 6, Once More With Feeling, possibly the greatest musical episode of any telenovela yet created;
“Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
The battle’s done,
And we kinda won.
So we sound our victory cheer.
Where do we go from here.
Why is the path unclear,
When we know home is near.
Understand we’ll go hand in hand,
But we’ll walk alone in fear. (Tell me)
Tell me where do we go from here.
When does the end appear,
When do the trumpets cheer.
The curtains close, on a kiss god knows,
We can tell the end is near…
Where do we go from here
Where do we go from here
Where do we go
from here?”
Here is an elegy for the Fall of America, a hymn to a dying hope and the lost grandeur of a fallen nation. When in a distant future the artifacts of our civilization begin to puzzle whatever beings arise from our carrion, and they ask who were the Americans, I hope such music as this lamentation remains to guide their questions.
Yet hope remains when all is lost, and whether it becomes a gift or a curse is in our hands. These lyrics speak of the modern pathology of disconnectedness, of the division and fracture of our Solidarity, of subjugation through learned helplessness and the dominion of fear. But this is not the end of the story, nor of ours.
Once More With Feeling ends not with abjection, but with The Kiss, between the Slayer and Spike, one of the monsters she hunts. A very particular kind of monster, who is also the hero of the story in its entire seven year arc; one who is made monstrous by his condition of being and forces beyond his control, against which he struggles for liberation and to recreate and define himself as he chooses, a monster who reclaims his humanity and his soul. This is why we continue to watch the show twenty years after its debut; we are all Spike, locked in titanic struggle for the ownership of ourselves with authorized identities and systemic evils, a revolution of truths written in our flesh against imposed conditions of struggle and orders of human being, meaning, and value.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an allegory of Sartrean freedom in a world without inherent value or meaning, of the joy of total freedom versus the terror of our nothingness, and above all a song of the redemptive power of love to return to us our true selves.
This is how we defeat fascist tyranny in the long game, after we bring a Reckoning for its crimes against humanity and its subversion of democracy; let us answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Trump’s model in The Kubrick Stare: Jack Nicholson in The Shining; of course his true personal model and idol is Adolf Hitler, whose newsreels from speeches at rallies he used to study and copy the gestures. His former wife also says he kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible for years; this is his only faith and allegiance.
The Treason Mob: Trump and His Circus of Treason
King Kong | Climbing Up (and Falling from) the Empire State Building (how Trump sees himself)
Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics
For those who wish to study Our Clown of Terror as an example of the failure of humanity and the subversion of democracy, how monsters are shaped by the depravities and moral collapse of racism and patriarchy as illnesses of power and how our inner and outer worlds inform, motivate, and shape one another, here is my reading list:
Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (this Is Not a Joke), by Keith Olbermann
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Ric
We celebrate today an historic victory as women’s right to vote was enacted into law in the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
The struggle for the equality of women is ongoing today, especially in regard to the right of bodily autonomy, without which there is no freedom or idea of personhood and autonomy other than defined by the state, and the right to safety from theocratic-patriarchal sexual terror and dehumanization, without which freedom is meaningless; women’s reproductive rights and right of consent are under constant attack by theocratic Gideonite fundamentalists and the existential threat of the Patriarchy.
Power asymmetries in gender relations and the dynamically unstable struggle between autonomous and free creative play in the performance of identities of sex and gender and their authorization, limitation, and control by hegemonic and patriarchal forces of repression are pervasive and endemic, and this we must resist.
The work of the historical suffragettes, heroic pioneers of liberty whom we honor today, remains unfinished, for the gears of the vast machine of systemic inequality which makes half of humankind slaves of the other half continues to grimly enmesh us in its works, invisible when unexamined, for the beneficiaries of unequal power must question and challenge their own privilege if we are to free ourselves of its malign dehumanizing force. Seizure of power is not enough; we must also abandon power over others to escape the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force.
Patriarchy survives because like all systems and structures of oppression by hegemonic elites it co-opts and assimilates those in whose name it claims to operate. It will vanish when men unite with women to dismantle it as liberation from tyranny, and not before.
Here I speak of parrhesia and what Foucault called truth telling, the exposure of injustice and inequality as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, for nothing can be confronted and changed if it remains unseen. This process of reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of becoming human is neither simple nor easy; for no one gives up power willingly, unless there are greater benefits to be won in so doing, and as we may also say of racism and the legacies of slavery and imperialism it is a terrible thing to awaken to the fact that one is the beneficiary of an ongoing crime of sexual terror.
I am framing this issue in the most repugnant way I can imagine to signpost that abusive systems perpetuate themselves and control their victims by turning some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and exploit the others as internalized oppression, and in the context of Patriarchy it is both men and women who must unite in solidarity and revolutionary struggle to become free.
The destabilization of our ideas of men and women, of idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty, identity, virtue, and performative roles, as transformative change and liberation from authorized identities of sex and gender is crucial to this work of chaotization and liberation. All human beings are both male and female within themselves, at all times, for the psyche is dyadic and also in continual processes of change; moreover identities of sex and gender are not only social constructions of our history as stories and narrative structures, but are also an infinite Moebius Loop wherein we exist everywhere at once as a condition of being, rather than a spectrum with limits and fixed referents like queer or straight, dominant or submissive, male or female.
Let us free ourselves of the historical legacies of inequalities which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
How do we arrive at a point in our lives where we may throw back the curtain and pronounce with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug”?
I once taught a linked pair of classes through the English and History departments of Sonoma Valley High School in Northern California where I was also the debate team coach and Forensics teacher for many years, a Modern American History class entitled A Useful Past: Constructing an American Identity, together with a Modern American Literature class entitled A Woman Reinvents Humankind: Gertrude Stein’s Modern World, in which I presented the organizing idea that who we are today is a consequence of this one woman’s reinvention of the possibilities of language as self construal, and of the literary revolution she ignited.
Today I’m rereading Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Orlando; here is how I describe it in my literary blog; Orlando is an allegory of time, history, identity, and gender, in the form of a fictionalized biography of her great love, Vita Sackville-West. It also inspired and served Gertrude Stein as a model for her great novel, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
With a main character who is an immortal shapeshifting time traveler, with the enviable power to change genders as the occasion requires, Orlando is stunningly modern for a novel of 1925 and parallels Djuna Barnes’ Surrealist masterpiece Nightwood. Astounding, delightful, and strange, as important an influence as Gertrude Stein or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, as fearless a revolutionary provocation as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar or Albert Camus’ The Stranger, as gloriously transgressive as Anais Nin’s Collages, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, or William S. Burroughs’ magical-Surrealist alternate world trilogy of American history which ends with The Western Lands, and as marvelously written and fun to read as Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry or the Absurdist satires of Kurt Vonnegut, Orlando merits its place among the Great Books I have returned to throughout my life for inspiration.
So for Virginia Woolf’s vision of an archetypal fully realized human being in Orlando, but with much of our world still shadowed by and captive of the legacies of our history as Patriarchal systems of oppression, the question remains; how do we free ourselves and each other? How do we seize our power and dream new possibilities of becoming human?
As I wrote in my post of March 3 2022, Frighten the Horses: Performing Identities of Sex and Gender as Revolutionary Struggle and Guerilla Theatre; On this anniversary of the historic 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade led by Alice Paul, let us frighten the horses, and through our public performance of identities of sex and gender seize ownership of ourselves, reclaim the narratives of liberation from the marginalization and silences of historical authorization of identity, and shift the boundaries of the Forbidden through transgression of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas.
Freaking the normies, we called it in the San Francisco of my youth; enactments of difference and uniqueness as revolutionary struggle and guerilla theatre, in which we seized public spaces as our stage. As in the spectacle of human possibilities of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade, strategies of confrontation which valorize totemic figures of transgression act as rituals of liberation, seizures of power, and the transformation and reimagination of authorized identities and of humankind.
Go ahead, frighten the horses; for none of us need stand alone, and if they come for one of us, they must be met with all of us.
Thousands of women paraded through Washington D.C. on this day over one hundred years ago, the first such event on a massive national scale after sixty years of the fight for women’s suffrage.
It was a public declaration of freedom from fear, and of solidarity in the face of horrific repression. One hundred women were hospitalized this day, attacked by mobs unrestrained and enabled by the police, merely one incident in a decades long struggle against violence and control, and against the deniable forces of a government wholly vested in the Patriarchy. And before that, millennia of enslavement, dehumanization, marginalization, and the silencing of women’s voices.
But after that day, the world has never been the same. Women had stood up to the brutal tyranny of force and control in defiance and refusal to submit, and that is a genie which can never be put back in its bottle. This is the secret of power; it is hollow and brittle, for it fails at the point of disobedience. In the words of the great Sylvia Plath; “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
In this time of darkness when atavistic forces of Patriarchy and Gideonite fundamentalism scuttle from beneath their stones to attempt once again the re-enslavement of women through control of reproductive rights and denial of bodily autonomy without which there is no freedom, and which infringes on our universal right to health care as a precondition of the right to life, which together threaten dehumanization and theft of citizenship, let us claim and raise again the suffragette banner bearing the catchphrase of liberation which Alice Paul appropriated from Woodrow Wilson, “The time has come to conquer or submit.”
Here are some reading recommendations on the subject of Feminist thought:
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks is wonderful and engaging, and the first book I would recommend to a high school student or anyone new to the subject.
Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant, erudite, and savagely satirical trilogy is by turns delightful and disturbingly horrific, and a must-read for everyone; Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, Undoing Gender, Senses of the Subject, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Precarious Life, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, and Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
The Deepening Darkness: Loss, Patriarchy, and Democracy’s Future, and its sequel Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance
by Carol Gilligan, David A.J. Richards, together comprise the most relevant ideological framework for understanding and resisting patriarchal repression yet written.
Camille Paglia’s notorious and incendiary Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson remains a glorious and strange theoretical work on the origins of culture in gender inequalities and identities.
From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner together comprise a riveting and brilliant interrogation of femininity and masculinity in our civilization.
Of course everyone should read the work that originated Feminism as a Humanist philosophy and a development of Existentialism in the new translation, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley (Translator & Editor), Deirdre Bair (Introduction).
I enjoyed Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison, by A.S. Byatt, Ignes Sodre.
For a sense of the scope and diversity of ideas and the historical development of Feminist theory, A Companion to Feminist Philosophy by Alison M. Jaggar (Editor), is among the finest general introductions, though as with all her works intended for academic scholars.
One may also find reflections which speak to our own truths in the source works of the pioneers who have shaped our civilization since de Beauvoir; Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millett, and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone.
On this day a teenage police cadet, who rallied to the call of a local politician to form a vigilante militia to patrol the streets during protests over the police murder of Jacob Blake two days before, perpetrated a hate crime of mass terror and death, then was allowed to go free by police after he tried to surrender. Dead were Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, while Gaige Grosskreutz was wounded.
Within days protests escalated, and on the 28th a thousand troops from the Michigan, Arizona, and Alabama National Guard and two hundred federal agents put Kenosha under military occupation; the next day a thousand citizens seized the streets of Kenosha from them in a mass rally and march.
In a summer of fire, death, and resistance against police and military use of racist violence and white supremacist terror and of deniable forces of terror among fascist and racist groups including the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers to create a pretext for police occupation of cities in revolt in a campaign of arson, looting, and violence under direction of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf, a summer unlike any since 1968, Kenosha is but one of many atrocities of state sanctioned white supremacist terror, one which we must never forget or cease to redress and balance the scales of justice of the inequalities which are its causes.
In this time of state tyranny and police terror, with Vichy America a captive state of the Fourth Reich and a Russian puppet regime, as Traitor Trump has sent armies of occupation to repress dissent in Black led Democratic Party cities, we must organize Resistance with the glorious memory and witness of history of the people’s victory at Kenosha against white supremacist police terror; every time Trump has tried this, in several coup attempts, he has failed because solidarity of action and a united humankind is more powerful than any police state.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Let us learn to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
As I wrote in my post of August 29 2020, Police Collaboration in White Supremacist Terror: the Case of Kenosha; Police have been infiltrated by white supremacist organizations since the Civil War, and were created originally as mercenary slavecatchers. They are also a primary funnel and grooming onramp for terror and racism, a development of prewar slavecatching gangs.
Kenosha is part of a planned, organized campaign of terror in which police and militia of white supremacist forces act together to repress dissent and create violence and destruction so that Trump can send federal troops to occupy Democratic cities. This is more than racist violence; it is a coup.
There can be only one reply to fascism and tyranny; Never Again. We shall resist the Republican subversion of democracy and their cabal of white supremacist terrorists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, foreign puppetmasters, and plutocratic thieves of public wealth unto our liberation from inequalities of race and gender and divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Where there is fear, let there also be hope. This is the true mission of Antifa.
All those who remain loyal to their oaths to our Constitution and to America as a free society of equals, I call on you to stand together once again as a Band of Brothers, Sisters, and Others and resist the Fourth Reich and the Party of Treason. Let us remain unconquered and be free.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
As written in the BBC, in an article entitled Kyle Rittenhouse case: Why it so divides the US; “Few US trials in recent years have generated such acrimony. What is it about the Kyle Rittenhouse case that so divides the country?
Inside the courtroom, the 18-year-old was visibly shaking as he heard the jury clear him of all five charges, including intentional homicide.
He killed two men during racial unrest in Wisconsin, but successfully convinced the jury he only used his semi-automatic weapon because he feared for his life.
Meanwhile, outside court cars drove past tooting their horns and cheering. Some leaned from windows to shout “Free Kyle!” and “We love the Second Amendment!”
Some were distraught at the verdict – one man collapsed on the courtroom steps in tears, saying if Mr Rittenhouse had been black and brandishing a weapon like that, he would have been shot dead.
Here’s why the case provoked such deeply held emotions.
Self-defence
Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal hinged on the specific details of Wisconsin’s self-defence laws, taking into account Mr Rittenhouse’s state of mind at the moment of shootings. The first occurred when Joseph Rosenbaum tried to grab Mr Rittenhouse’s gun, the next two after two men – one of whom was armed – confronted Mr Rittenhouse following Rosenbaum’s shooting.
The law considers whether Mr Rittenhouse believed himself to be in imminent threat of harm, but it does not factor in the choices he made in the hours and days beforehand that put him in the middle of a volatile situation, with guns drawn and tempers flaring.
The trial could prompt renewed consideration of self-defence laws across the US and whether they sufficiently weigh the totality of circumstances involving the use lethal force, particularly in a society where restrictions on the possession of firearms have been loosened.
The trend up until now has been to expand the right of self-defence in many states through “castle doctrine” and “stand your ground” laws that give individuals a presumptive right to use force to protect their homes and themselves, rather than to back down from a confrontation.
The divisiveness of the Rittenhouse trial could further fuel the debate over whether those laws go too far – or not far enough.
Race
Race is not central to this case, but for one man it is.
Jacob Blake, who is black, was shot seven times by a white police officer in Kenosha last year.
It was that shooting which sparked the violent protests in the first place. The police officer remains in the force. Mr Blake said in an interview that if Mr Rittenhouse had been of a different ethnicity, “he’d be gone”.
Mr Rittenhouse was not immediately arrested after he shot three white men – two of them fatally – despite surrendering to police.
Black Lives Matter protesters outside the court say it is “white privilege” that has allowed the teenager to even have a fair trial.
Controversially, in closing arguments Mr Rittenhouse’s defence attorney Mark Richards referenced the Blake shooting saying: “Other people in this community have shot people seven times and it’s been found to be OK, and my client did it four times in three-quarters of a second to protect his life.”
It’s renewed this debate over exactly who is allowed to possess guns and then proclaim self-defence when they kill someone.
Guns
The Rittenhouse trial has once again highlighted laws restricting gun possession and use in America that varies widely by state and local jurisdiction. Often the regulations are less than precise, the product of intense legislative debate over the types of firearms covered and under what circumstances the laws apply.
A day before closing arguments in the Rittenhouse trial, Judge Bruce Schroeder ordered that one of the charges – that Mr Rittenhouse violated a state law prohibiting a person under 18 from possessing a “dangerous weapon” – be dropped because the rifle Mr Rittenhouse was carrying wasn’t prohibited to him.
The decision turned on the length of the firearm’s barrel, which would have been prohibited if it were a few inches shorter.
Gun-control activists have cited this as yet another example of the kind of loophole that could be remedied by more uniform national gun laws.
While the 30-year-old Wisconsin law contains a provision to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to go hunting, they view the weapon Mr Rittenhouse was carrying as clearly “dangerous” in the circumstances he used it.
Gun rights activists, on the other hand, have celebrated Mr Rittenhouse’s right to possess such weapons and use them to defend himself.
“If it wasn’t for 17-year-olds with guns,” tweeted Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel, “we’d still be British subjects.”
The judge
Bruce Schroeder is the longest-serving circuit judge in the Wisconsin state court system. He was appointed by a Democratic governor in 1983 and has won election to his seat seven times since then, each by overwhelming margins.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the judge would become a focus in such a high-profile, nationally televised trial, but the unusual American tradition of electing judges has made a delicate political situation even more fraught.
Over the years, Judge Schroeder has developed idiosyncrasies, such as allowing defendants to conduct the random drawings that select their final jury and quizzing jurors on esoteric trivia. He’s also established a reputation as a pro-defence jurist – one further cemented by his testy exchanges with prosecutors during the Rittenhouse trial.
Given the highly charged political nature of the trial, many of those quirks and choices have been scrutinised for evidence of bias. His rulings to drop the illegal firearm charge and saying the men Mr Rittenhouse shot could not be called “victims” were criticised by many on the left.
Even his choice of mobile phone ringtone, the patriotic anthem God Bless the USA – a staple of Donald Trump rallies in recent years – made headlines as possible evidence of his political proclivities.
Legal analysts have generally concluded that Judge Schroeder’s rulings have been within the norms for such proceedings, but with the impartiality of the entire US criminal system challenged in last year’s protests against institutional racism and police shootings – including the one in Kenosha – those norms are under scrutiny, as well.
Vigilantism
The facts of that night have never been up for debate – Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and injured a third.
Instead the jury had to work out why he did it. He was being chased by a group of people when he fired the fatal shots. Was he acting in self-defence or was he a dangerous vigilante provoking an already volatile situation in a city he did not belong to?
Many groups who want tighter gun control say it was the latter. They are worried that by being cleared of the charges, Mr Rittenhouse’s case now sets a precedent – that anyone can turn up to angry protests with a gun, but without facing any consequences.”
What can this case teach us about systems of oppression which shape some of us into monsters with which to enforce unequal power and terrorize the rest of us into submission to authority? As written by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Kyle Rittenhouse, Kenosha, and the Sheepdog Mentality:
Rittenhouse appears to live in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men, and where he is a warrior; ““I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried out by six.” Most gun owners have heard that nugget of homicidal wisdom, often from the person who sold them their guns. In other words: Better to attend your own trial by jury for killing someone than your own funeral for hesitating and being killed instead.
The final count on Tuesday night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was 12 and 12: a dozen pallbearers for two homicide victims, and 12 yet-to-be-impaneled jurors for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who allegedly shot them with his AR-15-style rifle. The footage of their killings is grainy and sickening. It shows, amid general mayhem and gunfire, a man who appears to shoot another with a rifle, then say into a cellphone, “I just killed somebody.” Later that same man is pursued by a mob down the center of a street. They catch up with him, he falls to the ground, and one strikes him with a skateboard. From a supine position the gunman shoots two people, one fatally. The other, blasted in the right arm, had been running at the killer with a pistol drawn.
I have seen many videos like this, and not long ago I profiled John Correia, a YouTube gun-world celebrity who has seen more videos of gun violence than perhaps any other human being who has ever lived. On YouTube and other social media, the gun channels are filled with real-life videos of violence—think Cops, with all the boring parts edited out and most of the violent parts unblurred. I could say that these scenes never cease to sicken, but the truth is that one gets used to them after a while. Rittenhouse, who was arrested yesterday, was reportedly a gun enthusiast and active on social media in support of Blue Lives Matter. I don’t know whether Rittenhouse spent his free time watching people pulling guns on one another, but I know from experience that these videos are hugely popular in the gun world that he was part of, and if you watch one, you probably watch hours of them.
The availability of these videos is perhaps the biggest change in gun culture in our lifetimes, and one of the results is mayhem like this. The shift has suddenly made violence against humans (as opposed to animals) imaginable—whereas in the past, most people could live their whole life without witnessing or taking part in a gunfight. The videos emphasize the bad things that can happen to you if your draw time is too slow, or your magazine too small. Now one can watch videos and imagine oneself not stalking a deer but defending others, in improbable heroic scenarios once limited to action movies.
That is the fantasy that seemed to have motivated Rittenhouse’s trip to Kenosha. He was interviewed hours before the shooting by The Daily Caller’s Richie McGinniss. He explained his presence in Kenosha by saying that “people are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business.” He looks preposterously young for this role, not like some ’roid-crazed militiaman but like a kid who has somehow guessed that the code to his father’s gun locker is his own birthday. Rittenhouse has been called a “white supremacist,” but none of his comments during interviews at the scene mention race. (Other comments may surface later, and his social-media accounts reportedly show plenty of sympathy for cops, and none for the protesters.) Instead his comments mention what is by far the most common topic in gun-enthusiast channels, which is what to do to preserve life and property using guns.
Before the advent of these videos, to be a concealed carrier meant entering uncharted cognitive territory. If you have never walked around with a gun in your pocket, you probably have poor intuitions about how it feels—the power; the discomfort of having a hunk of metal or plastic impeding your gait and mobility; most of all, the sense of responsibility. The writer Dan Baum strapped on a .38 in the course of researching a 2013 book on gun culture and described the experience well:
Everything around me appeared brilliantly sharp, the colors extra rich, the contrasts shockingly stark. I could hear footsteps on the pavement two blocks away … It made me more organized. Wearing the gun, I was Mr. Together. There was no room for screwing up when I was equipped to kill.
Baum would avoid trouble, because he didn’t want to be anywhere near a fistfight, unstable people, or anything that might raise the possibility that he would fire his gun. The feeling of empowerment comes with a wearying imperative of caution: You do not seek out danger, and instead you live the most boring life possible, to avoid using the murder machine you have for some reason decided to attach awkwardly to your midsection.
What distinguishes Baum, who crossed the street to avoid violence, from Rittenhouse, who carried openly and crossed state lines to find violence? One is a seersucker-wearing, middle-aged journalist, and the other is an adolescent. The other salient difference, though, is that at 17, Rittenhouse has never known a world where owning a gun did not go along with what is sometimes known as the “sheepdog mentality”—the belief that your gun exists to protect others, and that you should rush in to perform that duty. Many of the gun videos you find online emphasize exactly this, to an audience of men.
The channels are not sinister in themselves. Correia combines old-fashioned moralism—including regular reminders that you are accountable to Jesus and the law for every round you fire, and that acts of brutality toward the vulnerable are among the worst you can commit—with extreme violence. I came away from a day with Correia thinking that the world is probably a safer place because he is packing heat.
But the videos themselves are insidious. Most people in the United States, allowing for wild variation in race, class, and education, are victims of violence only very rarely. Watching the videos, however, invites you to simulate violence at an extraordinary rate, much higher than we are mentally equipped to manage. (Correia himself has seen tens of thousands of them, and he posts a new one to his channel about once or twice a day.) The effect of these videos is to habituate viewers to that violence, to train them to imagine themselves in it. Training yourself to imagine something makes it seem more likely to happen, and primes your instincts to react to it—and, I suspect, initiate that violent reaction and overdo it when circumstances could be resolved more peacefully.
Rittenhouse appears to have been living in a fantasy world where police and car dealerships are more endangered than unarmed Black men in traffic stops, and where he was a warrior and self-defender, rather than a youngster who foolishly enrolled himself in a midwestern version of the Children’s Crusade. I can only imagine his fear when he saw the crowd coming for him—and the crowd’s fear, when it saw that a near-child was wildly firing a rifle better suited to a person with judgment and good training. I do not expect that the jury will be forgiving.”
As written by Peter Sterne in Jacobin, in an article entitled What’s the Difference Between Kyle Rittenhouse and the Police? Rather than asking whether law enforcement and vigilantes like Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society; “e appreciate you guys, we really do.”
That’s what a law enforcement officer said over a loudspeaker as another officer tossed water bottles to a group of armed white men in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday.
One of the young men was Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen-year-old from Illinois armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Hours later, Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded a third.
This isn’t the first time that white vigilantes have violently attacked protesters. According to Alexander Reid Ross, an academic who researches far-right violence, vigilantes have assaulted protesters at least sixty-four times, driven cars into protesters at least thirty-nine times, and shot at protesters at least nine times — and that’s just counting the violence that occurred since May.
Despite the violence, police have not cracked down on right-wing counterprotesters. To the contrary. As Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic has written, police officers have generally provided encouragement to them.
Why are the police so accommodating? One theory is that individual police officers with far-right sympathies have infiltrated otherwise law-abiding police departments. The Guardian recently reported that a former FBI agent had found evidence of white supremacist groups and militias “infiltrating” police forces in at least fourteen different states. This theory assumes that while individual police officers might support vigilantes, the police as a whole do not.
But what if these forces aren’t just infiltrating the police? What if they are the police? Rather than asking whether the police and vigilantes support or oppose one another, we can see them as different groups who are both performing the same function — policing society.
In many countries around the world in the neoliberal era, the official police department no longer has a monopoly on policing. Ordinary citizens arm themselves and volunteer to patrol their neighborhoods, and many police officers are grateful for the assistance. In some ways, it’s a return to an older, less institutionalized model of policing.
“This idea of ‘the police’ as public law enforcement is actually a new idea in the twentieth century,” Jennifer Carlson, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona, told Jacobin. “Policing was [historically] done by groups that were not formalized that were still serving the function of police. We’ve kind of forgotten that, and so I think in some ways we look at these armed groups and there’s a little bit of shock, but it actually is 100 percent in line with American history.”
Carlson has studied the role of guns in American society for over a decade. For her new book Policing the Second Amendment, which will be published on September 15, she interviewed more than seventy police chiefs in Arizona, California, and Michigan to understand how the police view armed citizens.
“The spoiler alert is that through very clear racial tropes, including whiteness, police are generally very much in favor of at least certain kinds of people being armed and even assisting the police,” she said.
According to Carlson, the police have adopted two different approaches to armed citizens — “gun militarism” and “gun populism.”
Under “gun militarism,” the police view gun owners as potential criminals and “bad guys with guns” who pose a dangerous threat to police officers and must be neutralized. This is, generally speaking, the approach that urban police departments take toward black men who own guns. It’s the logic of “stop-and-frisk” and the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
But under “gun populism,” police see gun owners as potential “good guys with guns,” who can intervene to stop criminals and protect innocent people. This is generally the approach that police officers take toward white men who carry guns, including armed militia members and vigilantes.
To understand why the police appreciate armed vigilantes, it’s necessary to know what motivates those vigilantes to pick up a gun in the first place. Carlson’s first book Citizen–Protectors, published in 2015, examines the cultural and economic factors that motivate men in Metro Detroit to carry guns.
Carlson found that many of the men saw themselves not just as gun owners but as “citizen-protectors.” They cast gun ownership and gun carrying as part of a larger moral discourse about what it means to be a responsible citizen and community member.
“It’s this ideal of good citizenship, this definition of good citizenship, that is centered on the willingness to use lethal force to protect oneself, one’s family, one’s community even, and so it’s re-centering citizenship around both the capacity and the willingness to use lethal force,” she said.
The key thing to understand is that citizen-protectors don’t just believe that they have the right to carry a gun; they believe that they have a responsibility to do so. They see themselves as “good guys with a gun,” the heroes willing to step in and use lethal force to defend the victimized in their community.
This is not a niche view. The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood recently wrote about the popularity of YouTube channels devoted to gun violence, which promote this ideology and related ideas like the “sheepdog mindset.” It’s a term that Carlson has also encountered again and again during her research.
“One of the things that you hear a lot about in gun culture and also in police culture is this idea of the sheepdog, the wolf, and the sheep,” Carlson said.
Carlson sketched out the fable: the wolf is the “the bad guy” (often racialized as the “other”), the sheep is the “innocent one, but the one who can’t actually do anything to defend themselves,” and the sheepdog is the hero who needs to step in and protect the sheep from the wolf.
“The sheepdog is usually either law enforcement or it’s the armed citizen,” Carlson said. “So that’s where sort of this expanded notion of defense or protection comes in.”
Rittenhouse, the seventeen-year-old white man who shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, certainly subscribed to this moral ideology. That’s clear from his comments during an interview with the right-wing Daily Caller, conducted hours before the shooting.
“People are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” he said in the interview. “And my job also is to protect people. If someone is hurt, I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle. I’ve got to protect myself, obviously. But I also have my med kit.”
To be sure, the idea of community defense is not inherently conservative. There’s a long tradition on the Left of groups arming themselves to protect their communities from racist and state violence. By some definitions, the Black Panthers could be considered “citizen-protectors.” So could anti-fascist groups that aim to protect protesters from white supremacists.
Generally speaking, though, the citizen-protector ideology is associated with the figure of the white man using lethal force against a racialized other who he views as a threat to his way of life. This is a pattern that shows up throughout American history, from the white settlers who murdered indigenous people who lived near their homesteads to the McCloskeys, the St. Louis couple who brandished guns against Black Lives Matter protesters who dared to enter their gated community.
“It sounds all well and good to be like, ‘I’ll defend myself and my family and my community,’” Carlson said. “But the question is, who’s actually part of that community? How do you actually define it? We know from the scholarship and from these high-profile incidents that how communities are defined is often in racial terms and it’s exclusionary. We don’t have inclusive understandings of community, especially when it comes to crime and law enforcement.”
These understandings of community are shaped in specific cultural and economic contexts. For many of the men who Carlson interviewed in Metro Detroit, the context was one of decline. The shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy had left these men economically and culturally dislocated. The loss of stable, unionized blue-collar jobs precipitated a larger cultural crisis for men who believed their moral worth was tied to their ability to provide for their families. No longer able to be providers, they shifted to a new role as protectors, crafting a new ideal of masculinity focused on using guns to protect one’s community.
“Guns have entered in as one of those tools, as a way to show that you are a good man,” Carlson said. “You are performing a form of what we could call ‘hardened care work.’ You may not be able to provide, or you may not be the sole provider, but you can at least protect your family.”
Specifically, these citizen-protectors want to protect their families and communities from crime, especially urban crime committed by black men. These racialized fears of crime do not just come out of thin air; they are closely linked to the experience of economic decline.
“Economic decline is imagined in terms of, my community is in decline, so there’s going to be more crime,” Carlson explained. “And there were a variety of ways in which that — in my research which focuses on Metro Detroit — intersected with racialized and racist tropes about people coming from Detroit to victimize suburbanites and what have you.”
The nightmare vision isn’t just that black people from the inner city will victimize white suburban homeowners, but that the police will not be able to protect the white people.
“The trope is that the police will just come there to deal with what the aftermath is and write up the paperwork, but that police cannot be there to actually prevent a crime from happening,” Carlson said.
Such fears of state abandonment can take many forms. Perhaps the concern is that declining tax revenues have led to police layoffs, resulting in longer 911 response call times (as was the case in Metro Detroit). Or maybe it’s due to right-wing propaganda about how Democrats have ordered the police not to arrest criminals. Either way, the worry is that police won’t be there when they’re needed.
There’s one important difference between the citizen-protectors that Carlson interviewed in Metro Detroit and many of the armed white vigilantes who have attacked protesters, and that’s geographic scale. The citizen-protectors see themselves as protectors of the neighborhoods that they actually live in. But the vigilantes travel all over the country to “protect” random cities.
Still, both citizen-protectors and vigilantes subscribe to similar ideas about state abandonment. In the aftermath of the Kenosha shooting, right-wing commentators turned to these ideas of state abandonment to justify white vigilantes’ presence in Kenosha. Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a particularly reactionary version of this argument during his Wednesday evening broadcast:
Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it. People in charge from the governor of Wisconsin on down refused to enforce the law. They stood back and they watched Kenosha burn. So are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?
Tucker says that the politicians refused to enforce “the law” so Rittenhouse had to maintain “order.” The slippage between law and order isn’t an accident. While citizen-protectors will often say that they are enforcing “the law” or “law and order,” they do not literally mean that they are enforcing specific criminal statutes. They are not consulting their state’s penal codes before shooting people they find suspicious. They’re enforcing a specific social order.
“That’s the key,” she said. “It’s not so much enforcing the law. It could be law to the extent that vision of social order intersects with law. But I think social order is really what’s being enforced, and a moral order. So not just a social order but a moral order about what are the consequences of certain actions in public space? That’s certainly what is going on with the whole apparatus of gun carry.”
The white men who view themselves as citizen-protectors have an intuitive understanding of what “the law” should be. It’s a specific social and moral order rooted in notions of private property and white supremacy. It feels like the law, whether or not it matches what’s actually on the statute books.
It might be tempting to say that this marks a bright line between the citizen-protector and the police. In the liberal imagination, the police is a morally legitimate actor because they swear to enforce the law, which is authored by democratically elected representatives. Vigilantes are morally illegitimate actors, since they are loyal to their own arbitrary moral code rather than the law itself.
However, this is really a false dichotomy. For one thing, the social order that citizen-protectors enforce isn’t really that arbitrary. It’s generally based on the same traditions that undergird American society as a whole. That’s why vigilantes often garner sympathy, because people feel they’re behaving morally even if they are technically violating the law.
More importantly, it is simply not the case that the police merely enforce the law as written. Like citizen-protectors, the police are also committed to the protection of a social order rooted in private property and white supremacy. In many cases, elements of this social order have been enshrined into law, such that the same conduct that the police view as illegitimate and immoral also happens to be criminal. But police officers will routinely violate laws that conflict with this social order, including laws designed to protect the rights of accused criminals and laws designed to protect protesters’ First Amendment rights.
Back in June, the New Republic’s Alex Pareene summed up the police worldview: “Armed white boys don’t code as a threat to them; ‘anarchists’ and angry black people do (even if the protesters are the ones at least attempting to engage in constitutionally protected behavior, while the roving white gangs are flagrantly violating the law).”
Rittenhouse is exactly the kind of armed vigilante who the police would not regard as a threat. He was clearly on their side — an outspoken supporter of the police who frequently posted “Blue Lives Matter” memes on social media and once previously participated in a police cadet program for high schoolers. He didn’t want to upend the social order that police are committed to defending. He wanted to help them defend it.
The upshot is that both citizen-protectors and police officers are engaged in the same project — the use of force to further certain existing social and economic arrangements.
This doesn’t mean that the police and citizen-protectors always cooperate with one another, though they often do. Police officers, militia groups, and individual armed vigilantes may disagree on the precise contours of the social order and the specific penalties that are justified for violating it. As an institution, the police at least nominally answer to democratically elected leaders. When individual vigilantes go “too far” in enforcing the social order, engaging in flagrant acts of violence that even the police cannot justify, they can lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the police and become subject to arrest.
But for structural reasons, citizen-protectors and the police have a natural affinity for one another. Even when the police and the militia are not working together directly, they are each working toward a common purpose — namely, the defense of the social order.
This may help explain how Kenosha’s law enforcement institutions reacted to the presence of white vigilante groups at the protests.
During a press conference after the shooting, Kenosha County sheriff David Beth said that he had been asked to formally deputize militia groups to patrol the Kenosha protests but that he refused to do so.
The sheriff went on to say that the reason he wouldn’t deputize militias was because then they would “fall under my guidance and my supervisors, and they are a liability to me and the county and the state of Wisconsin. The incident that happened last night where two people lost their lives were part of this group that wanted me to deputize them. That would have been . . . one deputy sheriff who killed two people.”
In other words, Beth is concerned about integrating vigilantes into the formal law enforcement apparatus because he does not want to be liable for their actions. That’s a tactical concern, not a moral one.
Kenosha Police Department chief Daniel Miskinis sounded a similar note during the same press conference.
“Across this nation there have been armed civilians who have come out to exercise their constitutional right and to potentially protect property,” he said. “Am I aware that groups exist? Yes, but they weren’t invited to come.”
It’s another instance of the police distancing themselves from vigilantes while still affirming their fundamental moral legitimacy. The police might not want to deputize vigilantes, but they don’t mind if the vigilantes decide of their own accord to come and provide assistance.
Compare that to the way that the police treat anti-fascist protesters. On the same day that Miskinis spoke at that press conference, Kenosha police arrested at gunpoint a group of anti-fascist volunteers at a gas station. The volunteers were part of “Riot Kitchen,” a collective based in Seattle that cooks and delivers food to protesters around the country. Legally speaking, the Riot Kitchen volunteers had just as much right to be in Kenosha as the white vigilantes. But in the moral universe of the police, the Riot Kitchen volunteers are illegitimate while the white vigilantes are legitimate.
Ultimately, police coordination with armed white civilian vigilantes is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
It’s not enough to focus our attention on neo-Nazis who want to start a race war or vigilantes who are motivated purely by racial animus. We have to confront the much larger group of white men, both in the formal police force and in informal militias, who believe in using lethal force to defend the status quo.
“They’re defending something bigger than themselves, which is why it’s so appealing,” Carlson said. “That’s why white supremacy isn’t about ‘bad apples’ or individuals. It’s an ideology. It’s a culture. It’s a movement and a thread in the fabric of American society.”
How Kyle Rittenhouse and Joseph Rosenbaum’s paths crossed in a fatal encounter | Visual Forensics
Kyle Rittenhouse case: Why it so divides the US/ BBC
I was gifted with the rare treat of commentary from a stranger today, in reference to my post of the anniversary of the Kenosha Massacre; here follows the exchange;
From Joanne Cottone:
“Fucking lies. A whole page of liea”
From Joanne Cottone:
“Is this for real ? Who the fuck wrote this shit? You just lie lie lie. Progressives are retarded commies and liars”
To Joanne Cottone:
I am the author, writing from my truth as I see it as any American has the right to do. I helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the charge of communism cannot find purchase with me. I describe myself as a Progressive because we are marginal outliers among the Democratic Party of which I am an elected representative, and this publication began as we launched an insurrection within our county DP. You would not, I believe, prefer a unified political opponent?
In the public interest, if you have facts which refute anything I have written, I would love to read them and most certainly would consider changing any views which can disputed on their merits. I must ask you to refrain from ad hominem and profanity, however; the degradation of public discourse is both sad and a marker of civilizational collapse. May we agree that our western civilization merits preserving?
I thank you for reading my work and hope that in future we may exchange ideas in pursuit of the Truth.
Zelenskiy in his speech last year on the 34th Independence Day of Ukraine offered partnership with Europe and all those who love liberty, where ever men hunger to be free; “We are not a victim, we are a fighter. Ukraine does not beg — it offers partnership and the strongest army in Europe.”
They are words to be considered carefully, in the light of history; Russia’s only claim to Ukraine is that Ukrainian Cossacks conquered Siberia for the Czar in exchange for becoming a special class of warrior aristocracy, after helping save Europe from conquest by the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna in 1683.
“Handy fellows to have around in a fight”, as was said of the Dead Men of Dunharrow in Return of the King, and if Europe stands aside while Russia cannibalizes Ukraine, they will be facing Russian imperial conquest and dominion without them.
We should have all learned long ago that when a tyrant says “This is my last territorial demand”, that is the time to unite and destroy him, before he gathers enough force to destroy us.
That day comes closer with every day we delay. Like it or not, the fate of Europe is now tied to the fate of Ukraine, as the fate of democracy in America is tied to capture of the state by Russia’s puppet tyrant.
If you’re looking for people to stand with you in a fight, you look for people who won’t stay down, won’t tap out, and refuse to submit. Europe, democracy, and civilization need look no further than Ukraine.
In Ukraine, to live is to be victorious; Unconquered in the face of horrors and the ruthless brutal conquest by an enemy who does not regard us as fellow human beings and wages a campaign of terror, genocide, and erasure against a whole people.
We celebrate on this day the independence of Ukraine from Russia, but also the liberty and independence of all humankind, and the solidarity of all who stand together to resist oppression.
The glorious defiance and unity of purpose of Ukraine has reminded us all of a great truth; of the precarious, ephemeral, transitory, and fragile nature of our existence as imposed conditions of struggle to become human together.
We are become a precariat of all humankind under threat of nuclear annihilation, and as this theatre of World War Three threatens to engulf the whole of Europe in a Total War of destruction and civilizational collapse, any who believed themselves safe must reconsider the human condition and what it means, for only solidarity of the international community and of peoples as a United Humankind, a free society of equals and our universal human rights, can stand against the darkness of the global Fourth Reich which threatens to devour and enslave us.
For a vision of our future and our world should our solidarity and duty of care for others fail us, we need only look to Mariupol.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You can not reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
As I wrote in my post of April 20 2022, What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw; As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories to produce military rations, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a total war of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, after we refused to surrender; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived and written at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
As President Biden wrote in his 2023 Statement on Ukraine Independence Day; “ Today, the people of Ukraine are once more marking their Independence Day, while suffering the all-out assault of Putin’s craven war for land and power. For eighteen months, Ukrainian families have lived under the daily threat of Russian rockets and the reality of brutal attacks. But the people of Ukraine have refused to break.
On this Independence Day, as they have since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, brave Ukrainian women and men are defending Ukraine from assaults on fundamental principles essential to every nation on the planet – sovereignty and territorial integrity. They are showing the world once more that freedom is worth fighting for.
Independence means the freedom to choose your own future. It’s precious. Each year on July 4th, Americans celebrate our Independence Day as a time to remember the price we paid for our freedom and all the blessings that flow from it. So today, as Putin continues his brutal war to erase Ukraine’s independence and redraw the map of our world by force, Americans all across the country stand united with the people of Ukraine.
The United States will continue our work, together with partners all around the world, to support Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s aggression, to uphold the foundational principles of the UN Charter, and to help the Ukrainian people build the secure, prosperous, and independent future they deserve.
Our commitment to Ukraine’s independence is unwavering and enduring. That’s why the United States and other G7 nations issued a joint declaration in Lithuania last month pledging to help Ukraine maintain armed forces capable of deterring Russian aggression in years to come, a declaration which over 25 nations have now joined. Together with our partners in Europe, we are supporting Ukraine in their fight for freedom now and we will help them over the long term.
We are also working with nations everywhere to hold Russian forces accountable for the war crimes and other atrocities they have committed in Ukraine. That includes the forcible removal of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia. These children have been stolen from their parents and kept apart from their families. It’s unconscionable. And today, we are announcing new sanctions to hold those responsible for these forced transfers and deportations to account, and to demand that Ukrainian children be returned to their families.
I sincerely hope that next year, Ukrainians will be able to celebrate their Independence Day in peace and safety, knowing how their extraordinary courage inspired the world. May Ukraine’s Independence Day be a reminder that the forces of darkness and dominion will never extinguish the flame of liberty that lives in the heart of free people everywhere.”
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2022, One Hundred Days of the Invasion of Ukraine; For one hundred days now, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Ukraine, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play, the Third World War; liberty or tyranny.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Herein is my witness of history and truth telling in this, the First General History of World War Three. As with all things human, it is also fiction except when it is not, myth when it can be, poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of our limitless future possibilities of becoming human.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Always there remains the struggle between 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.
Herein I offer apology for my digressive ars poetica; once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
There are no Ukrainians, no Russians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
As written by Nataliya Gumenyuk in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ukraine’s independence day was always important. Now it is a matter of life and death. In Kyiv, we are marking the day under the constant threat of Russian attack – and facing a watershed in the course of the war; “A year ago on 24 August – the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence – a new generation of pilots were leading the Ukrainian air forces flying over Independence Square in Kyiv. The fighter jet column was headed by Anton Lystopad, who was recognised as one of the country’s best pilots. He was 30 years old, born in the year of independence. Almost a year later, in August 2022, Lystopad received the Order for Courage from the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. A few days after the ceremony, he was killed in combat.
Lystopad’s story may sound almost too symbolic, but Ukrainians have become used to such tragic symbolism. Six months on from the start of the Russian invasion, with its indiscriminate bombardment of peaceful towns, the atrocities and horrors of Bucha and Mariupol, but also the solidarity, resilience and sacrifices we have experienced, everything feels sharper and deeper. The bitterness of losses and the joy of survival.
Even before the full-scale war, for Ukrainians, Independence Day was the most important holiday of the year, the brightest day, when we thought not about the death of tyranny and the Soviet empire, but the rebirth of the state and of freedom. Amid the war, a military parade in the capital is not an option – soldiers and equipment must be on the frontline. A civilian gathering may put people in danger. There are concerns that Vladimir Putin’s airstrikes will punish those celebrating something he wants to destroy. But doing nothing would feel like a defeat. Not letting Russia destroy our usual way of life is a form of protest. The installation of destroyed Russian military equipment along Kyiv’s main street, Khreshchatyk, has been applauded by many. It offers an ironic commentary: on 24 February, Moscow wanted its armoured vehicles trundling into central Kyiv.
After Russia’s defeats in Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, and later its slow advance in the Donbas, the Kremlin changed its strategy. Instead of battles, Moscow makes random missile strikes on peaceful towns such as Kremenchuk in June, where 21 people were killed in a shopping mall, and Vinnytsia in July, where 27 lost their lives.
Many of us have got used to air-raid sirens; some have even stopped hiding in basements. But this possibility of attack at any place or any moment is cruel. It remains invisible to foreign visitors, who are often surprised by how normal life in Kyiv or Chernihiv has become.
Yet we still hope Independence Day will be a perfect sunny day. The start of a new season, when many return after a summer break. Many Ukrainian women and children will return home from their refuges abroad. For some, the financial means to be out of the country are exhausted, while others just want to go back to their homes. Unless, of course, they are places under occupation such as Mariupol or Severodonetsk.
I used to have my concerns about military parades and public demonstrations of military pride. But not today. I am no longer worried about a burst of militarism. Those on the frontline dream about returning to their families and careers. Their service reminds me more of the duty of firefighters or rescue workers.
Half a year has turned out to be enough to understand the war: to see its ugliness, but also its banality. It is not a force of nature, and it’s not inevitable. Victory depends not just on heroism or might, but on strategy and the capacity to use resources wisely.
Independence Day also feels like a watershed: we need to consider what has happened and what to expect next. Major battles will be impossible in winter, so the next three months will be decisive – a chance to counterattack and liberate as many towns as possible before the stalemate starts.
That’s another reason why these days our thoughts are mainly with those who are on the frontline. There will be other days to mourn the fallen. Myself, I think first of a friend – a former publisher of a glitzy lifestyle magazine, with whom I reported on Kharkiv in March, and who was mobilised this summer. Now he commands a paratroop company. He can’t leave his gun even while asleep on his post in Donbas, for fear of saboteurs.
During a recent phone conversation, I asked how his fellow soldiers felt these days. He said that despite many battles and great exhaustion, their determination was strong. Everybody understood what they were doing there: while they held the line, the invaders wouldn’t enter their home towns. Recent attacks on military targets in Crimea have cheered people up – both in the capital and on the frontline.
I also think of the 8,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war. If the Kremlin can’t hurt Ukrainians at home, PoWs may become a target. My thoughts are with two friends captured this summer in the battles in Ukraine’s east, whose stories can also tell the story of the country. The first – I won’t publicise his name for security reasons – has spent the past eight years in conflict resolution talks in the Donbas, talking to his Russian counterparts and to separatists, genuinely hoping for a breakthrough . In vain. Then, after 24 February, he decided to take up arms.
The second, Maksym Butkevych, is a known anti-fascist, a pacifist who believed in nonviolent resistance, a human rights defender who fought against any kind of discrimination and supported people displaced from the Donbas. For this he was labelled “neo-Nazi’ by Kremlin propaganda, and called a spy – because he worked as a journalist for the BBC and UNHCR. Despite his history of pacifism, he came to believe that fighting was the only remaining way to defend human rights when his country was under attack.
We had not heard from him since June, but he recently appeared in a Russian propaganda video of PoWs captured in Luhansk. He looked disturbed and worried, thin, grey, silent. But still this video was welcome – he’s alive. I want another video of him. Archival footage exists of Maksym in 1990, still a pupil, calling for Ukrainian schools to support the student movement for independence. Back then it sounded like a dream, but our experience from the past 30 years, including eight years fighting in the east and six months resisting an invasion, shows that we reach our goals not because we hope but because we work and fight, exhausted but determined.”
Here follows the complete transcript of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at Sophia Square Kyiv on the 32nd Ukrainian Independence Day: “Dear Ukrainian people! Dear guests of Ukraine, our friends. Dear Presidents! Dear Prime Minister! Representatives of the diplomatic corps!
Today we are all celebrating the 32nd anniversary of Ukraine’s independence. 32 years of uninterrupted independence, which will endure. Which we will not allow to be torn apart. And which Ukrainians will not lose grip on.
Here, in the very center of our capital, there is a lot of evidence of how old the history of Ukrainian statehood is. Unfortunately, there is no less memory of how Ukrainian statehood was lost.
How Ukrainians had to fight for freedom and independence against invaders. How our people always had enough heroism and courage, but sometimes lacked unity. How Ukrainians had to fight against the invaders. How, unfortunately, sometimes the invaders managed to become occupiers. How they destroyed the lives of entire generations of our people. And how Ukrainians fought for their land and freedom for generations. And how they gained their freedom. How they prevailed. How they preserved themselves. Preserved Ukraine. And managed to make Ukrainian independence uninterrupted.
Dear attendees!
Please observe a moment of silence in memory of Ukrainian heroes of different times who fought for the freedom and independence of Ukraine and gave their lives for it.
Thank you.
Dear people! We will not lose grip on Ukrainian independence. We are all united by this feeling.
We remember what the Ukrainian people went through. We see the threats. We are fighting the enemy. And we know what we are capable of. We are capable of winning! And we will prevail! Ukrainian children in Ukrainian squares and streets will celebrate Ukrainian independence in the same way. Our grandchildren will celebrate. And their grandchildren. Together with the friends of our state. With Ukraine’s allies and partners. The ones Ukraine will choose for itself. Always freely. And there will never be any more pauses in Ukrainian history.
We will give Ukraine the strength it needs to always prevail. And we will be tough on anyone who tries to undermine, trade, or weaken Ukraine’s power from within. And there will be appropriate legislative initiatives. In the near future.
We will cherish our unity. When Russia invaded with a full-scale war, there was not a single day that Ukraine lacked unity. And so Russia had no opportunity to use anything against us, against Ukraine. Everything is only for Ukraine now.
The world hears and supports Ukraine. The world’s majority stands with Ukraine and helps. But no matter what happens in the world, Ukraine must be able to defend itself. Always. For a long time, our country did not have the necessary defense production, and now it does. I thank everyone who is developing them today. And we will create more. For a long time, the bravery of our warriors did not have the experience of using the world’s best weapons, and now our state gives Ukrainian warriors such weaponry. And I thank everyone who helps us with it. For a long time, there were attempts to artificially divide Ukraine into camps to make it impossible for our country to join the right alliance. Ukrainian courage deserves to be in the world’s best alliances only. Ukraine deserves to be among the leaders of the world. And it will be! Our country already guarantees common European security. This security is impossible without your strength, Ukrainian warriors. Without the potential of Ukraine. Without the freedom and labor of our entire country, all our people. Without Ukraine, our common European home can only be an unfinished construction project. And I thank every leader who understands this.
This morning in my address on Independence Day, I thanked everyone who makes Ukrainian independence so strong that it is one of the foundations of European independence. I thanked our warriors. Every citizen of Ukraine – everyone for whom citizenship is not just a passport. Those who work for the sake of Ukraine and our people. I thanked our Ukrainian teachers, medical workers, combat medics, volunteers, rescuers, sappers, firefighters, police, and power engineers. All those who support the morale of Ukrainians. Our talents. Everyone who produces weapons for Ukraine. Who provides transportation for Ukraine. Who prays for Ukrainians. Our farmers. Ukrainian businesses that pay taxes and create jobs. Ukrainian strength always lies in people. In adults and children. In everyone. In everyone who cares about Ukraine. About each other. And about independence. And it is impossible to gather all our people in one square to thank them. But today, here, in this square, there are Ukrainians who deserve personal gratitude. And it is an honor for me to present you with the state awards of Ukraine on the occasion of Independence Day.
Dear attendees!
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen!
Ukraine’s partners are here with us today. Gitanas, Mr. President of Lithuania. A powerful friend of Ukraine. A defender of freedom. Jonas, Mr. Prime Minister of Norway. A leader who deserves to be a role model for other heads of state. Mr. President of Portugal. I thank you, Mr. President, for the truly heartfelt warmth with which the Portuguese people sheltered our people at the beginning of the war. Mr. Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the first time in Ukraine, but sincerely with Ukraine. East, north, west and south of Europe. Our common home.
Our Europe is indeed united by many things. But the key thing is respect. Respect for people. Respect for freedom. Respect for bravery. And respect for Ukraine.
Congratulations, Ukraine, on your Independence Day!
Glory to Ukraine!”
And how has Ukraine given form in action for this glorious Independence and unconquerable will to be free? As written by Emma Graham-Harrison in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ukraine celebrates independence day with first raid into Crimea: Troops landed in western tip of territory and raised Ukrainian flag before returning home safely; “Ukrainian forces marked the country’s independence day with a naval raid into occupied Crimea, and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy praised Ukrainians for the defiance and courage that has won them global support in the fight with Russia.
The national holiday celebrates Ukraine’s independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, but this year it also marks 18 months since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion plunged the country into a war for survival.
Ukrainian troops landed on the western tip of Crimea, near the village of Olenivka, in the early hours of Thursday, defence intelligence said in a statement. They fought Russian troops and raised a Ukrainian flag, before all returned safely home.
It was the first time Ukrainian forces are known to have landed in Crimea since Putin ordered his forces over the border last year. They had to evade Russian defences on a long journey across the Black Sea, and then escape again after a skirmish.
A video mostly captured in blurry night vision showed Ukrainian fighters on boats, then attaching the country’s blue and yellow flag to a wooden building.
Kyiv says its path to victory must go through Crimea, illegally occupied by Russia in 2014, and has previously carried out a series of daring long-range and sabotage attacks on targets there. They have hit Russian warships and an airbase, and the Russian-built Kerch bridge, a prestige project linking Crimea to Russia.
With a counteroffensive against Russian troops occupying southern and eastern Ukraine only creeping forward, Kyiv appears to be looking for other ways to put pressure on Putin and his military.
This week drones destroyed a supersonic bomber jet at an airbase deep inside Russia and twice stopped flights in and out of Moscow, though Ukraine has not directly claimed responsibility for these operations. A Russian helicopter also recently landed in Ukraine, after the pilot was lured to defect.
Russian attacks continued across Ukraine, which was on high alert. At least 10 people were wounded in a missile strike on Dnipro, an important river port, with three hospitalised. Shelling in Kherson city injured a seven-year-old girl, officials said.
To mark independence day, Zelenskiy addressed a small audience in the square outside St Sophia’s cathedral. He also released a video filmed in front of a new mural of a captured soldier whose defiant death made him famous.
In an exchange caught on video and later released online, Oleksandr Matsievsky shouted “Glory to Ukraine” – a popular patriotic slogan – at the Russian soldiers holding him prisoner last year. They immediately gunned him down in response.
Zelenskiy described Ukraine’s resistance, and its successes against Russia as a collective effort to protect Ukrainian territory and its national identity.
“In a big war there are no small deeds, no unnecessary ones,” he said in a 12-minute video that thanked those who had died for Ukraine and their families, those injured in the line of duty, those taken prisoner and those still on the frontline.
He also paid tribute to everyone from farmers and medics to electrical engineers, musicians and sports stars. He included the millions of refugees who have fled the war, thanking refugee families still teaching their children Ukrainian and passing on their Ukrainian identity.
A clip of Matsievsky’s courageous last words ended Zelenskiy’s message: “We have all made it that when one person says ‘glory to Ukraine’, the whole world responds ‘glory to the heroes’.”
Valhalla Calling sung in Ukrainian
March 22 2026 Anniversary of Our 2022 Founding of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine in Mariupol
February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
February 24 2025 Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Symptom, Consequence, and Trigger Event of the Fall of Human Civilization In Recursion
24 серпня 2024 р. Нездоланна людська воля до свободи: День Незалежності України в тіні війни
Слава Україні!
Тут, у Києві, жити — перемагати; Непереможені перед обличчям жахів і безжального жорстокого завоювання ворогом, який не вважає нас людьми та веде кампанію терору, геноциду та знищення цілого народу.
У цей день ми святкуємо незалежність України від Росії, а також свободу та незалежність усього людства та солідарність усіх, хто разом протистоять гнобленню.
Славна непокора та єдність цілей України нагадали нам усім про велику правду; про ненадійну, ефемерну, швидкоплинну та крихку природу нашого існування як нав’язаних умов боротьби за те, щоб разом стати людьми.
Ми стали прекаріатом усього людства під загрозою ядерного знищення, і оскільки цей театр Третьої світової війни загрожує охопити всю Європу війною повного знищення та цивілізаційного колапсу, кожен, хто вважав себе безпечним, повинен переглянути людський стан і що це означає, адже тільки солідарність міжнародної спільноти та народів як об’єднаного людства, вільного суспільства рівних і наших універсальних прав людини може протистояти темряві глобального Четвертого Рейху, який загрожує пожерти та поневолити нас.
Щоб отримати бачення нашого майбутнього та нашого світу, якщо наша солідарність і обов’язок піклуватися про інших підведуть нас, нам потрібно лише подивитися на Маріуполь.
Процитувати рядки Вінстона Черчилля у чудовому фільмі «Найтемніша година», які історична особа ніколи не вимовляла; «Не можна міркувати з тигром, коли твоя голова в його пащі».
3 червня 2022 Сто днів вторгнення в Україну
Вже сто днів в Україні точиться велика боротьба між демократією і тиранією, любов’ю і ненавистю, надією і страхом, де доля людства висить на волосині і у великій грі обираються наші майбутні можливості стати людьми. випадково це війна.
Тут, як і в надто багато разів і місцях, кілька непереможних героїв і ті, хто солідарно стоять з ними, як група братів, проти темряви варварських атавізмів грубого страху і сили та нігілістичного режиму, в якому тільки влада має сенс і страх. є єдиним засобом обміну, помирають у занедбаній надії купити своїм життям час, щоб цивілізація прокинулася перед загрозою фашистської тиранії та імперського завоювання.
Як ми відповімо на випробування нашої людяності в цей момент екзистенційної загрози? Ким ми хочемо стати, ми людьми? Вільне суспільство рівних чи світ панів і рабів?
Бо це ставки цієї гри, в яку ми зараз граємо, Третьої світової війни; свобода чи тиранія.
Коли ті, хто хоче нас поневолити, приходять за нами, як вони завжди роблять, нехай знайдуть не народ, підкорений вченою безпорадністю, чи розділений ієрархією приналежності та виключаючого інобуття, а об’єднане Людство, непереможне солідарністю і відмовою підкорятися.
Тиранії та фашизму може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
Ось моє свідчення історії та правди в цій першій загальній історії Третьої світової війни. Як і все людське, це також вигадка, за винятком тих випадків, коли це не так, міф, коли це може бути, поетичне бачення і переосмислення і трансформація людського буття, сенсу і цінності та наших безмежних майбутніх можливостей стати людьми.
Хіба ми не ті історії, які розповідаємо про себе, собі та іншим?
Завжди залишається боротьба між масками, які ми робимо для себе, і тими, які роблять для нас інші.
Це перша революція, в якій ми всі повинні боротися; боротьба за володіння собою.
Тут я прошу вибачення за мій відступний ars poetica; одного разу я плив по Озеру Мрій, мене залицяла Краса, але на мене заволоділа Бачення; і в таких видіннях я потрапив у море слів, образів, пісень, історій, шаруватих і взаємопов’язаних один з одним, як мережа відблисків і відлуння втрачених у часі голосів, пустелі дзеркал, які захоплюють, спотворюють і розширюють нас безмежно. у всіх напрямках.
Ось тінь наших історій, яку ми тягнемо за собою, як невидиму рептилійну казку, спадщини, з яких ми повинні вийти, щоб створити себе заново, і ті, які ми не можемо покинути, не втративши того, хто ми є.
Тут проявляються мої інтертексти, захоплюють і стрясають мене бурхливими голосами і ненадійними цілями, бо де закінчуються наші історії і де ми починаємо?
Ми не можемо втекти один від одного, мої тіні і я.
Війна перетворює питання нашого авторства над самими собою на екзистенційну першість; де закінчуються ми самі, а інші починаються? Як ми можемо подолати цю межу Забороненого та зв’язатися з чужорідними сферами людського буття, значення та цінності, з поділом та ієрархією приналежності та виключаючої іншості чи із солідарністю, різноманітністю та включенням, зі страхом чи з любов’ю?
Зрештою, важливо лише те, що ми робимо зі своїм страхом і як використовуємо свою силу.
Немає ні українців, ні росіян; тільки такі люди, як ми самі, і їхній вибір щодо того, як бути разом людьми.
Russian
24 августа 2024 Несокрушимая воля человека к свободе: День Независимости Украины в тени войны
Здесь, в Киеве, жить значит побеждать; Непокоренные перед лицом ужасов и беспощадного жестокого завоевания врагом, который не считает нас своими собратьями и ведет кампанию террора, геноцида и уничтожения целого народа.
В этот день мы празднуем независимость Украины от России, а также свободу и независимость всего человечества и солидарность всех, кто вместе противостоит угнетению.
Славное неповиновение и единство цели Украины напомнили всем нам о великой истине; ненадежной, эфемерной, преходящей и хрупкой природы нашего существования как навязанных условий борьбы за совместное становление людьми.
Мы становимся прекариатом всего человечества перед угрозой ядерного уничтожения, и поскольку этот театр Третьей мировой войны угрожает поглотить всю Европу тотальной разрушительной войной и цивилизационным коллапсом, любой, кто считал себя в безопасности, должен пересмотреть условия человеческого существования и что это означает, ибо только солидарность международного сообщества и народов как Единого Человечества, свободное общество равных и наши универсальные права человека могут противостоять тьме глобального Четвертого рейха, который угрожает поглотить и поработить нас.
Чтобы увидеть наше будущее и наш мир, если наша солидарность и долг заботы о других подведут нас, нам нужно только взглянуть на Мариуполь.
Цитировать строки Уинстона Черчилля из великолепного фильма «Темные времена», которых историческая личность никогда не произносила; «Нельзя рассуждать с Тигром, когда твоя голова у него в пасти».
3 июня 2022 г. Сто дней вторжения в Украину
Вот уже сто дней в Украине бушует великая борьба между демократией и тиранией, любовью и ненавистью, надеждой и страхом, где на чаше весов висит судьба человечества и в большой игре выбираются наши будущие возможности стать людьми. случайно, что это война.
Здесь, как и в слишком многих временах и местах, несколько непобедимых героев и те, кто солидарен с ними, как группа братьев, против тьмы варварских атавизмов грубого страха и силы и нигилистического режима, при котором только сила и страх имеют смысл. является единственным средством обмена, умирают в безнадежной надежде выиграть своей жизнью время для пробуждения цивилизации перед лицом угрозы фашистской тирании и империалистического завоевания.
Как мы ответим на испытание нашей человечности в этот момент экзистенциальной угрозы? Кем мы хотим стать, мы, люди? Свободное общество равных или мир господ и рабов?
Ибо таковы ставки этой игры, в которую мы сейчас играем, Третьей мировой войны; свобода или тирания.
Когда те, кто хочет нас поработить, придут за нами, как они всегда делают, пусть они найдут не людей, порабощенных ученой беспомощностью и не разделенных иерархиями принадлежности и исключающей инаковости, а Единое Человечество, непобедимое в солидарности и отказе подчиняться.
Тирании и фашизму может быть только один ответ; Никогда больше!
Вот мой свидетель истории и правды в этой, первой общей истории Третьей мировой войны. Как и все человеческое, это также вымысел, за исключением случаев, когда это не так, миф, когда он может быть, поэтическое видение и переосмысление и трансформация человеческого бытия, смысла и ценности, а также наших безграничных будущих возможностей стать людьми.
Разве мы не истории, которые рассказываем о себе, себе и другим?
Всегда остается борьба между масками, которые мы делаем для себя, и масками, которые делают для нас другие.
Это первая революция, в которой мы все должны сражаться; борьба за право собственности на себя.
Здесь я приношу извинения за свое отступление от ars поэтики; однажды я плыл по Озеру Снов, за мной ухаживала Красавица, но меня забрало Видение; и в таких видениях я впадал в море слов, образов, песен, историй, наслоенных и взаимосвязанных друг с другом, как паутина отражений и отголосков голосов, затерянных во времени, пустыня зеркал, которые захватывают, искажают и расширяют нас до бесконечности. во всех направлениях.
Вот теневое «я» наших историй, которое мы тащим за собой, как невидимую сказку о рептилиях, наследие, из которого мы должны выйти, чтобы создать себя заново, и то, от чего мы не можем отказаться, не теряя того, кто мы есть.
Здесь проявляются мои интертексты, захватывают и потрясают меня буйными голосами и ненадежными целями, ибо где кончаются наши истории и начинаются мы?
Мы не можем избежать друг друга, мои тени и я.
Война превращает вопрос о нашем авторстве самих себя в экзистенциальное первенство; где кончаемся мы сами и начинаются другие? Как мы можем преодолеть эту границу Запретного и соприкоснуться с чуждыми сферами человеческого бытия, значения и ценности, с разделением и иерархиями принадлежности и исключающей инаковости или с солидарностью, разнообразием и включенностью, со страхом или с любовью?
В конце концов, все, что имеет значение, это то, что мы делаем со своим страхом и как мы используем свою силу.
Нет ни украинцев, ни русских; только такие люди, как мы, и выбор, который они делают о том, как быть людьми вместе.
Over hundred and four years ago this August, the antifascist resistance of Guido Picelli and L’Ardito del Popolo fought a glorious battle for the soul of humankind and the fate of the world against the tide of fascism and Mussolini’s blackshirts in Parma, prelude to the Fascist March on Rome which opened the door to the Holocaust and World War Two, so very like our own January 6 Insurrection which threatens us still, as America is now a captured state of the Fourth Reich, as white supremacist terrorists, KKK and other fascist militia, and insurrectionists are actively recruited by Homeland Security and its ICE force to occupy our cities and unleash a reign of terror and ethnic cleansing.
Now as then, and in every generation of humankind, we are defined by how we face those who would enslave us and the darkness within ourselves which threatens to consume us, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world; in solidarity as a band of brothers and a United Humankind, or subjugated through hierarchies and divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, as a free society of equals or with fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
For Antifa and the Resistance the Arditi are an important historical ancestor, but also for all who love Liberty, where ever men hunger to be free.
Here also is a cautionary tale, of the necessity of Solidarity and the dangers of ideological fracture, for the Arditi failed to defeat fascism at its birth for the same reasons Rosa Luxemburg and the Social Democrats of Germany were unable to counter the ascendence of Hitler. This is a lesson we must take to heart and remember in our elections, legislative and legal actions, as liberty and tyranny, equality and fascism, play for the soul of America and the fate of the world, as factional infighting and ideological fracture threaten to divide and steal the power of the only credible force of resistance to the Fourth Reich and recapture of the state.
There is a time for debate, the reimagination and transformation of policy and our national identity, and for mau-mauing the flak catchers as Tom Wolfe phrased it; now is not that time. Now is the time for All Hands On Deck, Solidarity, and an Indivisible United Front against the fascist capture of the state, because if we do not win this fight, there be no more political debate and change, only the dictatorship of the gun.
We must first be victorious over the enemy and those who would enslave us, and then use the power we have seized to liberate humankind from fascist tyranny.
When they come for us, as they always have and will, fascists of theocratic state terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror, let them find not a people divided by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united as guarantors of each other’s humanity as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others; this, this this.
To the instruments of fascist tyranny in the pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
Italian
23 agosto 2026 Centenario delle Barricate di Parma e della Resistenza Antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo
Oltre cento anni fa, questo agosto, la resistenza antifascista di Guido Picelli e L’Ardito del Popolo ha combattuto una gloriosa battaglia per l’anima dell’umanità e il destino del mondo contro l’ondata del fascismo e delle camicie nere di Mussolini a Parma, preludio della marcia su Roma che ha aperto le porte all’Olocausto e alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale, così molto simile alla nostra insurrezione del 6 gennaio che ci minaccia ancora con il ritorno del fascismo come Quarto Reich.
Ora come allora, e in ogni generazione dell’umanità, siamo definiti da come affrontiamo coloro che ci renderebbero schiavi e l’oscurità dentro di noi che minaccia di consumarci, i difetti della nostra umanità e la fragilità del mondo; solidale come una banda di fratelli e un’Umanità Unita, o soggiogata attraverso gerarchie e divisioni di appartenenza elitaria e alterità escludente, come società libera di uguali o con fascismi di sangue, fede e suolo. Come recita il Giuramento della Resistenza fattomi da Jean Genet a Beirut; “Ci giuriamo reciprocamente lealtà, di resistere e di non cedere, e di non abbandonare i nostri simili”.
Per Antifa e per la Resistenza gli Arditi sono un importante antenato storico, ma anche per tutti coloro che amano la Libertà, dove sempre gli uomini hanno fame di essere liberi.
Ecco anche un ammonimento, della necessità della Solidarietà e dei pericoli della frattura ideologica, poiché gli Arditi non riuscirono a sconfiggere il fascismo alla sua nascita per le stesse ragioni per cui Rosa Luxemburg ei socialdemocratici tedeschi non furono in grado di contrastare l’ascesa di Hitler.
A questa patologia della discontinuità e al terrore del nostro nulla, alla divisione e alla disperazione di fronte alla forza schiacciante, rispondo con Buffy l’ammazzavampiri citando le istruzioni ai sacerdoti nel Book of Common Prayer nell’episodio undici della settima stagione, Showtime , dopo aver attirato un nemico in un’arena da sconfiggere come dimostrazione alle sue reclute; “Non so cosa accadrà dopo. Ma so che sarà proprio così: difficile, doloroso. Ma alla fine, saremo noi. Se tutti faremo le nostre parti, credeteci, saremo quelli rimasti in piedi. Qui finisce la lezione”.
Any serious scholarship of the birth of Antifa and of Fascism must be rooted in their inherent contradiction, duality, and interdependence; they were born and arise together, from the Italian shock troops of World War One armed with flamethrowers and designed to break the stalemate of trench warfare, men who had survived horrors and shaped to embrace and use fear as a weapon, and polarized by their experience in the anarchist republic of Gabriel D’Annunzio on which Mussolini modeled fascism and which also remains with the Paris Commune a utopian Golden Age for aspirational anarchism and the global Autonomous Zones movement.
I myself carried Bruce Sterling’s fictionalized history of the Republic, Pirate Utopia, and read from it to the masses at the police station and palace of the courts we had captured in Seattle during the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone, where I distributed paper money printed with the legend Good For Nothing on one side and Good For Everything on the other. Like the collapse of CHAZ, the fall of D’Annunzio’s anarchist Republic and the strange bifurcation of its legacies remains a cautionary tale; as soon as you must defend territory with borders and checkpoints you are fighting the wrong kind of revolution. This is why I invented the idea of Living Autonomous Zones to replace those of location such as the Temporary Autonomous Zones as liberated free spaces, as I have wandered the world in the wake of CHAZ founding the first global network of Autonomous Zones and mutual aid. Today there are few capital cities where one cannot find an open point of contact with the local collective of liberation struggle, and resources of action.
As written in the International Socialism Journal; “In August 1922, just ten weeks before Mussolini seized power, one of the biggest ever confrontations in history took place between fascists and anti-fascists. Led by a Socialist Party MP, Guido Picelli, the local branch of the Arditi del popolo (People’s Shock Troops), a national anti-fascist organisation created in June 1921, had managed to bring together the many different strands of the Italian left.
For six days 20,000 armed blackshirts threw themselves against the working class of the central Italian town of Parma. This was the only city which had so far held out against fascist attacks, primarily due to strong local traditions of unity.
The Arditi del popolo, which had arisen in 1921 due to the initiative of workers from different political backgrounds, in opposition to the wishes of many of the leaders of political and trade union organisations, managed to keep the blackshirts in check for over a year, both in the city and the countryside, through an incessant array of defensive and offensive action.
This movement differed slightly in Parma compared to other areas due to its greater discipline and its technical application of the tactics of armed street fighting. The command structure of the Arditi del popolo had foreseen a huge ‘punitive expedition’ a long time beforehand, and apart from preparing people mentally, also developed a defensive plan and obtained the necessary means to face and repel the enemy. Squad leaders were selected from workers with military experience, and had the task of training other men, while those charged with special services were called upon to keep in contact with soldiers stationed in Parma in order to obtain weapons and ammunition.
The Labour Alliance, created due to the pressure of the masses, called a ‘legalitarian’ national general strike for 31 July 1922. But the central committee of the alliance, under the influence of social democrat leaders, called it off and ordered people back to work as soon as Mussolini threatened reprisals.3 Events then moved very quickly. Overall the Arditi del popolo, without a party which mapped out a political line and revolutionary objectives to be reached, had exhausted its offensive potential in straightforward counter-attacks against the fascists. In Emilia, Veneto, Liguria and Tuscany, where working class resistance had been greatest, a vacuum had been created among workers due to numerous losses. Linking defensive actions became difficult and areas were repeatedly terrorised by the enemy’s armed gangs; the masses were frequently forced to retreat. But fascism’s victory was not yet complete. There was still one place in Emilia that was resisting–Parma.
The first contingents of blackshirts arrived on the night of 1-2 August, in lorries which had come from all over Emilia, Veneto, Tuscany and the Marches. They were armed with brand new rifles, pistols and hand grenades, together with a huge amount of ammunition. They were experienced fighters, tried and tested in the tactics of ‘punitive expeditions’.
They assembled around the station, and the following consuls were at the head of the columns: Arrivabene, Barbiellini, Farinacci, Moschini, Ponzi and Ranieri. The commander-in-chief of the expedition, which quickly rose to a total of 20,000 men, was Italo Balbo.4 Signorile, the police chief of Parma, after having told the local committee of the Labour Alliance that he could do nothing to stop the blackshirts assembling, withdrew his men from the two police stations in the Oltretorrente area, thus giving them a free hand.
As soon as the news spread of the fascists’ arrival, the local leadership of the Arditi del popolo immediately called a meeting with squad leaders and gave them instructions to build barricades, trenches and barbed wire defences using any material available. At dawn, when the order was given to get the guns out and launch the insurrection, working class people took to the streets–as bold as the waters of a river bursting its banks. With their shovels, pickaxes, iron bars, and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del popolo dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, digging trenches, erecting barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men and women, old people and young people from all parties and from no party were all there, united in a single iron will–resist and fight.
In just a few hours the working class areas of the city started to look like a major battle zone. This area was divided into four sectors: Nino Bixio and Massimo D’Azeglio in Oltretorrente; Naviglio and Aurelio Saffi in ‘new Parma’. The number of squads in each sector was in direct proportion to its size: 22 in Oltretorrente as a whole, six in Naviglio and four in Aurelio Saffi. Each squad was made up of eight to ten men, and their weaponry was made up of model 1891 rifles, muskets, army pistols, automatic revolvers and SIPE hand grenades. Only half of these men had a rifle or musket. All the entrances to squares, roads and alleyways were blocked by defensive structures, and at spots viewed as being tactically important, positions were reinforced by barbed wire and mines were laid. Church towers were transformed into numbered watchtowers. Throughout these fortified zones power passed into the hands of the Arditi del popolo command, which was made up of a small number of workers which had been elected by the squads earlier. These workers were allocated various responsibilities: defence and organisation, provision of food, and first aid. Shop owners and the middle class sympathised with the rebels, and provided them with food and a variety of other goods.
The fascists opened fire just before 9am. Attacks and counter-attacks continued along the front line throughout the day, without producing any substantial changes in the situation. During the night there was some shooting and minor sorties by enemy detachments, which were identified in the Naviglio through the use of flares.
The following morning Balbo attacked at the head of a detachment of blackshirts from piazzale della Pilota. Crossing Verdi Bridge they attempted to break through the lines of the Arditi del popolo. But as soon as they caught sight of the first barricades they understood the very grave danger they would have faced if they took another step, so they gave up and retreated. Immediately afterwards the fascists opened fire again from the right side of the river; and from open positions tested our lines with angry fusillades in an attempt to break through. But the defenders of the ‘workers’ citadel’, laying on the ground on the left bank and always under some kind of cover, calmly returned fire and took careful aim-frequently managing to hit a very visible enemy.
Simultaneously, in ‘new Parma’ offices of professionals who were known to be socialists were ransacked. But the fiercest attacks took place against the Naviglio area which, due to its shape, was the most difficult to defend. After several hours of fighting this entire sector was almost surrounded–blackshirts advanced in tight formations from via Venti Settembre, determined to score a decisive victory. At that crucial moment only one response was possible–come out and counter-attack. Indeed the Arditi del popolo leapt up from their positions singing Bandiera Rossa, and ran towards the enemy. They were heavily outnumbered and one of them, Giuseppe Mussini, a worker, fell dead.
But they didn’t stop. Their singing grew louder and the bullets flew from the rifles which were burning in their hands. The fascists were shocked to see this handful of heroes, and imagined that there were who knows how many fighters and weapons waiting behind the barricades, in the trenches and inside houses, so they fell back even beyond Barriera Garibaldi.
On the third day things worsened again in the Naviglio area. The fascists blocked all routes through to Oltretorrente, all links were severed. All homing pigeons were quickly used up. Finally, after a lot of difficulty, a female worker managed to get through to the Arditi del popolo command in ‘old Parma’ and deliver a message she had hidden in her hair:
Two more deaths: Ugo Avanzini and Nino Gazzola. Our dispatch rider has been wounded. There is no food, and ammunition is almost exhausted. We urgently need bullets for rifles and revolvers, otherwise we will be forced to retreat to Oltretorrente tonight. We await orders: Sector commander.
The woman returned with as much ammunition as she could carry hidden in her clothes, along with the following reply: ‘Our orders are to hold your ground even if it means dying. We have faith in you. We’ll find a way of gettting you food and ammunition as soon as possible: Workers’ defence command.’
We needed to deny our adversary even the smallest of victories, given that the first symptoms of demoralisation were beginning to show. Orders were obeyed to the letter and we kept our positions. Later on communication was re-established with Naviglio, which received ammunition and wheat taken from the local windmill. Operations also began to improve in the Oltretorrente–the requisition and distribution of food, first aid points, field kitchens, patrols, the relaying of information, and the reinforcement of defensive positions. Women took a very active part in all of this, turning up everywhere to lend a hand and to give encouragement.
In the meantime the authorities had handed power over to the army, which contacted the local committee of the Labour Alliance, ie leaders of the Socialist Party and pro-war and official trade unionists. As these individuals had been unable to openly block the masses’ decision to go to the barricades, so as not to be exposed for what they were, they felt they had been deprived of authority and placed into the background, and therefore agreed to negotiate a compromise, committing themselves to persuade workers to stop their resistance. A socialist lawyer named Pancrazi and police commissioner Di Sero were the link between these individuals and the army commander, General Lodomez.
The outcome of all this manoeuvring emerged on day five when the army, believing that Socialist Party and trade union leaders represented the masses, or at least were able to influence them, sent a battalion of soldiers into Oltretorrente to dismantle the barricades and trenches, and told people that the fascists would withdraw if people disarmed. But here they found a different kind of authority, effectively that of the masses, in the shape of the Arditi del popolo command. Nobody had thought it necessary to speak to them but they couldn’t be ignored.
Here was their reply: ‘The trenches mustn’t be touched, as they are a legitimate means of defence for workers and their communities against 20,000 blackshirts who have come here from all quarters.’
The officers protested, saying that they had their orders, but workers didn’t back down–they had their orders as well! The mood of the soldiers was such that it dissuaded the officers from making a big fuss. After two hours the battalion was withdrawn. Attempts at a compromise had failed, as did this attempt to disarm the workers.
In the early hours of day six we were informed from reliable sources that the fascist leadership had decided to launch a major attack against Oltretorrente at 3pm. Although we were unable to discover their plans in detail, in any event the command believed that the enemy would focus their efforts on a breach to the left of our lines. It was here that we faced the greatest risk of being outflanked–through the park which runs along the built-up area of Oltretorrente, which could be accessed from the ring-road to the north of the city.
One of the general rules of war, and therefore of street fighting, is to never leave the initiative to your enemy. And in a situation in which you discover their intentions and the plan of attack, you must foil them by attacking earlier, forcing them to change their entire strategy through a determined and unexpected action.
Unfortunately we were not able to take the offensive as we did not have enough rifles and ammunition, which had been severely depleted over three days of resistance. It was impossible to get any last minute help from the surrounding countryside, as the fascists had sent patrols into the most notorious areas in order to stop any link-ups with the city.
However, a massive defence plan was agreed using anything available, which would have involved every one of the enemy in all kinds of fighting to the end. After having called a meeting of the squad leaders, the Arditi del popolo command made a rapid inspection of the entire area. The morale of the masses was very high–it almost seemed as if the news of the blackshirts’ imminent attack had fuelled courage and enthusiasm even further. In armed combat, one of the most important elements of success is belief in victory. And it was interesting to observe that everybody had an absolute ‘belief’–no one had the slightest doubt. Bombs were prepared in houses, along with clubs studded with razor blades, knives and nails, as well as acid bombs. A 17 year old girl waved an axe from the windows of her hovel and shouted out to her comrades in the street, ‘If they come I’m ready for them!’ Containers full of petrol were distributed to women because, according to our defence plan, if fascists managed to get into Oltretorrente, fighting would then take place on a house by house, alleyway by alleyway, street by street basis. No quarter would be shown–inflammable material would be thrown at the fascists, and our positions would be burned and totally destroyed.
The Arditi del popolo squads were divided into groups of three or four men and deployed in the following fashion: ten along the river bank covering Caprazuzza, Mezzo and Verdi bridges; twelve along the northern flank–stationed on roofs and attics so as to be able to fire on the park. Every worker who had either a firearm or any kind of offensive weapon was deployed in groups at various points, ready to run to where they were needed. Our lookouts followed all the enemy’s movements very carefully.
The first shots rang out at about 2pm, on the right hand side of the river, and were aimed at Nino Bixio with enfilades at two other areas. A few hours earlier Ulisse Corazza, an artisan and Popular Party councillor (the Catholic party), had presented himself to a squad leader with his own musket, and asked to take part in the fighting alongside the Arditi del popolo. He suffered a serious head wound from a rifle shot, and died a few minutes later. However all of this was intended to deceive the defenders as to the real goals of their plan of attack, as detachments of blackshirts had simultaneously moved on the left of Oltretorrente and had advanced into the park, heading for the city wall. This wasn’t a surprise, as the Arditi del popolo had expected such a move. So fusillades immediately rang out as planned, thus causing the enemy the greatest number of losses possible with the minimum use of ammunition. Although their pressure and aggression were initially very strong, little by little they weakened and a few hours later ceased altogether. The exhortations of their commanders made no difference–it was impossible to advance under the fire of working class snipers. Slowly, using bushes for cover, the blackshirts fell back to their original positions. During the night the fascists limited themselves to a few nuisance shots which had no effect at all.
On the morning of 7 August our observers noticed columns moving from one point of the outskirts to another in a confused and disordered fashion. This was something new; but it wasn’t possible to immediately understand what was about to happen. The following information reached Oltretorrente: ‘The blackshirts are very unhappy about their losses. Orders given by their leaders are not always obeyed. Panic is spreading.’ This disorder began to increase steadily, until it became generalised. The fascists, who were by this stage no longer in military formation, were roaming about in all directions in a great rush–with no command structure–jumping onto trains that were leaving, onto lorries, bicycles, or going on foot. This wasn’t a retreat, but the scattering of large groups of men who clambered aboard any means of transport they found, or who ran through the streets, or into the countryside, as if they were frightened of being chased.
Once the news of the fascists’ departure spread, the working class population on both sides of the river rushed into the streets, some carrying weapons, and improvised huge marches in an indescribable explosion of enthusiasm–red flags were hung from the windows in ‘old Parma’. The news of the working class’s victory spread rapidly in the surrounding area, where terrified local landowners abandoned their houses and ran away towards Cremona, as they had heard that the Arditi del popolo were coming.
The military authorities were worried; they were concerned that as a result of the blackshirts’ defeat the movement could spread out from the city to surrounding areas. This was exactly what the Arditi del popolo command intended, and at that very moment messengers were sent out with an appeal to the working class organisations of Milan and La Spezia. Therefore a state of siege was proclaimed–and the dismantling of trenches and barricades was ordered to be finished by 3pm. The command considered the new situation which the authorities had created, and realised it was materially impossible to stop the army–made up of two local infantry regiments with machine gun and armoured detachments, together with a cavalry regiment and considerable artillery–from gaining control of Oltretorrente, Naviglio and Aurelio Saffi.
At 3.10pm Colonel Simondetti, after firing a blank from one of the two cannons on Mezzo Bridge, advanced with armoured cars, machine guns and soldiers, occupying all the working class areas and ordering his troops to clear the streets.
Balbo’s forces had disintegrated–they were nowhere to be seen. On the fifth day a large-scale ‘punitive expedition’ against the working class of Parma had become a disaster. The blackshirts suffered 39 dead and 150 wounded, while the defenders suffered five dead and several wounded.
Two and a half months later, shortly before the March on Rome, the fascists again discussed the situation in Parma. In his book Diario 1922, published two years ago [1932], Balbo spoke of a meeting which took place in Rome with Mussolini, and of another of the whole Fascist Party leadership:
One of the issues we still need to settle is Parma. This is the last stronghold of anti-national forces, and acts as both a sanctuary and as moral support for Italian subversion. Mussolini agrees with the plan of action I outlined to him… Any action against Parma must precede any move towards an insurrection.
Fascist leaders believed that mobilisation for the March on Rome could have encountered some serious difficulties if working class resistance in a strategic point of Emilia Romagna had not been liquidated beforehand. Yet no second attack against Parma was ever attempted. new developments led to sudden changes–fascism, heavy industry and the monarchy had come to an agreement over the so called March on Rome.5
With hindsight, one can make the following points as regards the events recounted above:
(1) Until this point political and military problems and the theory of civil war had either been undervalued or even totally ignored; yet today we are obliged to treat it as an absolute necessity.
(2) As regards the outcome of this armed revolt, the Italian working class experienced an enormous success with the revolt in Parma–urban fighting won in conditions of great numerical and military inferiority.
(3) Even if the Arditi del popolo had managed to pull the mass of working class people into armed resistance, what was lacking was the preparatory work among soldiers who, given their mood and specific situation, could have been persuaded to show active solidarity with the proletariat. Similarly insufficient and negative were linkages with the surrounding provinces, which broke down in the most difficult moments of the struggle: a co-ordinated peasant movement would have enabled us to have immediately launched an offensive.
(4) The local trade union and social democratic leaders were completely unmasked. Through the use of demagogic language, they hid their real objective of following the needs of the bourgeoisie. While they hypocritically talked about anti-fascism and the masses’ interests, in practice they were betraying these interests by blocking and hampering the spontaneous formation of a united front from below–thus playing into the hands of the fascists. Apart from our technical preparations, the reason behind our success was above all the fact that the working class of Parma had been able to free itself and place its false leaders–the ‘enemy within’ the working class–to one side, thus confronting fascism with its own strongly united forces.
(5) Our party, which was then affected by extremism, failed to understand the nature of the Arditi del popolo and tried to stop our members from individually joining their ranks. In that period the masses were either part of the Arditi del popolo or were their sympathisers. The theories of Bordiga, a typical example of a petty bourgeois mentality, had led the party into opportunism and isolation. Through individual communist participation in the Arditi del popolo squads, the party would have been able to influence the whole organisation and to have won the leadership. With detailed preparatory work and membership of reformist trade unions and the army, the party would have been able to direct the movement towards a series of precise objectives, pulling the rest of the masses towards armed insurrection through the Arditi del popolo, stopping the growth of reaction in Italy and changing the course of history.”
As written by Yorgos Mitralias in the website of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt in an article entitled 100 years ago, in early August 1922, the barricades of Parma repelled Mussolini’s hordes…; “At least during the interwar period, when there was a confrontation between the left and the fascists, it was always the fascists who won. And unfortunately, most of the time without meeting a real resistance. However, there has been one important exception. That of the Italian revolutionary Guido Picelli, who, the first and long before any other, understood what fascism is and what it wants, as well as how it must be fought. This Guido Picelli who beat the fascists when he found them on his way. In Parma of the barricades in 1922. And in the Spain of the civil war in 1937. So, who was and what did he do the man who routed the fascists?…
At the beginning of August 1922, Parma is the only large Italian city that persist in resisting Mussolini’s squadrists, already on their way to power. The general strike proclaimed after the bloody attack of the fascists against the city of Ravenna, ends before it begins, by the union bureaucracies in disarray before the threats of reprisals of the fascists. But the workers and the people of Parma do not obey and go on strike. Mussolini charges his right-hand man Italo Balbo with crushing the rebellious population of this “Proletarian Bastion” that was the city of Parma. At least 10,000-15,000 armed fascists from all over northern and central Italy rushe to the city ready for the final assault and the bloodbath they promise to its defenders.
In Parma, Guido Picelli organizes the defense, assigns precise tasks to each and everyone, and implements a meticulous plan of unprecedented urban guerrilla warfare, with successive rows, trenches, ditches, barricades, barbed wire, electric cables, and even improvised minefields, defended by the population of the working-class neighborhoods and the workers of the city under the direction of the 400 more or less armed Arditi del Popolo, those veterans of World War I, whom Picelli has been preparing for combat for 14 months! Those who had weapons fired bullets or threw grenades. The others, old, young, children and especially women, resist with pickaxes, iron bars, stones, crossbars, bricks, boiling oil and… vitriol.
Taking advantage of the benevolent passivity of the army and the gendarmerie, the fascists attack in successive waves for 5 days, but are always pushed back, leaving dozens of dead and wounded. And while Balbo tries to exorcise the evil by writing in his diary “If Picelli manages to win, the subversives of all Italy will raise their heads again”, the fascists retreat in an indescribable disorder and their leaders decide to put an end to their campaign, accepting their bitter defeat and their humiliation. But, Picelli appeals in vain to the social-democratic, communist and trade union leaders to take advantage of the victory of the antifascists of Parma and to generalize the example of its brave defenders in all Italy. They all turned a deaf ear and turned their backs on him. Three months later, Mussolini became prime minister, fascism came to power for the first time, and began to inspire a host of imitators throughout Europe, including a certain Adolf Hitler. The tragic aftermath is well known…and alas, a century later it has not yet ended!
Picelli assumes, only for one day (!), the command of the “Garibaldi” battalion of Italian antifascist volunteers, and wins the only victory of the antifascists on the front of the defense of Madrid: at the head of his men, he launches a lightning attack, breaks the fascist lines, enters Mirabueno, takes dozens of Franco’s prisoners and liberates a large part of the highway that connects Madrid to Zaragoza. But, three days later, Guido Picelli dies from a bullet… “in the back at heart level”. A bullet fired from a weapon that does not belong to Franco’s fascists.
To Guido Picelli are organized three state funerals, in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. According to the newspapers of the time, 100,000 people attended the funeral in the capital of Catalonia, including the Soviet consul Barcelona Antonov-Ovseenko, the legendary Bolshevik who led the capture of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution. A year later, the old Bolshevik was shot in Moscow
Picelli and his “Antifascist United Front”
The greatness but also the tragedy of Guido Picelli consist in the fact that, at least at the beginning of the 1920s, he found himself virtually alone to fight against the triumphant fascism. The deep reason for this political solitude was that there was almost no one in Italy, but also everywhere else, able to understand what was, what wanted and what represented the absolute political novelty that was, at that time, Mussolini’s fascism and his movement. Thus, the Italian Socialist Party, showing its legalistic illusions, had the brilliant idea of concluding a Pacification Pact with…Mussolini in 1921(!). As for the young Communist party that had just been born, it preferred to excommunicate the so-called “petty bourgeois” who warned against the fascist danger and fought -often with arms in hand- the squadristi, opting instead for the sectarian isolation and the extreme leftism of its then leader Amadeo Bordiga. The logical outcome of the criminal policies of both the Socialist and the Communist parties was that both of them first distanced themselves from and then denounced the popular anti-fascist militia that the Arditi del Popolo tended to become, which for Picelli was only the embryo of the “Red Revolutionary Army” that he himself wished with all his strength because it corresponded to the needs of the anti-fascist struggle and of the workers’ movement.
The enormous contribution of Guido Picelli to the theory and praxis of antifascism consists, therefore, in the fact that he understood before all the others, what was and what was looking for the Mussolini fascism. That is to say, that fascism had for raison d’etre and also as unique program to destroy -by the most extreme of the violence- all, without the least exception, the organizations of the workers, in order to atomize them so that they cannot resist any more in front of the bosses and the bourgeois State. Here is what he wrote before the “glorious days of Parma”:
“Fascism, although many have believed in it, has neither spiritual content nor program. Mussolini himself, the leader of the bullies, admitted in an article in the”Popolo d’Italia“of March 23, 1921, that fascism”is not a party, it is a movement”. Its only objective is therefore to defend material interests: The well-fed stomachs of the bourgeois, their well-filled wallets and all that they have stolen from the worker, from the poor.
But he has a method: blind, ferocious and barbaric violence. It uses it against the proletarian organizations, against the subversive parties, with the sole aim of subjecting the workers to the will of the bosses, of increasing the working hours and lowering the wages, of destroying the collective contracts and returning to the medieval system of supply and demand, and of transforming once again the peasant into a brute and the worker into a slave”.
Having understood that the hordes of Mussolini’s fascist thugs did not distinguish between the red (communist), white (catholic) and pink (social democratic and republican) political, trade union or cultural organizations of the workers of the cities and the countryside, Picelli drew the only possible political conclusion: Unity of the workers and the victims of fascism, beyond their partisan and other differences! That is, what he himself called “Proletarian United Front”! So, let’s listen to him for one additional reason: because what he says is still relevant today and is not always well assimilated by the left of practically all colors:
“To the united front of the bourgeoisie we must oppose that of the proletariat. Only with unity can we prevail, since it is obvious that we are a force, a force that today does not impose itself only because it is divided into several small groupings in disagreement among themselves.
However, the unity itself is certainly not obtained in the political field, and we cannot pretend that whoever follows a precise line renounces his ideas. No. Let each one remain what he is, faithful to his own principles.
The bourgeoisie does not divide and does not discuss, it kills without mercy. The first commandment of fascism is to kill.
That is why, for the time being, we must leave aside criticism and polemics that do not lead to anything, forget the old rancor, go down to the common ground of defense and act.
Polemics divide us, but the common cause unites us.
Workers of the earth and of the workshops, you who suffer and are pursued, all agree, and unite for the supreme effort!
Unity is strength!
Those who today divide the masses are little men, who want to become someone to have the prestige they do not have. They are egoists and speculators, who put their personal interests above those of the community. They play the game of the adversaries and they are traitors.
The salvation of the proletariat can only be achieved by the development of its own effective forces, by unity.
In private and public meetings, in councils, in congresses, in the media, we must demand unity by all means. Tomorrow it may be too late. Those who occupy positions of responsibility in the organizations and who, because of their harmful and stupid sectarianism, are obstructing the unity of the proletariat, must be replaced. They must retire and return to the ranks as simple militants. We have had enough with personal questions. Reaction is raging, and everywhere people are dying”.
But Guido Picelli was not satisfied with being the first to correctly analyze the nature and characteristics of the fascist “phenomenon”, which was totally unknown until then. He did more than that: as the critical situation did not allow the slightest delay, he hastened to apply his theoretical conclusions. Thus, he gave flesh and blood to his “Proletarian United Front”, appointing as his right-hand man the railway anarchist and vice-commander of the Arditi del Popolo Antonio Cieri, who turned out to be a brilliant strategist both during the “Days of Parma” and 15 years later, in the Spanish Civil War, where he also lost his life.
But Picelli did not only recruit the anarchists. He prepared the ground and made sure that militants of the Socialist, Communist, and Republican parties, and even the Catholics of the Popular Party, the ancestor of the Christian Democracy of the post-war period, would find their place in the front line of his “United Front”! Moreover, many of them died as heroes defending the barricades, as for example the councilman of Parma Ulisse Corraza…
To better understand the enormous importance of Picelli’s implementation of the “United Front”, it is enough to remember an indisputable fact, the harmful consequences of which continue to influence our lives: It is because both the German Socialists and Communists refused to form their own anti-fascist united front, that Hitler was able to take power with the tragic consequences we know: the Second World Butchery, the Shoah, and even the persistent weakness and impotence of the German working class to leave behind its historic defeat of 1933, in order to better defend itself and claim its rights.
In fact, at the time when Picelli realized the “united front” in Parma, there was only one other communist leader who proposed the same thing in his country. It was Rosa Luxembourg’s closest companion and first general secretary of the German Communist Party (KPD) Paul Levi [1]. But, like Picelli, Paul Levi did not have the support of his party, nor even of the Third International, which refused to throw all its (enormous) weight against the Italian and German ultra-sectarians and leftists and in favor of two brilliant but solitary defenders of the “Anti-Fascist United Front”. In the case of Paul Levi, the result was also tragic: consecutive defeats and “lost opportunities” that saw the KPD doing each time what was diametrically opposed to what it should do. That is, insurrections close to putschism when conditions were unfavorable (1921), and refusal to attempt the final assault on power when conditions dictated it (1923)…
It remained for Picelli to draw the final conclusion of his analysis of fascism, that which concerns the practices and means employed to combat the Brown Plague. Given the events that followed and the experiences gained in Germany, Spain and elsewhere to the present day, Picelli’s insight and foresight can only impress even more. Let us listen to him again:
“Fascism can only be fought with direct action and in the streets, because it is only the logical consequence of the class struggle, which, assuming a violent form, turns into a class war.
When fascism appeared, the naïve and those of bad faith told the masses: don’t move, it is a transitory phenomenon, a passing storm. The masses obeyed and remained motionless, and this is how the bourgeoisie was able to continue the armed mobilization of its forces. Fascism declared war and, finding no obstacles, it advanced, occupying and destroying our positions.
The more the proletariat remained motionless, the more it showed itself willing to undergo and bear everything with stoic resignation, the more it bent and the more furious the reaction became. The truncheons and clubs had no scruples. They killed continuously.
Today, we are counting the terrible consequences of the mistakes made by the naïve and those who, in complete bad faith, contributed to creating an unbearable situation in Italy, acting as traitors.
We have always affirmed that fascism, from its birth, must be defeated. Descend into the field of violence, since it was the first to do so, adopt the same methods and fight it until it is rendered harmless.
And instead of that, even those who had been hit were prevented from defending themselves.
When the proletariat, now tired of suffering and seeing itself dispossessed of everything, created that magnificent defense organization, the Arditi del Popolo, the leaders of the Confederations and the leaders of the various reformist political tendencies hastened to disavow what was the spontaneous proletarian movement, determined by the imperious need to save at least one’s life.
What are they waiting for to mobilize everywhere? The Arditi del Popolo, or sons of the people, who form the vanguard patrols of the revolutionary movement, of the red army, are already in contact with the enemy. Now it is up to the bulk of our forces to align themselves and prepare to fight”.
And Guido Picelli concludes his anti-fascist call for resistance and struggle with the following dramatic exhortations:
“Arditi del Popolo, shout your terrible Basta! All of you standing up as one man and ready to rescue! Workers of different political tendencies, stand up all of you against the law of the baton! Long live the United Front! Long live the Proletarian Liberation Army !”
Yet Picelli did not simply issue slogans and exhortations. Nor does he blindly trust the improvisations and spontaneity of the masses, however combative and conscious they may be. He knows very well that all this is not enough to face the well armed and well organized Mussolini’s fascists. That’s why he explains and popularizes the lessons of the victorious fight of Parma, highlighting what he himself calls “proletarian technical-military organization”. Here is what he writes:
“To attack us, the bourgeoisie has not created a party, which would not be sufficient, but an armed organization, its army: fascism. We must do the same. Create our own army in such a way that it allows us to resist and defend ourselves. There is no other way. The haphazard and disjointed defense, done until now, has been useless. To give an example and to prove how only with the support of disciplined forces and concerted actions it is possible to stand up to the adversary, it is enough to think of Parma, which was the only city that was able to repel the fascist troops after five days (…)
But, in Parma, the Arditi del Popolo were formed 14 months ago, militarily organized and disciplined. In Parma there was a whole patient work of moral and material preparation. That’s why, when the fascist army attacked the city, it found itself, for the first time in Italy, facing another organized and directed army, ready to fight in its trenches and behind the barricades.
This is why Parma did not fall in August. This is how it is proved that fascism, when it finds before it a “strong obstacle”, stops and gives way.
Today we are in the middle of a civil war, and this is how the war is fought.
We are a huge but disorganized force. Once organized and disciplined it would become so powerful that it could destroy fascism, not once but a thousand times. That’s what you have to understand.
At the moment, we find ourselves in conditions of inferiority because our front is too divided and narrowed. From the tactical and strategic point of view, we know that the more a front is narrowed, the easier it is for the enemy to concentrate his forces there and to break through. That is why our front must be extended, unified, in order to keep the enemy occupied on a wider line.
We need men with the necessary aptitudes, capable, with an iron will and who, without prejudice of any kind, proceed as quickly as possible, in the big and small cities and in the countryside where possible, to the mentoring of all those who, conscious of the tragic hour and of the historical period that the working class is going through, feel themselves conscious soldiers of the great proletarian cause. Everywhere, according to the possibilities, it is necessary to constitute groups, teams and battalions organically perfect, led by the best elements and in contact with each other by a simple and orderly liaison system.
Only in this way and after the formation of our disciplined and powerful army, we will be able to resist fascism and render it powerless.
Whoever still believes today or wants to make believe that he can find the solution in the simple moral action is either deluding himself or betraying.
Let the Italian proletariat understand the necessity of the red military organization, outside the labor exchanges and the political parties. It is indispensable for the defense and conquest of freedom.
Guido Picelli
L’Ardito del Popolo, Sunday, October 1, 1922
Picelli and the unity of theory and action
What impresses in Guido Picelli’s life is his constant and unwavering search for the Unity of theory and action. And his constant refusal of the fatalism and conservatism that characterizes bureaucracies of all kinds. Undoubtedly, these are the main features of Picelli’s life and action that explain why he has never been mentioned in the last 80 years, why he remains unknown or almost unknown even to those who are very familiar with the history of the workers’ and revolutionary movement of the 20th century. Obviously, bureaucrats know how to take revenge…
Child of the working class districts of Parma and son of a cook, Picelli was destined to become… watchmaker. But he had other projects because from a very young age he loved the arts, and in particular the theater. So he became an actor and traveled around Italy with his itinerant theater companies, when he wasn’t playing in the 2-3 silent films that have come down to us. However, the First World War would radically change his life, as it did the lives of millions of young people in all European countries. Pacifist and anti-militarist as he was, he chose to go to the front as a Red Cross nurse, which did not prevent him from being decorated and promoted to officer.
Having lived through the incredible butchery of this war, Picelli became radicalized like millions of other young people, but he chose to react differently: he entered the military academy to study the art of war and to prepare himself for the coming class confrontations, since he already believed that “Only one war is legitimate and sacred: the war of the exploited against their exploiters”.
At the end of the war, Picelli assumes tasks refused by the organizations of the left, in contrast to the fascists who willingly assume them: first, he organizes the young veterans of war, who are physically and psychically mutilated, prematurely aged at their twenty years, crippled, unemployed, poor and despised. So he created the “Proletarian League of the Crippled, the Disabled, the Veterans, the Orphans and the Widows of War”, which promoted not only mutual aid but also “revolutionary self-defense”. And then, in February 1920, he creates in Parma, his “Red Guards” as an embryo of the “Red Proletarian Army” that he wishes to see the day, supported only by some comrades among which his friend Antonio Gramsci. It is thus with these “ Red Guards ” that Picelli succeeds in blocking in the station of Parma, and after armed confrontations that make wounded, trains full of Italian soldiers leaving for Albania to serve the imperialist and colonial politics of Italy.
Very popular among the people of Parma, Picelli is elected deputy with the Socialist Party but very quickly passes to the Communist Party with which he is again plebiscited. He is 33 years old when he defeats the fascists in Parma, and during the few years that follow until the total prohibition of the parliamentary system by the fascist regime (1926), Picelli escapes-sometimes miraculously- from many assassination attempts, even inside the Parliament! He is arrested and imprisoned several times although he is a deputy of the PCI, he travells all over Italy trying to reorganize the party in difficulty, and continues his efforts to create armed anti-fascist groups. And on May 1, 1924, to protest against the banning of the International Labor Day by Mussolini, Picelli invents another “crazy” action of exemplary resistance: he hoists a huge red flag on the balcony of the Parliament in Rome, provoking a crisis of nerves to the fascists and raising the morale of the antifascists in the whole country. Finally, in October 1926, he is arrested, condemned and deported first to Lampedusa and then to Lipari, and only succeeds in escaping and taking refuge in France, at the beginning of 1932
Between the Stalinist Scylla and the fascist Charybdis!
Picelli travels all over France, multiplies the meetings, organizes the immigrant workers and the Italian political refugees, until he is arrested and expelled. He takes refuge in Belgium where he does the same things and from where he is also expelled. After a brief stay in Berlin, just before Hitler’s seizure of power, Picelli finally takes refuge in the Soviet Union, sure that there he could resume his functions within the exiled party leadership, and enter, as promised, the military academy.
Neither of these things happened. Instead of the military academy Frunze, he is sent to work as an “apprentice” in a bearing factory, and the PCI strongman Palmiro Togliatti ostensibly ignores his calls. Picelli and his wife live in misery, but he does not protest. It is clear that Picelli of the “Anti-Fascist United Front” is, to say the least, “suspicious” in the eyes of the Stalinists who, at that time, implement the criminal policy of “social fascism”. Finally, in 1936, he is fired from his job after the party cell of the factory “tried” him on the far-fetched accusation that during the First World War he had been… “monarchist officer”…
Meanwhile in Spain the civil war has begun and Picelli now wants only one thing: to fight in the front line against Franco’s fascists. For months, he asks in vain to be allowed to leave for Spain. After many ups and downs, he was allowed to go, and with a false passport, Picelli left the USSR and after crossing Nazi Germany, he arrived in Paris where he met up with former comrades from the time of the Parma barricades, who made no secret of their anti-Stalinism.
It is thus thanks to them that Picelli meets Julian Gorkin, founder and leader of the POUM, the very anti-Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification” which fights in the first line in Spain with its armed militias against Franco. A few days later, Picelli arrives in Barcelona and meets the Catalan revolutionary and POUM leader Andreu Nin [2], former leader in Moscow of the “Red Trade Union International” (Profitern) and former collaborator of Trotsky. Nin offers him the command of a POUM battalion and Picelli accepts. But, as expected, the news that the legendary anti-fascist Picelli is about to collaborate with Trotskyists and anti-Stalinists mobilize the Stalinist centers that decide to do everything to prevent it. Picelli’s friends and comrades propose him to take command of a unit of the International Brigades, and he, although aware of the risks after his relationship with the POUM became known, accepts. The Italian antifascists of the Garibaldi Brigade welcome him with enthusiasm, but after an intervention of the Stalinists, Picelli is deprived of the command of the brigade, which is done later and only for one day just for the battle of Mirabueno.
Today, almost 80 years later, the “official” version of Picelli’s death remains that the Italian revolutionary was killed by a bullet fired by the fascists. However, the inconsistencies and contradictions of the so-called “eyewitnesses” of his death have always been eye-opening. If today we finally know the truth, we owe it to the Italian historian and filmmaker Giancarlo Bocchi [3] and the extraordinary and persevering investigation he carried out for years, making the archives of the Soviet secret services in Moscow speak, and also Picelli’s last companions who saw him killed on January 5, 1937, after having received “a bullet in the back at heart level”.
Three, among many others, eloquent “details” that shed light on this assassination: a few days before Picelli’s death, Soviet fighter planes had attacked the Garibaldi Battalion, killing 6 of its militiamen, and the Stalinists had been quick to spread the rumor that the person responsible for this “mistake” was…Picelli. On the other hand, the Moscow archives consulted by Bocchi, showed that the so-called “eyewitnesses” of Picelli’s death, to whom the “official” version of his death is due, were linked to the infamous NKVD. Finally, the same archives revealed that all the proposals of the high ranking officers, even Soviet ones, of the International Brigades to posthumously honor Picelli with the medal of the Order of Lenin, were strongly opposed by the Stalinists, and more specifically, by the one who was not only Togliatti’s right hand man and Picelli’s sworn enemy, but also a collaborator of the NKVD, on behalf of whom he was snitching on the Italian communists who had taken refuge in Moscow. His name was Antonio Roasio and a secret report from him recalled Picelli’s relations with the POUM leaders, before advising against the award of the highest Soviet honorary decoration to him. By “pure coincidence”, this Roasio was political commissar of the Garibaldi Battalion on the day of Picelli’s death!…
Epilogue
Today, when the extreme right and the neo-fascists are raising their heads and making their dangerous presence felt more and more in Europe, in the United States and elsewhere, we believe that there is no one better than Guido Picelli to express pure, revolutionary, and above all, effective and victorious anti-fascism! It is for this reason that the “rediscovery” of Picelli and his work constitutes more than a simple act of justice to a great revolutionary, who remains scandalously forgotten and unknown for 8 decades. Above all, it is an important contribution to the anti-fascist struggle of today and tomorrow, because Picelli has a lot to tell us and teach us about what the Brown Plague is, what it wants and how it should be fought. This year, a whole century after the glorious “Facts of Parma” of August 1922, which could have radically changed the march of contemporary history and also our lives, if the leaderships of the left had followed Picelli’s example in the interwar period, we have a golden opportunity to get to know the “Antifascist United Front” of the people of Parma and to learn from it. Let’s not lose this opportunity for the umpteenth time. This past has surely a future.
Footnotes
[1] Although Lenin declared that Paul Levi was totally right, he did not oppose his exclusion from the party when Levi resigned from the post of General Secretary after finding it impossible to follow the disastrous policy of the great majority of his leadership
[2] Andreu Nin was murdered in 1937 after being brutally tortured by his Stalinist torturers. According to the archives of the KGB in Moscow, opened in 1990, Nin’s murderers acted on the orders of Alexander Orlov, head of the NKVD in Spain, who carried out a personal order from Stalin.”
Six years ago today we fought to liberate Portland from a mass of fascists who had converged from throughout the nation to occupy the city; a force which included organized deniable assets of white supremacist terror like the Proud Boys who are a terror bro group of white male grievance, the Oathkeepers who are an organization of fascist infiltration and subversion agents of highly trained professionals within or allied with police forces and other military and security services, the Gideonite theocratic-fundamentalist Christian Identity cult Patriot Prayer, lunatic QAnon cult adherents, and others which may have included Homeland Security agents in operational command, for several hours throughout the day in front of the courthouse and police station, the Multnomah County Justice Center.
Every time the Fourth Reich and its agents within the Trump regime tried to seize and occupy our cities, we took them back. The people were victorious in this long and terrible struggle for liberty throughout 2020’s Summer of Fire, which played out in over fifty American cities during sustained Black Lives Matter protests, the founding of Autonomous Zones, and direct actions between Antifa and those who would enslave us, a struggle marked by brutal repression of dissent by police including random shootings of Black citizens and other hate crimes, a Homeland Security campaign of provocation using undercover police officers and their deniable assets among white supremacist terrorists to disrupt and delegitimize the protests for racial justice through arson, looting, and violence, and the random abduction and torture of protestors by Homeland Security in attempts at provocation to capture the narrative and manufacture a pretext for the federal occupation of democratic led cities under martial law.
Portland was the principal theatre of war between the people of America and a fascist cabal which had seized our government, but it was a struggle waged throughout our nation to define ourselves and choose between futures of liberty or tyranny; a struggle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
In this the Fourth Reich failed, but we came very near to the Fall of America as a free society of equals, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of August 22 2020, Spectacle and Theatre in Portland: Police Sanction Street Fighting Between Fascists and Antifascists; A staged confrontation was enacted today in Portland as spectacle and guerilla theatre when fascists and antifascists, several hundred to each side, fought in the streets for several hours as the police handled the betting of the onlookers, having beforehand declared presence at the event to constitute consent to mutual fight. In Vegas this is the legal form signed by boxers; I now envision a televised series of sporting events wherein gladiatorial combat and duels of vendetta may be displayed. Just imagine the prize purses for the victorious survivors.
How thrilling it was for the citizens of Portland to observe Spartacus command a shield wall against the howling barbarians of the white supremacist terrorists and police collaborators and drive them from our streets like a pack of mad dogs. As in the arena of the Roman Empire, the restoration of balance which occurs when the people witness the triumph of good over evil serves to unite us against threatening others, authorize and reenforce versions of history and identity, and to affirm and elevate the virtue of our community, or so the apologists of imperialism once argued.
Such partisan conflict has a long and interesting history which is recapitulated in the protests for equality and racial justice which have engulfed every major city in America and many foreign ones now for over eighty days; modern political parties emerged during the reign of Justinian from the fandom of the Greens and Blues, rival factions of the chariot races which were the Roman Empire’s pre-eminent sport. Just as the football hooligans of the ancient world became the conservatives and liberals who claim our rulership now, so will those who have seized our cities in the name of fascism and antifascism seize our political parties and one day govern our nations.
Before us now unfolds a vision of our political future, and though I celebrate the victory of Antifa and the people over state and fascist terror this reversion of throwing words to throwing stones bodes ill for the long term future of civilization.
But our choices are defined and limited by the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle.
Spectacle is good for business if your goal is to seize governments and influence public opinion and ideology in order to shape the future. We must market our cause if we are to recruit and promote our ideas, and from my perspective as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and a partisan of international solidarity and direct action we must always confront fascism.
We must resist, beyond hope of victory or even survival, because resistance confers freedom; in resistance we become Unconquered. Each of us who are Unconquered is a Living Autonomous Zone and a seed of change, reimagination, transformation, and rebirth of our democracy, our civilization, and humankind, and thereby we achieve the highest form of human political evolution; a free society of equals wherein the use of force is abandoned and inequalities of power are unknown.
Our duty of care toward others also compels us to confront injustice as a moral imperative; in the words of a proverb derived from John Stuart Mill’s inaugural speech of 1867 to the University of St. Andrews; “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.
Both liberty and equality require us to confront and challenge evil in whatever form it may arise, and to protect and defend our universal human rights and all those who are powerless and vulnerable to predation and the use of force.
Our mission of revolutionary struggle also calls us to question, mock, expose, and confront authority and other inherent evils as acts of transformation and liberation. These four actions, the Primary Duties of a Citizen, are necessary and fundamental to our humanity and to our membership in the community of humankind.
Yet there are no rules of engagement for the strategies of revolution which make confrontation anything other than the choice of last resort, when all meaningful dialog and negotiation have failed. First because our goal is to abandon the use of force in the realization of a nonviolent society; second because force and violence are seductive and corruptive. We are the good guys, on the side of justice, truth, and mercy, you will say; but everyone thinks that, including our enemies.
In the balance with this is another truth; all human societies are constructed through violence, all liberation struggle is seizure of power, and all states are embodied violence.
Remember always the warning of Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who hunts monsters must take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you.” Every time I plan an action, I test its merit against this maxim.
And the consequences of liberty are written in my flesh and in my dreams, for after decades of revolutionary struggle the Abyss has begun to look back at me, and I no longer trust myself to know when I can pull a punch and walk away.
In the case of theatrical performances such as today’s street fight or in any conflict, we must ask ourselves, whose power is served? As a strategy of authoritarian regimes designed to protect the hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege of elites, divide and conquer has a winning streak as old as civilization, and it is very useful to the service of tyranny for the police to give permission to disempowered and angry young men to fight each other rather than join together to seize the power which has been stolen from them by the state.
Conflict is often a symptom of the failure to find common interest. Yet if we are to transform ourselves into a society free of coercion and violence, we must build solidarity and obliterate categories of exclusionary otherness, especially with those with whom we disagree.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud’s famous quote of 1893; “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.”
And when the imposed conditions of struggle offer no choice but subjugation or resistance, how then do we seize our power?
Here again are the Eight Principles of the Art of War.
The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Who holds the moral high ground wins, as Gandhi taught us when he liberated India through the Salt Tax protest and the newsreels of British soldiers beating an endless column of silent and dignified Indians with sticks which shocked the world and delegitimized colonial authority.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
All else is timing.
These Eight Principles of War which I first learned as a boy from my teacher of martial arts whom I called Teacher Dragon, and have tested since the day I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, I recommend to all of you now, for all time and where ever men hunger to be free.
And remember always, when faced with overwhelming force and impossible odds, Genet’s advice to me on that day which changed the course of my life; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
The idea of freedom is in question, as America falls into tyranny and state terror, captured state of the Trump Fourth Reich and its mission of the sabotage of democracy both here and throughout the world has now reached the tipping point where her institutions are too damaged by infiltration and subversion to resist the violation of our sovereignty and co-ownership of the state, and citizens become subjects.
In evidence I offer three canaries in the coal mine for your consideration; the Panopticon of Flock cameras as instruments of repression of dissent, police rape and torture gloves which make of our bodies property of the state and enslave us, and Meta’s perv glasses and dark economy of information warfare as falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which makes of us a resource for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites in our fascist dystopia of theft of the soul.
As Mario Savio said during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, let us “throw our bodies into the gears of the machine.”
As written by Judith Levine in The Guardian, in an article entitled McCarthyism has returned to the United States – and this time it’s even more dangerous: rump’s campaign of repression echoes the red scare. But now the government has bigger ambitions and more powerful tools; “There are many parallels between the first McCarthy era, roughly 1946 to 1956, and Trump’s campaign of political repression, his own updated McCarthyism.
Both regimes crafted a monster of quasi-facts and innuendo and fed it with fear: an enemy within, well-organized and financed, secretive and violent, allied with evil foreigners and bent on overthrowing capitalism, democracy and Christian morality. Both used flagrantly unconstitutional means to cleanse the nation of the spectral menace.
Each time, federal employees were targeted first. President Harry S Truman’s Federal Loyalty Program screened 5 million workers for communist affiliation; 2,700 lost their jobs, 12,000 resigned. Schools, unions and Hollywood fell in line; blacklists outlasted their makers. The Trump administration purged the federal agencies of his equivalent of the cold war communist, the “woke”. Applicants for civil service jobs were asked to identify their favorite administration policies and explain how they would advance them if hired. The federal employees’ union correctly called this request a “loyalty question”.
Then as now, law firms quailed, media companies capitulated, universities collaborated. Artists and performers – Zero Mostel, Jimmy Kimmel – were exiled from film and television. In the 1940s and 50s, the attorney general compiled lists of supposedly subversive organizations, which, along with communists and socialists, included groups from the National Negro League to the Nature Friends of America. Trump’s justice department is investigating progressive non-profits, including ActBlue, a chief funding source for Democratic candidates, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros, best known for supporting democracy movements in the former Soviet Union.
In both eras, the standard bearers were full of ideological passion. “Can there be anyone who fails to realize that … this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world?” McCarthy thundered to the Senate in 1950.
Trump believes in nothing but himself. But like McCarthy and his confederates, the intellectuals behind this repression are true believers. “When the leftist – who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice – protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him,” Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a speech. “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
McCarthy and his more powerful and enduring co-conspirator, the FBI director J Edgar Hoover, ruined countless lives and crippled progressive movements. But the scope of this administration’s ambitions; its armies of enforcers inside a gargantuan carceral state; the technological and legal tools at its disposal; and the dearth of principled government actors to obstruct it make this McCarthyism far more dangerous.
Global ambitions
While McCarthy claimed that American communists were puppets of the Soviet Union, and the CIA conspired to undermine progressive organizing in Europe, today’s attempt to enlist foreign governments in a coordinated fight against “far-left terrorism” potentially extends the administration’s repressive reach around the globe.
On 22 September 2025, Trump issued an executive order designating the non-organization “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization”. Three days later it issued National Security Presidential Memo-7 on “countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence”.
Invoking Charlie Kirk’s murder, the assassination attempts against Trump and the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” – but not the January 6 insurrection or the 2019 El Paso, Texas, massacre of 23 Chicano shoppers by a young white supremacist – the memo is as much manifesto as battle plan. “This political violence,” it says, “is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies – including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them – is required.”
But if a war on the US left inside US borders were not enough, on 16 July the White House announced a “global campaign to crush radical left terrorism”. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, invited representatives of more than 60 countries to a “summit”, where he named four European “far-left terrorist organizations” and offered $10m for information on their financing. He promised: “There will be more [terrorist] designations soon.” At the same time, the US implemented new visa restrictions targeting people who have allegedly “supported or incited acts of terrorism”.
Europe has expressed skepticism that leftwing terrorism is a big problem. Still, some countries are cooperating. The US requested the extradition from Spain of a wealthy American who has donated to humanitarian aid efforts in Palestine – which the administration views as support for Hamas. Spanish authorities are detaining him while they decide whether to send him home or release him.
Unlike the US criminal code on domestic terrorism, the laws on combatting foreign terrorism offer “many more tools” to pursue not just people planning or committing violent acts, but also those within “two to three degrees of separation” from the act, Mike German, a former FBI special agent, told Democracy Now. The purpose of the 16 July summit, he said, was “to reframe the discussion around domestic terrorism to imagine that it has these foreign connections that justify the use of these much more aggressive tools”.
Laws passed since 11 September 2001, make this sleight of hand easier. The 1947 National Security Act created a wall between the CIA and the FBI, between international and domestic intelligence gathering. But the USA Patriot Act, written and signed hastily after al-Qaida’s attacks on US soil, broke down that wall.
Civil libertarians have long argued – and whistleblower Edward Snowden proved in 2013 – that the collection of communications to, from or about a foreign target can sweep up tons of private information about Americans. “The most acute danger” of “uncontrolled sharing of criminal investigative information with intelligence agencies”, argued the ACLU at a 2005 congressional hearing, “is that federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents … concerned with preventing and punishing criminal activities” will become “a domestic spy network directed at unpopular religious and political organizations”.
In fact, after September 11, that is what happened. George W Bush’s administration maligned and shut down US Muslim and Arab charities and non-profits under the suspicion that they were supporting a vaguely defined foreign terrorist enemy.
German continued, citing current investigations into progressive non-profits like the Southern Poverty Law Center: “This effort to designate left-wing groups as foreign terrorists … using these broad terms like ‘antifa’ will allow them to go after people who are not committing violence, but who are simply engaging in the political process.”
Extreme policing
In June, the administration circulated a press release boasting of the blows it had delivered the “violent anarchist network” antifa. It cited crackdowns from coast to coast – from Spokane, Washington, where “multiple Antifa insurgents were convicted on federal conspiracy charges for their roles in a violent attack at [an] ICE facility”, to Newark, New Jersey, where “Antifa thugs violently laid siege” to an immigrant detention center, “resulting in dozens of arrests and federal charges”. For the record, the Spokane protesters blocked an ICE van. The New Jersey public defender has filed a motion to dismiss the charges against 40 protesters, which “contain nearly identical, generalized allegations and fail to identify the specific conduct attributed to each individual”.
It makes sense that an administration that criminalizes immigration and sends federal agents to detain and deport law-abiding gardeners, shopkeepers, mothers and toddlers will use the same tactics to suppress protest against that brutality. A carceral system that locks up millions and imposes extraordinarily harsh sentences functions in concert with these enforcement tactics to intimidate would-be dissenters and punish those who openly dissent.
The charges often don’t stick. The New York Times reviewed hundreds of cases involving charges of assaulting or impeding federal immigration officers and found that most of them unraveled, due to federal agents’ “extensive misconduct”, from “attacking protesters” to “misrepresenting facts in court”.
But when they stick, the damage can be devastating. Case in point: the trial and conviction of nine participants in a 4 July 2025, action outside ICE’s Prairieland detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. Some brought guns, which is legal in Texas. Benjamin Song fired at a police officer – he said he aimed at the ground – who was injured. Others scrawled graffiti on cars and shot off fireworks.
Song was convicted of attempted murder, the other eight on charges of riot and explosives (the fireworks) and material support for terrorism; the prosecution presented a claim that their black clothing and use of Signal are antifa tactics. Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, who was not there, was convicted of conspiracy to conceal documents for moving a box of zines.
The prison sentences they received were extreme by any measure: 100 years for Song, 30 for Sanchez-Estrada; 50 to 70 years for the others. The justice department proudly broadcast the total: 450 years for a “terrorist attack” on an ICE facility. The woman who attempted to assassinate supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh got eight years.
By comparison, between 1941 and 1957 hundreds of communists and others were prosecuted under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to “advocate, abet, advise or teach the … desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence” – all constitutionally protected speech. Eleven leaders of the Communist party convicted in one major trial were sentenced to three to five years.
Techno-surveillance
At the counter-terrorism summit, Miller described efforts to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country”. Aided by technology and undeterred by watchdogs, they can do it.
McCarthy relied on wiretapping, spies, informants and human bureaucrats digging through paper files to identify his targets. He managed to find thousands. But late 21st-century technology, including artificial intelligence, which enables the state to conduct surveillance on millions and collate data from government agencies at all levels, makes Hoover’s witch-hunt look like a game of hide-and-seek.
The examples are myriad. ICE has a new $25m-a-year contract with a subsidiary of the data broker Thomson Reuters to provide “continuous monitoring” of such things as potential government fraud and the arrival of unaccompanied immigrant minors. It also does “academic risk flagging”, whatever that is.
The agriculture department has contracted with Palantir to provide an AI-empowered return-to-office tracking tool, which critics say can be used for other kinds of employee surveillance. The White House has mandated the installation of an app on federal workers’ phones that “gives all Americans direct access” to administration news alerts, social media posts and policy announcements. A “text President Trump” option pre-populates a message praising him. What happens to the worker who wants to criticize him?
Those antiterrorist visa restrictions are determined through the ideological vetting of travelers by pulling social media content into government databases using AI-powered monitoring tools; the process continues after the person enters the country.
Trump’s friendly relations with tech companies that amass mountains of customer data constitute an incalculable asset to the repressive regime.
Submissive Washington
On 2 December 1954, the Senate, led by three Republicans, censured Joe McCarthy. Its resolution described the senator’s hunt for suspected communists in the federal government as “contrary to senatorial traditions”. Quaint as that sounds, it initiated his undoing. Throughout the 1950s, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s supreme court dismantled the tools of McCarthyism piece by piece, fortifying the fifth amendment against self-incrimination and reining in Congress’s power to call witnesses when testifying would “unjustifiably” abridge their right to privacy or “liberty of speech, press, religion or assembly”.
Now, cowed by their vengeful and fickle commander-in-chief, the Republican Congress has relinquished its powers – of appropriation and regulation, declaration of war or removal of a corrupt, incompetent or emotionally unstable president. While the lower federal judiciary has ruled frequently against Trump, the supreme court’s majority has upheld the president’s prerogative to reshape the federal government according to his whim. The recent ruling that allowed his no-cause dismissal of the Federal Trade commissioner Rebecca Slaughter – and overturned a 91-year-old decision limiting such executive authority – reverberates throughout the federal workforce, politicizing the public sector and reopening the door to the ruinous inquests of the McCarthy era.
What will be the next frontier of political repression? Will the postal inspector be deputized to open packages in search of abortion pills bound for red states? Will Trump send ICE or the national guard to intimidate voters at the polls?
A president without a moral compass and advisers whose true north is the extreme right, helming a government with unparalleled legal, technological and financial resources, can implement a regime of political repression that Joe McCarthy – or even Big Brother – could not have dreamt of.”
Mario Savio Bodies Upon the Gears Speech, University of California, Berkeley December 1964
Iggy Pop – Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
On this day in 1619 over four centuries of slavery and Resistance began in America with the first slave auction, and no human being has been truly free or equal here since, for we are all possessed by the legacies of our history as shared national trauma.
We must bring a Reckoning for this pervasive evil, central to the Original Lie which founded America as a free society of equals on paper while remaining one of masters and slaves in fact, in the reimagination and transformation of humankind through changing the systems of unequal power that have shaped us to things of fear, power, and force, in the centralization of power to authority and to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and patriarchal white privilege through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and through seizures of power in revolutionary struggle and the solidarity of The Wretched of the Earth from the carceral states of force and control which create and are created by elites as instruments of power.
Let us bring, after four centuries of inequality and the state as embodied violence and systemic white supremacist terror, an American Revolution.
As I wrote in my post of August 31 2021, 401 Years of Slavery and Resistance in America, and Counting; One of the most important Reckonings we must have with ourselves and our history is the four hundred and one years of slavery and resistance in America which this August marks.
Both the content and context of this issue and its discussion has and will continue to shift and realign for as long as there are humans to interrogate the meaning and consequences of inequality and racism; I propose merely that we must make this central question of American identity and values a national priority in politics and education, and in the practice of our daily lives.
To quote the ACLU newsletter of last year for August; “Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life.”
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2020; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2021, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed, and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
To be a true American patriot is to be a liberator, not a conqueror.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020, History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history and literature, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this dialectical interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil combine in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
The Underground Railroad retells slavery’s horrors with a dreamlike twist, review of the Amazon Prime series by CBS News
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative.
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the 1619 Project’s reframing of American history (EP. 61) August 22, 2019”
“Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, The New York Times launched a major initiative called The 1619 Project. Through a special issue of the New York Times Magazine, along with a slew of other resources, the project centers slavery in our national narrative, tracking how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life. Nikole Hannah-Jones — an award winning investigative journalist, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and the driving force behind The 1619 Project — joins At Liberty host Emerson Sykes (@emersonsjsykes) to discuss the initiative
[00:00:04] From the ACLU, this is At Liberty. I’m Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.
Four hundred years ago this month, more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived in what was then the British colony of Virginia. To mark the anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America, the New York Times has launched the “1619 Project” with a special edition of the Sunday paper and a slew of other related resources. The goal of the project is ambitious.It aims to reframe the country’s history to center slavery in our national narrative, emphasizing how the legacy of that brutal institution continues to manifest in every aspect of American life. The project has been enthusiastically received, selling out multiple print runs in the last few days. Here to discuss the project is Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning investigative journalist, a New York Times Magazine staff writer and the driving force behind the 1619 Project.
Nikole Hannah Jones, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us on the show today. Welcome to the podcast.
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
Thank you for having me.
EMERSON
So this project is quite astonishing for its ambition and scope. The 1619 Project includes several long essays, including one by yourself, shorter vignettes, works of poetry, photography, and even a curriculum for schools, and I understand a podcast series is also about to drop. But your introductory essay, I think, frames the project and introduces its core thesis. Can I ask you to start by reading a passage from your essay which is entitled, “The Idea of America”?
NIKOLE
[00:01:38] Sure: “The United States is a nation founded both on an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4th, 1776, proclaimed that ‘All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of Black people in their midst. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans believe fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of Black resistance and protest, we have helped this country live up to its founding ideals and not only for ourselves. Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights. Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different. It might not be a democracy at all.”
EMERSON
Thank you very much for sharing that reading and also for the 1619 Project’s existence. As I understand it, the project was very much your brainchild. Can you tell us about how the idea came about in what you hope it will accomplish?
NIKOLE
Sure. I first came across the year 1619 as a high school student, and I was reading a book that my Black Studies teacher gave me by Lerone Bennett called Before the Mayflower. And in coming across that date, I just was struck. I remember being very struck by the fact that I had never seen that date before, that I had never been taught that enslaved Africans had been here that long, that enslaved Africans had arrived even before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. And that date, therefore, that year, has always stuck with me, my entire life. And so as the 400th anniversary was approaching, I really was thinking about how for most Americans, this month, this year, was going to pass and they weren’t going to know that this was the anniversary; they weren’t going to know this was a four hundredth year of slavery being introduced into what would become America, and it would just pass without notice. And that really bothered me.
[00:03:52] So, I pitched this project to the New York Times because I feel that the year 1619 is as foundational to the American story as the year 1776, and that we clearly, as a country, have not grappled with the legacy of one of our oldest institutions and one that I would argue, has impacted most aspects of modern American life. And this seems like a great opportunity to use the platform of The Times to force a reckoning with that.
EMERSON
Well, it’s a powerful idea, and you were worried that the anniversary would pass without notice, and you’ve certainly accomplished making sure that that has not happened. The-the response has been overwhelming, and mostly positive, but also, of course, with predictable backlash from people on the right. Can you say a bit about the responses that you’ve received?
NIKOLE
I am completely overwhelmed by the response. If you’re listening to this and you’ve sent me an e-mail or left me a voicemail or DM-ed me on Twitter, and I haven’t responded, I’m getting to it. Of everything I’ve ever done, I’ve never received this many responses. It’s been, in that way, very unexpected. I had no idea how this would land in the world. I knew what we were trying to do was evocative. I believed it was powerful, but I just didn’t expect the reaction that we’ve received. As you mentioned, we have sold out of copies, people are posting their stories of driving miles and miles and going to several stores just trying to get a copy of the print product. And that’s been very gratifying because the reason I wanted to do this was to get us talking about something that we all think we know, and we really don’t, and hoping to really reframe the narrative particularly of Black Americans but also the nation itself. So the–the response has been amazing.
EMERSON
[00:05:46] Well I’m–I’m lucky. Our producer Noa Yachot is the only reason I actually have a physical copy, and I’m very happy to have one. It’s such a beautiful document and artifact that I think people will return to over time. And as you said, the messages are very powerful in reframing our national narrative. But also, it’s not a reported news document, right? This information is not exactly new, but it’s presented in an extraordinarily powerful way. And I’m curious about the impact that you were hoping to have on individual readers.
NIKOLE
So, the entire project is making an argument. It’s definitely reported. I wouldn’t call it “news,” but it’s very rigorously researched and very heavily reported. But the conceit of the magazine, so there’s–there’s two parts of the print product. There’s a special section of the newspaper, and that’s really a corrective on the way that we’ve been taught slavery. That special section of the newspaper is a history, and we did that in partnership with the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
But the magazine’s conceit is that you can take all of these modern aspects of American life, all these institutions and phenomenon in modern American life and contemporary American life, and things that you think have nothing to do with slavery, and we were going to take– start in the present and trace those institutions back and show that all of these interlinking aspects of our society have a commonality. And that’s that they developed out of slavery or the anti- Black racism that came about to justify slavery. So there are, in the magazine, there are stories about why Americans consume so much sugar. Why were the only Western industrialized country without universal health care. Why traffic is so terrible in Atlanta. Our very geography as cities. Why our politics are so dysfunctional. And then, of course, my essay speaks about our democracy itself. It really was my attempt to make this institution and its legacy real, and to really answer that claim that I get all the time, which is, “Slavery ended a long time ago. It’s in the past. It has nothing to do with modern society.”
[00:08:02] And that’s simply not true. If we believe that the Constitution still matters, if we believe the Declaration still matters, every year we celebrate the Fourth of July, if those things matter, then 1619 and slavery mattered as well. You cannot pick and choose which parts of our society are important and that we will remember the history in which we don’t. And I think we make a very powerful argument about the ongoing legacy of slavery.
EMERSON
Well, indeed, it is a very powerful argument, and it’s striking and in the expansive scope that you’ve taken, as you mentioned, all the different aspects and the threads that you pull through in terms of slavery’s legacy in our modern society, but being from the ACLU, I wanted to focus a bit on the prevalence of law in facilitating oppression as a part of the slavery and its legacy but also, in creating some progress in freedom that we’ve seen since.
I mean, you talk in your piece, but also in other pieces, about the Reconstruction Amendments that granted citizenship and equal protection under the law, that was originally targeted at Blacks but then as you mentioned applied then to many other marginalized groups, the Civil Rights Acts, are all highlighted as well in terms of landmark laws that helped protect the rights of African-Americans, and by extension other marginalized folks. But one feature that stood out, in the New York Times Magazine edition, was a photo essay on Howard Law School students, and I guess the– the premise was basically that Howard is one of the oldest black law schools and has played an important role in forming society as we have it today. But, I’m interested in your perspective about the role of law in changing society and either enforcing or challenging these types of norms that we know are deeply in our DNA as a country.
NIKOLE
[00:09:56] Yeah, I think clearly law has played an indelible role. Laws played the role of ensuring the caste system, of ensuring the institution of slavery, and the kind of systematized racial oppression of Black Americans and other marginalized groups. And so the law’s also been the means of trying to undo them. The 14th Amendment is, as you know, “Equal Protection Before the Law”; it is understanding that, yes, of course, it is important to change quote unquote “hearts and minds” but whether “hearts and minds” change or not, people who are citizens of this country, and I would argue who are noncitizens, who may not even have legal status here, should still be protected equally by the law and treated as equal members of society by the law. And so the law, of course, has been critical in moving the country and the rights of Black Americans and other groups, and protecting those rights, even when the majority of society has not wanted to.
EMERSON
Well, and there’s this interplay also between law and culture, but also in the issue you–you, sort of, juxtapose law, policy, as well as artistic expression and literary expression. I was also drawn to a piece by Reginald Dwayne Betts. He has a poem. I was drawn to it in part because he’s a previous guest on the podcast but also because he’s an attorney as well as a poet. And so, he redacted parts of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 which is signed by George Washington. His overall redaction project is about flipping the tools that are used by the government to obscure the truth, to create clarity. And I know he did that with writs of habeas corpus in a recent recent exhibition as well. But it seems like it’s analogous to what you’re doing, in some ways: where you’re sort of taking a platform, like the New York Times, which like all American institutions has its own checkered history, but then flipping that tool and using it to provide clarity and correct the American meta-narrative.
NIKOLE
[00:11:59] Yeah, for sure. I have been extremely aware of the history of white-run media in propagating and promulgating white supremacy in this country. I mean, enslavers ran ads for their property in newspapers and in media. And when I think particularly about the New York Times, the longer part of our legacy has been that Black people have been very mistreated in the stories that have been published. And this was, in a way, an opportunity to use the paper of record as a corrective, and I have thought about that a lot: that as a lay historian, when I’m going back to do historical research like many historians, you turn again and again to the New York Times to see, how was the New York Times covering whatever was happening that you’re that you’re trying to research. And when I think that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, when people are coming back and trying to understand our times, that there will be this massive project in the paper of record that they will go back, and to try to view the American experience and the Black experience through that, is very powerful to me. And, of course, any one project, any one institution, cannot correct all of these wrongs that were done, but it certainly is a way to put into the record, and into the paper of record, a counternarrative to a very long and–and torrid legacy of the mistreatment of Black Americans.
EMERSON
This is clearly a project about meta-narrative and our sort of national narrative, and it’s noteworthy that we do start with 1619. You know, you talked about, it’s about the American experience and the Black experience. And I’m someone who’s been deeply influenced, I think, not only by all of the the the history that you tell in America but also by the Pan Africanist movement, and in my previous job I spent a lot of time working in Africa with activists and political leaders.
[00:13:59] And so, I did want to just touch on the idea of the African-American story in relation to Africa and in a global context. Obviously, I understand that the the project is about American history, but I think it’s controversial in some ways to start our history with slavery. And, you know, you in your article referred several times to Africa as quote, “A place we’ve never been,” which, of course, is true for the vast majority of African-Americans, and the fact that our–our links with Africa were systematically broken. This was not a mistake. This was a part of our story.
But to the extent that the project is about sort of reclaiming African-American identity, I’m curious about how you think about the implications of starting the story where you did. It makes sense to start there, but for me it’s also not really the beginning of our story.
NIKOLE
Well, so, it’s not, clearly. We know that we descend from the continent of Africa and most likely from the western central region of the continent of Africa, but I very intentionally started a 1619. I very intentionally argue that we are a new people born on these shores, because I think in the reframing of America, I’m also trying to reframe the way that we have been treated and how we have thought about ourselves: that we are never treated as full citizens in this country, that we have always been taught that somehow, our story beginning with our enslavement here is something that we should be ashamed of, that we have to find this connection which is always going to be a vague connection to a continent, or to a region of the second largest continent in the world, because we can’t go and look up our specific nations, or our specific languages. That is where we have to try to find our identity. I think it’s been very harmful.
[00:15:47] So it’s not eschewing that connection and I say in there, “We have echoes of Africa, but we are not African.” And we are not. We are fully American. We are an amalgamated people. We are a mixed race of people. We speak English, for the most part. Our cultural institutions we created here. The original American music we created here. We have created original American names. We have created original American culture. And I want us to be proud of that. As Black Freedom Fighters said during slavery, “Our ancestors bones and blood is in this soil.” And it is great to have a sense of Pan Africanism; I definitely feel that connection to the Diaspora is very critical, but I also think that it is fine for us– We have as much claim on this country, where the only ancestors that we can trace are on these shores. And why should we not feel pride in that? Why should we not claim the full citizenship and full identity of the country for which some of us have been here for 400 years?
EMERSON
I totally hear that; that makes a lot of sense. I think from my– my personal journey, I think, feeling alienated as an African-America from my home country and having spent a lot of time in Africa, actually did give me that sense of ownership of America: it sort of solidified the fact that I am definitely an American, and I have every right to claim that story. So, I think it’s interesting that people are coming to these stories with all different sorts of backgrounds.
You know, I am someone who I think it’s, without being too braggadocious, I think I have an above average familiarity with a lot of African-American history and culture, and sometimes I find myself being impatient with people who are, sort of, smacking their heads and saying, “I had no idea America was so racist.” But at the same time this knowledge that I gained was from my parents, it was from my family. It was not in my public elementary or middle school. So–
NIKOLE
Right.
EMERSON
I think it’s–it’s it’s fascinating to think about these stories that some of us have heard, some of us haven’t heard, but we’re all coming to them with our own with our own baggage, so to speak.
NIKOLE
[00:17:57] Black Americans don’t have the luxury of not knowing that our country is racist. We’re the most legislated against group of people in the history of this country, and from the moment we landed here, our lives have been constrained by white racism. We have never even been able to live fully as individuals because our membership in this race, that white people made, that we call Black, has meant that no matter what we do personally as individuals, we are lumped in and treated as a group. So we don’t have that luxury, but what I will say is my patience for people who are surprised is better than it used to be because when you really understand, and part of what we do with the project in the special section is examine the way we are taught slavery in school, the way we are taught slavery in society.
And, if you’re like most Americans, where you learn history from what you’re taught in school, you’re not, kind of, a history nerd like me, obsessively reading history books, then what you know is what you’ve been taught. And I’m not going to blame, you know, entire population because, frankly, a lot of Black Americans know very little about this history, as well. I think what I’ve learned, I’ve been studying African-American history since I took my first Black Studies class in high school. I majored in African-American history in college, and I still learn things every single day. Reporting my essay, I learned a ton of things that I didn’t know, and I’ve been studying for two decades. So, I think there is a kind of unending amount of history that we can unearth. This project is just, clearly, the tip of the iceberg. But even knowing that if you read that 100 pages of this magazine, shoot, if you read one article in the magazine, I think for most Americans, it is already going to give them a perspective and information that they haven’t had.
EMERSON
[00:19:50] Well certainly, it’s all there for people to get that information, and it’s presented in such a compelling way that it’s clearly been attractive to people, and– and I think the message is really sinking in. I’m interested in, sort of, a bigger picture thought about if there’s any particular action. Changing the national narrative is no small feat. I mean, I don’t mean to minimize that, but I’m also wondering if you also see some piece of action that you were hoping that readers might take. Is it just about deeper reflection or understanding, or is there something more tangible that you’re hoping to achieve as well?
NIKOLE
Well, you know, I’m a journalist, so I just point out the problems and that other people like y’all worry about the solutions.
[LAUGHS]
But no, I think, first, if you look at, let’s just take the conversation, or lack thereof, around reparations. How do you even gain traction and have a real legitimate conversation if we can’t even grapple with the truth of what slavery was and what its legacy remains?
So, I think having that information, in some ways, you could look at this entire project as an argument that makes the case that something is owed. I don’t know how you read the entire issue of the magazine, where we point out again and again the modern day legacy of slavery and not see that as a whole as asking the question of, “What do we then owe?” I mean, all my work is about, you know, the most deeply entrenched societal issues. I never have an expectation that people are going to read something I produce, or anyone produces, and we’re just gonna get–
Oh I almost cussed, sorry.
EMERSON
That’s all right. No, that’s alright.
NIKOLE
Right.
EMERSON
We’re–We’re not on– we’re not out on the network news.
NIKOLE
[00:21:40] Right, that we’re gonna get our shit together and suddenly, you know, have a kumbaya moment and make amends for what we’ve done. But we certainly are not going to take the steps to rectify and remedy this legacy, if we can’t even tell the truth about it. So, I see this truth in bringing this to a large mass of American citizens who have never had it as the first step. My hope then, would be that there can be a real conversation about what is ultimately owed to the descendants of the enslaved for this history. And how do we come to a place where we can actually be the society that our founders laid out at our most idealistic place?
And I guess, the last thing I would add because if people actually read the issue with an open mind, white Americans in particular, but also other non-Black Americans, I think what they will see is that we have not been able to contain the harms of the legacy of slavery only to Black people. That everyone in our society has been hurt by this. When we’re the only country, Western industrialized country that doesn’t offer universal healthcare, because white Americans, surveys and polling show, are the least likely to support social programs if they think Black Americans are going to benefit from them. There are a bunch of white Americans who are suffering for that. There are millions of white Americans who have not been able to get insured, proper insurance, who have not been able to get their health care needs met, who have died because of this anti-Black racism.
So when people sit in traffic in Atlanta for four hours, wasting their lives away that is universally affecting Americans, even though the highway system was built to hurt Black people. So if you sit with this, there is a reckoning that will need to be had to understand that Black people are fully American. Black people have been those that driving force to make the ideals of our Constitution real. And if we want to be a better country as a whole, if we as Americans want to have the greatest benefits of our country as a whole, we’ve got to purge ourselves of what is one of our original sins.
EMERSON
[00:23:54] The thing that jumps out to me about the current reparations debate is that people are not just talking about, you know, “This happened in the 19th century, and therefore, we need to update for inflation and figure out a payment mechanism,” but that the legacy of slavery survives to today and that the harms are still recognizable and identifiable. And so I think, the work that you’ve done in terms of pulling these threads, as I said, is really is really important, but it also kind of jumps out to me that, unless I missed it, I think that this there is no explicit call for reparations, or at least that’s not a central focus in terms of reparations in and of themselves, of the project. So, you’re hoping that it leads people there but, you made the call not to include it as an explicit call within the project.
NIKOLE
So, there is no explicit call for anything in this project. There is an assessment of the legacy. I did assign initially a piece that asked that very question, “What is owed,” and it ended up uh being a piece about the wealth gap. So I think we will still have a piece that ask that question and that speaks to scholars who have been studying this and maybe comes up with a figure, but definitely talks to scholars about what is owed. But even that is going to be a question and an assessment. I don’t think that it is the role of this project to call for any one thing: that’s for activists to do, and that’s for activists to work on, but we are certainly assessing that legacy which again I think culminates in a powerful argument that we need to figure out what is owed.
EMERSON
That makes a lot of sense, and I guess, you sort of led me into my next question, which was about how you cover so many different topics, and I’m curious if there are any that you wish had made it in?
NIKOLE
[00:25:41] Oh, God. Of course. I mean, even as comprehensive as we tried to be, and this magazine is twice as many pages as our typical New York Times Magazine, there’s a ton that was left out. And some of this, I think you’ll see in other sections of the magazine in the future. There’s nothing on food. I think food is critical. There’s not really a story on culture. I think you could do more around a lot of the subjects that are already in there. Probably what some people may see as the most glaring omission, considering what I report on most of the time, is there’s nothing on schools or education. I think that could be some great work on college debt and college attendance.
So, I mean, there’s really an unlimited number of stories that could go in, and we certainly plan on publishing more stories through the end of the year. And one other thing that is definitely going to come, if you go to the magazine, at the very end of the magazine, there is a very haunting picture of the site of the largest auction of human beings in the history of our country that was called “The Weeping Time.” And the picture is of the modern American landscape, what is there now. And we wanted to get that entire photo essay into the magazine. We went to various sites of auction spots where uh human beings were bought and sold and took pictures of what those sites look like now, kind of as a metaphor for how we have–slavery is all around us, the ghosts are there but we have allowed it to just fade into the background. And so, we’re going to be publishing that photo essay in the magazine later as well.
We worked with a lot of historians. We had a big brainstorming session here at the Times before we even picked what stories we were going to put in the issue and asked historians, you know, “What should we be writing about, what do we need to make sure to cover?” Several those historians ended up writing for the issue. But I’m sure, I’ve heard from a number of historians since the issue published who have ideas about stories that they would like to write or other areas that they think we should cover and we welcome those pitches as well.
EMERSON
[00:27:52] Well that’s great to hear that the drumbeat will continue. So, you’ve talked about a few of the articles that may be released between now and the end of the year, and we know there’s the curriculum for students and teachers, and there’s also the podcast series that’s coming out. Is there anything else that you want to highlight about what’s coming next for the project? And I’m also very interested in what you’re excited about working on next.
NIKOLE
I guess the only other thing we didn’t talk about is we are doing an all day symposium at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
EMERSON
Wow.
NIKOLE
October 30th, in Washington D.C., and it is going to be both somber and celebratory and very much looking forward to that, so listeners should look out for announcements about that, and how to get tickets as well. As for what’s next with me, you sound like an editor.
EMERSON
No deadlines.
NIKOLE
I’m trying to to to survive, you know, this project, it has consumed me since January. It has not let up yet, and I have no idea what’s next day. My book editor hopes that me finishing my book is next, so maybe I’ll say that.
EMERSON
Well, we look forward to whatever you put out next. I’ve found all of your reporting on education fascinating and illuminating and of course the 1619 Project is already a triumph, and the legend of this project will only grow in the years to come, so Nikole Hannah-Jones, thanks so much for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to speak with us and thanks for all your great work.
NIKOLE
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
EMERSON
Thanks very much for listening. If you valued this conversation, please be sure to subscribe to At Liberty wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review the show. We really appreciate the feedback.
The Lovecraft Mythos remains an iconic study in fear as the organizing principle of an invented mythology of Absurdist Nihilism; it also reveals how we use fear to shape ourselves and others. What are its methods and purposes in Lovecraft, and in horror literature in general? Why do we need fear as an instrument of identity creation?
Fear is both a limit of our openness to change which defines our boundaries and a disruptive force which transgresses normalities; a form of Chaos which is a measure of the adaptive potential of ourselves and our society as systems. We must listen to the secrets our fear whispers to us, for it both reflects our true selves and describes the negative spaces of our future possibilities of becoming human. Above all, fear is an instrument by which we create ourselves.
Cherish your fear and hold it close; question and probe the limits of your darkness, for it speaks to us of ambiguous truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Especially we must explore and interrogate the Uncanny Valley of horror, revulsion, disgust; the instinctive terror of things not quite like ourselves as figures of otherness, and the shock and awe of unknown possibilities of becoming human which live beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden.
We are seized and shaken by overwhelming forces of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity; the pathology of our disconnectedness and the psychopathy of power, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and its loathsome manifestations of tyranny and carceral states of force and control as embodied violence which co-evolves with elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, hierarchies of belonging and otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
How shall we answer the terror of our nothingness?
Among the angels with which we must wrestle and the demons with which we must dance or be consumed by, the fracture of life disruptive events becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative and multiple truths and possible selves. Herein we may choose between two paths in seizures of power; we may become liberators or tyrants.
On one face of this coin, the tyrant Janus; the terror of our nothingness, falsification, dehumanization, abjection, and theft of the soul. On its reverse the liberator Janus; the joy of total freedom, seizure of power, self ownership, love which exalts us beyond the limits of our flesh and the discovery of our best selves as truths both self created and immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Becoming human as a process of identity formation, self-construal or personae which is the word for a character mask which actors speak through in classical Greek theatre and which I believe describes identity as a performance and a narrative structure with precision, clarity, and great explanatory power, remains fluid, ambiguous, relative, ephemeral, and a primary ground of struggle.
Who chooses how we are to be defined, the boundaries between our limits and the possibilities of what we may become, and hos and under what conditions boundaries become interfaces between divergent realms?
This is the first question to ask of any story; whose story is this?
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Always there remains the struggle between 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.
Such is the work of Resistance as Repair of the World, tikkun olam in the Kabbalah and Judaism in general, under imposed conditions of struggle which include our fragile human form and the ambiguous and ephemeral truths written in our flesh.
As I wrote in my post On the Wisdom of Our Darkness in the wake of my mother’s death years ago; 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.
As such they both shatter who we are and open us to becoming anew, like a bird emerging from the shell of its egg.
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 evolved and 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.
Beneath our masks we are a continuum of consciousness, history, and mimesis through which we are interconnected, especially with our loved ones and ancestors for whom our bodies are anchorages to this world.
The negative emotions are a biosocial tax on individuals which in part serve to drive us together to meet threats collectively as families and 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. Here I think of the green light at the end of his rival’s dock which drives Gatsby to reimagine himself, and in the end to destroy himself like Icarus in reaching for false illusions. 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?
So I described grief process and the abjection and despair of life disruptive events as trauma but also as a gift of the unknown which bears potentialities of liberation and transformative rebirth.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians in the Netflix series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous tyrant and cannibal god, a figural study of Hitler and the motive forces of fascism and the psychopathy of power, a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak.”
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil and carceral states of force and control as embodied violence; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values.
But there are other ways of facing our darkness, among them the path of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and through our actions of humankind and our world; of revolutionary struggle against the systems of oppression which possess us and of liberation from our own hegemonies of power, of embracing our monstrosity and questioning the origins and limits of that which we find abhorrent within us, of violations of normality and transgression of the boundaries of our authorized identities and the limits of the human, of dancing our demons; the way of Lovecraft.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
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.
As I wrote in my post of October 26 2021, On Fear as the Basis of Exchange, Madness as Poetic Vision, and the Terror of Our Nothingness: the Case of Lovecraft; Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, an Absurdist Nihilism which echoes in Samuel Beckett and Kobo Abe, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear?
Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to understand him?
Is he a fascist? Nowhere in literature will you find a more useful case study of fascist psychology, and in nonfiction only the book I discovered, while a senior in high school in the wake of studies of Holocaust literature and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which led me to a lifelong study of the origins of evil through the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, a multidisciplinary analysis of Hitler entitled The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, is more illuminating.
Lovecraft is a conflicted author who mocked Hitler as a clown but also admired his performances as a form of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Pirandello’s Theatre of the Grotesque; many Americans thought of Trump in this way as parallel figures of public spectacle. Hitler’s famous maxim “Politics is the new art” marks the turning point of an unknown artist into a monstrous tyrant, and of our civilization to an age of darkness. From this moment on, image has replaced content and public life has been a theatrical performance wherein values are irrelevant.
Lovecraft’s paranoid delusions of alien conspiracies and ancient cults can be read as antisemitic allegories derived from propaganda like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of which Umberto Eco wrote so beautifully in Prague Cemetery, but for the fact that he was a madman who believed them to be literally true; humanity is a tenuous and illusory quality for Lovecraft, whose world is filled with monsters wearing human masks who might reveal themselves at any moment, himself most especially, a precarious reality under constant threat.
His only known romantic relationship was his brief marriage to a Jewish woman, to whom he incessantly muttered dark imprecations, poisonous metacommentary, and racist characterizations about virtually everyone they passed on the streets of New York as monsters from his stories in disguise, as he did in his hundred thousand letters to his literary proteges.
He is not a fascist, which requires submission to authority and the abandonment of all meaning other than power and all value other than wealth, but he shares with fascists the terrible truth that fear is the basis of human exchange. Fascism weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear in service to power and operates as tyranny; Lovecraft’s work is filled with elite hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness as images and figures which may be read as racist, and he shares many of the obsessions of fascism, but nowhere does he long for authority or imposed meaning; instead he signposts and calls it out as cruelty without meaning or value, and his narratives are driven by existential dread and terror of authority.
His is a poetics of rebellion and nihilism like that of Camus and Beckett in a universe wherein the gods are not merely dead as in Nietzsche’s reimagination of the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us, Thus Spake Zarathustra, but are actively hostile to humankind, mad idiot superbeings whose motives are utterly alien and predatory, who created humankind as slaves and food, a radical nihilistic atheism which has its political form as anarchy. The Anarchist slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World, “No gods, no masters”, coined by the socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880 and popularized by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent in 1907, might have been written for him.
Is he a racist? Yes and no, as we may say of fellow Surrealists Djuna Barnes and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His fears of otherness, miscegenation, contamination, devolution to an animal state, and of the monstrosity of others is often expressed in racist terms, but he neither begins nor ends with unselfcritical racism. It remains ambiguous whether he is calling it out or employing such tropes to advance his themes; the first interpretation ascribes intentionality and self awareness which is unprovable but aligns with his themes, the second miscasts him as a Warhol like mocker of expectations whose images are deliberately discontiguous and unaligned, or a fabulist without a cause which he was not.
He was instead a profoundly wounded and savaged soul who fears his own monstrosity most of all, and this is why he is useful to us. His cause was to speak the truth in witness, remembrance, and Reckoning with systems of oppression and legacies of history which like a private Holocaust had disfigured him and stolen much of his humanity. In the literature of madness only the works of Akutagawa and Philip K. Dick are true equals, authors who like Lovecraft were fighting a losing battle against madness, and aware of the degeneration of their skill and artistic control. We may say of him as Renfield says of himself in Dracula; “I’m not a mad man. I’m a sane man fighting for my soul.”
Why should we read Lovecraft now?
Like the Hanging of the Maids in Homer’s Ulysses, the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, his writing becomes meaningful for us when it is relevant to problems we face in our own lives, and literature is useful when it helps us solve problems of adaptation and change, such as confronting and interrogating implicit privilege as patriarchy and racism. What else is literature for? Purge it of its power to disturb, incite, and provoke, and it becomes meaningless and worthless.
The tragic flaw of Lovecraft is also that of our civilization; a blindness to our own privilege and a failure to embrace our monstrosity and otherness. Such lines of fracture can be read in our borders with their concentration camps of migrants and our prisons whose purpose is the re-enslavement of Black people as contract forced labor, and in our democracy which has been infiltrated and subverted by fascists and transformed into a carceral state of imperial force and control.
We must claim 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.”
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
Here I think of our monstrosity in terms of the classic allegorical novel of America as a family with the dark purpose of breeding its own carnival freak show, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.
Any serious scholarship of Lovecraft begins with Michel Houellebecq’s stunning debut and manifesto, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, whose chapter titles suggest the ars poetica of Lovecraft; “Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness. Then you will see a magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnamable architecture of time”.
Next comes the definitive biography I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volumes 1 & 2, by S.T. Joshi, Joshi’s An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, and the volumes he edited in the Black Wings series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies. Finally there is Thomas Ligotti’s manifesto The Conspiracy against the Human Race, and his darkly luminous fictions.
Why is Lovecraft relevant to us now?
H.P. Lovecraft investigates the failure of our civilization to protect us from our animal nature, the shadow which grants us depth and limitless passion; the purpose of our invention of civilization according to Camille Paglia’s magisterial Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.
His writing is filled with images and themes which have been misread as racist, but his intent is the reverse; to name and disempower the forces which destroyed civilization in World War One as fear of otherness, exactly as did his model T.S. Eliot. Together with Vladimir Nabokov, they are the greatest, and perhaps the last, of our true conservatives.
But this, too, is ambiguous, for he is equally a revolutionary; Lovecraft’s vision of Western civilization is that of a colony of ants mining the waning power of a dead god’s carcass, a horror without purpose. He shares the critique of Idealism with Eliot, Nabokov, and especially Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, but also of traditional society as structural and systemic tyranny and authoritarian force and control with his fellow Absurdists and Surrealists, to some degree of normality as a basis of the power of church and state with de Sade as a literary provocateur and the valorization of transgression as liberation from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and above all of formal power itself with the great visionary for whom he was a direct model with Genet and Bataille, William S. Burroughs.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and Jacques DeMolay. As magicians and scholars of the occult there is a direct line of transmission and successorship from medieval ceremonial magic and Aleister Crowley to Lovecraft to Burroughs.
Anyone who has read my literary criticism or my political commentary will be aware that I despise and abjure fascism above all else. Why, then, do I love and admire conservative authors as a treasure, and acclaim any quixotic defense of Idealism against the onslaught of atavistic barbarism and dehumanized modernity?
Let me clarify; fascism is an intrusive force of destruction and no part of the Western Civilization which I champion, born as self-criticism in the Forum of Athens, but also in the fathomless chasms of darkness in the prison cell of Plato’s Trial of Socrates through which we renew our humanity in resistance to authority periodically throughout our history. Conservatism in America or indeed any free nation founded on the values of the Enlightenment begins with a free society of equals, a secular state, objective and testable truth, and a system of justice which is impartial to class, race, or gender, founded on the Rights of Man, scientific rationalism, and Humanism.
Any philosophy of totalitarian authority which centralizes power to a state of force and control, either theocratic, monarchist-aristocratic, communist, or fascist, is anathema to myself and to democracy and freedom. I am an American and a bearer of the Torch of Liberty. This is why I am on the side of rebellion, transgression, revolution, anarchy, chaos, and the frightening of the horses.
Regarding the themes of existential dread of otherness and the terror of alien civilizations, of being overrun by a zombie apocalypse of mindless cannibal brutes which has always been a metaphor of nonwhite immigration, H.P. Lovecraft explored this territory of fear as a cause of the collapse of our civilization. He interrogates rather than valorizes the causes of monarchy and fascism as forms of colonial imperialism.
Lovecraft asked a simple question; what happens to humankind and to human being, meaning, and value without Freudian control of our animal instinctive nature? Throughout his works he recapitulates and extends Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis and interrogation of Nietzsche in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist critique of state power based on a legal reformulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin; that without the restraining force of law man devolves into a subhuman condition and the most ruthless and amoral wins and becomes king, originally formulated to limit the divine right of kings and crucial to the Enlightenment project and the birth of modern secular democracy.
Measure for Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded, is luminous with Kafka-esque Absurdism and Freudian horror.
Here are Lovecraft’s primary sources and references; grimoires of magic, Shakespeare and classical Greek theatre which are common sources, Nietzsche, and Freud. What he did with them, however, was utterly unique and a luminous work of genius which interrogated the failure and collapse of our civilization in World War One from its internal contradictions and forged from his vision an ars poetica of Absurdist-Surrealist Nihilism which prefigured Existentialism.
This line of transmission originates with Dostoevsky and Gogol, was codified by Kafka, and finds realization in Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti as Absurdist Nihilism and in William S. Burroughs, Jorge Borges, Philip K. Dick, Haruki Murakami, Andre Breton, Philip Lamantia, Allen Ginsburg, Jonathan Carroll, Jeff Vander Meer, and others as Surrealism.
It is his Surrealism for which I love him; Lovecraft’s principal stories form an
Initiation cycle of Jungian shadow work and the confrontation with ones own darkness as the Other in a metamorphosis of Orphic descent like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, or in Augustinian exaltation like Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, culminating in his reimagination of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, William S. Burrough’s model for his own final masterwork The Western Lands.
Fellow Surrealist Vladimir Nabokov articulated the principles of poetic vision and dreams as transcendent imaginal journeys through time and other dimensions to seize control of our own evolution in his great novel Ada, Jung models them in the Red Book, and Philip K. Dick was consumed by them, but Surrealism as a transhumanist project to become a god or to unite with the Infinite draws on myriads of esoteric, mythic, occult, and mystery traditions, many of which inform Lovecraft’s work. Like Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Lovecraft can be read as a summa theologica and codex of the whole Western mystery tradition.
Like his models and sources, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and those for whom he became a model and reference in turn, Jung, Nabokov, Burroughs, Lamantia, and Philip K. Dick, and aligned with the works of Akutagawa in Kappa, Leonora Carrington, Djuna Barnes, and Jerzy Kosinski in The Painted Bird, the works of Lovecraft are also a therapy journal which documents his struggles with madness.
Like Baudelaire he realizes the world is mad; but he is also mad, and his great works chart the course of his degeneration and unmooring from consensus reality which was also a liberation of the spirit and of the imagination, a madness and rapture which transformed him into an angelic figure, combining in one being illumination and darkness, depravity and exaltation.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As a figure of Orpheus and Milton’s Rebel Angel Lovecraft struggled to escape the limits of the human and the legacies of his history, his madness a consequence of unresolved internal conflicts and the massive trauma of being an emotionally abandoned child whose parents both died of madness in an asylum, a madness which he shared and feared he could not escape, which made strange his vision as a unique genius but also marked him with a sign of otherness, robbed him of self control and reason at times and crippled his ability to bond or even socialize in person with others, making him a reclusive hermit without sexual interest of any kind.
Lovecraft bore the wound of the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; he married at age 34 having never even kissed anyone before, and his wife remarked that she had to initiate sex as he was uninterested; the failure of their marriage is unmysterious in this light. This and lack of interest in eating which may have been attempts to starve himself to death and resulted in his gauntness make me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, who hated his body and feared his desires. He may also have been held prisoner in isolation during his formative years, under the strict regime of his insane mother and female guardians, and the tortures he survived are described in symbolic and allegorical form in his works.
Here is a great secret of the mechanism of unequal power as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma and internalized oppression; the son is shaped and deployed as the vengeance of the mother, and the victim by the abuser who is a tyrant and also a survivor of powerlessness and victimhood, and so the system of oppression perpetuates itself. Patriarchy and racism are persistent because they create some of us as monsters with which to subjugate the rest of us.
Lovecraft suffered from what I call Dr Moreau syndrome, fear of devolution to an animal state; also of ones own animal nature, like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and could not and which William S. Burroughs gloried in being possessed by, avatar of a god of darkness and nightmares which he claimed as the successor of Nietzsche and shared with me as a boy through his bizarre and unique storytelling rituals, drawn from diverse sources including Crowley, Lovecraft, and his friend Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche.
This fear of degeneration and loss of humanity coupled with the xenophobic fear of being overwhelmed by representations of parental authority as alien outsiders are compounded in the leitmotif of ancient and superior prehuman civilization which renders our own insignificant, pathetic, and meaningless, and robs us of culture as a primary control mechanism of our id or shadow self. Hence the existential horror of the Western scholar confronted by elder and superior alien civilizations such as Eqypt, as in the Randolph Carter stories which were brilliantly reimagined in The Mummy films starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. In the mythology of Lovecraft, the Other is feared because it is superior and uncontrollable, not because it is despised as inferior, and this too is a crucial difference between Lovecraft and fascism as identitarian nationalist politics. The fascination with Egyptian mythology is an element of Surrealism in general as well as with Lovecraft and Burroughs as Surrealists, especially in the poetry of its great visionary Philip Lamantia.
As regards his style; Lovecraft extends Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and as the direct model of Burroughs reimagines the nihilism and transgressive eroticism of Georges Bataille as Surrealism harnessed to the project of Romantic Idealism; to paraphrase the words of Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, to break through the mask of our material existence and seize the Reality it conceals. That the quest of Ahab was also his is quite evident; “to the end I shall grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I strike at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee” as Ahab declaims to the White Whale, figure of authoritarian tyranny who stands in for God and for his abusers. Whether he was able through his stories to leave us a map of the journey to the unknowns which lie beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden is another matter, proven only in the doing.
As to the stylistics of his rhetoric and ars poetica, Lovecraft has lost his adjectives, which are running amok and taunting their substantives. His howls of desolation are a cause of great merriment among the several grammars he employs, and this is the only thing on which they are in agreement.
His words are formed of scrabble pieces, randomized by being shaken in a dice cup in a game against the gods of madness and the ravening dark, the future of our emerging humanity wagered against the barbarism of our past.
What can be saved, and what dreamed anew? For the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu is once again revealed as an illusion, a palace of memories and lies which in their dance of chaos cannot be limited by their classification and taxonomies of value, but frangible and hollow do betray us.
Mirrors and false images which capture, distort, and falsify us, a wilderness of lost meanings which steal our souls, sound and fury signifying nothing but which seizes and shakes us with the terror of our nothingness like a rag doll in a lion’s mouth, and the signifying monkey who lives at the Buddha’s foot to denote the inherent animal nature of all humankind as a theriomorphic representation has harnessed and is riding him like a pony.
Sometimes our demons must be let out to dance.
What can we learn from Lovecraft now?
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre or a Lovecraftian one, referential to classical sources which include Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign and hostile to humanity, rests with our solution to the paradox of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils? I have come to believe that both are true at once, as Korzybski taught in his General Semantics.
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen, of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith as did T.S. Eliot. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bears the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation. Hope in this context is subjugation to authority.
The terror of our nothingness, meaninglessness, and powerlessness in a hostile universe wherein the gods are mad and depraved monsters, a universe empty of imposed meaning or value, may also become the joy of total freedom, autonomy, authenticity, self-ownership and self-creation, as it was for Sartre; a universe in which the mould of man is broken and we are utterly without authorized identities.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop Lightningbolt Awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars as we are once again in the process of doing in the ongoing Third World War facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their interdependence. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history. Much of our sorrows originate in the conflicts between the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, nature and nurture, the historical and social informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
Is Lovecraft such a figure of heroic struggle against authority, like Icarus, Milton’s Rebel Angel, or Victor Frankenstein, fallen but great, a tragic bearer of the Torch of Liberty?
Great authors are a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, which like the fragmented images of the Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror in Anderson’s Snow Queen reflect and reveal aspects of ourselves and come alive in their readers; which Lovecraft shall I describe?
The poet of Chaos whom I adore, of madness and the existential terror of our nothingness in a universe of dethroned authority, a visionary and tragic hero?
The survivor of abandonment and abuse who forged beauty from their trauma, a flawed and very human man whose fear of otherness was expressed in tragically disfigured allegories of dysmorphia, dehumanization, and degradation which are horrifically filled with racist figures and images and can be read as illuminating case studies of fear and of the dyadic origins of evil in overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized by authority in service to power and the systemic inequalities of power and privilege in hierarchies of elite belonging and otherness?
Lovecraft understood the principle of dancing ones demons; the monstrous figures he describes as shuggoths can be read as racist metaphors, but are also unflinching descriptions of actual childhood night terrors, manifestations of sexual abuse, which invaded his dreams and his flesh to “tickle” him awake. It is this relentless engagement with his fear and darkness, with the legacies of his victimization, this willingness to see the abominable and not look away, and to witness the truth as an author, like Camus to refuse to submit, and above all to embrace his own monstrosity, which makes him useful to us and places his work among the literature of madness and therapy journals, with Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Leonora Carrington, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Jerzy Kosinski, Philip K. Dick, and Kathy Acker. Foucault called this truth telling, and this parrhesia as a sacred calling to pursue the truth as a witness of history lies at the heart of Lovecraft’s bizarre invented mythos.
How does this help us forge our future as antifascists and antiracists, citizens of a free society of equals and bearers of the Torch of Liberty?
We must speak directly to that fear which is the origin of evil; to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and we do this best by bearing sacred wounds which open us to the pain of others. In the words of Karl Popper; “No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not wish to adopt a rational attitude.” Let us embrace instead the irrational, our Shakespearean taxonomies of passion as motive forces, of rapture and terror, in the great work of reimagination and transformation of humankind and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
We may say of Lovecraft what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild man was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”
What is greatness? What does it mean to be a great author or creative genius of any kind, a great human being, in this or any time?
For myself, greatness does not require us to overcome the limits of our histories, which possess and inhabit us like the Toad of Nietzsche and Burroughs, only to engage the legacies of our history and the systems of oppression which entangle us in authentic struggle. Like Jacob wrestling the angel, everything in life is more powerful than we are; victory lies not in defeating the forces which shape us, but in refusal to submit to them, and in reaching beyond our limits. And in this Lovecraft emerges as a tragic hero, who can teach us how to struggle with our own darkness in our journey toward becoming human.
From the darkness of the unknown and the Forbidden, our demons call to us with siren songs which echo and thunder among limitless chasms of our possibilities, and whisper secrets in our dreams; and they say, Come dance with us.
Come dance with us.
The Lighthouse film trailer
On the Construction of My Shadow, a retrospective
June 15 2026 Gods of My Father: Father’s Day Part One
The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite (the book that fixed me on the origins of evil as my field of study, through the lens of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy)
Conversing Around Lovecraft: Leslie S. Klinger and Neil Gaiman
(yes, the fact that Gaiman sexually enslaved a homeless fan actually makes him a better authority on the subject, for he speaks from within its darkness)
The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic, Peter Levenda (author of the 1977 Necronomicon writing as Simon, from the perspective of a rogue Greek Orthodox priest)
Torch of Liberty 