Our memories and histories inhabit us like ghosts, ephemeral but casting long shadows in which we live, and a ground of struggle as identity and mimesis. For our memories are never identical with their original, even in the most transparent and authentic witness of history, but structures of reproduction shaped by myriads of others, and how we have interpreted them over time as beings of change and impermanence.
Baudrillard’s simulacra, Sartre’s nausea of inauthentic being, Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, phantasms, falsifications. How do we enter the imaginal worlds of our own self and past, when all becomes a Rashomon Gate Event of transformation, relative truths, shifting and ambiguous meanings? How shall we practice the arts of remembering and the pursuit of truth when all that we are is subject to the Observer Effect and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and what does this mean for our ars poetica?
Schrödinger’s Cat is laughing at me.
So also for my thoughts now during this the week of the Fall of Panjshir, last battle of the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, though we who answered the call of the great warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud’s son for help from the international community in defense of Liberty and the sovereignty and independence of all human souls are fighting still, in the bastion of the Taliban’s power in Kabul as well as in Panjshir and elsewhere in this vast and broken world.
For years later the meaning of these events has changed for me, and its lessons for the future of liberation struggle in Afghanistan against the theocracy of the Taliban which instrumentalized and co-opted the liberation struggle of the Afghan peoples from American imperial dominion and colonial exploitation, have become more clear.
As my stated purpose herein is to memorialize a glorious and tragic failure to redeem our future from the shadows of our past, and a chain of events begun with mistakes in America’s 1979-1989 proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the 1989-1992 Afghan Civil War which directly led to the resurgence of religious wars waged by al Qaeda and ISIS against democracy including 9-11 and the capture of Afghanistan by a theocracy as well as horrific wars in Syria and Yemen, I offer here my writing from the time as I traveled through the Khyber Pass to Panjshir during the Kabul Airlift.
Of our future I say this; Afghanistan under the Taliban is a mirror in which we may see our common fate, if we cannot unite in solidarity to seize democracy from the jaws of theocratic tyranny.
To this 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.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2021, Why Am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a Cave in Afghanistan?; Chaos beckons me with its siren call, like unto like, and as with Ulysses I cannot resist the call of the Unknown to discover what lies beyond our boundaries of the Forbidden. Here I am conjured into desolate and broken canyonlands and endless stars, shattered ruins of an ancient geological cataclysm and the ghosts of empires; a land of tragic beauty.
Trade is flowing across the Khyber Pass and the open border of Afghanistan and Pakistan regardless of the refugee crisis in Kabul, and I go with it, one insignificant bit of flotsam lost in a tide of opportunity for those who capitalize on chaos or like myself use it as a lever of change in a space of adaptive potential. Like a hunting spider I have left my lair in Peshawar, near the heart of the Taliban high command and the mosque from which its directives are propagated, as the great powers of the world meet in the G7 conference to decide the fate of Afghanistan and Taliban forces prepare to invade the defiant and unconquerable Panjshir province where the son of the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud has been joined in resistance by a government in exile led by Acting President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh.
I am on horseback touring remote villages as a traveling theatre with a projector, generator, screen, and a number of films, an industry still thriving here as in many places with little outside contact, a way of life brilliantly depicted in The Cinema Travellers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, celebrated in the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. I tell people I am a wandering seller of dreams; rather than try to go unnoticed where strangers rarely travel, I set up a show and gather an audience, and no one questions who I am or why I am here.
When you cannot blend in, stand out; it’s a trick I learned from my partner Dolly’s Uncle Bob through our fathers who grew up together in the shadow of the McKay Carnivals he founded during the Depression as cover to carry out the work of Socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World begun by her grandfather John F. McKay and his comrade Eugene V. Debbs, and from Bluey and his circus in Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a cover for espionage this has an ancient lineage, which includes Chinese circuses and American secret societies originating with Abolitionists. How do you hide a large number of highly unusual people with special skills and their support, always on the move? As a show. Let the strangers be truly strange, and sell tickets.
Why am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a cave in Afghanistan?
Inglorious Basterds is a great film of the stunning cruelty of force and power and the triumph of the unconquered human spirit, a dance of terror and beauty like the lives of ordinary people here in a place beyond all human law and throughout so much of our world wherein privation and the needs of survival are paramount, and overwhelming and generalized fear is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us. Also it is a film whose episodic and interlayered narrative structure is confusing to those unfamiliar with its intertexts and references; The Secret of Santa Vittoria, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, Zulu Dawn, The Seven Samurai; but the glorious nature of lost causes and forlorn hopes, of defiance and resistance in the face of certain death, is all too familiar to the audience of my traveling theatre.
Resistance is always victorious, for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Such is my definition of freedom and of victory in liberation struggle, and like Dorothy’s Magic Ruby Slippers it is a power and liberty which cannot be taken from us, and bears the power to take us home to our true selves.
Its an idea that translates well into Deobandi theological rhetoric, a parallel of Catholic Liberation Theology which originated both the Indian revolution against the British Raj and the Taliban’s liberation struggle against American colonialism.
Homer wrote in episodes too, as do I here in my daily journals and publication Torch of Liberty; Inglorious Basterds is a heroic quest to change the balance of power in the world, of revolutionary struggle by those whom Frantz Fanon called the “Wretched of the Earth”, in this case the historically marginalized and othered Jews, and those who place their lives in the balance with them; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Antifascist action is revolutionary struggle and class war; it engages unequal power in the forms of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and often of Patriarchy as well, which is interdependent with fascism as theocracy, and far more ancient, but central to its project of subjugation to hegemonic elites. The origins of evil are in systemic and structural inequalities, the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and as Wagner teaches us the price of power is renouncement of love. From this pathology of disconnectedness, nihilism, abjection, and dehumanization arises authority and the tyranny of the carceral state; police, prisons, borders, and the force and control of a society organized to dehumanize and falsify us in service to power through hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and authorized identities.
This we must resist, and in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free. The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine is an antifascist hero whose story models liberation struggle and teaches us how to engage those who would enslave us. It is a story of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but only as cases of a universal condition.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for self- ownership, autonomy, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Inglorious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
This is my theme song for Last Stands, by the magnificent David Bowie, which I only post when I am about to do something from which no return is possible, so far as I can foresee. It is a farewell to those I have loved and a wish for a better future than we have made of our past, we humans. It is also a declaration of no quarter and war to the knife to my enemies, to set the terms of our struggle; enter my arena, and anything goes, for those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none, and there are no rules in my games of resistance to fascism and tyranny.
My victory conditions do not include personal survival, only acts of resistance, which makes my goal in imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force to take the enemy down with me. And to such refusal to submit as absolute commitment tyranny can make no reply; there is no profit in it.
I have done this now more times than I can number or easily remember; yet here I remain to bear witness to the hollowness and fragile nature of power and authority, Unconquered. Here is proof of the unknowability of our limits, of the redemptive power of love as solidarity in liberation struggle, of our inherently autonomous nature and the unconquerable human will to become, and of my Principles of Revolution that force finds its limit in disobedience and that freedom is won by refusal to submit to force as described by Thoreau and by disbelief in authority as described by Voltaire. Here is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
References
The Cinema Travelers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, film trailer
Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW
by Peter Cole (Editor), David Struthers (Editor), Kenyon Zimmer (Editor)
خاطرات و تاریخ ما ما را مانند ارواح ساکن, زودگذر اما ریخته گری سایه های طولانی که در آن زندگی می کنیم, و زمینه مبارزه به عنوان هویت و تقلید. برای خاطرات ما هرگز با اصلی خود یکسان نیست، حتی در شفاف ترین و معتبرترین شاهد تاریخ، بلکه ساختارهای تولید مثل که توسط تعداد بی شمار دیگران شکل گرفته است، و اینکه چگونه ما آنها را در طول زمان به عنوان وجود تغییر و ناهمانی تفسیر کرده ایم.
سیمولاکرای بودریلارد، تهوع سارتر از وجود غیرممکن، بیابان آینه های اترتون؛ دروغ، توهم، هذیان، دروغ، دروغ. چگونه وارد جهان های خیالی خود و گذشته خودمان می شود، وقتی همه به یک رویداد تحول دروازه راشمون، حقایق نسبی، تغییر و معناهای مبهم تبدیل می شوند؟
چگونه می توانیم هنرهای به یاد آوردن و پیگیری حقیقت را تمرین کنیم وقتی که همه آنچه هستیم تابع اثر ناظر و اصل عدم اطمینان هایسنبرگ است و این برای شاعر آرس ما چه معنایی دارد؟
گربه شرودینگر به من می خندد.
بنابراین برای افکار من در حال حاضر در طول این هفته از سقوط پانجشیر، آخرین نبرد از بازپس گیری افغانستان توسط طالبان، هر چند ما که پاسخ به فراخوان پسر جنگجو بزرگ احمد شاه مسود برای کمک از جامعه بین المللی در دفاع از آزادی و حاکمیت و استقلال تمام روح انسان هنوز هم مبارزه، در بند قدرت طالبان در کابل و همچنان در پنجشیر و جاهای دیگر.
دو سال بعد معنای این رویدادها برای من تغییر کرده است و درس های آن برای آینده مبارزه آزادی بخش در افغانستان علیه حکومت سالاری طالبان که مبارزه آزادی بخش مردم افغانستان را از سلطه امپراطوری آمریکا و استثمار استعماری ابزاری و مشترک می کردند، روشن تر شده است.
همانطور که هدف اعلام شده من در اینجا این است که یادبود شکست با شکوه و غم انگیز به آینده ما را از سایه های گذشته ما، و زنجیره ای از وقایع با اشتباهات در جنگ پراکسی آمریکا در سال های 1979-1989 علیه اتحاد جماهیر شوروی در افغانستان و 1989-1992 افغان آغاز شده است جنگ داخلی که به طور مستقیم منجر به تجدید حیات جنگ های مذهبی توسط القاعده و داعش علیه دموکراسی از جمله 9-11 و تصرف افغانستان توسط یک حکومت مذهبی شد و همچنین جنگ های وحشتناک در سوریه و یمن،
من اينجا نوشته خود را از زمان سفر از طريق پاس خيبر به پنجشیر در جريان پرواز کابل پيشنهاد ميکنم.
از آینده ما من می گویم این; افغانستان در زمان طالبان آینه ای است که در آن ممکن است سرنوشت مشترک خود را ببینیم، اگر نتوانیم در همبستگی متحد شود تا دموکراسی را از فک های طوطی تئوکراتیک به دست آورد.
به این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط و وحشت از پوچی ما، به تقسیم، انتزاع، درماندهی آموخته، و ناامیدی در مقابل نیروی قریب به اتفاق قربانیان، من پاسخ با بافی قتل خون آشام به نقل از دستورالعمل به کشیش ها در کتاب نماز مشترک در قسمت یازدهم فصل هفت، Showtime، پس از luring دشمن را به عرصه شکست به عنوان یک تظاهرات به استخدام خود را؛
“من نمی دانم چه آینده است. اما من نمی دانم که این درست مثل این خواهد بود – سخت، دردناک. اما در آخر، ما خواهیم بود. اگر همه ما قطعات خود را انجام دهیم، باور کنید، ما کسی خواهیم بود که ایستاده باقی مانده است. در اینجا پایان درس است.”
همانطور که در پست خود در 24 آگست 2021 نوشتم، چرا من فیلم باستردز اینگلوریوس را در غاری در افغانستان نشان می دهم؟؛ هرج و مرج به من اشاره می کند با تماس آژیر آن، مانند آن، و به عنوان با اوریس من می توانم تماس ناشناخته ها برای کشف آنچه
نهفته است فراتر از مرزهای ما از ممنوع مقاومت در برابر. در اینجا من را به دره های ویرانه و شکسته و ستاره های بی پایان، ویرانه های شکسته از فاجعه زمین شناسی باستانی و ارواح امپراتوری conjured؛ سرزمین زیبایی غم انگیز.
تجارت در سراسر مسیر خبر و مرز باز افغانستان و پاکستان بدون در نظر گرفتن بحران پناهندگان در کابل جریان دارد، و من با آن می رویم، یک بیت ناچیز از فلوتسام در یک جریان فرصت برای کسانی که در هرج و مرج سرمایه گذاری می کنند یا مانند خودم از آن به عنوان اهرم تغییر در فضای پتانسیل سازگار استفاده می کنند، از دست رفته است.
مانند عنکبوت شکاری من در پشاور، نزدیک قلب فرماندهی عالی طالبان و مسجدی که دستورالعمل های آن از آن منتشر می شود، به جا گذاشته ام، زیرا قدرت های بزرگ جهان در کنفرانس گروه 7 برای تصمیم گیری در مورد سرنوشت افغانستان با هم دیدار می کنند
و نیروهای طالبان آماده می شوند تا به ولایت نافرمانی و تسخیر ناپذیری که در آن پسر جنگجوی افسانه ای احمد شاه اسد توسط یک دولت در تبعید به رهبری امرالله صالح سرپرست ریاست جمهوری افغانستان به مقاومت پیوسته است، حمله کنند.
مقاومت همیشه پیروز است، برای امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد است.
چنین است تعریف من از آزادی و پیروزی در مبارزه آزادی بخش، و مانند دمپایی روبی سحر و جادو دوروتی آن را یک قدرت و آزادی است که می تواند از ما گرفته نمی شود، و خرس قدرت ما را به خانه به خود واقعی ما است.
این ایده که ترجمه خوبی به شعارهای الهیاتی Deobandi، موازی از الهیات آزادی کاتولیک که انقلاب هند در برابر راج بریتانیا و مبارزه آزادی بخش طالبان علیه استعمار آمریکا نشات گرفته است.
اقدام ضد فاشیستی مبارزه انقلابی و جنگ طبقاتی است؛ این درگیر قدرت نابرابر در اشکال فاشیست های خون، ایمان، و روح، و اغلب از مردسالاری نیز، که به هم نزدیک با فاشیستی به عنوان خداپرستی، و به مراتب بیشتر باستانی، اما مرکزی برای پروژه خود را از انحنا به نخبگان هژمونی.
ریشه های شر در نابرابری های سیستمی و ساختاری، حلقه ترس، قدرت و زور واگنر است و همانطور که واگنر به ما می آموزد قیمت قدرت دست از عشق است.
. از این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط، پوچ گرایی، آبجک شدن و غیرانسانی شدن، اقتدار و استبداد دولت کارسرال را به وجود می آورد؛ پلیس، زندان ها، مرزها و نیرو و کنترل جامعه ای که برای غیر انسانی کردن و ساختگی کردن ما در خدمت به قدرت از طریق سلسله مراتبی از دیگر بودن انحصاری و هویت های مجاز سازماندهی شده است
این ما باید مقاومت در برابر, و در امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد.
همیشه مبارزه بین ماسک که دیگران را برای ما و کسانی که ما برای خودمان را باقی می ماند وجود دارد; این اولین انقلابی است که همه ما باید در آن بجنگیم، مبارزه برای مالکیت خود، خودمختاری، و امکانات بی حد و حصر انسان شدن.
I remember when I first realized that Trump is actually a treasonous and dishonorable foreign agent whose mission is the subversion and fall of democracy in America and not merely an apex predator of systems of oppression which include patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror; watching him take the sacred and ancient Oath of Office while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.
The Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole illegitimate and criminal Trump Presidency which ought to be nullified and erased in its acts and appointments was nothing but a sidelining operation to clear America from the board of play for the invasion of Ukraine by his puppetmaster and handler from the end of the Soviet era, when KGB Colonel Putin ran the black market in East Berlin and used Trump to hide the wealth of crime syndicates and oligarchs, and later to move Russian agents globally through Trump’s sex trafficking ring within the Miss Universe beauty pageant and modeling organizations he owned between 1995 and 2015.
There was never anything more grand to Traitor Trump and his despicable regime than this, the filthy and perverse sexual terror and nihilistic amoral greed of a crime boss in the service of the KGB and Russian syndicates, and he betrayed America every single day of his life as a foreign spy since his first visit to Moscow in 1987.
This sad and outrageous anniversary of our moral collapse and depravity falls this year in the midst of the worst scandal of the abuse of our armed forces personnel, starved and forgotten to wander adrift on the derelict ship USS Abraham Lincoln. Military service remains among the most ancient forms of labor exploitation; in the case of the USS Abraham Lincoln is revealed what the Trump regime did to our sailors, and does to all our servicepersons ceaselessly, in a failed attempt to steal other people’s wealth.
In my world you stand with those who stand with you: Trump has never done so. Loyalty is a kind of Captcha test; if you cannot meet this standard you are not human.
Can Trumps despisal and mockery of our veterans, inability to comprehend the value of a life of service to one’s nation, and disrespect for the military come as a surprise from a man without loyalty, and whose word means nothing?
How can I know with reasonable probability though not beyond doubt that Trump was a KGB asset before the Soviet Union became an oligarchy and crime syndicate in 1991, and Putin’s star agent in America thereafter?
In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, my friends and I made mischief throughout Europe, across and behind the Iron Curtain as a specialty. These were the Crows, led by the famous Irish gypsy Bluey, clown and Ringmaster of a circus which provided cover for his true enterprises. He made an art of finding what one wants or needs and offering it as a gift or favor to be redeemed later; a laughing trickster, who built an outlaw empire from winning trust, trading favors and secrets, and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting these same authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.
I learned much from him.
Bluey once described the Great Game to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; First, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything and trust no outsiders. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”
This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, ourselves being trapped on opposite sides of the Wall during a firefight with the KGB, and the reason my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change. Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German. Of course we could all speak some Russian as well, and I was reasonably fluent having worked with Soviet Special Forces and KGB advisors against Apartheid forces in South Africa and Angola among other places beginning with the 1983 Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and related regional conflicts in the Salvadoran Civil War and the Nicaraguan Revolution, and among the hundreds of Crows were languages from all over Europe and beyond.
As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
So while I cannot claim to have known Trump personally or to possess incriminating proof of his relationship with Putin during the Soviet era, I know the operational environment, the methods of the KGB, and how Putin did business as its kingpin very well indeed.
Enough to call him Traitor Trump, and apply to him the dictum that everything the enemy says is a lie.
The very first time I heard of Trump during the 2016 election campaign was in the context of remarks he had made about veterans. At the time I said to my partner Theresa; “Disrespects veterans? That’s it; that’s all I need to know about a man. I’m voting for Hillary.”
My hope now is that all of us, and most especially every serving or former member of the US Armed Forces and their families, will say the same and vote for whomever runs against the Trump regime and its Party of Treason, Tyranny, and Terror.
As written by Kevin Carroll in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising; “The tranquil majesty of Arlington national cemetery tends to bring forth civic virtues in Americans and eloquence in their leaders. Speaking there in 1985 above the graves of the fallen, Ronald Reagan observed that while we may imagine the deceased as old men, most “were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived … they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers … They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”
Nowhere in that vast cemetery is Reagan’s point driven home as poignantly as in section 60, which embraces those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice at painfully young ages since 9/11. Here the dates on the simple headstones are within memory, the grief of loved ones is raw and visitors may witness acts of tenderness in response.
Good manners, Jane Austen observed, hold a society together. George Washington copied longhand in boyhood and preserved into adulthood a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior”. Another general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, cautioned in his Guildhall address after VE Day that “humility must always be the portion” of any man who receives acclaim earned by others’ sacrifices.
Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.
Worse is the allegation that two Trump staff members assaulted a small, middle-aged female Department of the Army employee who attempted to enforce the regulation and preserve the cemetery’s dignity. The victim reportedly refrained from filing charges due to a reasonable fear of violence or harassment from Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign defamed this woman as mentally ill. His running mate, JD Vance, said Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for her campaign’s suggestion that the unauthorized footage was intended for use as political footage – just before Trump used it for exactly that.
This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016. In 2024 it is already, probably intentionally on Trump’s part, being replaced in the news by reaction to his social media posts making lewd innuendos about Harris, and QAnon threats to imprison Democratic party leaders. But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president.
Trump infamously described America’s dead from the first world war as “suckers” and “losers”. Trump also asked my former boss, White House chief of staff John Kelly – on Memorial Day and over the section 60 grave of his Marine son killed in Afghanistan – “What was in it for them?” I walked up to a visibly shocked Kelly moments after that exchange, the details of which he later confirmed.
Trump demanded military equipment parades in Washington of the kind Soviet leaders held on May Day in Moscow’s Red Square, but disdained appearing with wounded service members. He called America’s service chiefs “dopes and babies” and needled them about their public sector pay – God only knows what he thinks of enlisted troops who make a fraction of a general’s salary.
Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016 by mocking the late senator John McCain for being a prisoner of war; he followed this by feuding with the bereaved parents of Muslim American and African American soldiers; recently, he belittled Medal of Honor recipients shot during the brave actions that led to their awards.
More serious than Trump’s words are his actions and plans regarding the armed forces. In 2018 Trump discussed having troops shoot civilian migrants, including women and children, as they tried to cross America’s south-west border – a patently illegal order. In 2020 he unlawfully used national guardsmen to clear protesters from Lafayette Park for yet another campaign photo opportunity. In 2021 Trump and his advisors planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to misuse the military to put down protests anticipated if Mike Pence and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Trump’s Project 2025 envisions using the national guard for internal immigration investigations, a vast and ill-advised expansion of the American military’s limited role in domestic law enforcement.
Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party. Beyond that, his boorish statements and bad behavior regarding the military almost certainly come from a place of self-loathing. Trump dodged the Vietnam war draft by claiming – probably falsely – to suffer from bone spurs. A gnawingly insecure man, Trump is self-conscious of his lack of the virtues towards which the military strives: as the US army puts it, loyalty to the constitution, dutiful fulfillment of responsibilities, respect for others, selfless service to both the country and subordinates, honor, integrity and personal courage.
His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump. This attitude would be a sad commentary about any man, but ought to disqualify someone seeking to serve as commander-in-chief.”
Like everything else Trump does in this election, it seems to have backfired on him. And it is absolutely emblematic of his narcissism and inability to understand why anyone would lay down their life for their countrymen. In Trump’s world, it’s every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost. I propose for your consideration that this is not an admirable summum bonum in a national leader or a man of any kind, for it is not only a mask of cowardice bearing the image of amoral greed, but a disloyalty and treason which breaks the bonds of brotherhood from which any nation is made.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue: Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces; “Democrats are trying to turn Donald Trump’s clash with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, the hallowed final resting place of America’s war dead, into a broader election issue by highlighting it as an example of his history of disrespecting military veterans.
Congressional Democrats with military records and liberal-leaning veterans groups say the episode is consistent with past instances of the Republican presidential nominee flagrantly denigrating service in the armed forces.
They also see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on Republican efforts to undermine the record of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has come under fire for a series of supposedly misleading statements about aspects of his 24 years of military service in the national guard.
The US army rebuked Trump’s campaign this week after members of the former president’s entourage “abruptly pushed aside” a female cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them taking pictures of Trump at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a soldier who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The cemetery worker was acting in line with the facility’s rules, which prohibits pictures or film being shot in section 60, the burial area for personnel killed serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
Pictures later appeared of Trump posing alongside members of the soldier’s family smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign – a gesture denounced by some as inappropriate and crass.
Trump’s campaign also posted video footage on TikTok with the former president claiming – falsely – that “we didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.” In fact, 11 US soldiers were killed in Trump’s last year in Afghanistan.
Trump was invited to Arlington by several of the families of those killed to mark the third anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal – the botched handling of which stands as one of the most damaging episodes of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Now Democrats are accusing him of exploiting a revered site for narrow campaign purposes, in breach of the cemetery’s regulations. The former president did not attend the previous two anniversaries marking the withdrawal.
“Arlington National Cemetery isn’t a place for campaign photo-ops. It’s a sacred resting place for American patriots,” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic House member from New Jersey and former navy helicopter pilot, posted on X. “But for Donald Trump, disrespecting military veterans is just par for the course. It’s an absolute disgrace.”
Gerry Connolly, a congressman from Virginia, demanded the release of footage and paperwork from the incident. He said it was “sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honouring our heroes”.
Jared Golden, a Democratic Congress member from Maine and an ex-marine, called Arlington “sacred ground and all visitors should take the time to learn the rules of decorum that ensure the proper respect is given to the fallen and their families”.
Although surveys have shown that roughly six in 10 retired service members voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some left-leaning veterans groups have added their voice to the criticism.
Jon Stoltz, a former army officer and co-founder of VoteVets, a veterans group that is supporting Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, accused Trump of using the cemetery “for a political ceremony” and predicted that it could turn previously sympathetic ex-servicemen against him.
“They don’t have a right to do that with other veterans who are there,” Stoltz told the Associated Press. “I know there’s veterans who support Trump. He’s just motivated people against him.”
In a statement, Allison Jaslow, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, added to the condemnation, saying: “There are plenty of places appropriate for politics – Arlington is not one of them. Any aspiring elected official, especially one who hopes to be Commander in Chief, should not be confused about that fact.”
The cemetery’s rules state: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honoured dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
Trump’s attitude to military service has come under scrutiny because of a track record of dismissive statements, both public and private. This month, he appeared to disparage the Congressional Medal of Honor – saying it was inferior to the medal of freedom, which he bestowed as president – because most of its recipients had “been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.
According to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, he refused to visit a first world war cemetery during a 2018 visit to France, calling the American servicemen buried there “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed.
He also ridiculed the late Republican senator John McCain, saying he was only considered a war hero because he had been captured. According to separate reports, Trump voiced objections to having disabled veterans at a military ceremony which ultimately never occurred, saying “it doesn’t look good for me”.
As I wrote in my post of September 5 2020, All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men: Trump’s Base Begins to Shatter As His Contempt For Our Military Is Revealed; It seems Trump may have finally violated a taboo our society still cares about; his base begins to shatter as his contempt for our military is revealed.
As reported by Time; ‘Trump’s Support Among Military Voters Is Tanking.
At this point four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump held a massive lead of 20 points over Hillary Clinton among military voters. This time around, he’s struggling to keep up. A new Military Times poll revealed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by about four percentage points among active-duty troops.
And that was before today’s bombshell report published in the Atlantic. The article outlines a number of instances when President Donald Trump derided U.S. service members, even describing the country’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump and several top aides have rushed to deny the allegations. Trump told reporters late Thursday that he “would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”
That hasn’t dampened a backlash on social media among military veterans. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a frequent Trump critic, urged Twitter followers to vote against the president, posting a widely shared video in which he relayed a story about how his father was shot down over Vietnam. “I am stunned that anybody in the United States military would consider you anything but a loser or a sucker,” Eaton said. “You’re no patriot.”
Other veterans posted similar statements in response to the article, which described how Trump cancelled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t see a reason why he should honor people who managed to get themselves killed, nor did he want to get rained upon in front of TV cameras. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” the report quoted Trump as saying.
Biden, whose late son, Beau Biden, served in Iraq, issued a statement after the Atlantic article was published Thursday that said the comments were yet another sign Trump is unfit for the presidency. If the quotes are true, he said, it’s “another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States.”
The anonymous allegations in the Atlantic article would hardly be the first time the president, who received five military deferments for bone spurs in his heels that kept him out of the Vietnam War, has disparaged the records of military members. As a candidate in 2015, the president said he was no supporter of Sen John McCain, who was held captive in Vietnam for nearly six years after his airplane was shot down over Hanoi. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump’s interactions with military families have also come under scrutiny, particularly the question of how he has expressed sympathy for those who have lost loved ones in the line of duty. Individual parents and partners have come forward to say whether or not the President contacted them directly.
Eleven Gold Star families, those who lost loved ones serving the country’s military, wrote a joint letter in 2016 to the then-Republican presidential nominee, accusing him of “cheapening the sacrifice” of their deceased relatives in the way he responded to the parents of Captain Humayun S.M. Khan, who died in Iraq in 2004. Trump criticized his father and mother after they spoke out against him at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
In total, there are 1.4 million active duty service members, or less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population. But as a barometer of Trump’s base, and an indicator of his ability to drive turnout to counter mobilized Democrats across the country, Trump’s tanking numbers with the military are a bad sign for his campaign.”
As written by Jeffrey Goldburg in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic; “When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)
Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)
Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.
Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.”
As to the USS Abraham Lincoln scandal I turn to an excellent precis by Brent Molnar entitled Floating Prison, Neon Diversion: The 286-Day Nightmare Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln; “When the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) pushed into Thailand’s Laem Chabang port after 286 days trapped at sea, it dragged the physical evidence of institutional neglect directly into public view. The 100,000-ton nuclear carrier docked looking like an abandoned derelict, streaked with rust from waterline to flight deck. Beside it, the cruiser USS Robert Smalls and the destroyer USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. displayed the same rotted, mottled paint, visual proof that the Department of Defense ground a carrier strike group to dust to project power in the Middle East.
Naval leadership funneled thousands of starved, sleep-deprived sailors straight into Pattaya, the undisputed epicenter of Southeast Asia’s vice industry. Dumping an exhausted crew into a landscape of open bars, red-light districts, and sensory overload engineered an immediate blackout on dissent. After nearly ten months locked inside steel bulkheads, survival instincts turn toward escapism and sensory excess, functioning as an elite psychological containment operation that neutralized the urge to blow the whistle.
Behind the hull’s rotted exterior lay a living hell documented through congressional inquiries, military trade reports, and frantic messages smuggled to families. Desalination units repeatedly failed, cutting off fresh water and leaving sailors without showers for days on end. Laundry operations broke down for weeks, while failing plumbing backed raw sewage and foul gray water into living quarters, forcing young enlisted troops to exist in squalor.
Supply lines broke down while the Pentagon kept the carrier parked in contested waters. Mess decks instituted draconian food rationing, slashing hot meals to bare survival rations of tortillas, white rice, and dry canned food. The ship’s store emptied out, leaving the crew without soap, toothpaste, or deodorant. Five thousand Americans were left to barter for basic sanitary items aboard a nuclear warship that cost billions of taxpayer dollars to field.
The psychological toll was catastrophic. Confining thousands of troops to an industrial steel prison for over 260 straight days without setting foot on dry ground triggered a predictable wave of mental collapses. Suicidal despair spread through the berthings, documented by multiple instances of sailors attempting to throw themselves overboard, which required emergency search-and-rescue drills and hushed medical evacuations kept locked under tight operational security.
When international press met the first busloads of sailors arriving at Pattaya hotels, the military apparatus clamped down instantly. Facing reporters from major outlets, sailors physically backed away from cameras and refused to speak, citing direct orders forbidding them from uttering a single word about their living conditions.
The silence ashore was compelled through the full coercive weight of federal military law. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, any sailor daring to expose the filthy drinking water, the food rationing, or the rampant command failures faces immediate prosecution, forfeiture of pay, reduction in rank, or a federal court-martial under Article 92 and Article 134. The Department of Defense ensured absolute silence by placing its own troops under threat of prison time.
Pentagon brass and senior commanders responded with open gaslighting. The Lincoln’s commanding officer, Captain Dan Keeler, trivialized the visible decay of a critical capital asset, dismissing the extensive rust as nothing more than a dirty car parked outside. At the highest level, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed media investigations completely misrepresented the reality, actively writing off verified accounts of filth and malnutrition as an overreaction by weak sailors and uninformed families.
This calculated PR strategy relies on a ticking clock. Leadership knows that an overseas liberty port burns off initial fury, buys time, and diffuses the story before the ship hits American shores. By the time the Lincoln ties up in San Diego, the Navy plans to have the rust painted over, the broken valves hidden, and the media saturated with glossy, sanitized photographs of tearful reunions on the pier.
The deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln exposes the military hierarchy’s callous disregard for human life and warship readiness. Washington policymakers run multi-billion-dollar vessels and human beings to the breaking point, enforce total silence through strict legal gag orders, and rely on a neon-lit port call to bury the horrific reality of institutional neglect.”
Two important anniversaries in the history of Chile and socialism occur in September; the September fourth advent of the golden age of Allende and the tragedy of the September eleventh coup which deposed him. These two events will continue to define Chile for all of human history, for it will always remain a nation shaped by the legacy of Salvador Allende as interpreted by his cousin Isabel.
No nation has a finer historian of its secret heart and inner life than Isabel Allende, who rendered it in terms of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy in her classic works of world literature The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, in which she joins the triumvirate of Magical Realism with Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Do read her luminous interrogation of immigrant experience and the negotiations of ideas of homeland and new frontier as conflicted and juxtapositional constructions and source identities, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile.
Isabel Allende’s reimagination of the role of culture in becoming human as an autonomous free being and the special function of language in that process, so like that of Amy Tan, recalls to me Haruki Murakami’s origin story as a writer, the discovery of his voice and authentic self through deliberately composing in English, a second language with which he was not wholly conversant. It is important to understanding their glorious and beautiful novels, but also illuminating as a universal human process of individuation wherein language is our primary identity as reflected in the special issues of migrants as transnational explorers of unknowns.
We are all Strangers who claim membership in multiple cultures and societies, who live on both sides of the boundaries we transgress like the images of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror, who must create ourselves anew and become free. This strangeness is at once the greatest gift of our time and the greatest threat, for how a nation deals with otherness is as central to its identity and mission as it is to our performance of self.
We are our thoughts, and language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have. I have practiced the arts of writing and of languages as disciplines of self-creation since my freshman year of high school when I discovered Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, who tried to reimagine and transform humankind through creating a new universal language in Finnegan’s Wake, because through rewriting ourselves and thinking in different ways we can seize direct control of our own evolution and consciousness.
Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each with its own identity, by which I mean our personae or the masks we wear in the performances of ourselves as derived from the classical Greek theatrical mask, and the legacies of our history or prochronism, self construal as a history expressed in our form of how we humans have made adaptive choices to changing conditions over vast epochs of time.
From the age of nine I learned the spoken Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong and the Wu dialect of Shanghai with written Traditional Chinese and inkbrush calligraphy, with some Japanese as I studied Chan or Zen Buddhism for ten years interdependent with my studies of languages and martial arts. From seventh grade through high school I attended French rather than English classes; interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film and literature.
I learned some conversational Portuguese in eighth grade for my summer trip before high school to Brazil, a language branded into my soul regardless of little formal study by the trauma of my near execution by a police bounty hunting team whose campaign to kill the abandoned street children I had disrupted. There in the streets of Sao Paulo I first realized the praxis of learning languages not only as a means of connection with others, but also a lever of change, seizure of power, and revolutionary struggle. As the Matadors, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who rescued and welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
During high school I was an enthusiast of Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, under which influence I attempted the only project of language learning I have ever abandoned; to read the Kabbalah, which is written not in Hebrew but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, languages of which I could find no living speakers.
During summer breaks at university I continued to travel; I loved the poetry of Basho so much that one such summer I once walked part of his route across Japan to see where he had written them. And then there was the fateful trip between my junior and senior years, on a culinary tour of the Mediterranean as cooking had by then become a hobby of mine, which involved first contacts with Italian, Spanish, and Greek as well as a masterclass in French, wherein I was stranded in Beirut under siege and a chance encounter with the great Jean Genet set me on my life’s path when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance. This also marks the beginning of my studies of Arabic, both classical Quranic Arabic and conversational Levantine Arabic.
A full accounting of my languages now would be near impossible; those I need shift and change with where I am, and I have lived among many peoples. For example, there was a time over thirty years ago when my attentions were divided between a war of independence in Kashmir and revolutionary struggle against the monarchy in Nepal, with expeditions into Sarajevo under the Siege and other places; and for these theatres of action I needed three kinds of languages; that of the people, Koshur in Srinagar and Newari in Katmandu, of officialdom and bureaucracy which is Gorkhali in Nepal and Urdu in Pakistan as well as Kashmir and near identical with Hindi but written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and the languages of literary scholarship in which I was engaged, Classical Tibetan as a member of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Buddhism in Katmandu and in Srinagar Classical Quranic Arabic which I had been learning since Beirut along with spoken Levantine Arabic which has become a fourth natural language for me with English, Chinese, and French, and also Classical Persian and Ottoman Turkish as a scholar of the Naqsbandi Sufi order of Islam. In the Balkans I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.
Since the Invasion of Ukraine I have found myself speaking and writing in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish more than I wish were necessary; I do love the languages and the peoples, though as so often the conditions in which we meet are those of tragedy as museums of private holocausts, as well as the hope of our glorious and beautiful Resistance.
With every new language I choose a new name in that speech like every other student, but I also create new identities as roles to play. By now I’ve lived many lives within the scope of my own, and keep multiple possible selves in reserve as a spectrum of adaptive choices, some with their own passports and verifiable background for travel in such identities. We are all pluralities, but the student of languages enacts selfhood as a theatrical game.
Thinking in other languages shapes thoughts differently, frees us and opens the doors of possibility to new ways of being human, relating to our experience, and organizing ideas about the world. This is why the study of languages is necessary to balanced development for young people; learning languages provides many of the cognitive and emotional growth benefits of living in other cultures, though I regard travel and living elsewhere as critical formative rites of passage to a future self which is created and chosen with intent as opposed to one merely issued as a default identity by our circumstances.
Languages forge connections and immerse us in the worlds of others, interrogating our boundaries as parallel universes of human possibilities and allowing us to change otherness from a threat to a growth opportunity, reinforcing diversity as an adaptive value and also insulating us from modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness.
Writing is a way to structure and improve ones thinking and oneself, because how we write is how we think and we can operate on ourselves, edit and restructure our thought processes, and seize ownership and control of our own evolution and adaptation to change through writing. When we think and write in languages other than our primary home language, we liberate ourselves from the normality in which we are embedded. Haruki Murakami’s use of writing in English, a language he was not truly conversant in when he chose it as an instrument with which to escape the limits of his normalities, is an excellent example of the use of this tactic to shift perspectives and liberate ones experience from the prisons and legacies of our history, and as Picasso declared “to see in a new way”.
In this respect language is primary to all other forms of identity, because it organizes all other systems of relating to self and other. As Rene Descartes wrote in his Discourse on the Method; ”je pense, donc je suis.”
I believe in learning languages and ways of being human other than those of one’s home as a path of autonomy or freedom from the ideas of others as an imposed condition of struggle, of empathy and our duty of care for others in a diverse and inclusive society, and of seizures of power from authorized identities, especially those of nationality which instrumentalize division in service to tyranny.
So also with the selves we inhabit in our imaginal homelands and the brave new worlds we find ourselves in with the unfolding, pluralization, and transformation of ourselves through history.
A History of Chile in Three Acts
CIA, Chile & Allende
Neoliberalism and Privatization as American Imperialism, and State Terror and Tyranny in the CIA’s Pinochet Regime,
What are the roots of Chile’s economic inequality?
Chile, a study of national identity in three parts
4 de septiembre de 2026. Patrias Inventadas: Lengua, Identidad y el Legado del Heroico Salvador Allende de Chile.
Dos importantes aniversarios en la historia de Chile y del socialismo se conmemoran en septiembre: el advenimiento, el 4 de septiembre, de la época dorada de Allende y la tragedia del golpe de Estado del 11 de septiembre que lo depuso. Estos dos acontecimientos seguirán definiendo a Chile a lo largo de la historia, pues siempre será una nación moldeada por el legado de Salvador Allende, interpretado por su prima Isabel.
Ninguna nación tiene una mejor historiadora de su corazón y vida interior que Isabel Allende, quien los plasmó en términos de tragedia griega y shakespeariana en sus obras clásicas de la literatura universal: La Casa de los Espíritus, De Amor y Sombras, Eva Luna y Los Cuentos de Eva Luna, donde se une al triunvirato del Realismo Mágico junto a Mario Vargas Llosa y Gabriel García Márquez. Les invito a leer su brillante análisis de la experiencia inmigrante y la negociación de las ideas de patria y nueva frontera como construcciones conflictivas y yuxtapuestas e identidades originales, Mi país inventado: Un viaje nostálgico por Chile.
La reimaginación de Isabel Allende del rol de la cultura en la formación del ser humano como un ser libre y autónomo, y la función especial del lenguaje en ese proceso, tan similar a la de Amy Tan, me recuerda la historia del origen de Haruki Murakami como escritor, el descubrimiento de su voz y su auténtico yo al componer deliberadamente en inglés, un segundo idioma con el que no estaba completamente familiarizado. Es importante para comprender sus gloriosas y hermosas novelas, pero también esclarecedora como un proceso humano universal de individuación donde el lenguaje es nuestra identidad primaria, como se refleja en las particularidades de los migrantes como exploradores transnacionales de lo desconocido.
Todos somos extranjeros que reivindicamos nuestra pertenencia a múltiples culturas y sociedades, que vivimos a ambos lados de las fronteras que transgredimos, como las imágenes del espejo roto del Duende, que debemos crearnos de nuevo y ser libres. Esta rareza es a la vez el mayor regalo de nuestro tiempo y la mayor amenaza, ya que la forma en que una nación aborda la alteridad es tan central para su identidad y misión como para nuestra propia representación.
Somos nuestros pensamientos, y el lenguaje determina los tipos de pensamientos que podemos tener. He practicado las artes de la escritura y de los idiomas como disciplinas de autocreación desde mi primer año de secundaria, cuando descubrí a Wittgenstein y a su discípulo James Joyce, quien intentó reimaginar y transformar a la humanidad mediante la creación de un nuevo lenguaje universal en Finnegan’s Wake, porque al reescribirnos y pensar de maneras diferentes podemos tomar el control directo de nuestra propia evolución y conciencia.
Los idiomas son una afición mía; Crecí con tres voces: inglés, chino y francés, cada una con su propia identidad. Me refiero a nuestras personalidades o máscaras que usamos en nuestras representaciones, derivadas de la máscara teatral griega clásica, y a los legados de nuestra historia o procronismo, una autointerpretación como una historia expresada en cómo los humanos hemos tomado decisiones adaptativas a las condiciones cambiantes a lo largo de vastas épocas.
Desde los nueve años aprendí el cantonés estándar hablado de Hong Kong y el dialecto Wu de Shanghái con chino tradicional escrito y caligrafía con pincel, y algo de japonés mientras estudiaba budismo Chan o Zen durante diez años, en interrelación con mis estudios de idiomas y artes marciales. Desde séptimo grado hasta la secundaria, asistí a clases de francés en lugar de inglés, en interrelación con mi inmersión en el cine y la literatura surrealistas. Aprendí algo de portugués conversacional en octavo grado para mi viaje de verano a Brasil, antes de la secundaria. Un idioma que se me quedó grabado en el alma, a pesar de mi escaso estudio formal, por el trauma de mi casi ejecución a manos de un equipo de cazarrecompensas de la policía, cuya campaña para matar a los niños abandonados de la calle yo había interrumpido. Allí, en las calles de São Paulo, comprendí por primera vez la praxis de aprender idiomas no solo como medio de conexión con los demás, sino también como palanca de cambio, toma de poder y lucha revolucionaria. Como decían los Matadores, fundados por el gran y terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho, quien me rescató y me acogió en su feroz hermandad: «No podemos salvar a todos, pero podemos vengar».
Durante la secundaria, fui un entusiasta de Wittgenstein y su discípulo James Joyce, bajo cuya influencia intenté el único proyecto de aprendizaje de idiomas que he abandonado: leer la Cábala, que no está escrita en hebreo, sino en arameo y romance andalusí, lenguas de las que no pude encontrar hablantes vivos.
Durante las vacaciones de verano en la universidad, seguí viajando. Me encantaba tanto la poesía de Basho que, un verano así, recorrí parte de su ruta por Japón para ver dónde la había escrito. Y luego estuvo el fatídico viaje entre mi penúltimo y último año de secundaria, en un tour culinario.
El Mediterráneo, ya que cocinar se había convertido para entonces en una afición mía, lo que implicó mis primeros contactos con el italiano, el español y el griego, así como una clase magistral de francés. Me quedé varado en Beirut, bajo asedio, y un encuentro casual con el gran Jean Genet me marcó el camino de mi vida cuando me hizo jurar el Juramento de la Resistencia. Esto también marca el inicio de mis estudios de árabe, tanto del árabe coránico clásico como del árabe levantino conversacional.
Una lista completa de mis idiomas ahora sería casi imposible; los que necesito cambian según el lugar donde estoy, y he vivido entre muchos pueblos. Por ejemplo, hace más de treinta años, mi atención se dividió entre la guerra de independencia en Cachemira y la lucha revolucionaria contra la monarquía en Nepal, con expediciones a Sarajevo bajo el asedio y otros lugares; y para estos escenarios necesitaba tres tipos de idiomas: El de la gente, koshur en Srinagar y newari en Katmandú, de la burocracia y el oficialismo, que es gorkhali en Nepal y urdu en Pakistán, así como Cachemira, y casi idéntico al hindi, pero escrito con escritura persoárabe e influenciado por el persa clásico, y las lenguas de la erudición literaria en las que me dedicaba, el tibetano clásico como miembro de la orden budista Kagyu Vajrayana en Katmandú y, en Srinagar, el árabe coránico clásico que había estado aprendiendo desde Beirut, junto con el árabe levantino hablado, que se ha convertido en mi cuarta lengua natural junto con el inglés, el chino y el francés, y también el persa clásico y el turco otomano como erudito de la orden sufí Naqsbandi del Islam. En los Balcanes aprendí algo de croata escrito en escritura latina, mutuamente comprensible con el bosnio, ya que evolucionan de la misma fuente. Desde la invasión de Ucrania, me he encontrado hablando y escribiendo en ucraniano, ruso y polaco más de lo que desearía que fuera necesario; Amo los idiomas y a sus pueblos, aunque, como suele ocurrir, las condiciones en las que nos encontramos son las de la tragedia, como museos de holocaustos privados, así como la esperanza de nuestra gloriosa y hermosa Resistencia.
Con cada nuevo idioma, elijo un nuevo nombre en ese discurso, como cualquier otro estudiante, pero también creo nuevas identidades como roles que desempeñar. Hasta ahora, he vivido muchas vidas dentro del ámbito de la mía, y mantengo múltiples yos posibles en reserva como un espectro de opciones adaptativas, algunos con sus propios pasaportes y antecedentes verificables para viajar con tales identidades. Todos somos pluralidades, pero el estudiante de idiomas representa la individualidad como un juego teatral.
Pensar en otros idiomas moldea los pensamientos de manera diferente, nos libera y abre las puertas de la posibilidad a nuevas formas de ser humanos, relacionarnos con nuestra experiencia y organizar ideas sobre el mundo. Por eso, el estudio de idiomas es necesario para el desarrollo equilibrado de los jóvenes. Aprender idiomas proporciona muchos de los beneficios cognitivos y emocionales que ofrece vivir en otras culturas, aunque considero que viajar y vivir en otros lugares son ritos formativos cruciales de paso hacia un yo futuro, creado y elegido con intención, en lugar de uno que simplemente se impone como identidad predeterminada por nuestras circunstancias.
Los idiomas forjan conexiones y nos sumergen en los mundos de otros, cuestionando nuestros límites como universos paralelos de posibilidades humanas y permitiéndonos transformar la alteridad de una amenaza a una oportunidad de crecimiento, reforzando la diversidad como un valor adaptativo y aislándonos también de la patología de la desconexión propia del hombre moderno.
Escribir es una forma de estructurar y mejorar el pensamiento y a uno mismo, porque cómo escribimos es cómo pensamos y podemos operar sobre nosotros mismos, editar y reestructurar nuestros procesos de pensamiento, y tomar la propiedad y el control de nuestra propia evolución y adaptación al cambio a través de la escritura. Cuando pensamos y escribimos en idiomas distintos a nuestra lengua materna, nos liberamos de la normalidad en la que estamos inmersos. El uso que Haruki Murakami hace de la escritura en inglés, una lengua que no dominaba plenamente cuando la eligió como instrumento para escapar de los límites de su normalidad, es un excelente ejemplo del uso de esta táctica para cambiar de perspectiva y liberar la propia experiencia de las prisiones y los legados de nuestra historia, y como declaró Picasso, «para ver de una manera nueva».
En este sentido, el lenguaje es primordial para todas las demás formas de identidad, porque organiza todos los demás sistemas de relación con uno mismo y con el otro. Como escribió René Descartes en su Discurso del Método: «je pense, donc je suis».
Creo en aprender idiomas y formas de ser humano distintas a las de nuestro país de origen como camino hacia la autonomía o la libertad frente a las ideas de los demás como condición impuesta de lucha, hacia la empatía y nuestro deber de cuidar a los demás en una sociedad diversa e inclusiva, y hacia la toma de poder de las identidades autorizadas, especialmente las de nacionalidad, que instrumentalizan la división al servicio de la tiranía.
Lo mismo ocurre con los yo que… habitamos en nuestras patrias imaginarias y en los nuevos y valientes mundos en los que nos encontramos con el desarrollo, la pluralización y la transformación de nosotros mismos a través de la historia.
On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, six years ago, of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who had in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense, firing when fired upon, a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.
To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate, terrorize, or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.
I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have both a right and a duty to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and the ideas of other people, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence. Getting there, however, will be neither swift nor easy.
As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in the face of unjust authority; to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and there is no just authority. The inviolable principle of solidarity means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and precedes violence.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision. Possession of a gun is proof of intent to kill.
Choose life.
But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.
War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.
What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?
Let us remember always that the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce, and remember the warning of Nietzsche; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces which I count as forebears and natural allies, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.
One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.
For myself, to be an antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.
Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny
We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.
During the summer before my undergraduate senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Georges Bataille, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with a very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”
So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
Take the case of guns, for example; tools of death, but also of either tyranny or liberty, dominion and subjugation of others or resistance unto death in refusal to submit. When used for evil purposes, guns are evil; when used for good, they must also be judged good. This is because there is no good or evil as absolutes, for these are human words and require human deeds to make them real.
The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a democratic society of true equality, diversity, and inclusion in which we can abandon the social use of force.
Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals. Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those we must keep and remember, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Herein I offer reading lists in Modern American and World Literature as a gate of entry to diversity as beauty, joy, and hope, to balance the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world which threaten to consume us in despair, grief, and abjection.
We will need these things to uplift and sustain us in liberation struggle and solidarity of action in this time of terrible darkness and the tide of fascist hate which assaults our humanity and our democracies which are guarantors of our universal human rights.
These lists I have published before, developed over a lifetime of teaching and the study of literature as a means of entry into the imaginal realities of others from whom I wish to learn how to become human; I do so once again in reply to a request from a friend who is depressed over the downward spiral into racist terror which now engulfs his homeland of Britain as it does so many other guarantor states of equality and human rights we could once count on to “fight them on the beaches”, to use the magnificent antifascist leader Churchill’s iconic phrase.
We are not defeated, my friends, nor is all lost, so long as we refuse to submit, so long as we disbelieve the lies of those who would dehumanize and enslave us to their own wealth and power, so long as we do not abandon each other. Recognition of the glorious treasures of our diversity can be an instrument with which to combat division with solidarity and inclusion. In this cause I offer my reading lists as proof of the immense depth and richness of human experience and the many and sometimes quite different alternate human realities in which we live, that our boundaries might also become interfaces.
If possible I will post one such list each day, with links to my celebrations of favorite authors on their birthdays, including over twenty national literatures and with Modern American Literature including subcategories for Native American, African American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Hispanic American literatures. May you find beauty, joy, and hope in thinking the thoughts of others both like and different from yourself, as have I.
As I wrote in my post of September 2 2025, Becoming Human Through Literature: Jay’s Revised Modern Canon of Literature, a Resource For Back To School; As the new school year begins in America, and teachers, parents, students, and all those who love to read are gathering ideas for new worlds to explore, I offer here my reading lists curated over forty three years, many as a high school English teacher.
Of paramount importance is that school begins this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers. There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children, students, and each other in our ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not subjects.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
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 literature and 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?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval, funding, and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of literature, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by 28 lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s problematic list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty three years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2025 Edition.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; 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. I say again; self construal and the creation of identity is a dialectical process.
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 in celebration of Juneteenth, 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, of 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 tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.
What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?
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.
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 as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.
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 remain central to the project of its study. True education asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; 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 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 in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. 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?
A Literary Calendar: Celebrations of Authors On Their Birthdays
This day last year we were tantalized with the prospect of our Rapist In Chief’s imminent demise from whatever illness is consuming him, a pretty thing which once again distracts us like a cat’s toy bouncing at the end of a rod.
Whose hand holds the other end of this false hope, which seeks to rob us of our will to resist as if the death of one tyrant will free us from capture by the Fourth Reich and its vast and pervasive systems of oppression?
No, friends; the Restoration of America will be neither so easy nor so quick.
Let us remain vigilant and build momentum for retaking Congress in the coming elections, that we may begin to bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of September 1 2025, Is Trump Dead? Thoughts and Prayers, Just None of Them Benign; In my most cherished hopes Trump is rotting from within as an outward sign of his moral leprosy, drown in his liquifying innards and in pain equal to that of the innocents he has murdered in Gaza and Ukraine, the terror of the white supremacist and police violence and torture against nonwhite citizens and migrants he has perpetrated here in America, and the horror of his countless victims of sexual crimes.
May the devils that possess him make it linger, while he is imprisoned in his useless carcass of putrefying meat.
We will celebrate when Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and most effective foreign agent to ever attack America, dies. I dream of letting him achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dogshit. Imagine Trump’s monument under glass in a museum of tyrants bearing the legend; Here lies Trump, traitor and Russian agent, tyrant of Vichy America and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, whose mission was the Fall of America, democracy, the idea of universal human rights, and western civilization. His crimes of white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror are numberless, yet here he is, a pile of dogshit. Look upon him and despair, all those who would enslave us and steal our liberty.
As my friend Pat McClenahan summarized the situation in a Face Book post; “Hopefully we will soon wake up to the news that trump’s congestive heart failure took him in the night. His “kankles” (the swollen ankles he has), and the bruising on his hand is from the I.V. medication he takes for the congestive heart failure, and hes gone 13 days without golfing because he is getting worse.”
Tomorrow is another day, and another chance for this evil monster to die. If we are really lucky, all of his pervert racist followers will die with him. They can form their own level of Hell. How depraved, how degenerate, must one be to vote for a rapist, human trafficker and exploiter, theocratic sexual terrorist, white supremacist terrorist, Russian agent, and Nazi revivalist in order to be granted permission to do the same?
Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. Sadly, all of his followers want to grab with him.
And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name, the one they use among themselves; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
Thoughts and prayers, just none of them benign.
July 20 2025 My Curses Upon Trump and All Who Serve Him
July 18 2024 A Crusade Begins: On the Reimagination of the Failed Assassination as Divine Intervention and the Anointing of a King, and Theocracy As the Idolatry of Trump Cast In the Role of Cyrus the Great In A New Myth of Exile
This weekend I chanced upon a most curious discussion in the Fragrantica group regarding our modern degraded masculinity in the example of Chanel’s neglected palette of masculine identities as fragrances, and how their classics might be reimagined and transformed for our moment as imaginal spaces to grow into.
Chanel offers iconic and unsurpassed perfumes for men in a number of categories; herein are my ideas on realigning my signature scent, Egoiste.
In the category of Imaginal Calling Cards, Egoiste is what one wears to a meeting with someone who could make you fabulously wealthy and powerful or utterly destroy and ruin you, possibly even kill you, on a whim. By this I refer to the Grand Old Egoiste designed by Chanel’s corporate boss as a personal signature scent and later released into the wild. I’d like any reformulations or flankers to reflect this niche; to be worn to winner takes all gambles, forlorn hopes, and risks when everything you love is on the table with all you desire. Egoiste is for when one must play the role of Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones; ruthless, disciplined, masterful, and a multidimensional strategic thinker who profiles and leverages people like chess pieces. Not a good man, but sometimes a useful character to play when the imposed conditions of struggle require it.
Tywin is clearly a figure of the King archetype and a chthonic figure of the shadow self like Saturn, forces which Nietzsche described as the Abyss in his famous Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.” But this is not to say it can’t be useful.
“Man is a wolf to man”, “homo homini lupus” in the original proverb of Erasmus’s Adagia, a paraphrase of Plautus’ line in the comedy Asinaria “Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit”. The great question of becoming human is whether we must remain so, or emerge from the legacies of our history to create ourselves anew and discover better possibilities.
Equipage Hermès and Dior Homme Parfum also inhabit this space; with cues of luxury and refined masculinity as well as restrained power.
Oddly enough, fragrances I chose for their value as intimidation in negotiations and an authority marker in introductions also perform well as attractors, though anyone on the prowl not for joy or romance but for wealth and power merits caution.
Among the many identities I keep in my quiver of characters to play as circumstances may require are ideas of masculinity which unlike Tywin belong to the light rather than the darkness; the voice which I most often hear as my own thoughts when writing essays such as this or when I am called to lead and command by moral suasion and example, Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard, is one example. When I wish to be charming I perform Hugh Grant’s silken tones and melodic phrasing, as if he were singing lyrics rather than speaking prosody. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes I perform when solving problems, investigating, and finding patterns in events; his reference Received Pronunciation voice is a cornucopia of timbre and pitch which can be mischievous, sardonic, precise, or menacing at will.
As a teenager my role model was Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, whose voice of controlled inflections, deliberate enunciation, and consistently paced calm authority embody a character very much rooted in Sherlock’s precision and iron self-control, the chaos of fierce passions held at bay through will and discipline being the primary element of the character I wished to claim for my own.
In my late twenties and thirties I often spoke in Boston Brahmin or with a cluster of related accents; the Mid-Atlantic voice of Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane, my role model as a counselor when he is being empathetic and insightful and not in his private life when he is a self-sabotaging pompous fool, and when required to move among elites I kept William F. Buckley’s glorious and smooth TransAtlantic voice, full of Latin phrases as authority cues, to hand along with FDR’s marvelous Groton/Harward Mid Atlantic from his fireside chats which are master classes in the rhetorical use of dynamic range and tonal shift.
In all of this I remain as I began, a theatre brat who became an enthusiast of languages.
Were I to design a summum bonum, to use Cicero’s term, of all three of my top choices in this category of fragrance, I might begin by exploring the leather accord of Dior Homme Parfum, rich and presented in chiaroscuro with smoky vanilla and resinous spices of darkness like the gorgeous and royal starring note of Serge Lutens’ La Myrrhe, when integrated into the Descartean formal structure of Egoiste which unfolds according to the three unities of French theatre as defined by Voltaire, and as it brings change to its host.
Egoiste’s heart of rose-cinnamon-carnation is incomparable and must remain until the stars perish and fall from the sky like shattered loves. With apologies to Georg Trakl for the paraphrase of “last gold of exploded stars”. Seriously, this one inhales like the last words of a dying lover, as rapture and despair.
Finally I would capture two of the most delicious facets of Equipage Hermes, the signature leather accord of leather-clove-tobacco in contrapuntal mirroring, what Monet called juxtaposition, with the leather-vanilla-spice of Dior Homme Parfum, and the captivating savage green topnotes of autumnal menace which makes it unforgettable, like an aperitif of alpine forest. Chanel’s Paris-Edimbourg, my favorite sport fragrance and sometimes aftershave, maps this terrain as a Scottish wilderness beautifully. I reviewed it in my essay What is a man? A taxonomy in perfume.
Why do I love Egoiste so that it is my signature scent or Etoile? Here combine my favorite notes from three categories of favorites which they define; tobacco or Evenings at the Club, leather or Équipage du Chevalier which includes Chanel’s Cuir de Russie among its paragons, and carnation or Virtual Boutonnières.
If you could personalize your signature scent as a unique expression of your uniqueness, and an instrument with which to shape yourself in becoming human to control your own evolution, how would you change it, and what form would you give it?
June 23 2025 If My Masculine and Feminine Halves Could Perform Their Truths On the Stage of the World, What Would We Sing? Idealizations of Gendered Beauty and the Struggle Between Authorized Identities and Truths We Create Or Are Written In Our Flesh: On Father’s Day, Part Two
“For today, an observation and a ponderance. Chanel’s collection for men is going out of date. Scanning its catalogue, I was surprised to acknowledge that the brand hasn’t had a major release for 7 years! Last year, Allure Homme Sport flanker Superleggera hit shelves but, to me, promotion was subdued and it seems the brand produced something easy just to keep things ticking along. Prior to that, the Bleu de Chanel body spray came out in 2021 (quite a different market and function to alcohol-based fine fragrance sprays), and before that, Bleu de Chanel Parfum in 2018, for which there was quite some excitement.
In the last 10 years, Chanel has only released four fine fragrance products marketed towards men (all flankers, the oldest being Chanel Pour Monsieur Eau De Parfum in 2016). In the same time frame, the French perfume institution has debuted 34 female scents (not counting limited edition bottles of existing formulas) and 16 unisex compositions. The brightest sun of the bunch, from a planning and resource standpoint, was probably the pillar Gabrielle in 2017. It goes without saying, this is a purposeful strategy and not an accident, but certainly a curious one. Whilst Chanel has concentrated its effort almost exclusively on women, Dior has spearheaded gains with men, notably via Sauvage, totalling 17 men’s scents, 32 women’s, and 47 unisex across a decade. Bleu de Chanel and Sauvage may be competitors, but why did Chanel let Dior take so much market share without fighting back with another stellar best-seller for guys?
One explanation may be to avoid mistakes that cost money and waste a lot of time, a strategy to which Dior doesn’t seem very concerned (take the flop of Joy, for example). Another is that Bleu was performing to expectation, so why dilute its impact with distraction? One of the most exciting, fast-moving parts of studying the theory and practice of why people scent themselves and what scents mean to people is that ideas and feelings communicated by scents that are secondary consequences of their primary, relative descriptors (so, notional masculinity emerging from a confluence of tart, acidic, sweet, and dry components) is so often grounded in embodiment (i.e. encountering fragrances on other people as expression of their personhood). Our catchment for these gestural vectors is incredibly small – how many fragrances do you honestly smell on others over the course of a week? It’s not like fashion, which solidifies its codes with incessant repetition of form, ossifying stability in expectation (which is why a man in a dress is so shocking). The bonds that govern fragrance’s ideologies are less evidenced and more plastic, which makes them potentiate a quicker pace of reorganisation in the mind (facets as signifiers, notions of humanity as signified, nature as referent, is one working model to play with).
This is all to say that Chanel is far overdue for a big splash in men’s grooming. The classic collection is greying, and fast, even Bleu de Chanel, Allure Homme Sport, and Platinum Egoiste! I love them, but to people under 30, many smell old, even Bleu de Chanel. Generational association is a massive factor in moving fragrance fashions forward. None of the Chanel classics correspond very neatly to the macro carnival candy musk trend of today. One may protest that Chanel isn’t aiming at under-30 men, but I would be surprised if figures didn’t indicate that Gen Z males buy more fragrance than corresponding millennials. Also, we all know about the hype around fawning flocks of teenagers swarming fragrance counters.
It’s fun to hypothesise what Chanel’s next move might or should be. What kind of pillar for men should they release? Name? Notes? Storyboard? My suggestion – go orange blossom fougère per Naxos, sweet with candy meringue nuance, but make it sour, salty, and electric with grapefruit, blackcurrant, liquorice, juniper, and a hint of aldehydes. That could serve as a continuation of Bleu sentiments, borrow some of the success Dior had in Sauvage Elixir, and retain the glint and sparkle that Chanel’s signature style is known for, with a kind of retro-sci-fi dreamer aesthetic that continues to fascinate us in other art forms.”
Studies In Power and Authority: Tywin Lannister
The Tywin Doctrine
The Most Disturbing Detail in Tywin Lannister’s First Scene
The Real Reason Tywin Lannister Never Arrested Arya Stark
Subjugating His Council
Tywin’s Advice to Tommen
The Terrifying Psychology of Tywin Lannister
Game of Thrones | A Masterclass in the 48 Laws of Power
“Beware; I am Fearless and therefore Powerful”- Mary Shelly
Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
Like Milton in Paradise Lost and the magnificent novel of transgression written by Emily Bronte in direct reply to Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelly’s references and 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 her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the myth of the fallen angels and their monstrous children the Nephilim from the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
I believe a major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of reason and science to realize Idealist and Utopian visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
When I was a child I once drew the magic square of Abramelin the Mage from the many grimoires in our family library; it promised to grant the bearer wishes, and I was young enough to not only believe such things and such promises, nor to question the truths of authorities and their motives, but also not to question the ambiguity of wishes, the relativity of truths, and the recursive nature of cause and effect. I wondered; if I could have anything, be anything, what do I truly desire? And then like the Grinch I had a wonderful, terrible thought; if I am limited in who I will become by what I can imagine, what I want is to be able to imagine without limits. So with great solemnity I invoked the power of the square that can be read in all directions, and wished thus; “I claim the power to imagine, to envision, to dream, and to become without limits. I want to be able to think God’s thoughts.”
I like Victor, and have used variants of this name such as Zafir in Arabic as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, and also about the bifurcated nature of human being and the dangers of failure to embrace our shadow. As a reference to both Mary Shelly’s and Emily Bronte’s model in Goethe’s Faust, the roles of Victor and Catherine reprise that of Faust, while the monster and Heathcliff are versions of The Devil.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science and civilization versus nature which echo Rousseau, reason versus passion which prefigure Freud, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound humankind to his laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring cannot love, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the iron self discipline and 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. It is about birthing monsters, how systems of oppression shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest of us into consent to be governed and submission to authority, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
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!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
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?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
The Corpus Frankenstein: essential films and books
Penny Dreadful Caliban’s Speech; Why would you allow me to feel?
Mary Shelly
Young Frankenstein Puttin on the Ritz
The Frankenstein Chronicles
The Rocky Horror Picture Show – The time warp
(I was in the Berkeley live cast at the UC Theatre, Indecent Exposure)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
Blade Runner trailer
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
A victory for justice and the exposure of tyranny’s lies and falsifications was won two years ago this day with the United Nations declaration of the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang as genocide, slavery, and crimes against humanity.
We mark this anniversary today in the shadow of the Occupation of Hong Kong, as the regime of the CCP wages lawfare as state terror, repression of dissent, and the institutional dismantling of the Fourth Estate as a guarantor of freedom of information and of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
It remains for the international community to bring a Reckoning to Xi Jinping’s regime of cruelty and dehumanization, and join together with the peoples of China in liberation struggle.
China’s horrific crimes in Xinjiang are a boundary which defines the limits of the human and the legitimacy of the state, and it is a line we must defend or surrender to carceral states of force and thought control everywhere the principles of our universal human rights and democracy as a free society of equals wherein the state is co-owned by its citizens as a guarantor of their rights.
There is one and only one condition in which any state can be legitimate, and that is when it acts as a guarantor of the parallel and interdependent sets of rights of citizens and of human beings, and balances those rights so that none may infringe upon those of another.
For once we surrender our humanity to the state, and become things and not human beings, instruments of the power and profit of others through systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, subjugated by carceral states of force and control through abjection and learned helplessness, division and authorized identities of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, soil, and faith, we allow those who would enslave us to feed us into the machine of the state as psychopathy and embodied violence as the raw material of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us give to systems of oppression, to fascism, and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Jamey Keaten and Edith M. Lederer in Huffpost: “The office of U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet published its long-awaited report on alleged rights violations in China’s western Xinjiang region Wednesday, brushing aside Beijing’s demands to keep a lid on a report that fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region’s native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.
The report, which Western diplomats and U.N. officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet’s four-year term. The report was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years.
But Bachelet’s report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the member states that make it up. The run-up to its release fueled a debate over China’s influence at the world body and epitomized the on-and-off diplomatic chill between Beijing and the West over human rights, among other sore spots.
In the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called “training centers” but former detainees described as brutal detention centers.
Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges.”
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of July I 2020, An Empire of Terror and Racist Genocide: The Fall of Hong Kong and the Sterilization of the Uighur Ethnic Minority of Xinjiang; As the first wave of mass arrests and crimes against humanity by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime of state terror roll over Hong Kong on this anniversary of its handover by the British to their successor empire in the citadel of darkness which is Beijing, as the women of the Uighur ethnic and religious minority in Xinjiang are forcibly sterilized in a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide which parallels the campaign of erasure in the re- education prisons wherein their language, faith, history, and identity as a people are stolen, the world watches as yet another spectacle of inhumanity unfolds before us with stupefaction and the helpless surrender of civilization to atavistic barbarism.
And once again we do nothing when a predator arrives to cut the powerless and the dispossessed from the herd of humankind, for without a united front against tyrannies of force and control the most ruthless and amoral among us wins.
Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller spoke his famous condemnation of the complicity of silence in the face of evil in the context of the Holocaust, but it applies as a universal principle; “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2019, Vendetta Lives: Hong Kong Defies Tyranny and State Terror; I am one man, of limited understanding, though I have worn many masks in many places, and not all of my causes have been lost; through all my forlorn hopes and a lifetime of last stands I yet remain to defy and defend.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become better can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from 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.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang; A year ago I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post and cited in my journal entry of November 17 2019; ”We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in Xinjiang. The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of detention or “reeducation” camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. They insist that the camps are actually job-training centers where amenable Xinjiang residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.
That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including President Xi Jinping. The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. And what we see is chilling.
It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in Xinjiang warned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”
Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern Xinjiang city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.
The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”
The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. China makes independent reporting in Xinjiang virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in Xinjiang in recent years. The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2022, Why I Write: A Manifesto of Art and Revolution At the Dawn of the South Asian Spring; We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations throughout South Asia, systems of alliances referred to as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing and other cities in China, Thailand, and Burma, which during the past year have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Sri Lanka, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Libya in one dominion and within Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen in another.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
How shall we write our witness of history and sacred calling to pursue the truth as what Foucault called truthtellers? In this crucial moment wherein the fate of humankind hangs between tyranny and liberty, how are we to perform an ars poetica of revolution?
One way to describe our experience of our time is to focus on externalities, much as Flaubert did in his attempt to remove his own authorial voice from his stories in service to Reason. Such an exercise yields narratives much like the daily current events briefing I gave to my Forensics classes during Extemp Prep, a team current events speaking competition. Perhaps the best example today is the newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes the most impartial and trustworthy daily news brief as current history. Its a unique approach to events unfolding around us in real time, and her references and contexts are authoritative and reliable.
To contrast and compare her art to mine as rhetoric, I write here in my daily political journal what may be described as strategy, intelligence, and policy guidance for the antifascist community and allied revolutionary, liberation, and democracy movements throughout the world and its Autonomous Zones and International Brigades. That the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty is “to incite, provoke, and disturb” should give warning that I make no pretense to impartial and nonpartisan writing.
My biases are defined first by my values, including liberty, equality, truth and justice, nonviolence and our universal human rights, and their praxis as causes, and secondly by the windmills against which I tilt; unequal power, tyranny and theocracy, authority and authorized identities, normality and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, tyrannies of force and control and carceral states of police terror and institutionalized violence, militarism and imperial conquest, dominion, and colonialism, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and their systemic and historical instruments patriarchy and racism, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which drives all of this.
In this revolutionary struggle I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. And if you are among them or their allies who refuse to submit to tyranny and terror, this I say to you; I am not a good man, but I may be someone who can help.
I hope to be more useful than a good man, whose scope of action is limited by the false morality of those who would enslave us among the imposed conditions of struggle and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, as Shaw teaches us through the figure of Eliza’s father in Pygmalion and the gorgeous film My Fair Lady.
We must resist division in service to power into the deserving and the undeserving by a moral burden of merit as a hierarchy of otherness and membership in hegemonic elites. Let us answer merit and caste with equality and universal human rights, and division, especially fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with solidarity.
Neither of us need to be good in order to help or receive help, merely in need or able to help where needed as a duty of care for others which honors our common humanity and recognizes our interdependence.
So I say again, I am not a good man, for I accept no limits and trust no authority, and I practice as sacred acts seizures of power, disruptions of order and bringing the Chaos, the transgression of the Forbidden, violation of normalities, subversions of authorized identities, the pursuit of truth, believing impossible things but only those I myself have created or chosen, and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
And if you are among the outcast, the broken and the lost, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, I am a bad man who is on your side.
As written by Julian Borger in The Guardian; “The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has said that China had committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province which may amount to crimes against humanity.
Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, rejected it as an anti-China smear, while Uyghur human rights groups hailed it as a turning point in the international response to the programme of mass incarceration.
The 45-page report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded: “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, said in an official response that it was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and that it “wantonly smears and slanders” China and interfered in the country’s internal affairs.
The Chinese response was accompanied by a 121-page counter-report, emphasising the threat of terrorism and the stability that the state programme of “de-radicalisation” and “vocational education and training centres” has brought to Xinjiang.
Human rights organisations welcomed the report. Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group said it was “a game-changer for the international response to the Uyghur crisis”.
“Despite the Chinese government’s strenuous denials, the UN has now officially recognized that horrific crimes are occurring,” Kanat said.
Over the past five years, China swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps which it termed training centres. Some of the centres have since been closed but there are still thought to be hundreds of thousands still incarcerated. In several hundred cases families had no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained.
Out of 26 former inmates interviewed by UN investigators, two-thirds “reported having been subjected to treatment that would amount to torture and/or other forms of ill-treatment”.
The abuses described included beatings with electric batons while being strapped in a “tiger chair” (to which inmates are strapped by their hands and feet), extended solitary confinement, as well as what appeared to be a form of waterboarding, “being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces”.
The US and some other countries have said the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, the destruction of mosques and communities and forced abortion and sterilisation, amount to genocide. The UN report does not mention genocide but says allegations of torture, including force medical procedures, as well as sexual violence were all “credible”.
It said that the authorities had deemed violations of the three-child official limit on family size to be an indicator of “extremism”, leading to internment.
“Several women interviewed by OHCHR raised allegations of forced birth control, in particular forced IUD [intrauterine device] placements and possible forced sterilisations with respect to Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women. Some women spoke of the risk of harsh punishments including “internment” or “imprisonment” for violations of the family planning policy,” the report said.
“Among these, OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy. These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible.”
In the report, Bachelet, a former Chilean president, noted that the average rate of sterilisation per 100,000 inhabitants in China as a whole was just over 32. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region it was 243.
“Serious human rights violations have been committed in [the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies,” the report said. “These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.”
The report calls on the Chinese government to “take prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” in Xinjiang and “urgently clarify the whereabouts of individuals whose families have been seeking information about their loved ones”.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The United Nations Human Rights Council should use the report to initiate a comprehensive investigation into the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity targeting the Uyghurs and others – and hold those responsible to account.”
For myself, nothing characterizes and illuminates the true meaning of the Chinese Communist Party as an antihumanist regime of tyranny and terror like the Real Bodies Exhibit, a display of atrocities sent on tour round the world in 2018 to terrify us all into submission in preparation for the conquest of the Pacific Rim.
As written by Nic White in the Daily Mail, in an article entitled Exhibition is accused of using the corpses of executed Chinese political prisoners in its shocking ‘Real Bodies’ display; “Dozens of bodies used in a gruesome exhibit may have come from Chinese political prisoners who were tortured and murdered.
Real Bodies: The Exhibition shows 20 cadavers and 200 body parts preserved though plastination and is renowned across the world.
The exhibition shows human bodies striped of skin with their muscles, tendons, organs, and bones exposed to give an insight into how they function.
However, doctors hold ‘grave concerns that the bodies were not freely and willingly donated’ before they were harvested in China.
Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting said they were most likely members of banned religious sect Falun Gong, which is relentlessly persecuted.
‘The origins of these bodies have been questioned and believed to come from China — either death row prisoners, or as suspected by independent investigators, tortured prisoners of conscience,’ it told News Corp.
Cadavers were provided by Dalian Medical University Biology Plantation in China, whose Professor of Anatomy, Hong Jin Sui claimed were sourced them legally.
‘[They were] originally received from the city morgue and then transferred to medical universities in China and ultimately were legally donated to the Dalian Hoffen Bio-technique Laboratory preservation, dissection and exhibition,’ he said.
‘Dalian Hoffen Bio-technique only accepts specimens that have been legally donated, are free of infectious disease and certified to have died of natural causes.’
Imagine Exhibitions chief executive Tom Zaller said claims the bodies were from executed prisoners were ‘unfounded’ and ‘offensive’.
‘They’re inspected by health departments in countless countries. There’s no foul play,’ he said.
However, he admitted there was ‘no documentation’ to prove their identities or that they agreed to donate their bodies after death.
Other research claimed there were many more bodies from China given to science or sold around the world than actual bodies donated.
‘Trafficking in human cadavers has become a business. Plastinated specimens are publicly priced and traded,’ 2016 report Bloody Harvest / The Slaughter read.
‘The Government of China calls for bids on such trades.’
The researchers said ‘not a word ‘of what was claimed about the bodies in the Real Bodies exhibit was believable.
A Chinese student at one of the big harvesters of human bodies also doubted all the bodies were obtained above board.
‘Our tiny, amateurish medical college in Changchun somehow has more bodies and organ specimens than Waseda University in Tokyo,’ the student wrote in a blog post.
‘How is it possible that we have accumulated so many corpses and organ specimens in recent years after the Cultural Revolution?
‘I asked the teacher whether these bodies were donated, but the teacher told me not to ask. Later I discovered that in the suburb and district of Changchun there is a corpse processing plant.
‘Today in China, do we really have so many cadavers from voluntary donors, so many that we need corpse plants?’
In 2017 four doctors and four not-for-profit organisations in the Czech Republic attempted to get the exhibition banned from showing in Prauge.
‘Based on numerous reports of human rights violations in the PRC, there is a reasonable suspicion that the bodies were not obtained by legal means,’ they said.
They called on the organisers of the exhibition to produce const documents given by the donors of the bodies.
‘Documents containing informed donors’ body approvals that verify the existence of these consents and the fact that donors were informed about the use of their bodies for commercial purposes and the conditions in which they will be exhibited,’ it read.
‘We believe that the exhibition does not meet ethical or moral requirements to be part of the culture of the Czech Republic.’
The local police rejected the suggestion to ban the exhibition.
A similar exhibit called Bodies: The Exhibition run by Premier Exhibitions has been dogged by controversy over the providence of its cadavers since it opened in 2005.
A 2006 U.S. news report sparked a Congressional inquiry and an investigation by then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
As a result, Premier’s chief executive resigned and in 2008 the company was ordered to print a disclaimer on the exhibit’s website.
The disclaimer said it ‘relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners’ and ‘cannot independently verify’ that the bodies do not belong to executed prisoners.
Real Bodies: The Exhibition opens at Byron Kennedy Hall in Sydney on April 14.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
UN report on China’s Crimes Against Humanity in Xinjiang
China and Hong Kong, a retrospective of my writing
July 1 2026 This July, the 29th Anniversary of the Abandonment of Hong Kong and Her Hope of Independence and Sovereignty to the Chinese Communist Party and of Democracy to Tyranny
April 15 2023 Pax Sinica and the Case of China’s Secret Police Station in New York: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party Disguise Imperial Conquest, the Silencing and Repression of Dissent, and the Theft of Liberty as Peace and Prosperity
The Guardian view on a showtrial in Hong Kong: a new authoritarian low: The jailing of 45 pro-democracy activists testifies to the ruthless suppression of a once-vibrant civil society
Sixty three years ago, Dr Martin Luther King led the historic March on Washington; six years ago tens of thousands carried forward the banner of freedom and equality in the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks March. Today we celebrate our legacy of Resistance to fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror as a glorious heritage of all humankind, and a sacred duty to stand in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Let us March On Washington again, friends, and let us counter-Occupy it until the Fourth Reich is broken.
Let us drive the regime’s white supremacist terror force which has Occupied the capital for over a year now from the streets, unmask the enemy and bring them to justice.
Let us take back our White House from the Abominable One and his dark minions and purge our destroyers from among us in the upcoming elections.
In this time of darkness and capture of the state by the Trump Fourth Reich, as ICE secret armies of white supremacist terror are unleashed upon migrant workers and sent to occupy cities in repression of dissent and enforcement of elite white privilege, the time for solidarity of action in refusal to submit to a criminal regime of tyranny and police terror is once again upon us, and the imposed conditions of struggle require that we resist, as Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands and Malcolm X in his iconic speech phrased it, “By Any Means Necessary.”
All Resistance is War to the Knife, a phrase which comes into English unchanged from the original Norse Krig til kniven, and for us this means that those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none. “Beirut rules”, as the line in the film Syriana goes; the complexity and ruthlessness of politics hasn’t changed from the Viking era til now, and possibly Upton Sinclair was right when he wrote in the 1915 work The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, a line he attributed to George Washington; “GOVERNMENT is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.” My father once paraphrased it to me as; “Politics is the Art of Fear. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master, and with belonging it is the basis of human exchange. So, whose instrument will it be?” Actually, Washington did say something very similar, as justification for inciting the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 which he sent the army to repress in order to establish the right of the federal government to impose taxes; “Government is about force; only force.”
But as we know, force fails at the point of disobedience, and authority is delegitimized through disbelief. We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we can not be subjugated or defeated unless we give them our power.
The Fourth Reich of Trump’s loathsome regime of freaks, grifters, and perverts is trying to terrorize us into submission, the iron fist within the glove of falsification, propaganda, rewritten histories, and lies of which the Republican Party is constructed as an institution of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror.
Of this I say; who remains Unconquered in resistance is free.
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 June 28 2021 on Stonewall; I believe resistance confers freedom, that to be free of force and control means to remain unconquered within ourselves as autonomous individuals, that to defy tyranny and fascism is an act of liberation and affirmation of our humanity which cannot be stolen, and a victorious moment of self creation which exalts us beyond the limits of threat of force. And that each of us who remains unconquered becomes a seed of liberty and transformation, able to free others.
This is how we realize the ideals of democracy, of freedom and equality, and redeem the promise of America as a free society of equals whose citizens are co-owners of our government, an America which is a guarantor of our universal human rights and a refuge for the wretched of the earth, and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us stand united in solidarity against those who would enslave us.
Here I wish to amplify the mission statement for the Black National Convention which says, “We are in defense of ALL Black lives. When we say “Black lives,” that means everybody. We want all Black people to thrive. Black people of every gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion are included. Everyone in, nobody out.”
This bold and necessary declaration of principles of inclusion and diversity by a marginalized, dispossessed, and vulnerable community I would amend by expansion to general conditions of which white supremacist terror and racism in America are examples of universal systems of oppression; Let us defend all lives. When we say all lives, that means everybody. We want all human beings to thrive. Peoples of every race and nation, language, gender expression, sexual orientation, ability, ethnic background, class origin, country of birth, region, or religion included.
I dream of a United Humankind and a global free society of equals, wherein our universal human rights are paramount and we are guarantors of each other’s rights, and in which we have abandoned the social use of force. Everyone in, nobody out.
As written by Rachel Jones in 2020 in National Geographic, in retrospect of the historic March on Washington, in an article entitled A fractured and traumatized nation’ marches on, 57 years later: ”Like many other African-American parents, Tasha Johnson made the ten-hour drive to Washington, D.C., from Brunswick, Georgia, on Friday to represent her two sons, 27-year-old Rafeal and 26-year-old Akeem. But she was also attending the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on behalf of one of her sons’ best friends, who couldn’t be there.
Tragically, Ahmaud Arbery’s name was mentioned multiple times from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Friday’s Commitment March on Washington, a peaceful demonstration attended by thousands of people for a very powerful reason. A continuous cycle of police-related shootings and killings have stoked a national outcry. The organizers of Friday’s march, titled “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” to highlight the need for police and criminal justice reform, say the protest provided sorely needed evidence that Americans are ready to confront racial injustice. Not even the risk of COVID-19 could keep them away.
The last full Friday of August felt like the culmination of a long, restless summer bookended by George Floyd’s May 25 brutal demise in Minneapolis to the August 23 shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, seven times as he walked away from a police officer during an arrest. America’s seeming unwillingness to acknowledge the toll these events have taken was put on full blast during the protest, and few could sum up the relevance of the day better than Johnson.
“It was devastating to hear my son sobbing from the pain that he was in on the day Ahmaud was murdered,” Johnson says of her son, Akeem. Arbery, 25, was jogging through a Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood on February 23 when he was pursued and fatally shot by two white men who claimed they thought he was a burglar.
“He is still going through it,” Johnson said Friday. “He speaks of having visions of Ahmaud coming to him in dreams and talking to him. Where we are in this nation, we’re doing incredible damage to the minds and the lives of our Black youth, and it has to stop. I came because I want the world to know I am willing to be part of the solution.”
While some observers expected the threat of COVID-19 to restrict the numbers of participants, tens of thousands patiently queued in a line that wrapped around the perimeter of the National Mall, awaiting their turn to have their temperature taken as a precautionary measure. Then they were given a neon green wristband and a ticket to enter the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool area near the World War II Memorial.
March participants from across the United States descended on Washington to advocate for police reform, voting rights, and for more just, equitable lives for their children as the United States heads to a contentious presidential election clouded by claims of blatant voter suppression and interference during the 2016 campaign.
Like Tasha Johnson, many invoked the country’s long history of racial violence and economic injustice as their motivating factors.
Renee Jones of Riverside, California, says she was marching in honor of a cousin who was killed by a Las Vegas police officer. She wants better for her son, her nieces and nephews.
“I’m out here to give them a fighting chance and pay it forward, just like the generation before me did for us,” Jones says.
Another marcher, Keir Witherspoon, says she carries the spirit of two of her grandparents who had attended the 1963 march. (See rare color images from the first March on Washington.)
“They would feel proud of me for exercising my right to protest…and disheartened that I am fighting for the same thing they were,” says Witherspoon.
Lathan Strong attended the march set an example for youth.
“As an educator, it is important that we show our young people the importance of being out here and what it means to vote,” Strong says.
Friday’s march, which featured presentations by high-profile pastors, activists, labor leaders, and politicians, had glimpses of the original gathering 57 years ago. The 1963 event was a masterstroke of careful, deliberate staging and preparation. The official program reads like a social justice roll call of the ages. Envision a stage big enough for A. Phillip Randolph, the celebrated union leader who founded of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Myrlie Evers, recently widowed after her husband, Mississippi NAACP secretary Medgar Evers, was assassinated in his driveway. The Archbishop of Washington Patrick O’Boyle spoke, as did NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. Congressman John Lewis was a significant presence at the 1963 March. His death last month left a gaping hole in the fabric of American civil rights activism. (Lewis spent his life bridging America’s racial and political divides.)
And, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was anointed as the “Moses of his people” at the original march—and at several points during Friday’s rally. Back in 1963, speeches were punctuated by performances from opera legend Marian Anderson and the Queen of Gospel Music, Mahalia Jackson.
Organizing the 1963 march required an enormous amount of strategizing and planning by some of the nation’s leading civil rights activists, says Kenneth Janken, professor of African-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“It was the result of years and perhaps even decades of work to establish a solid working-class movement,” Janken says. “Not only was there a focus on the event itself, but it was in some ways a culmination of efforts that had been underway for a long time to increase the unionization of black workers, to raise pay and to demand legal and policy protections that white Americans took for granted.”
Randolph and Wilkins conceived the idea for the 1963 march to amplify the systemic barriers to employment and economic progress for Black Americans, who still faced enormous threats and limitations decades after slavery. The system of state and local laws enacted after the end of the Civil War, known as Jim Crow, effectively choked off all attempts by Black families to gain meaningful employment, economic stability, and the freedom to live peacefully. March on Washington architects seized an opportunity to highlight their demands in full view of the nation’s policy command center. Dr. King’s eloquent, passionate “I Have a Dream” speech is often listed among the best orations of the 20th century.
“That large rally was a manifestation of everyday work that happened in small towns, in rural communities, and in large cities,” Janken says. “It happened through the regular day-to-day, work of groups like SNCC, going into a community and finding out what their local grievances were, and equipping them with the skills to carry out campaigns of their own.”
Contrast this broad-based, longer-term event plan with Friday’s march. The “Get Your Knee Off Our Necks” march was conceived after George Floyd died as a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes. The Reverend Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, says the idea for the Commitment March came to him on the day of Floyd’s memorial service, which gave organizers just about two months to plan.
The urgency of the moment was palpable.
The list of featured speakers read in part like a registry of mourners. The event, co-organized by Sharpton’s National Action Network, Martin Luther King III, and a long list of partner organizations, featured relatives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician fatally shot on March 13 by Louisville police officers executing a drug warrant on the wrong apartment, New Yorker Eric Garner, and other Black and brown Americans whose deaths came at the hands of police officers.
Speakers also included U. S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Congress from the state of Massachusetts, former Secretary of Labor and head of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez, and top representatives of labor unions, religious leaders, and community activists. Martin Luther King III gave up part of his speaking time to someone he called “the future of our nation,” the only granddaughter of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, his daughter Yolanda Renee King.
In a piping, exhilarating tone, Ms. King charmed the crowd with a passionate assessment of her generation’s power. “Some of you may remember that two years ago at the March for our Lives, I said, ‘Spread the word, have YOU heard, all across the nation, we are going to be a great generation! That was in 2018. I didn’t know what would hit us in 2020, and shut our schools and put our young lives on hold. But great challenges produce great leaders!”
She added, “We have mastered the selfie and TikTok, and now we must master ourselves.”
For some people, the march was an opportunity for reflection, a teachable moment, or motivation to take a stand. Many who couldn’t attend the march found ways to contribute to the groundswell of energy to challenge racial injustice in the United States.
Shortly after George Floyd’s death, J.C. Sager, from Flourtown, Pennsylvania, co-organized the “Shade for Change” Go Fund Me campaign, which provided 2,000 black umbrellas that were distributed at Friday’s march to help shield participants from the August sun. Sager, a father of three boys under the age of five, says watching the video of George Floyd’s murder was a defining moment.
“I was raised a privileged white boy in suburban Philadelphia, and even though I have a good friend from childhood who’s Black, I wasn’t prepared for how hard that video hit me,” he says. “I was horrified. I saw my three sons under that officer’s knee, and that did something to me, to my heart, and it will never sit right. I don’t understand why more white people can’t consider their own son that way, or their daughter, like in Breonna Taylor’s case.”
During George Floyd’s memorial in June, Sager says he idea to raise funds for umbrellas came to him.
“I remembered reading about how umbrellas were used as social-distancing tools in protests in other countries,” Sager says. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to see these black umbrellas during a rally where “Black Lives Matter” was being emphasized?’
Sager reached out to his cousin Allison McGill-Higgins to help plan the fundraiser. McGill Higgins, who is African American and immunocompromised, couldn’t attend the march due to the risk of COVID-19. Sager says he’s proud to say he’s from a bi-racial family, and says “Black Lives Matter” reminds him of the need to get to know people from different backgrounds.
“It’s extremely important, to grow as a person, to know people who don’t look like you … opens up so many horizons and helps you to look at life through a different lens.”
His work on the “Shade for Change” project also guides Sager’s efforts to raise his boys. “I can’t look them in the eye and know that I did nothing to try and send some positivity out there in the world and to support Black voices and to use my privilege for good. “
When more than 250,000 people converged on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., 57 years ago, there was no social media footprint, no cell phone cameras, no viral organizing or rideshare apps to facilitate the gathering.
Veteran Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch covered the 1963 March as a 19-year-old journalism intern at Monmouth College. She had talked her way into the assignment at a local newspaper, the Perth Amboy Evening News, and onto a bus reserved for the journey by the local chapter of the NAACP. The trip resulted in her first front-page story and led to a stellar career as a courts reporter, covering trials that included some of the most racially volatile in America’s history: Angela Davis, O.J. Simpson, and Michael Jackson, to name a few.
Deutsch, who retired in 2014, spent part of the last week in August talking with friends in Kenosha, Wisconsin, about Jacob Blake, the Kenosha man who was shot seven times in the back by a police officer during an arrest. She thinks the hope and enthusiasm that guided marchers 57 years ago seems in short supply today.
“I wish I could be more optimistic, but it’s such a difficult time,” she says. “I haven’t felt this way since after the Rodney King verdict. I knew that this not guilty verdict in this white, suburban bedroom community would lead to unrest, and one of my colleagues turned to me after it was read and said, Well, I guess we have to go cover the riots now.”
But many speakers and participants at the “Get Your Knee off Our Necks” gathering said they’re counting on the same results for their effort that attendees of the 1963 march experienced. That activism yielded an epic shift in the American Civil Rights movement, culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 2020, march speakers highlighted the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a reform measure passed by the House of Representatives but awaiting a vote in the Senate. They also called for a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act 2020, which seeks to restore some of the voter protections that were stripped from the 1965 Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court in 2013.
Yet, in a fractured and traumatized nation, many people believe there’s still a chance to move toward Dr. King’s vision of a just and equitable America—despite the challenges. They are willing to work for it. (Hear from those who marched for racial justice after the death of George Floyd.)
“I don’t want my grandson to have to march for the same thing my grandfather marched for,” says Frank “Nitty” Sensabaugh, who led a group of marchers who walked 750 miles from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Washington, D.C.
The 24-day journey was not without trial. Supporters cooked food and provided monetary donations to offset hotel costs. But after a few days of peaceful walking, the group was met with resistance in Ohio and Indiana. Indiana State Police arrested Sensabaugh and co-organizer Tory Lowe because, according to police, they were blocking traffic. The group also faced racial slurs and even gunfire as they progressed toward Washington, D.C. The mixed reaction to the journey was exactly what organizers of the walk had hoped to illuminate, Sensabaugh says, a tale of two Americas, needing to unite as one.
For many, the 2020 Commitment March was an affirmation of Black lives.
“One of the main things we want to gain is the full representation of how many people are here,” said Ma’isah Malsuf, who traveled to D.C. from Chicago. “If you can have so many people come in one space during a time that’s so uncertain and risky, it solidifies that people are concerned about the direction of the country.”
As written by Joan E Greve Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tens of thousands join Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march in Washington DC; “Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC on Friday, demanding criminal justice reform and voting rights following a summer of protests against systemic racism and against police treatment of Black people.
The Get Your Knee Off Our Necks march, announced in early June following the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, also marks the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I have a dream” speech urging racial equality.
Thousands gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, many wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts, as speakers demanded racial equality and an end to police brutality in the US.
“We get less healthcare, like we don’t matter,” said the civil rights leader the Rev Al Sharpton, whose National Action Network organization was one of the event organizers.
“We go to jail longer for the same crime like we don’t matter. We get poverty, unemployment, double the others, like we don’t matter.
“We’re treated with disrespect by policemen that we pay their salaries like we don’t matter. So we figured we’d let you know, whether we tall or short, fat or skinny, light skinned or dark skinned, black lives matter.
“And we won’t stop until it matters to everybody.”
King’s son, Martin Luther King III, was among those to speak, telling the crowd they must “defend the freedoms that earlier generations worked so hard to win”.
Friday’s event comes ahead of a November election expected to see a record number of mail-in ballots, and with a Republican party seemingly opposed to making it easier to vote.
Donald Trump has admitted he is blocking money sought by Democrats for the postal service so he could stop people voting by mail.
“Our voting rights are under attack,” King said.
“We must vigorously defend our right to vote because those rights were paid for with the blood of those lynched for seeking to exercise their constitutional rights.”
The Democrat-controlled house of representatives has passed legislation making voting more accessible in 2019, and recently renamed the bill the John R Lewis voting rights act. The Republican controlled Senate has refused to act on the legislation.
Organized by the civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and groups including the NAACP and the National Urban League, the speakers at Friday’s rally also highlighted police brutality and the need for reform.
The Washington march comes days after Jacob Blake became the latest in a series of Black people to suffer brutal treatment at the hands of police.
Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Sunday, and remains in hospital. His family said on Tuesday that Blake had been paralyzed from the waist down.
Speaking on Friday, Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr, said: “There are two systems of justice in the United States. There is a Black system and a white system and the Black system isn’t doing so well. I’m tired of looking at cameras and seeing these young black and brown people suffer.”
Blake’s sister, Letetra Widman, said Black people were done “catering to your delusions”.
“America, your reality is not real,” Widman said. “We will not pretend. We will not be your docile slave. We will not be a footstool to oppression.”
Widman also called on protesters to continue to march peacefully. “You must fight, but not with violence and chaos – with self-love,” Widman said. She called out loudly: “Black men, stand up. Stand up, Black men, and educate yourselves.”
Among those expected to participate in Washington are the families of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, all Black people killed by police or by individuals on the extremist fringes who regarded themselves as vigilantes.
The march was organized amid protests over the killing of Floyd.
The 46-year-old died after a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, including the final two minutes when Floyd was unconscious.
“The reason why George Floyd laying there with that knee on his neck resonated with so many African-Americans is because we have all had a knee on our neck,” Sharpton told USA Today.
The march was set to be the largest political gathering in Washington since the coronavirus outbreak began to escalate in March.
The thousands of participants streaming in for the march on Friday morning stood in lines that stretched for several blocks, the Associated Press reported, as organizers insisted on taking temperatures as part of coronavirus protocols.
Organizers reminded attendees to practice social distancing and wear masks throughout the program.
The march will be matched by demonstrations in states which have a high Covid risk, NAN said, including in Montgomery, Alabama and Las Vegas, Nevada.
The NAACP is hosting a “virtual march” throughout the day.
Speakers will include the New Jersey senator Cory Booker, congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, from Michigan, and Stacey Abrams.
A group of protesters are due at the march who have walked all the way from Milwaukee to the nation’s capital for the event.”
As written by Charles Kaiser in The Guardian, in an article entitled March on Washington: the day MLK – and Dylan and Baez – made hope and history rhyme; “One hundred years after the civil war, the treatment of African Americans persisted as a gaping wound in the purported land of the free. Then, suddenly in the 1960s, the bleeding from lynchings, bombings, beatings and shootings finally had a seismic effect. It galvanized the noble group who made the 60s so electric: the nimble, passionate and utterly fearless Black and white citizens who banded together to rescue America’s soul.
By 1963, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr had become the leader of the first generation since the abolitionists who truly believed they had the power to heal the nation. Since founding his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King had worked tirelessly to fulfill its mission: “To save the soul of America.”
King turned 28 the week after he founded the SCLC. More successfully than anyone since Abraham Lincoln, this Baptist preacher united millions of Black and white Americans in a cause of moral righteousness. They were drawn to his brain, to his soul, to his deep baritone and to his bearing. The novelist Jose Yglesias noted that “King laughed with his whole body, like a man who trusts his feelings”.
His Gandhi-inspired choice of weapons put him on an unassailable moral plane. In a nation drenched in violence, he ordered his foot soldiers to fight with nothing but courage, intelligence and decency. In spring 1963, the world recoiled at the cost of that bravery, when the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than 1,000 non-violent protesters.
When the white establishment of Birmingham gave in and agreed to remove “whites only” signs on restrooms and drinking fountains and to desegregate lunch counters, white terrorists bombed the hotel room where King and his aides had been staying and the house of his brother, Alfred. Miraculously, none were injured.
A few weeks later, civil rights leaders were meeting John Kennedy at the White House when he said, “Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else.” At first they were shocked. Then they thought it was joke. Then they realized it was true. Nearly universal revulsion to Connor’s tactics was a big factor in finally pushing Kennedy go on television, in June, to propose a civil rights act, and to deliver probably the greatest speech of his life.
Echoing King, Kennedy declared: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free … Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.”
King was exhilarated. He told the president he had given “one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any president”. And yet even after that speech, Kennedy was so nervous that Congress would respond the wrong way to a massive demonstration in the capital, it took another five weeks before he publicly endorsed the March on Washington, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate today.
Courtland Cox, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key organizer of the March, recalled a day now remembered almost exclusively for the soaring words of King’s “I have a dream” speech but also a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.
A month before, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter registration rally.
“It wasn’t just a concert,” said Cox. “It was a community event.”
Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers just a few weeks earlier. That was also one of the songs Dylan sang before 250,000 people in Washington. When Lena Horne was introduced, she uttered a single word: “Freedom.”
Seeger had performed the most important musical pollination of all, when in 1957 King visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training camp for civil rights workers. When Seeger sang We Shall Overcome, it was the first time King heard it. He fell in love with it. In Washington, it was sung by the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel – and nearly everyone in the audience.
Cox had spent years registering voters in places where “if we got caught we would be shot. Alabama was the most dangerous. In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite. I thought your chances were better with a bullet than dynamite.
“I’m not sure how you can really express it. During the most stressful things the music would be the wind beneath your wings. It’s one thing singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas. It’s sung in a way that maintains your determination. The music had advocacy.”
Peter Goldman wrote all the most important Newsweek stories about civil rights. So he traveled to Washington for the march.
He said: “During the mid day break between the mostly entertainment morning sessions and the afternoon speechifying session, some of the musicians were hanging out in the rotunda of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing there and Joan Baez walks up behind Bob Dylan and pats him on the butt. ‘Let’s sing, Bobby,’ she said. So the two of them start on a Dylan song. They were joined by Peter and Mary – Paul was elsewhere. They went on for about an hour. Folk songs, freedom songs. Dylan songs.”
How big was the audience?
“Me. It was one of my luckier days.”
In his superb memoir, Chasing History, the great reporter Carl Bernstein writes that the Washington Star deployed more than 60 reporters, installed 10 special telephones up and down the mall, and even commandeered a helicopter to fly film to the newsroom. And yet, somehow, the lead stories in both the Star and the Washington Post failed to mention the main event: King’s extraordinary speech.
James Reston, the celebrated New York Times Washington bureau chief, did not make the same mistake. In a front-page analysis, he wrote that King “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else.
“He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”
Bernstein felt the same way.
“For me, listening to Dr King’s speech, with its emotive power, and witnessing the sheer numbers of Black and white people marching together, I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime – the ‘someday’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.”
I have a dream – Martin Luther King and the 1963 March on Washington
Joan Baez performs “We Shall Overcome” at the March on Washington
Bob Dylan – Only A Pawn In Their Game (March On Washington 1963)
The March On Washington: The Spirit Of The Day/ Time
How Martin Luther King Went Off Script in ‘I Have a Dream’, by Clarence B. Jones, MLK’s speechwriter and advisor/ Wall Street Journal
Al Sharpton on 60 years since the civil rights march on Washington
Presented by Jonathan Freedland, with Al Sharpton, produced by Danielle Stephens, and the executive producer is Maz Ebtehaj
This week, Jonathan Freedland sits down with Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life
Torch of Liberty 