On this day we remember the weaponization of faith in service to power as authorization of the use of state terror and repression of dissent against the Black Lives Matter protests of racial justice. In this obscene subversion of the message of the brotherhood of men and our duty of care for each other of the Sermon on the Mount, so beautifully written of by Tolstoy, Traitor Trump aped the gestural and rhetorical performance of his model Adolf Hitler as he often does, whose newsreels he studied for years as he sleeps with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible. This is the true faith of Trump, and his vision of a future for us all.
Let us remember, and bring a Reckoning; but we must remember also that Trump exploited but did not originate the weaponization of faith as authorization and legitimation of theocratic tyranny, white supremacist terror, and patriarchal sexual terror. This special form of totalitarianism is as old as the first city-states founded on mass slave agriculture and conquest as slave raiding, the first priest-kings who spoke for the gods and the first police enforcers who kept the slaves at their work. There is always someone in a gold robe who cons and bullies others into doing the hard and dirty work which creates his wealth and power. This we must resist and change.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of June 2 2020, The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic; As the world is gripped by images of Trump’s expulsion of the priests from the church and brutal repression of protestors against racist violence, of his photo op holding a Bible while invoking the use of the military against citizens to silence dissent and bolster his failing regime of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and authoritarian state force and control, I believe it is time to consider the relative merits of our Clown of Terror’s performance of the role of the Great Dictator as compared to its originator, Charlie Chaplin.
To this end I recommend Robert Coover’s 1968 satire The Cat in the Hat for President, written originally about Nixon and republished as A Political Fable, and the luminous and feral 1933 novel on which Trump has modeled his revised Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud.
Let us mock and deflate all such absurd monsters who would enslave us.
As written in the Charlie Chaplin website; “The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first film with dialogue. Chaplin plays both a little Jewish barber, living in the ghetto, and Hynkel, the dictator ruler of Tomainia. In his autobiography Chaplin quotes himself as having said: “One doesn’t have to be a Jew to be anti Nazi. All one has to be is a normal decent human being.”
Chaplin and Hitler were born within a week of one another. “There was something uncanny in the resemblance between the Little Tramp and Adolf Hitler, representing opposite poles of humanity, ” writes Chaplin biographer David Robinson, reproducing an unsigned article from The Spectator dated 21st April 1939; “Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other….Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society. (…) Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the “little man” in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.”
“Chaplin spent many months drafting and re-writing the speech for the end of the film, a call for peace from the barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel. Many people criticized the speech, and thought it was superfluous to the film. Others found it uplifting. Regrettably Chaplin’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1940.”
Transcript of Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator:
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost….
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
As the notorious St John’s Church incident is described in The Washington Post in an article entitled Trump’s use of the Bible was obscene. He should try reading the words inside it., written by Rev. William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove; “On Monday evening, federal authorities used tear gas to clear Lafayette Square so President Trump could pose for a photo while holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. It wasn’t the first time Trump has used the word of God as a political prop. But it was obscene, even for him.
Though Trump answered ambiguously when asked if the volume he was holding was his Bible, it appeared to be the Revised Standard Version of the text that he has used to signal to his Christian nationalist followers before.
According to David Brody and Scott Lamb’s unironic “spiritual biography,” “The Faith of Donald Trump,” the Revised Standard Version was a gift from Trump’s mother, Mary Anne, on the occasion of his graduation from Sunday Church Primary School at the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has publicly claimed that the Bible is “very special” to him, using it frequently to authenticate his faith among what he calls “the evangelicals.” When he took the oath of office at his inauguration, Trump placed that Bible on top of the Abraham Lincoln Bible from the Library of Congress.
Though Trump has said little more about this Bible publicly, charismatic television preachers such as his faith adviser, Paula White-Cain, have developed a mythos around it. According to the version of the story these preachers often recite in sermons, this Bible was sent to Trump’s mother by two aunts in Scotland who were instrumental prayer warriors in an early-20th-century revival there. Among so-called Christian nationalists who believe that America has strayed from its traditional values and must be redeemed by “Christian” leadership, this Bible has become a sort of talisman to convey spiritual authority to an unlikely “chosen one.”
Whether Trump believes any of this, millions of Christian nationalists do. For them, a picture of Trump with what appears to be his great aunts’ Bible in front of a beleaguered church is worth a thousand words of reassurance.
But for those of us who study and preach the Bible’s text, that Christian nationalism is an offense. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, tweeted on Monday evening that the president had “used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.” While that is true, we find it even more outrageous that Trump and the religious extremists he appeals to have turned Christian faith against itself.
As preachers in the South, one black and one white, we are painfully aware of the ways Christian faith has been used to justify slavery, white supremacy, legal segregation, corporate exploitation, the dominance of women and the dehumanization of LGBTQ people. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
Millions of Christians and other people of faith see and acknowledge this difference.
We read the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “Woe unto those who legislate evil … make women and children their prey,” and we know it is a challenge to this administration and any political leadership that neglects its responsibility to care for the poor and most vulnerable in our society.
We read the prophet Jeremiah crying out against those who say, “‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.” We hear it as a call to listen to the grief of Americans who are not only weary of racialized police violence but also of a pandemic that has fallen disproportionately on black, brown and poor communities who are often asked to do what the essential work of food preparation, sanitation and bodily care.
We read Jesus saying, “Woe unto you … hypocrites … you have neglected the weightier matters of the law,” and we know that, at the very heart of our faith, we are called to challenge those who try to twist belief to use it for their own ends.
The Bible as a talisman has real political power. But we believe the words inside the book are more powerful. If we unite across lines of race, creed and culture to stand together on the moral vision of love, justice and truth that was proclaimed by Jesus and the prophets, we have the capacity to reclaim the heart of this democracy and work together for a more perfect union.
To do that, we need to read the Bible and live it, not wave it for the cameras.”
On May 31 in 1921 America’s Black Wall Street was totally destroyed in a single night of terror by their white neighbors in Tulsa Oklahoma through massive and organized ground and aerial attack, because a black man stepped on a white woman’s foot in an elevator.
This was our Kristallnacht, and it must never happen again.
We must redress the inequalities and injustices of racism, and to reply to white supremacist terror and to fascism with this simple message; Never Again.
Six years ago tomorrow, some fifteen thousand people of Spokane Washington who feel as I do on this issue marched in support of racial justice and equality under the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter, though there is no chapter of this organization in our city. It was a model nonviolent protest and communal grieving, which began with Chief of Police Meidl praying with the protestors and was notable for the police officers who knelt in solidarity with the people, heroic and remarkable acts welcomed with waves of sudden bursts of tears among the crowd. For this brief and glorious moment, the dream of America as a band of brothers and a free society of equals was realized; we were one people.
But when those who had gathered in peace, love, and mutual support to forge a better future had shared their trauma and gone home, several hundred white supremacist terrorists who had infiltrated the crowd remained and began a rampage of pillage and destruction through the business district, as they have in all the major riots across America the week before.
This was an extremely sophisticated and logistically massive and well funded campaign of provocation and disinformation which bears the signatures of centralized command, intelligence, and communications, the design of which reveals its true purposes and intentions; to discredit the movement for racial justice, to provoke and justify state repression, and to incite a race war which will overthrow our democracy and result in a white ethnostate. Trump saw in this an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers, and had been conspiring with and using white supremacists as deniable forces throughout his regime of fascist criminality and terrorism.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump and his foreign puppetmasters and propaganda machine have called Antifa a terrorist group and attempted to shift the guilt for the mayhem and property destruction of their own organized white supremacists who in capturing the narrative of a peaceful protest movement which seeks constructive change enact the sabotage of democratic process. None of these goals align with those of Antifascists.
It is in the interest of all loyal Americans to defend each other and our democracy as the embodiment of our principles and ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
To be an American patriot is to be an Antifascist and an antiracist. We hold that all human beings are created equal; those who do not are enemies of Liberty and of our nation.
This I say to all serving and former members of the United States Armed Forces and their families and loved ones, and to all others who have sworn oaths of public service to protect and defend both our universal human rights and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens; if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
So say I as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine.
Let us stand together as a nation and as a humankind united in a free society of equals as guarantors of each other’s rights of life and liberty. Not subjugated by division and hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, not obedient with learned helplessness and terror, not falsified with rewritten histories, silence, erasure, authorized identities, and the alternate universes of propaganda and lunatic conspiracy theories nor of faith weaponized in service to power, but as the Band of Brothers, sisters, and others which is the dream of America and the hope of humankind.
Writing in Jacobin, Robert Greene II has called May of 2020 the Red Spring and likened it to the Red Summer of 1919, in which a brutal campaign of racist violence and the annihilation of Black communities swept America. Certainly the murders and other violent crimes against Black people which have ignited rage and chaos throughout our nation that historic spring have a long and terrible history, of which the Tulsa Massacre remains an enduring symbol.
To this there can be but one reply; Never Again.
Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Scott Ellsworth, John Hope Franklin (Foreword)
I find it interesting that the myth of the Flower Maiden, Blodeuwedd, as given in the Mabinogion presents a dual sided story which negotiates the boundaries and interfaces between patriarchal and matriarchal cultures, originating from the initial contact between Roman and Celtic civilizations.
She is the villain of the tale in one version, who plays the roles of both wives of Adam in turn, Eve and Lilith, transforming under imposed conditions of struggle from an exploited innocent as the Flower Maiden into the Owl of Wisdom, seductress and figure of death specifically as a negation of motherhood; but it can also be read as a manual of liberation struggle wherein she frees herself from ownership and control by men.
In this sense she is a female hero on a journey to selfhood, from a naif to a warrior as a free and independent being, themes of agency and empowerment predominating the narrative. Or, a cautionary tale against attempts to break free from patriarchal subjugation and forces of oppression.
In the myth of the dual aspected goddess who is both Flower Maiden and the Owl of Wisdom, we find a girls’ rite of passage to womanhood as seizure of power.
Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
As described in the World Mythos site; “Blodeuwedd is a fascinating figure in Welsh mythology, known for her beauty and tragic story. She appears in the Mabinogi, a collection of medieval Welsh tales. The name Blodeuwedd translates to “flower face,” which reflects her creation from blossoms and her connection to nature. Her tale is intertwined with themes of love, betrayal, and transformation, making her one of the most intriguing characters in Welsh lore. This article will explore her story, significance, and the various interpretations of her character throughout history.
The Origin of Blodeuwedd
Blodeuwedd’s origin is quite unique. She was created by the wizard Gwydion and his brother Math to be the wife of Lludd, a man who was cursed to never have a human wife. Gwydion used a combination of oak, meadow-sweet, and broom to form her. This magical creation signifies her deep connection to nature, as she is literally made from the earth’s beauty. The act of creating Blodeuwedd from flowers symbolizes purity and the enchanting aspects of femininity. However, her creation also sets the stage for her tragic fate.
Gwydion’s intention was to give Lludd a companion who would be both beautiful and devoted. However, Blodeuwedd’s life takes a dramatic turn when she falls in love with Gronw Pebr, a warrior. This love affair leads to a series of events that unravel the lives of all the characters involved. The choice to create Blodeuwedd reflects not only the power of magic in Welsh mythology but also the complexities of love and desire.
The Love Story of Blodeuwedd
Blodeuwedd’s love for Gronw Pebr is central to her narrative. Despite being created for Lludd, she finds herself drawn to Gronw, who represents a different kind of passion and freedom. Their relationship develops in secrecy, highlighting the theme of forbidden love. They meet in the woods, away from the prying eyes of the world, where they can express their feelings without restraint. This part of the story emphasizes the idea that love can often be at odds with societal expectations and duties.
As their love grows, Blodeuwedd becomes increasingly aware of the consequences of her actions. The tension builds as she must navigate her feelings for Gronw while being married to Lludd. This conflict illustrates the struggle between personal desire and social obligation. In Welsh culture, where loyalty and honor are paramount, Blodeuwedd’s choices reflect the complexities of human emotions and the often-painful decisions individuals must make.
The Betrayal
The climax of Blodeuwedd’s story is marked by her betrayal of Lludd. When Lludd learns of the affair, he is devastated. The betrayal is not just personal; it signifies a deeper commentary on trust and loyalty in relationships. Blodeuwedd’s actions lead to a tragic confrontation that ultimately seals her fate. This betrayal is a pivotal moment in the story, showcasing how love can lead to destructive choices and unforeseen consequences.
In a fit of rage, Lludd seeks revenge on Blodeuwedd and Gronw. He challenges Gronw to a duel, which ends in Gronw’s death. This act of vengeance adds another layer to the narrative, highlighting the cycle of love and revenge. Blodeuwedd, once a figure of beauty and purity, is now caught in a web of violence and sorrow. This transformation underscores the darker aspects of love and the tragic outcomes that can arise from betrayal.
The Transformation of Blodeuwedd
After the events of betrayal and death, Blodeuwedd’s fate takes a dramatic turn. Gwydion, feeling responsible for her creation and the ensuing chaos, decides to intervene. He transforms Blodeuwedd into an owl, a creature often associated with wisdom but also with darkness and loneliness. This transformation serves as both punishment and liberation. As an owl, she is free from the constraints of her former life, but she also loses her human form and the joys that come with it.
The symbolism of the owl is significant in this context. Owls are often seen as omens or messengers in various cultures, and Blodeuwedd’s transformation can be interpreted as a warning about the consequences of one’s choices. It also reflects the duality of her character—she is both a victim of her circumstances and a participant in her tragic story. This transformation highlights the themes of identity and change, which are central to many myths and legends.
The Legacy of Blodeuwedd
Blodeuwedd’s story has left a lasting impact on Welsh culture and mythology. Her tale is often revisited in literature, art, and modern adaptations. Many view her as a symbol of female empowerment and resilience. Despite the tragic nature of her story, Blodeuwedd’s journey resonates with themes of autonomy and the struggle against societal norms. She embodies the complexity of women’s roles in mythology and the challenges they face in asserting their identities.
In contemporary discussions, Blodeuwedd is often reinterpreted through feminist lenses, examining her actions and motivations in a new light. Scholars and artists alike explore her character, questioning the implications of her creation and transformation. This ongoing dialogue illustrates how myths can evolve and remain relevant across generations, allowing new interpretations to emerge.
Modern Interpretations
In recent years, Blodeuwedd has been the subject of various adaptations in literature and theater. Writers have taken her story and reimagined it, providing fresh perspectives on her character and experiences. Some portray her as a tragic heroine, while others emphasize her agency and strength. This diversity of interpretations reflects the multifaceted nature of her character and the enduring relevance of her story.
In literature, authors have used Blodeuwedd as a symbol of female strength and independence.
In theater, adaptations often highlight the emotional depth of her relationships and the consequences of her choices.
Artistic representations of Blodeuwedd frequently focus on her connection to nature and her transformation into an owl.
These modern interpretations allow audiences to engage with Blodeuwedd’s story in meaningful ways. They encourage discussions about the roles of women in mythology and the lessons that can be learned from ancient tales. By reexamining Blodeuwedd’s narrative, contemporary creators are able to connect with timeless themes that resonate with today’s society.
Blodeuwedd in Popular Culture
Blodeuwedd’s influence extends beyond traditional mythology into popular culture. Her story has inspired various forms of media, including films, music, and visual art. Artists often draw on her character to explore themes of love, betrayal, and transformation. These adaptations can range from direct retellings of her tale to more abstract interpretations that capture her essence.
In music, some artists have composed songs that evoke the emotions and themes present in Blodeuwedd’s story. These songs often highlight the duality of her character—the beauty and tragedy of her life. Similarly, visual artists may depict her in ways that emphasize her connection to nature, showcasing her as a powerful and complex figure.
Conclusion: The Enduring Nature of Blodeuwedd’s Story
Blodeuwedd’s tale is a testament to the power of mythology and its ability to reflect human experiences. Her story encompasses themes of love, betrayal, and transformation, making it a rich subject for exploration. As a character, she continues to resonate with audiences, prompting discussions about identity, agency, and the consequences of choices. The legacy of Blodeuwedd endures, ensuring that her story will be told and retold for generations to come. “
My May 2026 album of photos from our gardens at Dollhouse Park; May begins with lilacs and ends with roses, with clematis, irises, and columbines minding the gaps. And at the heart of May is our Scarlet Hawthorn in her glory, playing the compound roles of Jessica Rabbit the torch singer in red who seizes for her own the strategies of her subjugation and deploys them against her patriarchal oppressors, and of Shirley MacLaine’s outrageous and independent grand dame character Martha Levinson in Downtown Abbey who rises above them in sovereign grandeur. Exactly like my partner Dolly, or the Flower Maiden-Owl of Wisdom archetype.
Jessica Rabbit sings Why Don`t You Do Right, Who Framed Roger Rabbit
March 22 2025 Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park
Among the many horrific incidents of capitalist state terror and police crimes against humanity designed to repress dissent and break the power of organized labor, the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 remains an example of the principle of witness as articulated by the heroine of the telenovela series Wednesday; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
Along with the falsification of rewritten histories as authorized identity is the terror of silence and erasure as a system of control and repression of dissent.
The idea of witness, crucial in Elie Wiesel’s ars poetica and ideology as argued in his famous speech Silence is Complicity, here combines with Michel Foucault’s dialectics in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia to form a praxis of democracy as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
As I wrote in my post of December 24 2022, Nevermore A Silent Night, For Silence Is Complicity; Tis the night before Christmas, a liminal time throughout the diaspora of our civilization which was reshaped historically by Paul’s reimagination of classical mystery faiths and Judaism as they collided and transformed each other, a night of magic, the redemptive and totalizing power of love, the rapture and terror of dreams and the power of wishes to redefine us and our possibilities of becoming human.
Clustered in dense layers around this time are rituals and symbols whose roots in our collective psyche are ancient and powerful, among them the family singing of Silent Night, a carol of great beauty composed in 1818 and made a universal cultural heritage by Bing Crosby’s recording in 1935. Its primary meaning remains the same; while the world sleeps, we are recreated anew and reborn with the dawn, to a new life wherein all things are possible. Choose wisely what you wish for, and who you wish to become.
As Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Tonight I write to you not of the freedom and autonomy conferred by such acts of self-creation, nor of poetic vision as a sacred path in pursuit of Truth or of Orphic dream navigation as an art of transformative change, but of the art of making wishes itself. For wishes are a form of what Foucault called truth telling, though he wrote in the context of the witness of history and the Four Primary Duties of A Citizen to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. In wishes we speak the truth of ourselves, and shape our lives into an unfolding of our intentions as we have named and so created them, naming, defining, and claiming ourselves as Adam named the beasts. Wishes are a performance of our best selves, and of the truths we have chosen to become and embody; truths written in our flesh.
Herein the key and most precious and unique human act is to perform and make your dreams real.
We must never allow truths to be silenced, nor our souls stolen by those who would enslave us. True faith is living your truth; this sometimes means resistance to falsification and authorized identities as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, but it always means living authentically and on your own terms, for only you can discover your own best self, and in this you are the only authority and the sole arbiter of choices and decisions, and of human being, meaning, and value.
In the arena of struggle between truth telling and the complicity of silence, I wish for us all Nevermore a Silent Night, for silence is complicity.
To silence in the face of evil there can be but one reply: Never Again.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few?
Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
As written by Carol Quirke in Workplace Fairness, in an article entitled The Memorial Day Massacre: A Lost Piece of History; “You would think that, having been raised a mile from where 10 workers were killed and 30 more were shot by police while picketing a steel plant, I would have heard of such a tragedy. More confounding, my great-uncle, Eddie Marasovic, was wounded by a police bullet in that violent affair that would become known as a massacre.
Yet I knew nothing of it.
It happened in May, 1937, before I was born, on the prairie outside the Republic Steel plant on Chicago’s East Side. This spit of land, along Lake Michigan’s southern tip, linked the steel plants of southern Chicago to a long string of industry that reached through Indiana, giving rise to what labor economists called the largest steel producing region in the world.
Why did I only learn about the killing of workers from a poster of the massacre that I found in a bookstore, in a city located two states away, nearly half a century after the event transpired?
The Memorial Day Massacre, as many refer to it, was largely repressed by many in the community where it occurred.
In the late 1990s when I began researching it, scholars had also neglected the tragedy for decades. Greg Mitchell’s new PBS film and book, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, explore how vital evidence — a Paramount newsreel — helped union leaders and civil libertarians turn the tide against the extreme pro-police news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the killings.
A single newsreel cameraman, Orlando Lippert of Paramount News, captured the tragedy on film. Lippert’s footage, suppressed by Paramount until a congressional committee under progressive Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. (D-Wisc.) screened it, showed police firing at protesters, striking 40 of them, the vast majority in the back or on the side.
The newsreel provided vital proof of corporate and state violence against working Americans.
How had events transpired as they did?
Tensions had been ratcheting up for months ahead of the tragedy. In 1935, the new Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), under the leadership of United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, organized industrial labor, unskilled workers flexed their muscle. And, in late 1936, workers set off the sit-down craze, initiating hundreds of strikes from late November 1936 through the spring of 1937.
Lewis’s CIO achieved an agreement with U.S. Steel, the largest producer in the country, but Thomas M. Girdler, the CEO of Republic Steel, and the heads of other smaller steel companies (known as Little Steel), vowed to keep unions out. When workers called a strike at these plants, unionists rallied at Republic Steel. But Chicago police refused to let strikers picket the plant and on May 28, 1937, they viciously beat strikers, including women.
To build community support, workers organized a Memorial Day picnic for families and labor activists on the prairie several blocks from their plant. More than 1,000 people showed up, many in their Sunday best, and then set off on a peaceful march to form a picket line close to the Republic plant.
Police halted them halfway there. Orlando Lippert’s newsreel of events shows men and women gesticulating to police. Seconds later, the film shows workers fleeing. Police run after them, many with guns drawn, and fire upon the crowd. Four workers died of their wounds immediately, and within three weeks, another six had lost their lives. Others were hospitalized due to severe beatings. One boy, age 11, was shot in the foot.
My grandmother’s youngest brother, my great uncle Eddie, was one of those who had been shot. Ironically, though I learned of the massacre in 1983 at the Northern Sun bookstore in Minneapolis, I only discovered our personal connection at a family wedding several years later. My great uncle’s daughter shared the story of her father having been shot that Memorial Day.
In 1996, in the midst of my graduate studies, examining how news photography shaped labor conflict, I interviewed my aunts and uncles to see if I could find out more. They knew nothing of the Memorial Day Massacre. I became fascinated, not only about the events in Chicago, but about the ways in which it had been forgotten.
Only from an oral history that my brother, Michael, conducted with our grandparents did I find out that my grandfather was working in the Republic plant for 17 days before and after the massacre. He was one of the “loyal workers” the company deployed to suggest the strikers did not represent most workers. He was, in effect, a scab. My uncle Eddie, in contrast, stood on the field that day, fighting for the right to a union.
I have few strands of information, hardly more than whispers, of Eddie’s life.
He continued his employment at Republic Steel for nearly four decades. But these are the lone facts I can dredge up. From family, there is little more. Others, notably urban sociologist William Kornblum in his 1975 book Blue Collar Community, have observed that Chicago’s East Siders did not want to discuss the events that so divided their community.
As documentarian George Stoney found in his exploration of Southern millworkers involved in the 1934 general textile strike, being subject to state violence can cause trauma or shame, making workers suspicious and willing to repress their own experiences.
Even the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) refused to honor the massacre’s victims — it took a decade for the union’s newspaper to print the infamous photographs of its members being beaten and shot at by police, even as other union papers and metropolitan dailies published such imagery. In 1937, SWOC was fighting for its right to exist — and it may have feared scaring off membership by highlighting the massacre.
The intransigence of Girdler and the other Little Steel executives soon stymied the union drive. Little Steel only accepted union representation after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1940 that workers deserved compensation for the companies’ illegal actions against them, and as President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced industry to negotiate with unions if they wanted federal defense contracts.
While workers did not obtain contracts immediately, efforts at curtailing labor spies, corporate mercenaries, and police overreaction to labor disputes mostly succeeded. A committee under Sen. La Follette probed the massacre and exposed the buried Paramount footage.
This spotlight upon extralegal violence helped curb it in the future. Documenting and publicizing the surveillance of workers — and the collusion between private “security” forces, police and the National Guard — lmited such practices. The stifling of violence, and federal support for unions along with workers’ ongoing mobilization, ultimately led a third of the nation’s industrial workforce to enjoy union representation by the early 1950s.
It was only in the mid-1990s that I began to deeply research the story of the massacre. By reading the La Follette transcripts, I was able to find traces of my great uncle.
I knew from a second cousin that her father, Eddie Marasovic, had been shot in his leg, and he carried the bullet in his body to the grave. Unexpectedly I encountered his name, in Exhibit #1463: A medical examiner’s sketch of a body, with dots strewn across the drawing, for all the bullets that more than two dozen activists had borne that day. My great-uncle’s name corresponds to the bullet that wounded his leg.
My family had been touched by history, recorded in history, and yet those marks had been lost to me. Repressed, censored or silenced — I am still trying to learn.”
As written by Howard Fast in a witness statement entitled Memorial Day Massacre: It was a day for parades, picnics and boat-rides–and tear-gas, bullets and death; “Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot, humid, and sunny; it was the right kind of day for the parade and the holiday, the kind of a day that takes the soreness out of a Civil War veteran’s back makes him feel like stepping out with the youngsters a quarter his age. It was a day for picnics, for boating, for the beach or a long ride into the country. It was a day when patriotic sentiments could be washed down comfortably with Coca-Cola or a Tom Collins, as you preferred. And there’s no doubt but that a good deal of that holiday feeling was present in the strikers who gathered on the prairie outside and around Republic Steel’s Chicago plant.
Most of the strikers felt good. Tom Girdler, who ran Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands, and word went around that old Tom could do worse than earn an honest living hoeing potatoes. The strike was less than a week old; the strikers had not yet felt the pinch of hunger, and there was a good sense of solidarity everywhere. Because it was such a fine summer day, many of the strikers brought their children out onto the prairie to attend the first big mass meeting; and wherever you looked, you saw two-year-olds and three-year-olds riding pick-a-back on the shoulders of steelworkers. And because it was in the way of being their special occasion as well as a patriotic holiday, the women wore their best and brightest.
In knots and clusters, the younger folks two by two, the older people in family groups, they drifted toward Sam’s place on South Green Bay Avenue. Once, Sam’s place had been a ten-cent-a-dance hall; now it was strike headquarters, which meant, in terms of the strike, just about everything. There, the women had set up their soup kitchen, and there the union strategy board planned the day-to-day work; food was collected at Sam’s place, and pickets used it as their barracks and headquarters.
Today, several thousand people gathered around the improvised platform set up at Sam’s place, to listen to the speakers and to take part in the mass demonstration. How serious an occasion it was, they knew well enough; rumors circulated that the police were going to attempt something special, something out of the run of clubbing and gassing which had marked the strike from the very first day; rumors too that a mass picket line was going to be established today. It was a serious occasion, but somehow something in the day, the holiday, the sunshine and the warm summer weather made the festive air persist. Vendors wheeled wagons of cold pop, and brick ice cream, three flavors in one, was to be had at a nickel a cake.
For the young folks, it was the first strike; they sat under the trees with the girls, grinning at the way the strike committee worked and poured sweat; and the women, cooking inside the hall, reflected, as a hundred generations of women had reflected before, that man’s work is from sun to sun, but women’s work….
A group of girls sang. Strike songs were around, a new turn in the folk literature of the nation. First shyly, hesitantly, then with more vigor, with a rising volume augmented by the deep bass and rich baritone of the men, they sang the deathless tale of Joe Hill, the song-maker and organizer whom the cops had killed; they sang, “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong….” They sand of the nameless IWW worker, tortured into treason, who pleaded, “Comrades, slay me, for the coppers took my soul; close my eyes, good comrades, for I played a traitor’s role.”
The meeting started and came down to business. The chairman was Joe Weber, who represented the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee. Outlining the purpose of the mass meeting, he flung an arm at the Republic plant, a third of a mile down the road. Twenty-five thousand men were on strike; their purpose was to picket peacefully, to win a decent raise in wages so that they might exist like human beings. But there had been constant, brutal provocation by the police. Well, they were gathered here, as was their constitutional right, to protest that interference.
Dozens of strikers had been arrested, beaten, waylaid; strikers’ property, as for example a sound truck, had been smashed and destroyed. Even women had been beaten, dragged off to jail, treated obscenely. The National Labor Relations Act guaranteed them their rights; today they were going to demonstrate in support of those rights.
Other speakers backed up Weber. When the audience cheered some point, the children present gurgled with delight and clapped their hands. As soon as the meeting had finished the strikers and their wives and children began to form their picketline. After all, this was Memorial Day; the thing took on a parade air. Some of the strikers had made their own placards; also, a whole forest of them appeared from inside the union hall, made by committees. The slogans were simple, direct, and non-violent: “REPUBLIC STEEL VIOLATES LABOR DISPUTES ACT.” “WIN WITH THE C.I.O.” “NO FASCISM IN AMERICA.” “REPUBLIC STEEL SHALL SIGN A UNION CONTRACT.”
The signs were handed out, many of them to boys and girls who carried them proudly. At the head of the column that was forming, two men took their place with American flags. The news reporters, who had come up by car only a short while before, were hopping about now, snapping everything. For some reason that has never been analyzed, news photographers and strikers get along very well, even when the photographers come from McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. There was a lot of good-natured give and take. When the column began to march, down the road from Sam’s place first, and then across the prairie toward the Republic Steel plant, the news photographers moved with it, some walking, some by car. This fact later turned into a vital part of American labor history.
Republic Steel stood abrupt out of the flat prairie. Snake-like, the line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first: “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong…”; but then the song died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policement took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed–but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened. It brought to mind how other Americans had faced the uniformed force of so-called law and order so long ago on Lexington Green in 1775; but whereas then the redcoat leader had said, “Disperse, you rebel bastards!” to armed minutemen, now it was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”
About two hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding, striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of holsters.
“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”
The cops said, “You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”
Even if a modern man’s a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol equalizes him with a weakling–and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic, and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing ran like fire through the police.
They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers–at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.
And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.
Now, of course, this brief account might be passed off as a complete exaggeration, as one-sided and so forth–the same arguments might be used that are constantly thrown up whenever it is a case of labor versus capital or labor versus the police. It might be said, as the Chicago Tribune said the next day, that this was the doing of Reds who were plotting to take over the plant, and the police had only done their duty.
But the photographers were on the spot, and everything I have described here and a good deal more was taken down with both newsreel and still cameras. The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel held by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor; and I recommend to the special attention of anyone interested in checking this bit of labor history Exhibit 1418, Exhibit 1414, Exhibit 1351, and the morbid chart of gunshot wounds–in the back–known as Exhibit 1463.
That, in brief–and most brief, since the space here is limited–is a summary of what happened in Chicago on May 30, 1937. These events, which came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre, shook the nation as did few other acts of anti-labor violence since the Haymarket Affair of the 1880’s. Later, the Senate Committee’s investigation highlighted them, and brought home to the American people the full savagery of the police and the men who ran Republic Steel. But then the war washed the memory out for a time, and to understand fully today what happened then in Chicago, certain other facts must be noted.
Let us look at the situation of the steel industry after the worst part of the depression. Taking United States Steel as an example, we find that by 1935 the firm was well on the way over the hump, with a net profit of $6,106,488. Wheels had begun to turn again in America, and the next year’s profit took an enormous jump upwards, a net of $55,501,787 in 1936. Then the graph inclined even more sharply, and in the first three months of 1937 the company recorded a net profit of $28,561,533.
This was big steel. Republic, a light steel industry, was a part of what was known as little steel, and while the profits there were smaller–$4,000,000 in 1935 and $9,500,000 in 1936–they were part of the upward spiral.
It was within this framework of hot furnaces and mounting profits that the C.I.O. began to organize. And as they built their industrial unions, the steel companies built their armed goon squads. It was in 1936 that the C.I.O. began to make real progress in organizing the steel industry, and by the middle of 1937 half a million steelworkers had joined the union. Over 750 union lodges were formed, and by now most of the steel manufacturers had realized that it was a most destructive kind of insanity to fight organizaion. Again, by June 1937, some 125 companies had signed union contracts. Among these firms, which employed 310,000 workers, were Carnegie-Illinois and several other subsidiaries of US Steel.
But the big independents, the Little Steel combine, still held out. Let us name them as they stood on that Memorial Day of 1937. There was Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel, employing 53,000 workers. There was Bethlehem Steel, with 82,000 workers. There was Youngstown Sheet & Tube, with 27,000. Then there were the smaller firms, National Steel, American Rolling Mills and Inland Steel. All together, these firms employed almost 200,000 workers and they accounted for almost forty per cent of the steel produced in America.
They were lined up for a knock-down, drag-out fight; no quarter asked, no quarter given. Tom Girdler was granted nominal leadership; a latter-day “robber baron,” to use Matthew Jospehson’s phrase, he was a natural for such a position, and we shall see later how his tactics led to the Memorial Day Massacre.
But he did not introduce the concept of violence; it was not necessary for him to do so. As far back as 1933 the steel companies were arming themselves for the coming struggle. For example, the following order was shipped to Bethlehem Steel. The invoice entered on the books of Federal Laboratories, and signed by A.G. Bergman, is dated September 30, 1933:
That makes for quite a sizable armament, but Youngstown Sheet and Tube went in for more and deadlier protection against unarmed strikers and their dangerous wives and children. On June 6, 1934, this firm was billed for the following order:
10 1½” cal. riot guns 201, $60 ea.
10 riot gun cases 211, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. long range projectiles, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. short range projectiles, $4.50 ea.
60 M-39 billies, std. barrel no disc, $22.50 ea.
600 M-39 billy cartridges, $1.50 ea.
200 grenades 106M, 10% disc., $12 ea.
These are only two examples of widespread gun-toting by the steel companies. Nor were these the only techniques they used. They hired spies and special agents. They organized goon squads composed of thugs, professional gangsters, and assorted degenerates. They bribed police chiefs and sheriffs.
And under their natural leader, Tom Girdler, they set themselves for violence.
That was part of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre. Another part was Tom Girdler himself, and it is worthwhile to look into that gentelman’s history.
Matthew Josephson’s fine book, The Robber Barons, should be read as background to any study of Tom Girdler. Girdler is a latter-day Morgan, a Jim Fisk, a John D. Rockefeller–but operating at a time when the tactics of these financial pirates were supposed to be outdated and hopeless. Perhaps in some new edition of Josephson’s book, Girdler will be included, along with a few other of his worthy contemporaries, as a sort of appendix.
Girdler is a farm boy, and he likes to think of himself as a part and a little more than a part of the good old log-cabin tradition. He was fond of saying, in those days of steel trouble, that he liked a good rough-and-tumble fight; and he talked tough and tried to look and act tough. But his toughness was the toughness of the rear-echelon general, the armchair two-gun man. It was never his lot to face even a small reflection of the violence he created.
In the 1920’s, Cyrus Eaton, a Middle-Western manipulator, formed Republic out of four small steel companies. Eaton, too, had dreams of becoming an Andrew Carnegie; but his skill did not measure up to his ambition. He tangled with a very hard-boiled customer, Bethlehem Steel, and in the ensuing struggle Republic’s shares fell from 80 to 2. At that time, Girdler was making a very local name for himself in Jones and Laughlin Steel; Eaton pulled him out, promised him an arm and a leg, and told him to save Republic. In that case, anyway, Eaton’s judgment was not at fault, for not only did Tom Girdler save Republic: he turned it into the most up-and-coming steel company in the land–and in doing so, he took just a little more than the arm and leg; he eased Eaton entirely out of the picture.
There is no doubting that Girdler made the most of what he stepped into. Republic was light steel, specializing in steel for furniture, boilers, automobiles, light trains, various types of metal containers. Nor could this kind of production be changed; the plants, too, were specialized. Reluctantly, Girdler worked with what he had. His own fancy was for heavy stuff: girders, plates for warships–the kind of work Bethlehem did. He looked to a future alliance with Bethlehem, but in the meantime he worked with what he had. He hired scientists and picked their brains in the traditional fashion. He forced the development of more and better alloys, until his stainless steel had gained a national reputation.
The plants were old and inefficient, so he began to replace them. Cyclical depression usually winds up with a replacement of fixed capital which has become outdated, and the fact that Girdler’s action was being duplicated all over the nation in the middle thirties set at least a part of the wheels of industry in motion. At this point, Girdler was not too interested in profits; profits could be assured for a later period if he was successful in replacement and in mergers.
He worked for control of Republic by chasing down small holdings of shares wherever he could locate them. He begged proxies. Because his Ohio plants were a good distance from the ore deposits of Minnesota, he planned and executed a merger with Corrigan-McKinney of Cleveland. When this went through he had a lake port to operate from, and a modern steel plant to add to his growing empire. For four years he worked to get proxies and control, until at last he was sitting firmly in the driver’s seat, with plant after plant coming into the growing orbit of Republic. He went after Truscon Steel, the largest fabricator of building-shapes, doors, lockers and window frames in the Middle West, effected a merger, and built up Truscon until it was the largest plant of its kind in the world. All this cost money, and from 1930 to 1935 Republic lost something around $30,000,000. This did not affect Girdler; he drew his income from his own huge salary. He did not own the combine; he merely had control. No single stockholder held more than 6 percent of the total stock, but by 1935 Girdler was so firmly in the saddle that no one could challenge his rule–and since the financial-industrial empire was growing, in spite of some 2,000,000 additional shares of watered stock, no stockholder or group of stockholders made serious efforts to challenge or unseat him.
For all of his drive and his large talk about free enterprise, Girdler demonstrated in action that he not only did not believe in what American business calls “free enterprise,” but that he personally was working night and day to destroy it in the steel industry. His tactics were toward monopoly. He interlocked with Youngstown Sheet and Tube; he interlocked with Jones and Laughlin. He thought and talked combine–and he operated in that direction with a ruthlessness that bowled over his competitors like tenpins.
And when it came to dealing with his 50,000 workers, he chose the same tactics of ruthlessness and direct aggression.
He liked to refer to himself as a worker, but that was an out-and-out fiction; from his very beginnings in the industry, he had been an ally of management, and then, very soon, he became a part of management.
He entered the industry as a salesman for Buffalo Forge. Then he was employed by the Oliver Iron Company. He was an assistant superintendent with Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and he held similar jobs elsewhere. But always it was over labor or apart from labor. It was Tom Girdler getting ahead and using his brains in the best Horatio Alger tradition, while all around him heavy-set, heavy-muscled men by the thousands worked long hours to turn the ore into metal and to shape it, forge it, tool it. One would surmise from his later actions that he had never held anything else but contempt for those who worked with their hands.
He was schooled well for the battles of 1937. Jones and Laughlin’s Aliquippa Works was known as the “Siberia of America.” Their company town was a place where the few brave union organizers who dared to enter faced death, literally, tar and feathers, or some of the more gruesome and less printable fates that goon squads specialize in. The town was also called “Little Hell,” a more descriptive name.
Apparently it was a place that suited Girdler excellently, for in a space of four years he rose from an assistant to president. And after that, he continued to climb steadily on the irreproachable ladder of success. As he climbed, his technique of dealing with the men he employed became progressively more ruthless. When the Memorial Day slaughter occurred, he was earning $130,000 a year. One might consider his statement that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he bargained collectively with his employees as a piece of not too original verbiage. At the same time, he never gave any indication that the dead men and wounded women and children strewn over the Chicago prairie disturbed either his sleep or his equanimity.
Yet it would give a very false picture of the industrial situation in the second half of the third decade to single out Tom Girdler as industry’s bad boy. Nor could the dreadful occurrence of Memorial Day be understood from that point of view. From that point of view alone, the Chicago incident becomes an isolated instance of one man’s callousness–but it was by no means such an isolated instance.
Half a century before, the Haymarket Affair, also in Chicago, became the labor cause célèbre of the nation and the world. The four labor leaders who were then framed and put to death in Chicago became martyrs or devils, according to the reaction of one class or another. But they could not have been so framed and murdered had there not been complete accord on the part of the most powerful forces in American finance. The same accord operated in the case of Girdler and the Chicago bloodshed.
Girdler was the front, the testing ground, the trial balloon of the most reactionary forces in American capitalism. This is not a matter for speculation. Keen economic observers of the time analyzed the situation of Republic Steel in terms of the shareholders as well as the Wall Street moguls.
I pointed out before that Girdler never owned even a tiny fraction of Republic’s stock. The big stockholders in Republic–and among them were some of the most powerful finance blocks in America–willingly allowed him to climb into the saddle and, once there, made no effort to unseat him. It should be historically noted that the Chicago dead did not arouse either the ire or the disgust of these same shareholders. Their attitude was that of smiling behind their palms, and quietly letting Girdler bear the brunt of the storm. Also, Girdler all during that period was responsible to a board of directors. This board represented, in its composition, far-reaching and important interests; but at no point is there any record of their reprimanding Girdler or disagreeing with his action. Other factors can be cited. A handful of key men in Wall Street could have picked up their phones, called Girdler, and called a quick halt to the bloody, senseless battle with labor which he was promoting; they did not, and there is every reason to believe that they silently backed Girdler in his policy.
Following this line of thought, it is interesting to observe the general press reaction to the Memorial Day Massacre. Although brief, the description of events on that day given earlier in this account makes a fairly good picture of what happened in the meadows outside of Republic. Further documentation, hundreds of pages of detailed testimony, is included in the Senate Report, S. Res. 266, 74th Congress, Part 14, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937. Exhibits presented also run into the hundreds. The testimony is explicit; it goes into minutiae, as may be gathered from the following extract, page 4939. John William Lotito, one of the strikers, is being examined by Senator La Follette:
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Did you see Captain Mooney while you stood there in front of the police?
MR. LOTITO: I think Captain Mooney was standing on the side where the other flag was–that is, to my left.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Did you see what he was doing?
MR. LOTITO: Well, he had his hands up like this here. He was talking to the strikers. His lips were moving anyway. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You could not hear what he was saying?
MR. LOTITO: No.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: About how long would you say you stood there?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, maybe five minutes.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Now, tell me exactly, from your own knowledge, what happened at the end of this five-minute period.
MR. LOTITO: At the end of the five-minute period? Well, I was talking to this policeman there, and the first thing I knew I got clubbed, while I was talking to him.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: And then what happened?
MR. LOTITO: I got clubbed and I went down, and my flag fell down, and I went to pick up the flag again, to get up, and I got clubbed the second time. I was like a top, you know, spinning. I was dizzy. So I put my hand to my head, and there was blood all over. I started to crawl away, and half running and half crawling, and I didn’t know what I was doing, to tell you the truth. After I got up, why there was shots, and everything I heard, I didn’t know which way to run. Anyway, I retreated back that way.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You mean back toward Sam’s Place?
MR. LOTITO: And then I got shot in the leg.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: How far away were you from the place where you had been standing talking to the police when you were shot in the leg, would you say?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, I got quite a ways from there, all right.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Can you approximate how far?
MR. LOTITO: Maybe thirty or forty yards away I got.
This is just a page of testimony, chosen at random; there are far more harrowing details that might be listed; but the point is this: all the details necessary are there. They are reports of thousands of eye-witnesses who saw what happened. Newspaper reporters on the scene saw what happened. And if that were not enough, in addition to the still photographers, the Paramount News people took down a detailed photographic record of the whole affair.
In other words, the newspapers knew the facts of the case. They could not plead ignorance, even the carefully conditioned ignorance which allows them to interpret events precisely as they please. With all that, they too acted, with very few exceptions, very much as if they were part of the combine behind Tom Girdler. They lied about what had occurred outside the Republic Steel plant. They lied hugely and in unison, although they departed from the truth on many different levels.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, was overt and completely unabashed. It described the unarmed men and women and children who composed the picket line–none of whom were ever proved to possess a firearm during the march–as “lusting for blood.” It raised a red scare, which was sedulously promoted by the Hearst and the McCormick interests and their fellow hatemongers. The more conservative journals doubted that the police had indulged in provocation and pointed out that force was a necessary ingredient to the preservation of law and order. One looked in vain in such papers as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune for editorials reproaching Tom Girdler, or his private police, even in the mildest terms. No criminal action was ever taken to seek justice for the men who had died in Chicago. Only the few independent newspapers and the labor press kept the issue alive and fought for justice–and there too is a remarkable parallel to what happened before in the Haymarket Affair.
You may wonder how it was that you do not recall seeing the newsreel which so graphically describes all that happened, and which was shown at the La Follette investigation. The following editorial from the New Masses of June 29, 1937, sheds a good deal of light on that:
The reason given by Paramount News for suppressing its newsreel of the Chicago Memorial Day steel-strike massacre is an obvious sham. Audiences trained on the Hollywood school of gangster films are not likely to stage a “riotous demonstration” in the theater upon seeing cops beating people into insensibility, and worse. Against whom would the riot be directed anyway? The Board of Directors or Republic Steel and the Chicago municipal authorities are hardly likely to be found in the immediate vicinity.
The real reason behind the film suppression is its decisive evidence that virtually every newspaper in the country lied, and continues to lie, about the responsibility for violence in the strike areas. The myth that the steel strikers have resorted to violence to gain their just ends is now the basis for the whole campaign of slander and misrepresentation against them. That is why Tom Girdler of Republic Steel refuses to confer with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and that is why 95 per cent of the press carries on a publicity pogrom against the strikers.
Even after the St. Louis Post Dispatch performed a genuine service to the American people in breaking the story of the film (for which, though it is Pulitzer owned, it is very unlikely to get the Pulitzer award), the venal press still continued to blast away at the strikers with the same old legend. Not a comma has been changed in the editorials which, day after day, have defended the steel tycoons on the ground that there can be no compromise with labor violence.
And all this time, the film record exists–and has been described–which would enable the public to make up its own mind on this very crucial point!
At this point, with the added emphasis of the above editorial, we begin to have a very different picture of the Memorial Day Massacre than that which popularly surrounds it. Not that Tom Girdler’s responsibility is lessened, not that the brutality of his agents is mitigated one iota, not that the Chicago police bear any less the responsibility for murder; but the incident in whole becomes broader and more inclusive. We find that far from being an isolated case of managerial violence, it was a focal point for the theory and the technique of reactionary capitalism in the organizational struggles of the thirties. It was a test case; it was symptomatic. Steel is, as was said, the industry of industries, and in 1937 steel was chosen by the entrenched forces of the open shop as the battleground for the open shop–against industrial unionism.
It is the difficult and tedious task of the labor historian to document every statement he makes. There is a good reason for this, of course; the body of knowledge (press, magazines, most books, etc.) presented to the public, both currently and contemporaneously to the times of which he writes, contradicts almost every premise and almost every fact which he brings forth. Only the labor press, which has a limited readership compared to the commercial press, bears him out. This is not the case with other historians. For example, one could start a story about Lincoln with the accepted premise that we was a great and good man; in the case of Eugene Debs, one would first have to document his actions and prove his intentions.
In connection with that, the charge that labor promotes almost all industrial violence cannot be dismissed as a lie; it must be proved to be a lie–and once proved, this small account of the Memorial Day Massacre can be closed. I have shown some of the facts in the arms orders of the steel companies. After our account of what happened in Chicago, it might do to cite the New York Times headline for May 31, 1937:
4 KILLED, 84 HURT AS STRIKERS FIGHT POLICE
IN CHICAGO, STEEL MOB HALTED.
Technically, that is not a lie. Only four men had died then; eventually five more succumbed from wounds. If you called the picket line a mob, then there is no doubt but that it was halted–although some might prefer the word “slaughtered.” And some of the strikers did fight for their lives against the police. But this is pettifogging; the sense and intent of the headline, which very much set the pattern for nonsensational headlines all over the country, is more than apparent for anyone.
Let’s go on with the record. Monroe, Michigan–ten days after Chicago. There is a Republic plant which employs about 1,350 persons. The strike is called; the workers go out, and for two weeks picket lines are maintained in a disciplined fashion. There is absolutely no disorder.
Then, suddenly, there appears on the scene what we know familiarly as “the bloodthirsty mob of strikers,” and the hospital wards are full, and the damage is reckoned in lives as well as thousands of dollars. But the records show that after due deliberation and planning, Police Chief Jesse Fisher swore in enough special police to form a small army–at an expense of $9,000 to the little town. Leonidas McDonald, a Negro C.I.O. organizer, was attacked by a mob and severely beaten. This incident, which members of the mob assured reporters was carefully planned, touched off the riot. Then Chief Fisher ordered his men to attack the picket line. They went to work with tear-gas shells and grenades. The next day, the hospital wards were full, but Chief Fisher, bursting with pride, set about organizing a shotgun brigade of six hundred men.
It had worked in Chicago. Why not Monroe?
Newspapers told us that in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the same pattern of violence was being inaugurated by strikers of the Moltrop Steel Products Company. But George Mike was not a picket and not a striker. He was a crippled war veteran, who stood on a corner in Beaver Falls, selling tickets to a C.I.O. dance. A deputy sheriff leveled his gas gun at him and fired. The shell smashed his skull, and he died the next day. Our newspapers, during the same weeks, described the frightful riot provoked in Youngstown by–not the strikers, but their wives. Women too can be a frightful menace to society, if you only see them in the proper perspective. Many of these women carried their small children on this particular day, and no doubt that added to their potential menace. They were coming home from a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and a few of them paused to rest on an embankment that was a part of Republic’s property. The deputies on guard ordered them off. The women and children responded too slowly, and the deputies helped them along with gas shells. As the women fled, their screams brought men to the scene, and when the men appeared, the deputies switched to repeating rifles.
Result: two dead, thirty injured.
Massillon, July 11, and strikers holding a meeting outside C.I.O. headquarters. Again, the firing starts, and in a little while there are three dead strikers and five more on their way to the hospital. Then C.I.O. headquarters is surrounded, and for an hour lead is poured into the building. And in the building, there is not one firearm.
But the newspapers said, the next day: “STRIKING MOB ATTACKS MASSILLON POLICE.” That was a Middle-Western paper, but most others bore variations of the same.
This sort of record could be continued indefinitely. One labor historian estimates that casualties suffered by the working class in organizational struggles outnumber total casualties suffered by United States Armed Forces in all of this country’s wars up to World War II. Though the violence of Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel was sharp and dramatic, it could be matched by the violence of any one of a hundred other corporations, over a period of half a century.
Some of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre has been presented here. It was shown that the incident itself was both a part and a focal point in the pattern of closed-shop violence. The strange, wild, tragic, and disordered years of the third decade of the twentieth century, here in America, were not unproductive. Out of depression and despair came the greatest organization of labor this country ever knew–the industrial unionism of the CIO. Out of the broad united front against fascism, led by the C.I.O. and other organizations, came the strength and desire to resist Hitlerite Germany and to carry the world through its sharpest crisis.
The America of today is not and cannot ever be the America of a decade ago. History does not stage repeat performances. It is very likely that there will be violence in connection with future strikes; but the American people have learned a good deal. And if such an incident as that in Chicago occurs again, it is wholly possible that those responsible will have to face the anger of millions instead of thousands.”
Presenting “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” Chapter 6: Three Strikes. Dr. Lewis Andreas talks about being at the 1937 Memorial Day massacre and providing medical care during the Depression. Justin McCarthy discusses his job conditions at Ford Assembly Plant prior to the unions implementation. Mike Widman remembers heading up union negotiations and the strike at the Ford Plant in 1940-41. Bob Stinson discusses working at General Motors and how the sit-down strike began. Union songs performed by the Almanac Singers are played throughout the episode.
When Israel speaks to me in my dreams as if the voice of history were that of one human being, it wears not the face of an iconic survivor of the Holocaust and liberator of humankind from the existential threats of tyranny and terror and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which it once may have, but of the character of Martin Chatwin in the series The Magicians, a victim of monstrous abuse who by seizure of power became himself a monster.
He has a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak.”
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, Ortega, Mugabe, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the states they founded; Imperial France, America, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion was by any reasonable interpretation the Messiah, for he won Israel as a place of refuge and belonging after centuries of Exile and the Jewish peoples of the whole world being claimed by no state since the fall of al-Andalus in 1492; but this was little consolation for those who died beneath the tracks of his tanks. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power? And a simple test for whose side to champion; who is suffering at whose hands?
During the many happy years in which I taught Forensics at Sonoma Valley High School, I began each new year on the first day of class with a demonstration I called Becoming a Fulcrum; placing an object on my desk with the worlds “This is a fulcrum.” Then setting an oblong object on top of that, “It balances a lever. When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics class, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
It remains a reasonable mission statement in life, and I place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We who hunt monsters must remember always 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.”
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As I wrote in my post of May 29 2021, Palestine and Israel: State of the Peace; A fragile peace holds for now in the volatile, chaotic, and rapidly changing relationships between Palestine and Israel, and between these partners in the imaginations of America and the international community. It is an uneasy dance of identity, memory, and history performed to the lyrical songs of narratives of victimization and endless litanies of woe, songs which seduce and shape us to the service of power and authority.
Before the stage of the world and the witness of history, we can see here in real time the processes and consequences of divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as primary informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value.
For those of us who participated on May 10 2021 and in the nineteen days of battle which followed not in the defense of al Aqsa, a thing of grandeur fit for the death of heroes, but in defense of the families at prayer which Israel attacked and the unarmed women and children hunted through the maze of a derelict antiquity, disembodied screams in a land of fear and darkness, the Third Intifada was born on that night as a hope beyond the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity for reimagination, transformation, the redemptive power of love to heal the divisions of exclusionary otherness and the pathology of our disconnectedness, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
What is the state of the peace? How we answer this question hinges on implicit value judgements and becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, and a measure of our character. In this as in many things, I recall Monet’s description of the meaning of his art as a form of metaphysics and investigation into the soul of humankind; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
So our question becomes, what does this look like from the perspectives of its partners, Palestine, Israel, and America?
America vacillates with Joe Biden on the cusp of a vast and horrific realization; that we have for over seventy years been the sponsors of tyranny and state terror, and responsibility for the endless litany of woes which have shaped the peoples of Palestine are shared by all of us and by our proxy state of Israel. It parallels our national reckoning with the legacies of slavery and our systemic racial inequalities and injustices which awaken with the Black Lives Matter protests, like our reckoning with Patriarchy and sexual terror in the #metoo movement, and with the consequences of capitalism for our extinction in the Green New Deal of our champions Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and the global ecological movement led by the Pythian visionary Greta Thunberg.
An awakening and tidal change whose full consequences and potential for the reimagination and transformation of humankind are incalculable, our political, ecological-material, sexual, and racial social justice movements represent a total civilizational shift and a revolution in universal human rights which will one day utterly change and renew our ideas of human being, meaning, and value.
Francis Fukuyama was wrong when he predicted that we live at the end of history; we live at the beginning of a new history. But he was exactly right when he diagnosed its principles of operation in The End of History and the Last Man; “It was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.”
I hope we are at the beginnings of becoming human. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, and illusions. This, too, we must resist.
Israel is caught in the jaws of its history, held captive by Netanyahu’s regime of kleptocratic fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but also a victim which has become a dark mirror of her abuser. Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis; fear, power, and force are not the only things which have meaning and are real, nor do we live in a world wherein love is without redemptive power.
In his massive campaign of ethnic cleansing and repression of dissent, and in his diplomacy of terror and negotiations by missile fire, Netanyahu plays to his own alt-right constituents as their figurehead. But he may have miscalculated international reactions; he has been provoked into exposing the true nature of the Occupation, and the White Hat conferred by narratives of historical victimization is slipping.
The Third Intifada has accomplished its goals of changing the narrative, fracturing American support for Israeli militarism and advancing support for Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction, moving a decades old issue to center stage in our elections and political life, and timed to the vote on the massive arms deal now in Congress. Thus for the American Front of the Intifada; in the Israeli Front we have also shifted the narrative toward delegitmation of the Netanyahu regime in support of the democracy and peace movements of the people of Israel, of the Occupation, and of the ideology of Zionism. At least, those were my goals in the wake of our defense of the people of Palestine at al Aqsa.
Others among the defenders of Palestine have their own plans and objectives; certainly Hamas emerged as the clear victor of the struggle, having seized authority from the Fatah government of Palestine through active defense of its people, and rendering the elections Abbas refuses to call irrelevant. Hamas has delegitimized the Palestinian Authority, and stained its partnership with the Israeli government as collaboration, while the Third Intifada, waged by Hamas but also dozens of other factions, special forces from a number of allied governments, and madmen like myself, has called into question the idea of the Two State Solution.
Of Hamas and of all revolutionaries I say this; Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
Are we not our brother’s keepers?
There is a path forward beyond the dichotomous paradigm of a dual identity; abandon the Two State Solution and reimagine and transform Israel and Palestine as a united nation under secular law and designed to safeguard equality and universal human rights.
America’s enormous financial and military sponsorship of the state of Israel provides a very big lever with which to change the balance of power. I advocate Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel when it means peace and demilitarization; we must fund and shape ourselves to constructive and not destructive ends, to love rather than hate and to hope rather than fear.
Build democracy in Israel and we also build justice and equality for its minorities, exactly as in America. I believe we must liberate the peoples of Israel from a fascist regime of blood, faith, and soil, for the beneficiaries of state terror and tyranny are also subjugated by it. This is the great internal contradiction of authoritarian power as fascism; it is a system which dehumanizes and instrumentalizes even those in whose name it perpetrates its crimes against humanity as a strategy of authorization and the manufacture of consent, and why it must inevitably consume itself.
As Israel prepares its Final Solution to the problem of Palestine, America does nothing. Nothing to stop crimes against humanity, and everything to provide the criminals with arms and other support. We bear responsibility for these crimes with our proxies in Israel.
The people who lived near the Nazi death camps claimed they knew nothing of the Holocaust, nothing about the vast rain of human ash which blanketed their towns and stained them with its silent crimes. But we know. How shall we answer, when we knew and did nothing?
The Magicians: Fear, Power, Force, the Origins of Evil and the Carceral State as Embodied Violence
A History of the Third Intifada, a retrospective of my writing
May 9 2026 Tomorrow’s Anniversary of the Third Intifada of 2021, Now Ongoing In the Tenth Theatre of World War Three Which Contains and Supersedes the Gaza War, in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and the Middle East
29 مايو 2026 أصول الشر في الخوف والقوة والقوة: أسئلة وجودية في ظل الإبادة الجماعية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين بينما لا يفعل العالم شيئًا لإسكات أمطار الموت
عندما تتحدث إلي إسرائيل في أحلامي كما لو كان صوت التاريخ صوت إنسان واحد ، فإنها لا ترتدي وجه أحد الناجين الأيقونيين من المحرقة ومحرر البشرية من التهديدات الوجودية للاستبداد والإرهاب وحلقة واغنريان. الخوف والقوة والقوة التي قد تكون موجودة في السابق ، ولكن من شخصية مارتن شاتوين في سلسلة The Magicians ، ضحية الإساءة الوحشية التي أصبحت من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة وحشًا.
لديه سطر مثل لغز زن يطوى ويشير إلى ما هو السؤال الأساسي بالنسبة لي كيف أصبح إنسانًا في ظل ظروف كفاح مفروضة تتطلب استخدام القوة في المقاومة ، حيث يكون استخدام القوة الاجتماعية دائمًا غامضًا ، وغير إنساني ، ويطيع قانون نيوتن الثالث للحركة كقوى رد فعل ثنائية الاتجاه تخلق نقيضًا خاصًا بها. “كما تعلم ، عندما كنت صبيًا ، قام الرجل الذي كان من المفترض أن يعتني بي بثني على مكتبه وجعلني مرارًا وتكرارًا في كل مرة كنت وحدي معه. إنها تساعدني على فهم الحقيقة. أنت قوي أو ضعيف “.
هذه هي الكذبة الأصلية للطاغية والفاشي في الدفاع عن السلطة والتبرير الذاتي ؛ الكذبة القائلة بأن القوة وحدها لها معنى ، أنه لا يوجد خير أو شر. إن كيفية استخدامنا للقوة لها نفس أهمية من يحتفظ بها. الخوف والقوة هما وسيلتان أساسيتان للتبادل البشري ، لكنهما ليسا الوسيلة الوحيدة ؛ الحب والعضوية والانتماء لا تقل أهمية. السؤال الكبير الذي تحاول الديمقراطية الإجابة عنه هو كيفية الموازنة بين حقوق واحتياجات الأفراد بحيث لا يتعدى أحد على حقوق الآخرين.
إنه الخط الذي يلتقط تمامًا التناقضات المتأصلة في حلقة واغنري من الخوف والقوة والقوة كأصل للشر ؛ لأن استخدام القوة الاجتماعية هو تخريب لقيمها الخاصة. ومع ذلك ، غالبًا ما تتطلب الشروط المفروضة للنضال الثوري العنف ، وحتى يتم التخلص من آلهة القانون والنظام من عروشهم ، يجب أن أتفق مع القول المأثور الشهير لسارتر في مسرحيته الأيدي القذرة عام 1948 ، التي اقتبسها فرانتز فانون في خطابه عام 1960 لماذا نستخدم العنف ، وجعلنا مالكولم إكس خالدة ؛ “بأي وسيلة ضرورية.”
كما كتبه والتر رودني في The Groundings مع إخوتي ؛ لقد قيل لنا أن العنف في حد ذاته شرير ، وأنه مهما كان السبب ، فهو غير مبرر أخلاقيا. بأي معيار أخلاقي يمكن اعتبار العنف الذي يستخدمه العبد لكسر قيوده هو نفسه عنف سيد العبيد؟ بأي معايير يمكننا أن نساوي عنف السود الذين تعرضوا للقمع والقمع والاكتئاب والقمع لأربعة قرون بعنف الفاشيين البيض. لا يمكن الحكم على العنف الذي يهدف إلى استعادة الكرامة الإنسانية وتحقيق المساواة بنفس المعيار الذي يحكم عليه العنف الذي يهدف إلى الحفاظ على التمييز والقمع “.
وهذا هو المقطع الذي يشير إليه من ليون تروتسكي في أخلاقهم وأخلاقنا: الأسس الطبقية للممارسة الأخلاقية ؛ “مالك العبيد الذي يقيد عبدًا بالسلاسل من خلال المكر والعنف ، والعبد الذي يكسر القيود عن طريق الماكرة أو العنف – دعنا لا يخبرنا الخصيان الحقير أنهم متساوون أمام محكمة الأخلاق!”
ومع ذلك ، أفكر في التفكير في أولئك الشخصيات العظيمة الذين كانوا أبطال التحرير وأشرار الاستبداد. نابليون ، واشنطن ، ستالين ، ماو ، القائمة هي عبارة عن سلسلة لا نهاية لها من الويلات وإخفاقات الرؤية حيث أصبحت عوالم جديدة شجاعة جحيماً وحالات جسدية. بالدليل أقدم الدول التي أسسوها ؛ الإمبراطورية الفرنسية ، أمريكا ، الاتحاد السوفيتي ، الحزب الشيوعي الصيني ، وقبل كل شيء دولة إسرائيل ، حلم ملجأ مزور في رعب الهولوكوست الذي تعلم ضحاياه الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين واضطلعوا بدورهم في احتلال فلسطين. كان ديفيد بن غوريون ، بأي تفسير معقول ، هو المسيح ، لأنه فاز بإسرائيل كمكان للجوء والانتماء بعد قرون من المنفى ولم تطالب دولة اليهود بأي دولة منذ سقوط الأندلس عام 1492 ؛ لكن هذا لم يكن عزاءًا لمن ماتوا تحت آثار دباباته. إن مخاطر المثالية حقيقية للغاية. ولكن كذلك هي مخاطر الخضوع للسلطة والتواطؤ في الصمت في مواجهة الشر.
أنا صياد للفاشيين ، وأخلاقي صياد. بالنسبة لي هناك اختبار بسيط لاستخدام القوة. من يملك السلطة؟
خلال السنوات العديدة السعيدة التي قمت فيها بتدريس الطب الشرعي في مدرسة سونوما فالي الثانوية ، بدأت كل عام جديد في اليوم الأول من الفصل بعرض أسميه “أن تصبح نقطة انطلاق”. وضع شيء على مكتبي مع العالمين “هذه نقطة ارتكاز”. ثم وضع جسم مستطيل فوق ذلك ، “إنه يوازن ذراعًا. عندما يسألك والداك عما تتعلمه في فصل الطب الشرعي ، أخبرهم أنك تتعلم أن تصبح نقطة ارتكاز وتغيير ميزان القوى في العالم “.
يبقى بيان مهمة معقولاً في الحياة ، وأنا أضع حياتي في الميزان مع كل أولئك الذين فرانتس فانون نا
29 مايو 2021 فلسطين وإسرائيل: دولة السلام
يصمد السلام الهش في الوقت الحالي في العلاقات المتقلبة والفوضوية والمتغيرة بسرعة بين فلسطين وإسرائيل ، وبين هؤلاء الشركاء في تصورات أمريكا والمجتمع الدولي. إنها رقصة مضطربة للهوية والذاكرة والتاريخ تؤدى على الأغاني الغنائية لروايات الضحية ، الأغاني التي تغرينا وتشكلنا لخدمة السلطة والسلطة.
قبل مرحلة العالم وشهادة التاريخ ، يمكننا أن نرى هنا في الوقت الفعلي عمليات وعواقب انقسامات الآخر الإقصائي والتسلسل الهرمي لنخبة الهيمنة في الثروة والسلطة والامتياز باعتبارها قوى إعلام وتحفيز وتشكيل أساسية لـ الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة.
لأولئك منا الذين شاركوا في 10 مايو ليس في الدفاع عن الأقصى ، شيء من العظمة يصلح لموت الأبطال ، ولكن دفاعا عن العائلات في الصلاة التي هاجمتها إسرائيل والنساء والأطفال العزل الذين اصطادوا في متاهة من العصور القديمة المهجورة ، صرخات بلا جسد في أرض الخوف والظلام ، ولدت الانتفاضة الثالثة في تلك الليلة كأمل يتجاوز كسر العالم وعيوب إنسانيتنا من أجل إعادة التخيل ، والتحول ، والقوة التعويضية للحب للشفاء. الانقسامات حول الآخر الإقصائي وعلم أمراض انفصالنا ، والإمكانيات اللامحدودة لأن نصبح بشرًا.
ما هي حالة السلام؟ كيف نجيب على هذا السؤال يتوقف على الأحكام القيمية الضمنية ويصبح بوابة راشومون للحقائق النسبية ، ومقياس لشخصيتنا. في هذا كما هو الحال في العديد من الأشياء ، أتذكر وصف مونيه لمعنى فنه كشكل من أشكال الميتافيزيقيا والبحث في روح البشرية ؛ “للإنسان عينان يرى العالم من خلالها. أحدهما ينظر إلى الخارج ، والآخر ينظر إلى الداخل ، وهذا التقاء هاتين الصورتين هو الذي يخلق العالم الذي نراه “.
لذا يصبح سؤالنا كيف يبدو هذا من وجهة نظر شركائها فلسطين وإسرائيل وأمريكا؟
أمريكا تتأرجح مع جو بايدن على أعتاب إدراك واسع ومروع. بأننا لأكثر من سبعين عامًا كنا رعاة للاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة ، وأن المسؤولية عن سلسلة المشاكل اللامتناهية التي شكلت شعوب فلسطين نتقاسمها جميعًا ودولة إسرائيل بالوكالة. إنه يوازي حسابنا القومي مع إرث العبودية وعدم المساواة العرقية والظلم النظامي الذي استيقظ مع احتجاجات حياة السود مهمة ، مثل حسابنا مع البطريركية والإرهاب الجنسي في حركة #metoo ، ونتيجة للرأسمالية لانقراضنا في الصفقة الخضراء الجديدة والحركة البيئية العالمية بقيادة صاحبة الرؤية غريتا ثونبرج.
تغيير الصحوة والمد والجزر الذي لا تُحصى عواقبه الكاملة وإمكاناته لإعادة تخيل البشرية وتغييرها ، وتمثل حركات العدالة الاجتماعية السياسية والبيئية والمادية والجنسية والعرقية تحولًا حضاريًا كليًا وثورة في حقوق الإنسان العالمية والتي ستمثل يومًا ما تغيير وتجديد أفكارنا عن الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة.
كان فرانسيس فوكوياما مخطئًا عندما توقع أننا نعيش في نهاية التاريخ. نحن نعيش في بداية تاريخ جديد. لكنه كان محقًا تمامًا عندما شخَّص مبادئ عملها في كتابه “نهاية التاريخ والرجل الأخير”. “كانت رغبة العبد المستمرة في الاعتراف هي المحرك الذي دفع التاريخ إلى الأمام ، وليس التهاون العاطل والهوية الذاتية التي لا تتغير للسيد.”
آمل أن نكون في بدايات أن نصبح بشرًا. أخشى أن يتحول إرثنا التاريخي إلى أفخاخ وتزييف وروايات استيعابية واستعمارية قد تسرق فيها طغيان الهويات المرخصة أرواحنا. هذه هي مشكلة مرآة Hobgoblin المكسورة في Anderson’s The Snow Queen ؛ نحن ضائعون في عالم من الصور المشوهة والأصداء الملتقطة والأوهام. هذا أيضًا ، يجب أن نقاوم.
إسرائيل عالقة في فكي تاريخها ، أسيرة نظام نتنياهو للفاشية الفاسدة من الدم والإيمان والأرض ، ولكنها أيضًا ضحية أصبحت مرآة قاتمة لمن أساء معاملتها. لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين. الخوف والقوة والقوة ليست الأشياء الوحيدة التي لها معنى ، ولا نعيش في عالم يكون فيه الحب بدون قوة فدائية.
في حملته الواسعة للتطهير العرقي وقمع المعارضة ، وفي دبلوماسيته للإرهاب والمفاوضات بإطلاق الصواريخ ، يلعب نتنياهو مع ناخبيه من اليمين المتطرف كرئيس صوري لهم. لكنه ربما أخطأ في تقدير ردود الفعل الدولية. لقد تم استفزازه لفضح الطبيعة الحقيقية للاحتلال ، والقبعة البيضاء التي تمنحها روايات الإيذاء التاريخي آخذة في الانزلاق.
لقد أنجزت الانتفاضة الثالثة أهدافها المتمثلة في تغيير السرد ، وكسر الدعم الأمريكي للعسكرة الإسرائيلية ، وتعزيز الدعم للمقاطعة ، وسحب الاستثمارات ، والعقوبات ، ونقل قضية عمرها عقود إلى مركز الصدارة ، وتوقيتها للتصويت على صفقة الأسلحة الضخمة الآن في الكونجرس. على الأقل هذه كانت أهدافي في أعقاب دفاعنا عن شعب فلسطين في الأقصى.
آخرون من المدافعين عن فلسطين لديهم خططهم وأهدافهم ؛ بالتأكيد ظهرت حماس منتصراً واضحاً في النضال ، بعد أن استولت على السلطة من حكومة فتح في فلسطين من خلال الدفاع الفعال عن شعبها ، وجعل الانتخابات يرفض عباس وصفها بأنها غير ذات صلة. لقد قامت حماس بنزع الشرعية عن السلطة الفلسطينية ، ولطخت شراكتها مع الحكومة الإسرائيلية على أنها تعاون ، في حين أن الانتفاضة الثالثة ، التي تشنها حماس وكذلك العشرات من الفصائل الأخرى ، والقوات الخاصة من عدد من الحكومات الحليفة ، والمجانين مثلي ، قد دعت إلى يشكك في فكرة حل الدولتين.
أقول هذا عن حماس وجميع الثوار. إن من يقف بين الاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة من الغزو والاستعباد والموت وحياة الأبرياء هو أبطال وأبطال إنسانيتنا. التفاصيل ليست ذات صلة.
ألسنا حفظة أخينا؟
هناك طريق إلى الأمام يتجاوز النموذج الثنائي التفرع للهوية المزدوجة. التخلي عن حل الدولتين وإعادة تصور وتحويل إسرائيل وفلسطين كدولة موحدة في ظل القانون العلماني ومصممة لحماية المساواة وحقوق الإنسان العالمية.
توفر رعاية أمريكا المالية والعسكرية الهائلة لدولة إسرائيل رافعة كبيرة لتغيير ميزان القوى. أنا أؤيد حركة مقاطعة إسرائيل BDS عندما تعني السلام ونزع السلاح. يجب أن نمول أنفسنا ونشكل أنفسنا لغايات بناءة وليست هدَّامة ، وللحب بدلاً من الكراهية والأمل بدلاً من الخوف.
نبني الديمقراطية في إسرائيل ونبني العدل والمساواة لأقلياتها ، تمامًا كما في أمريكا. أعتقد أنه يجب تحرير شعب إسرائيل من نظام فاشي من الدم والإيمان والتراب ، لأن المستفيدين من إرهاب الدولة والطغيان يخضعون له أيضًا. هذا هو التناقض الداخلي الكبير للسلطة الاستبدادية مثل الفاشية. إنه نظام يجرد من الإنسانية ويستغل حتى أولئك الذين يرتكبون جرائمهم ضد الإنسانية باسمهم كاستراتيجية للترخيص وصنع الموافقة ، ولماذا يجب أن يستهلك نفسه حتما.
بينما تستعد إسرائيل لحلها النهائي لمشكلة فلسطين ، فإن أمريكا لا تفعل شيئًا. لا شيء لوقف الجرائم ضد الإنسانية ، وكل شيء لتزويد المجرمين بالسلاح وأنواع الدعم الأخرى. نحن نتحمل المسؤولية عن هذه الجرائم مع وكلائنا في إسرائيل.
ادعى الأشخاص الذين عاشوا بالقرب من معسكرات الموت النازية أنهم لا يعرفون شيئًا عن الهولوكوست ، ولا شيء عن المطر الغزير من الرماد البشري الذي غطى مدنهم وصبغهم بجرائمه الصامتة. لكننا نعلم. كيف نجيب ونحن نعلم ولم نفعل شيئا؟
Hebrew
29 במאי 2026 מקורות הרוע בפחד, כוח וכוח: שאלות קיומיות בצל רצח העם הישראלי של הפלסטינים, מכיוון שהעולם לא עושה דבר כדי להשתיק את גשם המוות
כשישראל מדברת אליי בחלומות כאילו קול ההיסטוריה היה קולו של בן אדם אחד, היא לא עונדת פנים של ניצול איקוני של השואה ומשחרר המין האנושי מהאיומים הקיומיים של עריצות וטרור ומהטבעת הווגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח שהיו לו פעם, אבל של דמותו של מרטין צ’טווין בסדרת הקוסמים, קורבן להתעללות מפלצתית שבאמצעות תפיסת השלטון הפך בעצמו למפלצת.
יש לו קו שכמו חידת זן עוטפת ומאפיינת את מה שאצל עצמי היא השאלה העיקרית כיצד להפוך לאנושי בתנאי מאבק כפויים הדורשים שימוש בכוח בהתנגדות, כאשר השימוש בכוח חברתי הוא תמיד מעורפל, דה-הומניזציה, ומציית לחוק התנועה השלישי של ניוטון ככוחות תגובה דו-כיווניים שיוצרים אנטיתזה משלהם. “אתה יודע, כשהייתי ילד, אדם שנועד לטפל בי כופף אותי מעל השולחן שלו וקיבל אותי שוב ושוב בכל פעם הייתי לבד איתו. זה עוזר לי להבין אמת. אתה חזק או שאתה חלש.”
הנה השקר המקורי של העריץ והפשיסט באפולוגטיקה ובהצדקה העצמית של הכוח; השקר שרק לכוח יש משמעות, שאין טוב או רע. אופן השימוש בכוח הוא בעל חשיבות שווה למי שמחזיק בו. פחד וכוח הם אמצעי עיקרי להחלפה אנושית, אך לא האמצעי היחיד; אהבה, חברות ושייכות חשובים לא פחות. השאלה הגדולה שעליה מנסה הדמוקרטיה לענות היא כיצד ניתן לאזן בין הזכויות והצרכים של יחידים כך שאף אחד לא יפגע בזכויות של אחר.
זהו קו אשר לוכד בצורה מושלמת את הסתירות הטבועות בטבעת הוואגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח כמקור הרוע; שכן השימוש בכוח חברתי הוא חתרני לערכיו שלו. עם זאת, התנאים המוטלים של מאבק מהפכני מצריכים לעתים קרובות אלימות, ועד שאלי החוק והסדר יופלו מכסאותיהם, אני חייב להסכים עם הכתבה המפורסמת של סארטר במחזהו “ידיים מלוכלכות” מ-1948, שצוטט על ידי פרנץ פאנון בנאומו מ-1960. למה אנחנו משתמשים באלימות, והפכו לאלמוות על ידי מלקולם אקס; “בכל דרך אפשרית.”
כפי שכתב וולטר רודני ב-The Groundings with my Brothers; “אמרו לנו שאלימות כשלעצמה היא רוע, ושתהא הסיבה אשר תהיה, היא לא מוצדקת מבחינה מוסרית. לפי איזה סטנדרט של מוסר יכולה האלימות שבה משתמש עבד כדי לשבור את שלשלאותיו להיחשב זהה לאלימות של אדון עבדים? לפי אילו אמות מידה נוכל להשוות את האלימות של שחורים שדוכאו, מדוכאים, מדוכאים ומדוכאים במשך ארבע מאות שנים עם אלימותם של פשיסטים לבנים. לא ניתן לשפוט אלימות שמטרתה החזרת כבוד האדם ושוויון לפי אותו קנה מידה כמו אלימות שמטרתה לשמור על אפליה ודיכוי”.
והנה הקטע שאליו הוא מתייחס מפי ליאון טרוצקי ב-Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “בעל עבדים שבאמצעות ערמומיות ואלימות כובל עבד בשלשלאות, ועבד שבאמצעות ערמומיות או אלימות שובר את השלשלאות – שלא יגידו לנו הסריסים הבזויים שהם שווים בפני בית דין של מוסר!”
אולם בהשתקפות אני חושב על אותן דמויות גדולות שהיו גם גיבורי שחרור וגם נבלי עריצות; נפוליאון, וושינגטון, סטאלין, מאו, הרשימה היא אוסף כמעט אינסופי של צרות וכישלונות ראייה שבהם עולמות חדשים אמיצים הפכו לגיהנום ולמדינות קרסראליות. לראיה אני מציע למדינות שהקימו; צרפת האימפריאלית, אמריקה, ברית המועצות, המפלגה הקומוניסטית הסינית, ומעל לכל מדינת ישראל, חלום מקלט שנרקם באימת השואה שקורבנותיו למדו את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים ונטלו על עצמם את תפקידם בכיבוש פלשתינה. דוד בן-גוריון היה לפי כל פרשנות סבירה המשיח, שכן הוא זכה בישראל כמקום מקלט ושייכות לאחר מאות שנים של גלות והעמיים היהודיים בכל העולם שנתבעו על ידי שום מדינה מאז נפילת אל-אנדלוס ב-1492; אבל זו הייתה נחמה קטנה לאלה שמתו מתחת לפסי הטנקים שלו. הסכנות של האידיאליזם הן אמיתיות מאוד; אבל כך גם הסכנות שבכניעה לסמכות ובשותפות השתיקה מול הרוע.
אני צייד של פשיסטים, ושלי הוא מוסר של צייד. מבחינתי יש מבחן פשוט לשימוש בכוח; מי מחזיק בכוח
במהלך השנים המאושרות הרבות שבהן לימדתי זיהוי פלילי בתיכון עמק סונומה, התחלתי כל שנה חדשה ביום הראשון לשיעור בהדגמה שקראתי לה להיות נקודת משען; הנחת חפץ על שולחני עם עולמות “זהו נקודת משען.” ואז להציב עצם מוארך על זה, “זה מאזן מנוף. כשההורים שלך שואלים אותך מה אתה לומד בשיעור זיהוי פלילי, אמור להם שאתה לומד להפוך לנקודת משען ולשנות את מאזן הכוחות בעולם”.
זה נשאר הצהרת משימה סבירה בחיים, ואני מעמיד את חיי באיזון עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון נא
med עלובי כדור הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים.
כל מי שצד מפלצות חייב לזכור תמיד את האזהרה של ניטשה במעבר לטוב ולרע; “מי שנלחם במפלצות צריך להיזהר שלא יהפוך בכך למפלצת. ואם אתה מביט ארוכות לתוך תהום, התהום תביט בך בחזרה.”
בסופו של דבר כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך
A shocking guilty verdict in the trial of the Spokane Three who protested the ICE abduction of a former city councilman’s legal ward as he turned 18 has enforced state terror and tyranny and the campaign of ethnic cleansing of the ICE white supremacist force, violated our rights of free speech, assembly, and redress of grievances, and granted immunity to the criminal Trump regime to prosecute and silence the witness of history of our citizens.
Three persons of color, including the Native American drag queen Justice Forral and the Black nonbinary Jac Archer who has two husbands and a baby, both prominent local activists and champions of our universal human rights and our rights as American citizens, were today convicted by an all white jury for protesting against the abduction of a Venezuelan migrant. Can this be more clear?
This is a white supremacist terror attack through the courts against our community, our rights as citizens and as human beings who have a duty of care for others.
Here I will note that Jac was among the core group who founded our Progressives of Spokane County group after our recognition as a caucus of the county Democratic Party was denied, and our first Chairman. Jac it was who assigned me the role of media and communications for the group, which became my publication Torch of Liberty wherein I write daily for over seven years now.
With a public facing political arm, I then founded Lilac City Antifa as a Direct Action arm of liberation struggle. Everything in the last seven years flowed from that moment when Jac assigned me responsibility for our messaging; the international network of Autonomous Zones in the wake of CHAZ, the development of coordinated capabilities with antifascists throughout America and Europe, the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine, and our victories over ICE in the Battle of Los Angeles in which I was fighting while this incident of ICE terror unfolded in Spokane leading to the arrest of nonviolent protestors sitting with discipline and goodwill in front of a bus, among them Jac Archer, Justice Forrall, and Bajun Mavalwalla the Second, heroes whose names will ring as long as we remember the dream of the equality of all human beings and our duty of care for each other in solidarity of action.
Thank you, my friends. To you and all who place their lives in the balance with the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, I say for all of us, all Americans and all who hunger to be free, what King Faisal said to Lawrence of Arabia after the liberation from the Ottoman Empire; “What I owe you is beyond valuation.”
As written by Erin Sellers and Valerie Osier in Range Media, in an article entitled BREAKING: Jury finds Spokane 3 protesters guilty of federal conspiracy charges: The defendants could face up to six years in federal prison and/or $250,000 in fines. They are expected to appeal the verdict.; “Nearly a year ago, former city council president Ben Stuckart posted on Facebook, asking people to come to the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building and sit in front of the bus that was scheduled to take detained immigrants from Spokane to Tacoma — including a young Venezuelan man who had been under his care.
Hundreds of Spokanites responded, and later, nine were arrested on federal felony charges, accusing them of committing a conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers or their property using force, threat or intimidation. While six of those originally indicted accepted plea deals to avoid the chance of federal prison time, Jac Archer, Justice Forral and Bajun Mavalwalla II chose to fight the charges.
On Thursday afternoon, after seven days of trial, more than two dozen witnesses and eight hours of deliberation, a jury of 12 people returned guilty verdicts on all three defendants, though at different levels:
Forral was found guilty of conspiracy to injure the property of federal officers (counts C and D). They found Forral guilty of aiding and abetting in the conspiracy as well.
Mavalwalla was found guilty of conspiracy to impede or injure officers through the aiding and abetting clause later added, not any of the original counts.
Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to impede or injure officers, counts A (injuring or impeding an officer) and D (property). Archer is also found guilty of aiding and abetting.
The original charges carry a maximum sentence of six years in federal prison and/or $250,000 in fines. It’s unclear so far how the partial counts will impact that.
The attorneys for the defense have said they plan to appeal the verdict, but before that they will ask the judge to overturn it in a Rule 29 hearing in five weeks.
The Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane is planning a community gathering Thursday afternoon with supporters of the defendants at A.M. Cannon Park near the gazebo.
More to come.
We’re continuing to cover the federal trial of the Spokane 3, local protesters charged with conspiracy for protesting ICE detainments on June 11, 2025”
As I wrote in my post of June 23 2025, Abolish Police: Case of the Spokane ICE Protest; epression of dissent, theft of our parallel and interdependent rights both as citizens and as human beings, the tyranny and terror of states as embodied violence, and the purpose of police as enforcers of unequal power and systems of oppression including patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror were in full display during the Spokane ICE protest leading up to the glorious No Kings Day marches.
Hearing of this horrible incident of white supremacist police terror perpetrated against Cesar, a migrant who had come to America as a child and the magnificent and heroic emergency response of his legal guardian former Spokane Councilman Ben Stuckart and many others acting in solidarity, I thought immediately of the lines of Captain Picard in STNG Season 3 episode 16 The Offspring; ” There are times, sir, when men of good conscience cannot blindly follow orders. You acknowledge their sentience, but you ignore their personal liberties and freedom. Order a man to hand his child over to the state? Not while I’m his Captain.” Or his comrade, his fellow American, his fellow human being of any kind. As are we all in our duty of care for each other.
I was in Los Angeles fighting the federal occupation forces of the Trump regime during this event, though I was in communication with people on site and in Spokane, and many of my friends and allies in Spokane were present and key players in its unfolding. Some have written of what they bore witness to in public forums which I amplify here.
Here follows the witness of history of Angelique Tomeo; “Last night’s protest in Spokane, intended as a peaceful act of solidarity, quickly descended into chaos when ICE and Border Patrol agents, assisted by Spokane Police Department (SPD) and Spokane County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO), cleared a path to detain immigrant asylum seekers.
What happened –
At around 2 p.m. June 11, former City Council President Ben Stuckart called people to block ICE from transporting two Venezuelan and Colombian refugees, legally in the U.S. and awaiting court hearings scheduled for later this year.
A few hundred protesters joined, linking arms and even disabling transport vans, but not disrupting anything violent from protesters’ side.
The state response –
As the crowd held firm, SPD and SCSO arrived en masse. Officers used “smoke grenades” (mistakenly called tear gas), pepper balls, bean bags, and foam baton rounds to break the line and CLEAR A ROUTE for federal agents.
Though rubber bullets weren’t “officially” used, SCSO confirmed deploying less-lethal rounds. Three bean bags and a 40 mm baton foam round. These targeted at protesters who had tossed back canisters they perceived as dangerous.
I have a colleague in the community who has evidence of being shot 5 times, including their head, with these “3 bean bag and single 40 mm baton foam, less-lethal” rounds.
There is also evidence of others being shot, point blank, with smoke canisters. More evidence of SCSO pointing their canister launchers at the faces of protesters.
On the ground impact –
Over 30 people were arrested for misdemeanor “obstruction” and other nonviolent infractions. Two were charged with felonies but released without bond the next day..
All had bail imposed upon them, no less than $500.
All who had their phones on them at the time of arrest, had them confiscated “as evidence”.
Some didn’t get glasses back, or they were broken.
All had any other property aside from the clothes on their back, shipped and locked away from them in a different part of the county.
Bail and phones confiscated proved to be real hardships effecting the ability for some to work, all to call for rides and let their people know they were released and safe.
Misdemeanor charges that should’ve been a cite & release (released on their Own Recognizance or OR) in usual circumstances, were all booked and processed completely into the jail system.
Coincidentally these are misdemeanor charges much like the proposed changes to the suite of homeless ordinances under the HOME Starts Here Initiative, also proposed by our mayor and City Council.
Mayor Lisa Brown imposed a 9:30 p.m. curfew. The first since George Floyd protests in 2020, claiming it was “necessary to prevent escalation”. ICE escalated the protesters. Local LE supported the escalation.
Voices from the scene –
Protesters had “smoke” projectiles fired at point-blank range (and not “at their feet” as reported by shooters), families and Indigenous elders suffering chemical burns, families at the stadium watching a soccer game. Those exposed and arrested were not allowed to shower afterward. This was a form of lingering torture.
This was OVERT political violence, ICE and Border Patrol incited it, not protesters. I am pointing to leadership decisions that allowed SPD & SCSO to enter and brutalize an otherwise peaceful protest.
Here is the BIG picture –
This incident mirrors nationwide unrest triggered by trump’s intensified deportation and ICE tactics, with cities like Los Angeles and Seattle seeing similar clashes and curfews.
Spokane’s leaders, who tout “In Spokane, We All Belong,” are now complicit in enforcing an overtly racist agenda. Turning a peaceful community demonstration into a militarized showdown that targets immigrants and allies alike.
“As an Indigenous woman I recognize that we’ve been here before. Unarmed people were shot, point blank, with ‘smoke’ shells… People tortured in holding vans, and sitting on curbs BURNING from the gas & pepper.”
Here is my Call to Action –
Every act of silence or support to capture, detain, and transport immigrants by ICE, away from our city, by our leaders validates this brutality.
This wasn’t about public safety. It was about giving permission to fascist enforcement.
Stand with immigrant families. Demand that our city truly lives up to “We All Belong”, or be silent and complacent. Don’t dare use the beautiful and inclusive tag line our City has adopted. You may not. Trust is being whittled down with every passing day ICE is able to strike fear, gang stalk, threaten, and kidnap our immigrant neighbors.
History is watching… and we won’t forget.”
Professor Levine commented; “Your description of the behavior of ICE and local police has been replicated across the country. Instead of controlling the situation through calm, non-violent behavior, the so-called “peace officers” are exacerbating the violence and poor treatment of protesters. This is nothing new. In 1963, when I was a freshman at the University of Buffalo, those of us who were protesting the Vietnam War were treated as criminals. The Buffalo police, dressed in military garb, were gassing us with CNS and pepper spray and shooting rubber bullets at us. There was no reason for their aggressiveness; it came from hatred of who we were and what we represented.”
Here is my reply; Yes, the purpose of the police is to enforce elite hegemonies, a term you may recognize from Gramsci, of wealth, power, and priviliege. Police are hired on the basis of their answer to the question, would you shoot someone? So they begin as sociopaths co opted by the state in service to power, then are trained and armed to kill under the counterinsurgency model of policing brought to us all by the Patriot Act which centralizes power to the state and legitimizes force and control.
Always the lie of the tyrant ”In Spokane, everyone belongs.” As declared by Mayor Lisa Brown, who unleashed white supremacist police terror on the ICE protest.
I grow impatient with white men brutalizing nonwhite women, especially white men with badges and guns. The Conquest is not a horror of the past; it is ongoing now.
What is to be done?, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such different prescriptions. As the line in the film Inglorious Basterds goes; “I can’t abide it; can you abide it?”
Witness of Jac Archer regarding the Spokane ICE protest. Jac is among the founders of Progressives of Spokane County with myself, an alliance of Democratic Party members which the County DP refused to recognize as an official caucus six and a half years ago, and who asked me to be in charge of our communications, for which I founded my publication Torch of Liberty. Jac is now in law school at Gonzaga, their self description on Substack says; “Movement worker and full-time law student, generally striving to be a pearl of a person: constantly agitating, and thus coalescing the beauty around me”.
“Abductions at 411 Cataldo
Content Advisory: ICE, immigration, state violence, injury, weapons.
NOTE: You may notice some shifts between present and past tense in this piece. I considered going back and unifying the text, but the tenses also reflect how I experienced both the events described, and the process of writing about them.
I’ve been a bit shaken all day. My mind feels kind of scattered, likely the result of poor sleep. A buddy of mine looked at me and said, “You’re still in fight-or-flight mode. You’re going to be for a while.” He’s probably right. This is not what nervous system regulation feels like, but I want to share my experience while it’s still fresh. I’ve avoided news reports and videos and livestreams as much as I can because I want to capture my own experience, as purely as I can.
I was at 411 W. Cataldo yesterday from approximately 2pm until after midnight. This is what I experienced, recalled to the best of my ability.
I am Co-Executive Director at Spokane Community Against Racism. Around 1pm on Wednesday, I went into work for my schedule office hours, planning to tackle a few tasks in preparation for Spokane’s PRIDE Festival this Saturday. I had just set up my computer when my phone buzzed. An alert in a group chat directed me to a Facebook post by Ben Stuckart. In it, Ben explained that he was the legal guardian of Cesar, a Venezuelan asylee who was illegally detained by ICE at his scheduled check-in. “I’m going to sit in front of the bus,” he said, “Feel free to join me….”
I re-posted the status almost immediately and began chatting over my own potential participation with a colleague in the office. But after only a few minutes, something clicked. This was an invitation to material action to stop a government kidnapping of a lawful asylum seeker. After helplessly listening to accounts of these detainers for weeks, grieving the integrity of my federal government, and raging against the lack of due process—after weeks of desperately wishing I could do something about the violent injustice happening in my country, I was being handed the opportunity to take action.
I took a beat to consider my position, and decided I have the social, financial, familial, and personal stability to risk arrest by taking a stand. My principle of solidarity with the oppressed means I cannot hoard the privilege capital I acquire, I must spend it in defense of those more oppressed than myself. I decided to go.
The Beginning
I arrive at 411 W Cataldo at just minutes to 2pm. There are protesters waving signs on the corner, drawing supportive honks from the cars racing up Washington. I ask one sign-waver if they knew what “the plan” was and they tell me to direct my questions to the people demonstrating by the minimally marked white bus up the hill.
At the bus I see about forty people standing along the walkway or sitting in the grass outside a red brick building I had driven past a thousand times, never knowing it was home to Immigration Customs and Enforcement in Spokane. People are filled with classic protest spirit: that unique mix of upbeat, almost jovial energy, mixed with grim determination and hope. Ben is up there, milling about and taking phone calls near the stark white ICE bus. Ben was accompanying Cesar to his scheduled check-in with ICE—a regular part of the asylum-seeking process for people fleeing violence . Instead of honoring Cesar’s lawful compliance, ICE detained him without due process and prepared to transfer him to a detention facility in Tacoma.
No one is really “in charge,” but there is sense of loose order, provided by rapid response observers from the Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network (WISN). The sense of order heightens with the arrival of more regular faces from Spokane’s progressive movement scene: perennial volunteers, leadership and members from the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane, Spectrum Center Spokane, The Way to Justice, Mutual Assistance Survival Squad, Veterans for Peace, and more fill the grass. A representative from the Washington State Commission on Hispanic Affairs is present, along with Spokane City Council member Lili Navarrete and former State Representative Timm Ormsby.
A uniformed ICE agent briefly emerges to demand we keep the sidewalk clear from the building entrance to the bus doors, and we comply. Our goal is to keep ICE from transporting the asylee under Ben’s legal guardianship—a twenty-one-year-old young man named Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez—from being transported to Tacoma. We can keep the sidewalk clear, but we don’t plan to allow the bus to leave.
We’re activists, advocates, and organizers—so we start organizing ourselves. We take turns on two white bullhorns addressing the group for a few minutes each. Some speakers share situational updates (“Did you see the GEO Group insignia on those uniforms? That’s the for-profit company that operates the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC) in Tacoma”). A couple other speakers share protest best practices. Another spreads the word that the ICE building is leased by Goodale-Barbieri; the phone number of a relevant corporate officer is announced over the bull horn, and we begin flooding their office with calls. We talk, we chant. We sing songs.
It becomes clear that there is some division over tactics, so we discuss what it means to be an observer versus a willing arrestee. Everyone is encouraged to make their own personal decision, and we collectively begin to define language about the type of protest we are a part of. We are disciplined. We are non-violent. We are not passive. We are not “nice.” Our goal is to prevent a government abduction, and to that end some of us are willing to engage in behaviors that carry the risk of arrest. Someone parks their car in front of the bus. Later, another person blocks it in from the back.
I am on the bullhorn, sharing what I know about civil disobedience, when a man with a face covering rides up on a bicycle, pulls out a can of white spray paint, obscures the front window of the bus. Then he rides away.
By 4pm, the crowd has swelled to around a hundred people. Members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation bring cases of water and some community members who cannot stay for the protest drop off snacks. The building is quiet, and no one has come out to disperse us or give orders, so we wait.
Building Pressure
At some point someone parked their car in front of the bus so it cannot be driven forward. Ben sits on the sidewalk in front of the bus doors, clearly in the area the ICE officer demanded we keep clear. Ben announces that he is willing to be arrested to prevent this government abduction. People begin to join him, seating themselves on the cement of the sidewalk. Someone else moves their car to block the bus from behind.
Eventually it occurs to everyone that ICE has likely given up on the bus. It is blocked in by two cars and the windshield has been permanently obstructed. If ICE is going to move Cesar, they will have to take him another way.
“Does this building have other exits?” someone asks. “Let’s send some people around to look.” A gaggle breaks off from the main group and discovers two more areas an ICE vehicle can leave from.
“Let’s cover every exit. We need people in each place.” The crowd by the bus thins to thirty or forty, as clusters break off to keep watch over the south gate, and the egresses in the building’s eastern parking lot. There’s still an active group of sign-wavers on two Washington intersections. Suddenly, a hundred people feels wholly inadequate for the job we’re trying to do, so I bury myself in my phone, furiously messaging friends and updating my personal and professional social media accounts to get more people to come down. I see many others doing the same.
Some time between 4 and 5pm, clearer roles have emerged. There are observers documenting why we are here. There are outward facing demonstrators near the roads, and protesters who have focused on the ICE building. We continue to developing smaller teams and leveraging our various skills toward our common goals: oppose ICE, stand up for due process, stop the kidnapping.
I have joined the willing arrestees seated in front of the bus. Perhaps because I have the most (professed) organizing and protest experience in the group, or perhaps because I cannot stop nervously strategizing aloud, I become the de facto group leader. I have a team now, and the wellbeing of the people who have decided to risk arrest with me are—at least to a degree—my responsibility.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, people who wanted to engage in civil disobedience were often required to complete intense, multi-day training to learn about the arrest procedures, build group cohesion, and train themselves through study and role play to endure violence without retaliating. I, on the other hand, have only minimal training in the basics of civil disobedience. I cannot lead an impromptu training in non-violent protest, but I do have one experience to draw upon.
I have participated in civil disobedience once before at the No DAPL protests in South Dakota. My mentor at the time took a small group of us to the Prayer Camp at Oceti Sakowin. When the protest leaders told us to, we advanced down the main road, marching until law enforcement officers, in full riot gear, chased us back, beating their shields in rhythm and yelling at us to “GET BACK!”
I still remember freezing for a moment, before another protester yelled at me to move, and I turned to run. I remember the acrid smell of the gas that quickly became an engulfing fog. I remember that I was part of one of the safest actions. Later waves returned with running eyes, wheezing lungs, and bleeding welts from rubber bullets.
I was a little shaken that day, but no one touched me. And I learned a lot from the organization at Standing Rock. I combine that learning with my nine years of organizing and advocacy experience in Spokane and discussed safety and tactics with my growing team.
“Do you have any kids, pets, or plants who will come to harm if you don’t come home on time tonight?” I ask, “Do you have an emergency contact who is not at this protest? Do they know how to care for your dependents? Do you need to call your job?”
We talk strategy, and adopt every choice collectively. We agree that we will resist, but we will not fight. We will not initiate any physical engagement, but we will put ourselves in the way.
Cam volunteers her legal knowledge and notebook, and I make sure each member of my team provides the necessary information to receive jail support. Sabrina and Angel step up to organize bail. Other volunteers off site act as trustees of information to ensure people’s emergency contacts are notified if their loved ones are arrested.
It is hard to overstate just how cared-for I felt by my community yesterday. Hundreds of Spokanites answered the call to stand against injustice, and we didn’t just come with signs. We came with signs, sharpies, and bullhorns; we came with cases of water, bags of chips, granola bars, and little oranges; we came with sunscreen, and masks, and med kits, and law licenses, and organizer training, and communications experience, and sheer commitment. We showed up for each other, so that together we could stand up for the people in ICE custody.
My team collectively agrees to stand and lock arms in front of the bus—or whatever vehicle ICE is using—to prevent ICE from putting Cesar on board. By now, another name was floating around the gathering: Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, a Columbian man in his early 20s. We now have two people to protect, and three or four different exits to guard.
An uneasy tension rises as people buzz around the building sharing updates of varied value. “Have you seen anything?” “No one has gone in or out.” “So many cars over here. Another vehicle there.”
Resistance
Some time after 4pm we hear a cry of alarm from the south gate. There are a couple hundred people distributed around the building now, and waves of us rush down the hill to respond. The gate on the south side of the building is open. It encloses a parking area for ICE vehicles, and one of them has its lights on.
I can only recall what happened next in bits and pieces. My team runs to the open gate and locks elbows to create a human barrier. We stand still as the mismatched contingent of five or six uniformed ICE agents stalk toward us. I feel my body being grabbed, and rough hands trying to wrench my arm from my teammate’s. An angry cacophony of “MOVE! Get out of the way! Get out of here!” fills my ears, as I am separated from my team and thrown to the side.
We reform the line and try to stabilize together. I feel hands shove me in the back and the shifting weight of my teammates as we try to ride the waves of shoves, yanks, and strikes. The agents seem to have chosen individuals to target, and as one friend hits the ground, I am pushed over her from behind. Somehow, it ends. The ICE vehicle and agents withdraw and close the gate. I have scratches on my palm, but I am proud.
We stood strong and prevented a vehicle from leaving the ICE facility. A few minutes later someone raises a pair of glasses in the air. “Did someone lose their reading glasses?” They are smudged and scratched, left on the ground from the physical confrontation. They are mine. I didn’t even realize I’d lost them.
The Hurry up and Wait
Anxious boredom. That’s the best phrase I can think of to describe the feeling at the south gate. Between twelve and twenty-one people stood or sat cross-legged in front of the last place ICE attempted to leave, prepared to lock arms and take tear gas and pepper spray if need be. Between ten and eighty observers stood watch, separated from us by yards of asphalt, and filing up the sidewalk, across the way. Handfuls of people ran back and forth between sites, passing supplies and messages, collecting personal effects, giving rides, and moving cars.
Sometime around the initial clash with ICE, I gave my phone to an observer for safe-keeping, and later arranged for it to be returned to my family. Later, a teammate kindly lent me their phone to text my husband and let him know I had not been arrested. I was okay.
My team stayed focused on the gate. If it was not personally affecting us or that gate, it did not matter. We planned to resist as a group. We would keep reforming the line as long as we could, but if we were fully separated from the line, we would accept arrest, and did not wish to be de-arrested.
We waited.
I coordinated with the leaders of the observers, primarily people affiliated with WISN and Veterans for peace.
We waited.
One team member, a therapist, led the group in moments of breathing and centeredness. “We are here for the people in that building,” this person said. “They need us. Send your love to them.”
We waited.
I onboarded people as they joined the south gate.
Jail support, emergency contacts, securing personal effects, removing weapons and jewelry.
“Our only chant is ‘Let them go!’”
“We are here to resist with disciplined nonviolence.”
“Can you take a punch without returning one? If not, do not join the line.”
We waited.
I coordinated with the leaders of the “ICE Out Now” protest, several hundred strong, which planned to meet at the Red Wagon. I wanted everyone fully briefed before they arrived on site.
We continued to wait, rubbing Vaseline around our eyes and periodically wetting face coverings with water.
I recycled announcements as more people joined us, and we waited.
A few times we heard loud pops, or a raised alarm from around the corner. We formed up immediately, pulling our masks over our faces as we locked elbows, but they never came to us. The main action appeared to be happening on the East side, where hundreds of us were gathered. Many south gate observers left to join them, but my team, and handful of observers decided to stay. If we left the south gate unattended, ICE would try again.
Pepper spray and tear gas wafted over to us on the wind, making us cough and raise our masks. Through the gate we could see one or two ICE officers continually watching us from the rooftop of the building. Drones buzzed above our heads. We stayed focused and we waited.
I felt like a stretched rubber band. We snacked, drank water, and took bathroom breaks. We shook out our bodies, we attempted to make small talk and get to know each other better. Two members of my team helped manage our emotional health with their therapeutic training. A few others furnished us with updates. I felt starved for information. We were blind on the south side, only able to see a small corner of the crowd, so we relied on information from runners.
Some updates were interesting: Negotiations with the mayor’s office, staff talks in city hall. Attempts to deescalate the situation through political channels. Other updates were disheartening: Another of our number arrested. Someone else injured. Some people from the east side came over to rest, show us their bruises, or display bleeding welts that looked like they came from rubber bullets. Conflicting rumors filtered down to us about whether ICE had moved Cesar and Joswar, and how many other detainees were in the building.
Occasionally, the updates were useful, and I would call over a runner or my counterpart from the observer side to make sure the information was acted on. Most often, the updates didn’t change anything. Spokane County Sheriffs on site, perhaps even deputies from Kootenai County in Idaho. Various numbers of SPD officers, SWAT teams, and threats of the National Guard. None of it mattered. Our mission was to hold the gate.
More tense boredom. Every few minutes curls of smoke peaking around the corner, the flash of a uniform, or a distant pop would make us all jump, and we’d jump into formation. We got a lot of practice forming up at a moment’s notice.
Backup
Some time after 7pm, we were wearing thin. ICE agents still observed us from the roof, but our lines of willing arrestees and observers had significantly thinned.
“Look! They’re coming! We have support coming!” The call came from the observer side. And there they were. Marchers from ICE Out Now demonstration, hundreds strong with signs raised high, they marched through Riverfront Park to join us.
“Gondor calls for aid!” Joked one person. Relief washed over us. We felt like the cavalry had arrived.
We also knew an influx of new bodies carried risks. I raced out to meet the sound wagon leading the march. I had been in periodic contact with the organizers of “ICE Out Now” throughout the day, and I was allowed to jump on the mic to give the crowd the same briefing I had given a hundred times.
I cannot remember my exact words, but I know I thanked them for being there. I was so grateful for their presence. I told them about our roles: observer and willing arrestee. I told them we were committed to disciplined nonviolence. I invited them to join the lines at the south gate on those terms, and proceeded to onboard the marchers who peeled off to risk arrest. The majority joined the east side.
The End
I don’t know how long it was before the second wave of tear gas came. It drifted over to us on the air, we could see crowd movement, and we braced to be cleared out, but nothing happened. Minutes later we heard that Cesar and Joswar had been removed from the building.
Rumors of their removal had been circulating all afternoon, so we continued to watch the gate. Later we learned, the second wave of teargas was used to clear the exit ICE ultimately used to load Cesar and Joswar into a Spokane-County owned van.
We were still being watched by drones above and ICE Officers on rooftop. We could see flashing lights from rows of police cars on North River Drive, and the surrounding police presence remained heavy, so we stayed.
The moon started to rise, and we discussed how long we were willing to wait. Were we going to wait out the police? Why were we still there if the detainees had been taken? Had our goals changed? No, we decided.
The abduction was wrong. The way law enforcement was treating us was wrong. We stayed to stand up for due process using our First Amendment rights. We had every right, perhaps even a duty, to remain at the gate. The presence on the east side continued to wane, and the law enforcement presence began to shrink. We caucused again, and sometime around 11pm we decided to do a final interview with KHQ in front of the gate, and head home.
We arranged to leave in pairs, carpooling and arranging rideshares. It was 1am when I finally made it home. I smiled when I saw my personal effects in the hall, carefully delivered to my family in a demonstration of community care and organizing in action. My phone was carefully tucked inside. When it was finally charged enough for me to turn it on, it was flooded with messages from friends and family asking if I was okay. **
Afterward
I started writing this the day after the events described, on Thursday evening. I had to stop writing after recounting the confrontation with ICE at the south gate. I originally started writing my narrative to process the experience, and to get the story out of me before it was tainted by too much external commentary. Now writing this has become important to me, a way to get my story on the record.”
Everything we know about the Spokane ICE protests;
Over 24 hours of boots-on-the-ground independent reporting.
By Erin Sellers, Aaron Hedge, Valerie Osier, Luke Baumgarten & Pascal Bostic
As written by Erin Sellers, Aaron Hedge, Valerie Osier, Luke Baumgarten & Pascal Bostic in Range Media, in an article entitled Everything we know about the Spokane ICE protests; “Background: On Wednesday, June 11 between noon and 1 pm, former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart sent out an alert to the general public.
Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez, a young man who had, until that very day, been in Stuckart’s care as a “Special Immigrant Juvenile,” (SIJ) was detained during a last minute appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Stuckart was refused entry to the appointment, and only found out about the detention after Perez was already in custody.
Stuckart asked for folks to join him in protesting the detainment of Perez and of Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, a Colombian national in his late twenties, who had walked across multiple states with Perez, trying to find safety as refugees. As the RANGE team texted him asking to connect once we arrived at the demonstration, he responded, “who knows if anyone shows up.”
He didn’t need to worry.
Under the SIJ program, Stuckart was considered Perez’ legal guardian. Though he did not live with Stuckart, Stuckart took the young man — who he met while volunteering at Latinos en Spokane (LeS) — under his wing, helping him get to immigration hearings and navigate the complicated process. They were both under the impression that things were going well: Perez had attended every meeting he was told to, had been filing paperwork on a limited basis through a contract attorney from LeS and even had a court date scheduled for 2026, Stuckart said.
Yesterday, everything changed: it was Perez’ birthday.
He turned 21, which meant Perez had aged out of the SIJ program. ICE called Perez in for a check-up. When Stuckart tried to go in with him, he wasn’t allowed.
“It took them seven minutes,” Stuckart said. “And then they came out and said we’re detaining them — Joswar and Cesar.” (Torres had also been called in for a meeting that day.)
ICE agents wouldn’t let Stuckart in to talk to the young men, nor would they give a clear reason for their detainment, just stating they were being sent to an immigration judge in Tacoma.
It was confusing for Stuckart: Perez had an asylum court date scheduled for next year, and had a legal work permit up until last Friday, when it was abruptly revoked with no clear communication as to why, Stuckart said.
“ He’s done everything right,” Stuckart said yesterday afternoon, smoking a cigarette in front of the bus. “So me? I’m gonna sit in front of this bus and tell them I don’t want them to take my friend, whatever happens.”
A Timeline
A detailed timeline of events with photo and video logs.
Wednesday, June 11
1 pm-ish: Former Council Member Ben Stuckart sent out an action alert, calling for protestors to come to the ICE Office at 411 W Cataldo Ave.
1:56 pm: A young man in a different case went in for a scheduled ICE appointment. A translator was denied access to the building. Shortly after, around 20 protestors and members of the media arrived at the office. There was an ICE van parked in front of the office. Stuckart and representatives from Latinos en Spokane spoke to the press. Stuckart pledged to stay in front of the van and not let it drive off. Other protestors discussed their willingness to get arrested to block the bus, including two youth who were sitting in front of the side doors to the bus.
2:30 pm: Someone in a mask rode up on a bike, spray-painted the windshield of the ICE transport van and rode off. Stuckart and other protest leaders communicated what had happened to city and state officials and reiterated the group’s intent to stay nonviolent.
2:31 pm: Justice Forral drove a red car to park in front of the ICE transport van, boxing it in from the front.
2:34 pm: Two people, presumably ICE agents, exited the building to tell a protester sitting in front of the bus that they would be arrested if they did not move. One of the agents walked up to Party for Socialism and Liberation member David Brookbank and asked if there was anyone they could talk to representing the protest. The agent stressed that people blocking the van would be arrested. Others who were willing to be arrested, including Stuckart, Liz Moore (of Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane), Angel Tomeo Sam (of Yoyot Sp’q’n’i) and Julie Garcia (of Jewels Helping Hands), jumped in to join the sit-in in front of the bus. Protestors shouted “Shame, shame,” through the entire interaction.
2:43 pm: ICE personnel filmed from the windows of the building as protestors chanted “Asylum seekers are welcome here, immigrants are welcome here, refugees are welcome here.” As protestors noticed the agents filming, they started shouting. The group of protesters blocking the bus grew to 12, including Naida Spencer, chair of the Spokane County Democrats.
3:01 pm: A second car arrived, boxing in the ICE van from the rear.
3:15 pm: A second crowd began to form on the back of the building after protestors noticed a second ICE vehicle preparing to leave. At this point RANGE estimates there were between 75 to 100 people spread between the exits.
3:49 pm: Protestors willing to get arrested huddled up, agreeing on their strategy and community norms.
3:51 pm: Community members started forming a pile of donated supplies including snacks, sunscreen, electrolyte powder and water.
3:55 pm: Stuckart told the crowd that Mayor Lisa Brown and Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall were in contact with ICE trying to negotiate the release of the people who had been detained. Brown later denied this happened. Hall said his office had been in contact with ICE, though it was unclear if it was to push for release or to coordinate the law enforcement response.
After two hours of protest there had been no violence.
4:46 pm: RANGE received a press release from Mayor Lisa Brown with her stance on the protest.
5:02 pm: Two immigration lawyers from Manzanita House were working in a corner with colleagues on the other side of the state, trying to find any legal statute to argue for release of the two detained people. One of the immigration lawyers said she had spoken to ICE through the callbox on the front of the building and offered to represent the detained immigrants who had no legal representation on site.
5:08 pm: At The Podium nearby, Spokane Velocity FC prepared to face Charlotte Independence SC in a soccer match celebrating Pride. The national anthem could be heard faintly from the protest. Video provided by a protestor.
5:20 pm: Protestors from the south exit shouted for backup as they saw an ICE transport start to leave. We got no footage of this moment as we were running to cover it.
5:24 pm: A RANGE reporter arrived at the open south gate as protestors lined up in front of the exit to stop them from leaving. We filmed from the side as protestors shouted “Let them go.” ICE agents and men with no uniforms then began indiscriminately shoving protestors who had linked arms as well as the RANGE reporter, who had identified themselves as press . The ICE agents and men with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) insignia shoved people to the ground then retreated behind the facility gate. Here is footage from the reporter and footage sent to us by a protestor.
5:35 pm: Protestors had begun to build a barricade in front of the lower gate with Lime bikes and plastic bollards.
6:24 pm: For about an hour, things were uneventful. Protestors maintained groups at all three exits. No one was in the street. Then, at 6:24, after a warning to protestors from a source inside City Hall, police arrived.
6:25 pm: At least 10 vehicles and a red ICE transport van and shut down Washington Street.
6:26 pm: Police officers from SPD’s tactical team quickly cleared a path from the sidewalk into the building to the red ICE transport van.
6:26 pm: Protestors then started to coalesce near the police presence, gathering around the red ICE van, including a group that was willing to risk arrest.
6:29 pm: A group of protestors willing to risk arrest sits in front of the red van.
6:33 pm: View from above as protestors continue to gather and shout “Let them go.”
6:34 pm: Protestors, including Tomeo Sam, Garcia and Stuckart linked arms on one side of the transport van to stop it from leaving.
6:36 pm: The County Sheriff officers arrive, increasing the police presence at the so-far peaceful protest.
6:45 ish: the RANGE reporter started livestreaming. Their phone died so a chunk got deleted. Footage then resumes and can be watched in full here. Police started violently arresting people, which can be seen on film. The tires of the red ICE van were deflated or slashed. Protestors were warned that the gathering had been declared unlawful and that chemical munitions would be deployed. We didn’t get footage of the moment, but amidst the chaos, ICE agents walked three people who had been detained to a third ICE van and departed the police barricade for the Tacoma ICE detention facility. By 8:45, chemical munitions had been deployed against protestors.
One protestor, who was later arrested, kicked a smoke bomb back towards officers (which was the lone act of violence against officers that we witnessed in the entire evening.) Smoke bombs were thrown in the direction of media members who were corralled into a small area with no clear, safe exit.
There was one smoke bomb with green smoke which may have been tear gas, as multiple reporters felt stinging in the eyes and mouth after its deployment. Pepper balls were shot by SPD into the crowd, as were rubber bullets by the Spokane County Sheriffs.
Over the course of the evening, tactical equipment and officers from other jurisdictions arrived on scene, like surveillance drones, a helicopter and additional Bearcats — heavily armored vehicles. We got an anonymous tip that Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels tried to call in the National Guard for what was a nonviolent protest (at least on the part of the protestors) until police arrived. Nowels later told another outlet the Department of Homeland Security had called him rather than SPD.
Attendees of the Spokane Zephyr Pride game described smoke hovering over the game, and experiencing burning sensations in their eyes and mouth.
8:30 pm: Multiple vans filled with protestors had been taken to the county jail. Folks with various mutual aid groups showed up with bail, as did multiple pro bono lawyers. Most of the people arrested were charged with misdemeanor obstruction and $500 bond, though two queer people — at least one of whom is a queer BIPOC person — were charged with multiple counts of unlawful imprisonment after Forral built a barrier outside the ICE facility. One lawyer told us “it was chaos,” with additional charges being threatened against prominent politicians who had been arrested.
9:30 pm: A curfew on the area around the ICE office was imposed by Mayor Brown, running from 9:30 pm to 5 pm. Despite the curfew, we did not witness any additional arrests or chemical munition deployments from this point, but our reporter was cordoned on the South side of the protest and wasn’t able to record from the North side of the protest — after officers split the group into two halves near the beginning of the police response.
10 pm: Brown held a press conference during which she defended SPD facilitating ICE officers as they tried to transport the immigrants out of the Homeland Security building, saying the protesters had violated city law by impeding public rights of way. SPD Chief Kevin Hall said his officers deployed white smoke grenades and pepper balls but did not fire rubber bullets. He could not speak for the other agencies.
10:30 pm: Bond had been paid for most of the 31 protestors who had been arrested. Only two faced felony charges and were not allowed to have their bond paid.
Thursday, June 12
10:00 am-ish: We received reports that those arrested who were bailed out had been released, leaving Justice Forral and Erin Lang — the two charged with felonies — in custody.
10:46 am: We received visual confirmation from two freelance photographers of rubber bullets or long distance foam batons being fired into the crowd. Here’s a quick guide to the difference between less lethal munitions.
The Court Hearing
Of the 34 people who were arrested in Wednesday night’s protest on suspicion of the misdemeanor charge of failure to disperse, two were also charged with seven counts of “unlawful imprisonment”, a class C felony in the State of Washington.
Justice Forral, an organizer with Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR), and Erin Lang, a local artist, were both given the unlawful imprisonment charges and one count of failure to disperse each.
On Thursday afternoon, a Superior Court Commissioner released them both on their own recognizance without an additional bond.
It’s unclear why exactly Forral and Lang were specifically targeted for felony charges while other protesters were not, neither the prosecuting attorney nor the court documents gave any details.
Even though this was just a first appearance hearing, dozens of people crowded into a tiny courtroom at the Spokane County Courthouse, sitting on the floor and spilling into the hallway. The crowd was a mix of press and supporters of Forral and Lang. The presiding judge, court commissioner Anthony Rugel, decided to move the hearing to a larger courtroom to accommodate the crowd.
Both defendants appeared separately on a large video screen with their attorney Sarah Freedman: Forral in bright yellow scrubs and Lang in grey scrubs and a bright orange undershirt.
Stuart Fox, an attorney with the Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office, asked the judge for a $2,500 bond in each case, arguing that there was “a concern for community safety” because “individuals were trapped at the location.” Fox said both Forral and Lang had obstructed justice and had a “potential impact to the administration of justice.” He prefaced his argument in both cases by acknowledging that neither defendant had a criminal record.
Freedman argued against any bond being set and also asked that probable cause “be reserved,” meaning that she wanted the judge to wait to determine if there are reasonable grounds for the charges in these cases.
She also noted during the hearing that she gave the prosecutor copies of the professional conduct rules for attorneys that states the special responsibilities of prosecuting attorneys — among which include that they “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause.” She noted specifically that “prosecutors are administers for justice.”
In an unusual move, the judge did not give either attorney the opportunity to really argue probable cause, meaning that neither side was able to present evidence supporting or disproving the charges of unlawful imprisonment. It’s unclear why this happened, and in a followup interview with RANGE, Freedman declined to speculate whether that was a violation of court procedure, but said it’s why she went out of her way to reserve probable cause.
“There is no evidence of a violent crime here,” Freedman told the judge during the hearing, and no allegation that either Forral or Lang committed a violent act that risked the safety of a person.
Rugel, told the court that with no criminal history for either defendant, he would be releasing them both on their own recognizance. He set their arraignment — where the defendants will enter their pleas — for June 25.
After the hearing, Freedman came to the courthouse to talk with press and family members of Lang and Forral and to represent another client in a completely separate case.
She described a chaotic night: she and several other attorneys who had volunteered to help the arrested protesters were at the jail until about 2:30 am ensuring that the people arrested were bailed out and had representation.
It was unclear at first who exactly was arrested at the protest, as law enforcement was arresting people and placing them in plastic cuffs on the sidewalk before transporting them to the Spokane County Jail.
“We were trying to guess who people were based on the inmate roster,” she said. They went off recent bookings, bondable people and bond size, which was $500 for the charge of “Failure to Dispurse.”
Forral and Lang were released today, and Freedman said that they are both OK and happy that bond wasn’t imposed for these charges.
“Right now, we’re just waiting to see what happens next.”
Quotes from the first four hours
Some random quotes collected from reporter Erin Sellers from 1:45 to 4:30 pm.
“We’ve seen this before. The US has always written policies that criminalize who we are,” – Angel Tomeo Sam, Yoyot Sp’q’n’i
“What is justice to you?” – protestor, attribution unknown
“This is no different than when presidents endorsed slavery because it was good for the economy,” – Mark Finney, Thrive International
“ We fucking feed you. We work. We clean your houses. We take care of your kids. We make your food, take care of your kids. Stop kidnapping our people without due process. We deserve our day in court,” – protestor, chose to remain anonymous.
“ Our commitment is to the people who are being held inside. Our commitment is to the people who are being targeted and harassed for trying to live. Our commitment is to each other. Our commitment is to stand up against the billionaire agenda that’s using racism to target and weaken our entire career. Country and community and to directly harm wonderful people who are just trying to live. So we are not here to satisfy our own egos. We’re here to prevent this bus from moving and say, no more deportations, abolish ICE, not in our name. So it’s not about being peaceful, it’s not about being calm, it’s about being calm, disciplined, nonviolent and committed to each other,” – Moore, PJALS
Why people were willing to be arrested
“ I’m a brown person who has the privilege of being born here. That does not mean everyone in my community does, and that their lives are not valued,” — Julie Garcia
“ I’m with Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR), and this is the definition of standing up against racism to me. Like this person said, I have a privilege of being able to take this risk and so if I’m not willing to do that, I don’t know how I can expect anyone else to,” — Jac Archer, SCAR
“ I am the executive director of Yoyot Sp’q’n’i, and we actually made a statement condemning ICE, condemning these orders, from our president. And I just want to pull a little piece out of our statement that says, ‘I stand with all these targeted by these violent and hauntingly familiar policies. We will not be silent as our relatives are caged, disappeared and torn from their loved ones. We believe in liberation, not incarceration; care, not cruelty; belonging, not banishment. And I also wanna say that we are on the lands of the Spokane people. And this was always a gathering place. And, it’s a horrific time for other people, but we know about these borders on stolen land and there shouldn’t be. I stand with every single person here who says, abolish ICE. So that’s what I hope to do. Abolish ICE,” — Angel Tomeo Sam, Yoyot Sp’q’n’i
“The way that the multiracial, working class of this country is being manipulated and split by strategic racism to benefit a handful of billionaires who are trying to trick us all into advancing their deeper and deeper pockets. So we say no. We say no to racism. We say no to anti-immigrant hatred, and we’re gonna put our bodies in the way,” — Liz Moore, PJALS
“ My father was not born here. He came here from South America when he was four. At that point in time, there was not a long waiting list that people had to stay in their terrible, terrible situations while wanting to come here for a better life. I am blessed to have been born here, right? And … I don’t have the same complications as other people — my skin is white even though I’m not. I am here because this is not right. Like we’ve sat there and watched people get pulled out of their homes, get tackled and assaulted, and all of this. The literal slogan of America is a complete contradiction to what is going on right now,” — a person willing to be arrested who chose not to give their name.
“I like my ICE crushed and I’m here to show white men what it means to do the bare fucking minimum,” — Mickey Pike
“ I’m the chair of the Spokane County Democrats. I’m also a Kosovo, Afghanistan veteran, and this is not what I served for. Everyone deserves due process. It’s time for our elected officials and our law enforcement to follow the constitution. Thank you,” Naida Spencer, Chair of the Spokane County Democrats
“ ICE is trying to deport people. They can’t deport ’em if they can’t get in the bus,” — Jude
Late Night Presser: Brown defends police facilitating ICE access to agency building
As a standoff between protesters and four separate law enforcement agencies began dying down on Wednesday, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown hosted a 10 pm press conference at City Hall during which she defended law enforcement helping federal officials transport the two immigrants they’d arrested from their Cataldo Avenue facility.
The police had closed down Washington Street near the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, where hundreds of demonstrators had gathered to protest the detentions. The immigrants are in the country legally.
Washington is a sanctuary state under the Keep Washington Working Act (KWWA), a law that bars local agencies from helping federal agents enforce immigration law. Brown said she didn’t see a contradiction between her vocal commitment to the KWWA and ordering Spokane police to clear away the protesters, effectively allowing the ICE vehicles to leave with the detained men. Brown said the KWWA didn’t come into play at all, as Spokane police officers were enforcing municipal code that bars people from impeding rights of way.
“It’s pretty clear from the observations I had of what was occurring there and frankly from my communication throughout the afternoon with some of the protestors that they did not expect that they would be successful in stopping ICE — a federal agency — from completing their mission,” Brown said.
Brown argued that by responding to the protests with city police, she had made it less likely that President Donald Trump would send in National Guard and Marines as he has done or threatened to do in California and other places that have seen similar protests.
Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall also took questions from reporters, saying SPD deployed white smoke in the crowd of protesters and fired pepper balls at the demonstrators’ feet. He said SPD did not use rubber bullets, though it’s unclear how he could be absolutely sure of that so soon after the conclusion of the protest. Many protestors described being shot with bean bag rounds, rubber bullets and other less-lethal munitions and had the welts to prove it. Spokane County Sheriff deputies do appear to have shot protesters with less-lethal rounds.
Hall said about 185 city officers responded to the scene, not including sheriff’s deputies. By about 10:45 pm, there were around 20 protesters still on Washington Street, though a small group of people started gathering near City Hall.
Brown reiterated Spokane’s commitment to making sure immigrant communities are safe and feel welcome.
“ I know there is tremendous fear among our local immigrant and refugee community,” Brown said. “My heart goes out to families who are separated or are fearful of what might happen to them in their workplace or as they proceed about their lives in Spokane. That’s why I’ve been coordinating with some of our local partners to understand how we can be supportive of those communities. Because in Spokane, we all belong.”
As written in The Spokesman Review by Alexandra Duggan; “It took almost no time for two immigrants to become part of Shelly O’Quinn’s family.
She was on the cusp of becoming one of their “sponsors” to guide them in the United States as part of the U.S.’ asylum program. By all accounts, everything was going right. The two would spend their days working at the Airway Heights Walmart, check in with immigration and make it to every court hearing.
It all changed on Wednesday when they received a notice to check in with immigration. But instead of a check-in, the two were picked up by federal authorities.
“They are such good young men,” O’Quinn said. “They did all of it legally. And they have such a heartbreaking story.”
O’Quinn, a former Republican Spokane County commissioner, met 21-year-old Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and 28-year-old Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres last year at a church event after they escaped persecution in Venezuela.
The two refugees met in Colombia and began the trek to Mexico, but their journey was largely traumatic, O’Quinn said – they were sleeping on roads, were robbed at gunpoint and threatened with machetes.
“They got jobs in Mexico. They went to the border every day and applied to get into the U.S.,” O’Quinn said. “They finally were accepted and came here legally, in the humanitarian parole program.”
They both qualified for asylum and were following the legal court process, O’Quinn said. Alvarez Perez qualified for the juvenile asylum process because he came to the U.S. younger than 21.
They even had a court hearing scheduled for October, and it left O’Quinn optimistic about where things were headed. In Minneapolis on a work trip, she was stunned when she got the call that chaos had broken out on the streets of Spokane because the men were detained by ICE.
Alvarez Perez’s sponsor, former city council president Ben Stuckart, had taken the two to their check-in when authorities detained them instead. Stuckart posted a call to action on Facebook, which led residents to swarm the ICE office off West Cataldo Avenue in North Spokane.
The protest erupted throughout the evening, with a group of people attempting to stop unmarked law enforcement vehicles from leaving. Federal agents pushed back, sending some protesters’ belongings falling to the ground. Others crowded a bus to prevent it from leaving and were ultimately arrested for obstruction and failure to disperse, one of them being Stuckart.
While more faced off with police and deputies, law enforcement began throwing canisters of smoke and pepper balls to disperse the crowd.
Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown then issued a 9:30 p.m. curfew, calling the decision “the best path forward” for everyone to stay safe.
Stuckart eventually posted bail, but he has yet to hear from Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres, he said. O’Quinn, fearing the worst, flew to Seattle on Thursday and plans to attempt a visit with the two transported to Tacoma’s immigration detention center.
“If I can’t see them, the next step is figuring out how I can … Imagine if your kids were in a detention center with no contacts. It’s a scary place,” O’Quinn said. “I just imagine the fear they are feeling, and I want them to know someone cares for them.”
The legal way, no longer
Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres came to the United States through a legal program known as the Venezuelan Humanitarian Parole Program, or the “CHNV” program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. It allows for immigrants facing persecution to legally live and work in the U.S. “under parole.”
President Donald Trump attempted to terminate the program earlier this year, but a Massachusetts judge issued an injunction to pause the action. On May 30, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the injunction, giving Trump free reign to end the parole program and continue mass immigrant deportations, something he has vowed to do since the start of his presidency. The crackdown on immigration has led ICE to detain people all across the country.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a notice to the thousands of immigrants taking part in the program that their legal status has since been terminated, according to reporting from CNN.
“This notice informs you that your parole is now terminated. If you do not leave, you may be subject to enforcement actions, including but not limited to detention and removal, without an opportunity to make personal arrangements and return to your country in an orderly manner,” the notice says.
It’s unclear whether Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres received a parole termination notice, O’Quinn said. Either way, she expected it wouldn’t affect them because they had another pathway into the U.S. by asylum – but now, even their asylum status is murky. Alvarez-Perez also celebrated his birthday just this week, consequently aging him out of the juvenile asylum program he was part of.
“We are a country that allows for due process. I believe they should have the right to due process. They did what they were supposed to do,” O’Quinn said. “We are not a country that should be picking up people are who legally here without due process. It’s a violation of our rights in the United States.”
The Supreme Court decision allowing for deportation of those on humanitarian parole is “brutal on its face,” according to Spokane civil rights attorney Jeffry Finer. Normally, an injunction would give time for litigation while also preventing undue harm where there is no reasonable remedy, he said, like tearing down a historical building.
“There’s no way to bring back the building. You can’t fix it or reverse it,” Finer said. “So if it’s going to have irreparable damages, an injunction is the way to litigate the merit and keep the status quo so nobody is harmed if the lawsuit is successful.”
The dissenting Supreme Court opinion states the court botched the way it protects people during ongoing litigation. Finer said his interpretation of it shows “the risk to the government is small” but “the risk to immigrants is huge” – because once they’re deported, there likely won’t be a push to bring them back.
And there’s no telling if the two will be deported, because the jail is “a black hole” of information, Stuckart said.
Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres were so desperate to flee, they walked for weeks to find freedom from persecution and remained here with no criminal record, Stuckart added, which tells him no one is exempt from deportations. Immigrants with minor or no criminal records are still being detained across the U.S. despite Trump saying he wants to crack down on immigrants with violent backgrounds.
“They don’t have years to wait. Once they did get here, these two gentlemen got legal work permits and were working full time and contributing to society with taxes,” he said. “I don’t know what the difference is between someone who comes in at one point or another point. Take politics out of it. This goes beyond a political lens.”
Past the politics
O’Quinn’s family refers to Rodriguez Torres as “Randy,” a name he picked himself, because people had trouble pronouncing his name. It’s hard for her to look at news reports and court records identifying him as “Joswar,” she said. A picture of the two taken at the Barton English School, both smiling ear to ear, is “the smiles they always have on their face,” O’Quinn wrote in a text.
“I want him to come home,” she said Thursday. “Both of them.”
While Stuckart is a Democrat and O’Quinn was a Republican commissioner, the urge to bring back the men spans the political divide. Stuckart has made contact with Sen. Maria Cantwell’s office, and O’Quinn said she reached out to Rep. Michael Baumgartner for help, and he responded promptly by having his staff track information for her on how she could find where the men were taken.
“He’s actually been very supportive,” she said, “And I appreciate that.”
Baumgartner released a statement Thursday about the protests applauding law enforcement’s response and encouraging people to work with federal officials to enforce immigration laws.
“We need both secure borders and immigration reform,” the statement reads. “Peaceful protest is guaranteed under the Constitution, but there is no excuse for violence or impeding law enforcement officials.”
His office has not responded for further comment.
The stories of Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres deserve to be told, because “they have demonstrated their American values of hard work and integrity,” O’Quinn said – they shouldn’t become political pawns in a battle with red or blue. Both Republicans and Democrats have vouched for the men, Stuckart said later, calling them “the people you want in our country.”
Both agree the men did everything they’re told to do as immigrants: apply to come into the country legally, get a job and pay taxes.
It’s the reason O’Quinn believes their detainment doesn’t reflect the values of Spokane.
“I am grateful for the people who stood up for their rights yesterday,” she said. “It tells them that it wasn’t Spokane that kicked them out.”
Editor’s note — this story was corrected to reflect the men were not refugees under the U.S. Government but were rather seeking asylum.”
Spokane Police Special Force of the Political Intelligence Unit, come to kidnap former Spokane City Councilman Ben Stuckart’s ward Cesar Alvarez Perez.
As Captain Pickard’s line goes “Force a man to give up his child to the state? Not while I’m his Captain.” Or his comrade, his fellow American, his fellow human being of any kind.
Order A Man To Hand His Child Over To The State? Not While I’m His Captain STNG Season 3 episode 16
Also news of Justice Forrall, arrested in the police raid on the Pride gathering at Riverside Park; Native American drag queens don’t need to break laws to bring the wrath of police terror, proof that this arrest like many others for a great many years was never about law and order, but about authorized identities and white male systems of oppression.
As written in Range Media by Erin Sellers & Luke Baumgarten in an article entitled Queer BIPOC organizer arrested on their way to Spokane Pride: Spokane Police officers arrested Justice Forral on a warrant from the county Sheriff’s Office for new 3rd degree assault charges leveled against Forral for the anti-ICE protest on Wednesday; “On their way to Pride, Justice Forral — an organizer with Spokane Community Against Racism (SCAR) — was arrested by Spokane Police Department officers on a warrant from the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office alleging third degree assault.
Forral was on their way to celebrate Spokane Pride when officers ran up to them. Folks nearby started taking video as Forral quickly turned around, put their hands behind their back and told bystanders to notify SCAR.
These were additional charges resulting from Forral’s presence at a protest against Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) detainment of two young men who came to the US legally, which we covered in depth here. At the protest, Forral was one of two people — both queer — who were arrested at Wednesday night’s protest with seven counts of “unlawful imprisonment”, a class C felony in the state of Washington.
It is still unclear why exactly Forral and Lang were specifically targeted for felony charges while other protesters were not, but court documents showed that ICE agents told police that agents, employees and the detainees in the building were “concerned for their safety and felt that they were being held hostage.”
Forral was released without having to pay bail for the initial seven felony charges on Thursday afternoon, with a scheduled court hearing later this month.
After the arrest on Saturday, organizers from SCAR went to the jail to talk to Forral and bail them out, but were told that no bail would be posted. Forral could be held for the entirety of the weekend, pending a potential decision from a weekend judge at 2 pm tomorrow, organizers told RANGE.
When shown the footage of Forral’s arrest, Council Member Paul Dillon said,“This feels like a political arrest.”
Dillon told RANGE Saturday that he was going to try and speak with Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall or someone at SPD about the agency pausing future arrests of activists from Wednesday night’s ICE protest on charges brought by the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office.
This is especially pressing right now, as the only other person arrested on multiple felony charges along with Forral was Erin Lang, who is also queer and likely to be at Pride.
In a statement on Facebook, Guy Thompson, a former court watcher with SCAR, wrote “Spokane Police and Chief Hall absolutely can and do choose when to serve warrants. Arresting Justice on the way to Pride was an intentional provocation by SPD.”
We have requests for comment out to the Spokane Police Department and the Mayor’s Office about why this arrest happened during Pride, whether leadership knew it was going to happen, and whether other queer protesters should be worried about an arrest at the event — which is, by far, the most important event of the year for the queer community.”
Herein I offer a personal example of how my partner Dolly and I have used music as an instrument of self-creation and bringing order to ourselves and our experience of the world in time, both developmentally as we grew up and now as music soundtracks our lives at home and forms the ideational structure of home as an immense body beyond the limits of our form which sustains and empowers us.
You know how hearing music allows us to re-experience previous states of being and moments from our past? This is what I mean when I speak of our second body as mimesis and history; it is also an example of how music functions as a means of control of our passions and the legacies of our past, a ghost body which is also an instrument of self-construal.
Music was invented as a means of conferring upon ourselves the power to shape our own being and fate; as such it is not a peripheral activity but one central to becoming human.
And of course it allows us to create Beauty with which to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
My literary website is named Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium after our cottage, because it serves as a place of refuge and reflection for my partner Dolly and I in different ways because of the work we do; mine writing, hers music.
Where I think of my own study as a space of reading, research, and writing, an Imaginarium where I may dream and explore ideas, hers is a Conservatory where music can be created and played. She describes the differences between us this way; “You think in poems, I think in songs.”
Where most everything a writer does happens in their head, music requires instruments, and as you might imagine hers are spread out across three areas of our cottage. In the parlor off the foyer on the main level is Dolly’s hundred year old piano inherited from her aunt Georgia who played it in accompaniment with uncle Francis who was an opera singer; Dolly traveled and performed with them in the opera when young. With it she has two keyboards set up; a Roland RD2000 and a new RD-88 ultralight for one keyboard gigs. She has several such pairs and normally plays two together in a vertical stack, lead with the right hand and bass line with the left, sometimes one as a piano and the second as a synthesizer with all of the other instruments she arranges and programs for each song in a live performance. In the library and music room downstairs where she has her office are set up a second pair of keyboards, including one for composition and sound engineering, a Yamaha Motif XS6 music production synthesizer with integrated sampling sequencer and an Ensoniq ZR-76 for playing; the show set are in a shop in the garage which also has a second antique family heirloom piano, restored over the last year to her glory.
And she sings; I can best describe Dolly’s voice in terms of her two top cover songs, as she can mimic with precision Linda Ronstadt’s mezzo soprano with soprano extension in three octaves in Blue Bayou, also Madonna in Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, a G3-C5 song. Both of these singers are three octave mezzo sopranos.
I classify Dolly as a mezzo soprano with contralto and soprano extension, with a range somewhere slightly over three octaves, because she can also reach down into the contralto range with excellent tremolo which begins around C3, allowing her to sing Sweet Dreams Are Made of These, though with less depth than Annie Lennox’s astounding G2-C6 contralto coloratura. Her tessatura, the range in which she can sing without strain as demonstrated in the two hour gigs she plays at least once a week as the T&T Show, begins at E3, two notes above C3 and in the contralto range three notes below mezzo, all the way up to an F5 at the top of the mezzo soprano range.
Dolly had begun her career as a professional musician playing the 1974 World’s Fair, having discovered after many years of classical piano lessons that while piano recitals and competitions earned union scale in the symphony and a bit more for the occasional concert or television appearance, cocktail lounges paid well and hotels and cruise ships offered a free room with maid service and meals in the restaurant as well as lots of money. She had just lived her last year of high school in a private suite at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane with its stunning stained glass atrium ceiling in the Peacock Lounge where she played piano, then went to Victoria British Columbia and lived at the Empress Victoria Hotel for two years, with a sailboat in the harbor for exploring.
Through her twenties and thirties Dolly was a kind of minor star in Europe, in a very rarefied and exclusive circuit of luxury cocktail lounges, restaurants, clubs, and ballrooms, and once turned down a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon to retain artistic control of her own music. She spent the next two decades playing grand hotels and cruise ships in Europe; the Princess and Norwegian Lines, the Harry’s New York Bars in Paris and Hamburg, and her favorite places to live, Bath England and a resort in Bavaria, as well as Vegas casinos, but before all of this hobnobbing with royalty and high living she was the girl who at twelve saw the film Lawrence of Arabia at the cinema and then went home and played the entire score from memory.
Of course the rapture of her beautiful music fired my imagination and captivated my soul.
As to my own history with music, I grew up with the shakuhachi or Japanese bamboo flute as part of formal Zen study from the age of nine for ten years, literally suizen or “blowing zen”, and enjoyed making strange instruments from found objects in nature like a Sea Horn from cured and formed seaweed, which I imagined heralding the hunt of the merfolk. I made a kind of xylophone to release the voices of the trees and give reply to the winds as they move through them whispering secrets, and a kind of harp with which to converse with birds. I wrote mad songs from the ululations of strange beasts and the incantations of wild things, with lyrics influenced by Basho and Whitman, hymns to abyssal powers in invented languages in my Wittgenstein-Finnegans Wake teenage fanboy years, and made sporadic attempts to learn the piano, violin and guitar.
Piano and violin were inescapable as they were objects of great numinous power and historical weight in our home; my mother’s pecan wood upright with which she enlivened family festivities and my father’s Stradivarius from before we came to America in 1736. Guitar I chose in seventh grade because I wanted to play Flamenco and classical Spanish guitar music, a project I abandoned in less than three years because I couldn’t find anyone to learn it from, though my very patient teacher did try to attract me to folk music with Snowbird, whose lyrics haunt me still.
In the end none of these instruments captivated me or became part of who I am, piano, violin, or guitar, though I was still experimenting with my own invented instruments in my twenties. I can’t say my musical curiosities came to nothing, as they influenced both my poetry and how I learned languages, lifelong pursuits of mine.
For my partner Dolly, music is something quite different, interwoven with her history and forming the structural moving parts of which she is made, like a skeleton of dreams.
I’ve spent my whole life enchanted by my partner Dolly’s beautiful piano music; she can play anything she hears, even once, flawlessly and with years between. Music is literally a language to her, and she uses the same kinds of methods in singing and playing as I do in hearing and learning to create meaning in new languages.
She has been a professional musician for over fifty years from the age of seventeen, playing piano and keyboards and singing; we reconnected and began building Dollhouse Park twenty four years ago now, and all the while I have been part of her musical world, though for much of my life this has been largely imagined on my part and focused on classical piano repertoire and the symphony, opera, ballet, and chamber music where she played whatever her audience wanted to hear, all over the musical spectrum.
She now mostly plays as the T&T Show locally with her cousin Tommy on guitar, at least once a week for longer than I’ve been in Spokane; the ballroom dance crowd follows them. I’m the roadie, and her greatest fan; her one and only stipulation for living together being to help with her show. We don’t need the money, but playing music to live audiences is part of who she is, and it’s a terrific lot of fun.
So music has always been part of who I am, through my partner who has always been a primary informing, motivating, and shaping force for me, since the moment my mother first brought me home from the hospital as a new baby and asked Dolly, then four, if she wanted to hold me. I remember an orb of light like a bodisattva reaching out to me to gather me in, and she asked; “Can I keep him?” I believe I bonded to her, in the manner of wild things, and we have been a kind of dual consciousness ever since.
In terms of influence, I did not attend a full performance of Wagner’s Ring operas until I was at university and did not understand it til much later through my work as a counselor for angry boys, but I would never have come to my analysis of the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force without it and guidance from Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Ring of Power. From seventh grade I have adored the Romantic composers, opera and opera trained voices, and from my university years I made a grand event of attending the opera, symphony, and ballet in San Francisco with whose dancers I felt a deep kinship as a martial artist as we both practice arts in which we ourselves are the only product, a period in which I also listened to acoustic instrumental music including Spanish guitar and Irish traditional ensembles.
As to the place of music in our lives now, I wish to share with you some of the activity driven playlists with which I sound track our lives here at Dollhouse Park, from my You Tube Music page.
Yesterday was Memorial Day in America, a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, multiplicities of history from which conflicting and ambiguous narratives of identity can be forged, stories we live within and inhabit and those which possess and falsify us, both those we must claim and those from which we must emerge.
This holiday codifies national identity as veneration of the sacred dead who died to win our liberty, for myself primarily in remembrance of my own fallen comrades among the ghost legions and a celebration of antifascist struggle in World War Two and in the ongoing theatres of World War Three in Russia, America, Ukraine, Libya, Sudan and Mali and the whole of sub Saharan Arica and the region of Lake Chad, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and now Iran and the divided nation of Israel and Palestine, and should we fail to turn the tide of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Putin’s mad dreams of empire and a conflict which will engulf the whole of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, in which case civilization collapses and the world begins an age of tyranny and total war which humankind will not survive.
A spectre of our doom made all too real and timely as two years ago this week Putin began positioning his nuclear arsenal in Belarus for the Final Solution to the Ukrainian problem, and then Moldova and Poland, then NATO and the EU. Here is bottled death, the death of cities, nations, peoples, our species, and it calls to him like an evil genie, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
We must stop it here, this massive failure of our humanity which is the Russian conquest of Ukraine and the Israel genocide of the Palestinians, because from this point of no retreat history collapses and we become nothing.
History, memory, identity; our symbols and holidays are a ground of struggle, which open and close doors to possible futures.
Who do we want to become, we humans? This is the question which drives and organizes our interrogations of the past and the future possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; not our addiction to power and wealth which the family storyteller of my youth William S. Burroughs called the Algebra of Need in his reimagination of Marx nor the processes of dehumanization of capitalism, imperialism, and carceral states of force and control which my friend Jean Genet described as necrophilia in his famous 1970 May Day speech at Yale in support of the Black Panther Party. These too are crucial to understanding why we are rushing blindly to our extinction, as we are falsified, commodified, and dehumanized by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, force, and power.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Such questions illuminate the interdependence of our social and material systems, and the bidirectionality of forces of action and reaction. For our politics reflects and echoes our relationship not only with ourselves and each other, but with nature itself; our fear or embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of September 7 2019, As the Amazon Dies in a Bonfire of Our Vanities, a Final Message From Its Indigenous Peoples; Vast tracts of priceless and irreplaceable resources are now burning to clear the land for cattle and palm oil monoculture, in the Amazon and Borneo, and so many other sacred places of the earth, its beautiful wildness and glorious marvels sacrificed to profit and greed.
Jean Genet was right to call capitalism a kind of necrophilia; capitalism is a pimp at a bus station, an ambush predator waiting to cut the vulnerable out of the herd and convert beauty into profit, life into dead money. And what is money but a belief system, the promise to pay of a government and its value nothing more than the faith of those who trade with it in the reliability of that promise?
It is insubstantial as the wind, its value shifting with the confidence of those who use it, while real things, a leopard, a hornbill, an orchid, a tribal people living in harmony with nature, have intrinsic value which relies on nothing beyond themselves.
Which kind of things shall we value and preserve, the illusionary or the real, the impermanent or the eternal, the living, transcendent, and ineffable or the dead, meaningless, and profitable?
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2022, Politics Is About Fear as the Basis of Human Exchange, the Origins of Evil In the Wagnerian Ring of Fear, Power, and Force, and the State As Embodied Violence, and Revolution is the Art of Freeing Ourselves From It; A friend whom I regard as wise has asked me the question which redeems the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; are you all right?
Such questions become a moral compass which can reorient us when we are lost among the unknowns and nameless places of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value, for the bearers of questions as truthtellers perform the functions of the Just Humans in Jewish mythology who maintain the world and actualize its ongoing regeneration, an idea which references Maimonides’ principle of continual creation, that the universe is destroyed and recreated with each moment and must be remembered and renewed through tikkun olam or repair of the world lest we be consumed by the darkness of grief and despair, the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, the guilt of survivorship, and our helplessness and meaninglessness before the unanswerable tidal forces of death.
Here is my reply; As the line in Hamlet goes, “The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to” remain with us always as an imposed condition of struggle; yet I shall resist and yield not, and abandon not my fellows in their hour of need, as I was sworn to do by Jean Genet, nor shall I go quietly into the night which beckons, but rage against the dying of the light, of the fall of civilization, and of the negation of our humanity.
It gladdens me to hear that you are well in the wholeness of your soul; I am not, for in Mariupol the darkness began to look back at me as Nietzsche warned us.
There I tried to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, and failed. But as the Matadors said to me in Brazil the summer before high school when they welcomed me into their society, “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
The question for me now is whether this is enough to tip the scales of history toward democracy and away from fascism and tyranny, enough to salvage some fragment of my humanity as a balance against degeneration, to remain a man and not become a monster and a beast.
As with our myriad futures and limitless possibilities of becoming human, we begin the journey of each new day toward the discovery of ourselves, a grand and fearsome thing which requires the transgression of boundaries and the testing of unknowns. And so hope remains for us all, for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Be well, my friend, and never let our duty of the repair of the world become a task of abjection and despair, for it is a labor of Sisyphus shared by all humankind and must be carried forward by us all together, one day I hope as a United Humankind.
Thank you for your question, Professor Levine. I am not okay, and neither is America nor humankind okay; but one day, if we keep asking questions, we will be.
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2021, Freedom and Revolution as an Art of Fear and Pain: “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free,” so John Stuart Mill exhorts us in Principles of Political Economy, and I am thinking of this in terms of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and the primary strategic problem of how to delegitimize authority and demonstrate the meaninglessness of its power, how to seize power against impossible odds and in the face of twin threats of force and control, the brutal repression and massive military resources of state tyranny and terror and the pervasive surveillance and thought control of propaganda, lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls.
My father once said to me; ‘Never play someone else’s game. Whoever sets the terms and the rules of a game wins, so this is what you must seize first, and change the rules.” This wisdom was imparted as an observation of the differences between sports of personal combat, which have rules, and combat in war and revolution or anywhere beyond the boundaries of law or games with rules, which has none. In this it is like the distinction between politics and revolutionary struggle.
The Olympics playing out before us now offer us spectacles of excellence and the limits of human achievement, and I have been watching the fencing competition with great interest as performances which enact metaphors and tactical principles of struggle, a background against which a great theatre of shadow puppets is unfolding here in Brazil where mobilization for the re-election of Lula to the Presidency is coordinated with mass actions of the precariat underclass and workers unions, the resistance of indigenous peoples to genocide, and direct action against the institutions of state terror and tyranny.
As my father was a fencing coach, whose right arm was magnificently adorned with scars from actual sword duels, who taught both privately at our home and as a club at our high school where he also taught Forensics, English, and Drama, it was inevitable that I would have participated to some degree, but I loved saber and was reasonably good at it. How I came to discover this, and what it came to mean to me in time, is a story relevant to my understanding of freedom and the art of revolution as its praxis.
It was the Incident of the Bubble Gum which brought the disciplines of fencing and martial arts into my life, and changed how I was raised and who I became as a scholar and warrior, and as a man and a human being.
As a nine year old I spent recess at elementary school either playing chess with the Principal in his office, reading in the library, or experimenting with the chemistry set in the lab, which doubtless seemed unfriendly and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. This was the Defining Moment when I learned how absolutely crucial and determinative to viability and success it is to simply do what the other boys did, within limits. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals in bottles marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone; only fate or chance had allowed me to escape becoming a nine year old mass murderer. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; and politics is the Art of Fear. This is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Membership, too, is a means of exchange. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong.
Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need now is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
So my father described to me Sartrean authenticity and freedom as an escape from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a philosophy of total Resistance.
From this time I was engaged in the study of martial arts, fencing, and wilderness survival. Martial arts is a vast subject, and I trained in a number of fighting arts, but competitive saber fencing is a game with a very specific set of conditions which are directly relevant to actual combat, because like politics and war it is an Art of Pain and Fear.
Politics and how we choose to be human together, and the arts of revolution and war as seizures of power when we can no longer hear and speak to one another’s pain and dialog and negotiation finds its limit; these are arts of swallowing pain and metabolizing it as power and freedom.
To be clear, these are arts of power as intimidation, subjugation, and dominion through inflicting pain, and freedom won through discipline in embracing it. A fencing saber is a semi flexible steel whip with which we inflict pain to establish dominance, like a sjambok; fencers run at each other and deliver punishing hits that feel like real cuts, a white hot searing pain so intense it can disrupt consciousness.
On the first pass I preferred trading hits or counterattack to any defense; why defend and be reactive and controlled when you can teach your enemy to fear you? On the second pass a weak opponent will hesitate, betrayed by his flesh and the fear of remembered pain it holds, and be lost. If he is without fear we meet as equals in the second and third engagements, and the game becomes one of chesslike multilayered strategies, diversion and surprise, timing, precision, and control through continuous assault and patterns of attack and entrapment which set up multi-staged openings by making the opponent react in defense to establish habits and expectations of action as norms and misdirection which one then violates with an unpredictable surprise. An art of politics, war, and revolution.
Saber is the art of eating pain to turn it into victory.
I love saber because it is primarily a contest of will and only secondarily of skill, in which ferocity in attack and willingness to accept pain to achieve victory are decisive, though guile, deception, concealment of intent, and an ability to think moves ahead of one’s opponent improvisationally in a time-compressed fluid and dynamic situation define greatness in this arena.
So also with the arts of revolution as both war and political struggle.
To be beyond control by pain and fear is to be free from the limits of our form and from subjugation by authority, for who cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered. As Jean Genet said to me when we were trapped by soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
To once again tell the tale of how Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982:
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said with an ironic smile and a very Gallic shrug; “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty five years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death and pain over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and to the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
It is a principle of action I recommend to you all, for when we eliminate personal survival from our victory conditions, when we accept death and “the many ills to which the flesh is heir” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, as imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force and power, authority, and state terror and tyranny, we free ourselves from the limits of our flesh and can turn pain and fear as the means of enslavement against the tyrants of our dehumanization as forces of liberation and seizure of power. Freud called this death transcendence, and it is a precondition of autonomy in revolutionary struggle as self ownership of identity.
As Max Stirner said, “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized”.
Let us resist authority whenever it claims us, by any means necessary, and become exalted beyond ourselves in a liberty which cannot be taken from us.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. Why does not matter, not in terms of strategy, tactics, or mission goals; all that matters is that we never stay down, and remain loyal to our comrades.
When we define victory as refusal to submit, we can be killed, captured, tortured in endless horrific ways, but we cannot be defeated, not if we claw our way to our feet to make yet another Last Stand. And this, friends, is a power that cannot be taken from us.
At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.
Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness.
My suicide teams were among many reasons why we Antifa as a whole became to my knowledge the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle within her borders since Little Bighorn, as the Triumvirate of President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and Acting Director of Homeland Security Wolf announced articles of surrender ceding federal control of the New York, Seattle, and Portland Autonomous Zones to the People.
This I count as a victory with the fall of Apartheid and the Berlin Wall; it is possible to be victorious against vast and seemingly unstoppable force, if one disbelieves the lies of Authority and disobeys those who would enslave us.
A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
A fascinating essay by Cecil Bloom published in the Jerusalem Post, entitled The 36 Just Men Who Save the World, examines the mythic idea that existence is perpetuated not by the mighty, by Plato’s Philosopher-Kings or Hegel’s World Geniuses, not by Nietzschean Supermen or hegemonic elites, but by ordinary people through everyday acts of kindness toward others, as the movements of a butterflies’ wings may create whirlwinds.
This I call becoming Living Autonomous Zones rather than lamedvavnikim, and among the origins of the idea of mutualism and interdependence as the moral basis for society, one owned and originating in the unauthorized identities of the underclasses as a primary seizure of power from imposed ideas of virtue as submission to authority, the myth of Good Acts as the force which creates and maintains the material universe remains a compelling vision.
“There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints (lamedvavnikim) on whose piety the fate of the world depends. The Book of Proverbs provides an early source for the belief that the just man is the basis of the existence of the world: “When the storm wind passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation” (10:25). That is to say, that the righteous man holds up and supports the world just as the foundations of a building support it. Another source for the legend is from the Mishnaic period (1st-2nd century): “When the righteous come to the world, good comes to the world and misfortune is removed but when the righteous pass away disaster comes and goodness leaves the world” (Tosefta, Sofa 10:1). The specific reference to this phenomenon is in the Babylonian Talmud, which attributes to a fourth-century Babylonian teacher, Abbaye, the statement: “There are not less than 36 righteous men in every generation who receive the Shechina (the Divine presence). It is written, happy are all they who wait for Himâ” (Sanhedrin 97b; Sukkot 45a).
The Hebrew for Himâ (lamed vav) also represents the number 36 in Hebrew numerology (Gematria) and this provides the basis for the number of saints. The number may also be derived from the verse “Happy are all they who hope for Himâ” (Isaiah 30:18), which has been interpreted to mean: Happy are all they who hope for the 36,†that is, who depend or rely on these 36 just men.
There is a less well-accepted belief that there are 72 saints. The Zohar points to Hosea 10:2, which reads: “Their heart is divided.” The gematria of their heart in Hebrew is 72, which some have interpreted as representing 36 saints in Eretz Israel and 36 in the Diaspora.
At first the Talmud viewed lamedvavnikim merely as being good individuals, but later they began to be seen as hidden saints and many legends then circulated about them. Unrecognized by their fellow men and unknown even to each other, they are said to pursue humble occupations such as artisans or water-carriers. They do not admit their identity to anyone and, if challenged, would deny their membership. The Almighty is said to replace a lamedvavnik immediately upon death. A just man is believed to emerge and use his hidden powers when a Jewish community is threatened and return to obscurity once his task has been completed. This belief has given rise to the suspicion that a stranger who suddenly appears and who seems mysterious may be a lamedvavnik. Several legends claim that one of the 36 is the Messiah, who will reveal himself when the time is ripe. Others contend that as soon as a hidden just man is revealed, he dies.
It has been argued that the number 36 derives from sources other than those discussed above. One is that it comes from ancient astrology where the 360 degrees of the heavenly circle are divided into 36 units of dean and these deans were looked upon as guardians of the universe. Another theory is that 36 is the square of six which is said to be the symbol of the created world in Alexandrian Jewish philosophy but both these theories are not convincing.
Little research, however, seems to have been carried out to conclusively identify the legend’s origin. The lamedvavnik tradition is an Ashkenazi belief Sephardim do not recognize it but it has been present in Kabbalistic literature from the 16th century and in hassidic legends from the late 18th century. There are two 18th-century kabbalistic books whose authors, Rabbi Neta of Szinawa and Rabbi Eisik, a shohet from Przemysl, have been described as being lamedvavnikim. Hassidim recognize two categories of saint: those who work in full view and the hidden ones who belong to a higher order of men. Tales of the lamedvavnikim are widespread, particularly in hassidic literature. The noted hassidic scholar, Martin Buber, also introduced the lamedvavnik into some of his writings. Some hassidic tales emphasize the role of the saint behind a boorish or uncouth facade, a theme also used in some stories of the Baâl Shem Tov. Apparently, this was to make people believe that a noble soul could live within every man and that one should not draw conclusions from appearances.
Prominent writers, from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in the 18th century to 20th-century writers of the stature of S.Y. Agnon and Elie Wiesel have been attracted to the subject. Rabbi Nachman’s The Prince who was made entirely of precious stones introduces us to two lamedvavnikim who, on different occasions, helped a king to beget a daughter and a son and also to save the son from disaster. In Agnon’s The Hidden Tzaddik, the lamedvavnik is a stovemaker who wants to be buried in a plot where the stillborn are buried and whose grave should not be marked with a tombstone. Agnon followed the tradition faithfully, but Rabbi Nachman’s tale indicated that others knew of the identity of the two lamedvavnikim because it was only when the king ordered the Jewish community to help him that the two saints were produced. Elie Wiesel’s One of the Just Men also abandons the idea that the identity of these men is hidden, but Albert Memmi keeps to the traditional view in his The Unrecognised Just Men.
One novel on the subject, Andre Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, achieved best-seller status in 1960. Ernie Levy, a descendant of the 12th-century R.Yom Tov Levy is depicted as being one of the Just Men, inheriting the honor through his family line. The story of the Levy family begins in York in 1185, covers the Inquisition and pogroms in Kiev and describes many other indignities. Ernie is the last of the line and he is destroyed in Hitler’s gas chambers. Schwartz-Bart’s interpretation of the legend is a controversial one because the honor of being a lamedvavnik is not handed down from father to son. Nevertheless, this novel that won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary award, gave rise to much interest in the legend.”
Here is my witness of history regarding how I learned the principles of revolutionary struggle at the age of nine; I spent recess at school during fifth grade either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked as poison with the skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing ball at recess would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and fear becomes a lever you can use to seize power and win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Suicide Squad film trailer
My teams loved this film, the first of which released in 2016.
On this Memorial Day and anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, let us remember and awaken in solidarity and resistance to white supremacist terror and to the tyranny of our police state in recognition that America’s police are an army of repression of dissent which are always and everywhere at war with the people, that democracy in America never at any moment included included nonwhite others nor fully those who do the hard and dirty work which creates the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, that we are fighting an internal war for our liberty against the captured state of the Fourth Reich, and that if we are to remain citizens and not subjects under imposed conditions of struggle which include falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, if we are to remain human and not become things to be used by others, we must do so in Resistance and refusal to submit.
I find it telling that George Floyd Day and Memorial Day are the same, for the fight against fascist tyranny and terror in World War Two honored on this day as a national holiday is the same as our fight now, and the police murder of George Floyd forever reminds us who the real enemy is, and what’s worth fighting for. The police murder of George Floyd remains a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of police and other madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of imperial conquest and dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
Those who would enslave us make monsters of some of us in order to terrify the rest of us into submission and legitimize the centralization of power to the state.
As Joe Biden said; “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
Regarding solidarity and the total freedom conferred by the act of refusal to submit as Resistance, I have a story to tell you, and a gift to share with you; membership in a tradition of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Here I offer you the Oath of the Resistance, as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut in 1982.
During the summer before my 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, we joined whole networks of such groups already fighting, and more joined us; together we united in mass action with a vast and diverse resistance and liberation struggle.
From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege, and against the tyranny and terror of the state of Israel and its violations of our universal human rights in wars and Occupations of imperial conquest and dominion, as I yet remain.
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, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. This is all we truly own and which make us human, such defining moments; memories, stories, histories, identities. Against the terror of our nothingness we have only this with which to find a balance; the truths written in our flesh and the joy of total freedom to discover them. It is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before the Fall of Beirut, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path.
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 in a sack of murder and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, ordering people into the streets to surrender, abducting and blindfolding their children to use as human shields, and setting fires to burn alive in their homes anyone who refused, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes as the building we were in was set on fire, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic and 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 in Paris from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation which friends of mine were forming. 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, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by race or any condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
To all those who hunger to be free, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth, this I say; you are not alone.
Let none stand alone who refuse to submit to the tyranny and terror of force and control, who speak truth to power and question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, who answer division with solidarity, control with disobedience, authorized identities, virtue, and normality with transgression, who run amok and are ungovernable.
Nor can our souls be stolen from us by either the brutal repression of fear nor the seduction of lies and illusions, we who call the enemy by his true names and stand united in the cause of our liberty, for who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled by force and control becomes Unconquered and free.
In Resistance we are all, each of us, Living Autonomous Zones. No one speaks or answers for us, nothing is beyond question, and all authority which claims us is without legitimacy or meaning.
When those who would enslave us come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; let the fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege find not a humankind broken by cruelty and state terror nor divided by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, not hopeless and abject as products of a system of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, not disempowered by learned helplessness nor conditioned to submit to authority and force, but a humankind united in resistance; an unconquerable and United Humankind.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of June 20 2022, Say Their Names: the Visual Iconography of the Black Lives Matter Movement for Racial Justice as Ritual Mourning; As I reflect on the visual iconography and witness of history in film and photography of our epochal reckoning of equality and racial justice, I am awed by the possibilities for civilizational transformation of this moment, by its tidal force as the people reclaim their power from governments throughout the world which have betrayed them in three successive waves of revolution; #metoo, Extinction Rebellion & Fridays for Future, and Black Lives Matter, all driving motives and informing sources which empower the global democracy revolution against fascism and tyranny. If we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of America’s historical memory and vision of ourselves; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort. This image is shaped by the three primary forces of race, wealth, and gender which together act to authorize identity and subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us. And this we must resist.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as written in The Root; “In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America”.
If we count only the known victims of racial violence since Emancipation, we have a legacy of crimes against humanity in a nation founded on the principle that all persons are created equal which reveals this to be an Original Lie; racism is not a failure of our system, but a key element of its design. Now count all the Black people who lived and died as American slaves from the first landing in 1661 to Juneteenth.
The names of the victims of racism in our nation become an infinite loop of misery and despair, a lamentation of the brokenness of the world and of the human cost of a system which uses divisions of exclusionary otherness to change some of us into things to be used for the profit of a few oligarchic families of apex predators. Ideologies of white supremacy perpetuate inequality in our society today; the wolves are still among us, even if they must disguise themselves as sheep.
Among the most terrible instruments of those who would enslave us is this erasure and silencing of Black voices, of concealment of the scope and horror of the legacy of slavery in the power asymmetries and inequalities we are heir to. We have hundreds of years of lost lives and names to reclaim, and we can not lose a single one more.
Every one of those lost lives is an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for Liberty; let us honor them with our actions as songs of survival and revolution, and make of one another living monuments to our unconquered freedom in defiance of those who would enslave us.
Of the many insightful essays written of this moment in history and its transformative and revolutionary consequences for human meaning and being, few are as eloquent as Chaédria LaBouvier’s writing in The Cut, entitled
The Afterlife of George Floyd: A Portfolio by Photographer Eli Reed American iconography of a death, history, and a Black southern homecoming; “It is a beautiful symmetry to have Eli Reed’s photographs capture and canonize this American chapter and George Floyd’s funeral. Reed is one of the best living photographers and is walking history himself; he is the first Black photographer to join Magnum Photos and is a member of Kamoinge, the Black photography collective that has in its DNA Roy DeCarava, a founding father of black-and-white fine photography.
The images are something, as they say down South, perhaps even more so because George Floyd is so present and absent from them. Where is he? It’s just as well that Floyd be in absentia, in a sense, from a photo series about him. Find George Floyd, the human, the person who unsuspectingly became a symbol, the father, the man who called out for his mother as he lay dying. Reed’s photos aren’t the expected intimacy of a funeral’s mise-en-scène with the casket and Floyd’s family — like that of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King — but it is hard to find a real reason why America would have deserved that kind of record for the ages anyway. In lieu of photographing Floyd, Reed’s camera tenderly captures the minutiae of people, in the middle of a pandemic, social collapse, and a revolution, willing themselves to bear witness.
The iconography of George Floyd’s death begins, in the modern sense, in the lynching postcards of the early 20th century. They are a perverse picture of Americana; they are souvenirs from the scenes of murders. Like the leather wallets and belts fashioned from human skin afterwards, these postcards were first and foremost evidence of many things — murder, the unhinged fantasies of White subconsciousness that have long been anchored in the idea of a Black chattel class and a belief in the unalienable right to act out that role play. That a reminder of that kind of unforgettable horror could even be necessary or even desired is an indication of what has long not been well with White America, and for quite some time; Lillian Smith, a Georgia native who framed White supremacy as a mental illness, wrote in Killers of the Dream, “These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy … slip from the conscious mind down deep into the muscles.” James Baldwin put it more explicitly: “And they have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are White.”
Video is not infinite, but it is the strongest contender in humankind’s constant quest to conquer the infinite in real time. In its cruel loopability and limitless excess, what is immortality if not an excess of everything? Everything becomes excessive on video: the length, the audience, the distribution, the distortion, the filters. America has met its match. America has found a medium capable of showing her to herself without tiring and with the matched coldness and unrelenting brutality with which America has always treated Black people.
Perhaps this helps explain why the last moments of Black life on video have found an audience and momentum to catalyze protest and people in our contemporary times. That objectivity and excess of video have distilled the core of the moment in a way few mediums can: The combination of free-range prerogative and unhinged fantasies of White people has long been at the center of these murders and subjugations. The person and the body may be Black, but they are not the subject. It’s what makes Emmett Till’s body so difficult to look at; it is not him, it is not Mamie’s child. It is the site of an imagination, deranged, it is the deadly narcissism of Whiteness’s desires as bluntly as the point can be made, and infinitely as need be. Watching Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes is truly unhinged, and we are watching him enact the same fantasy that his forefathers stood proudly for in photographs when Black bodies were swinging from poplar trees. Video does not tire, and as such on a cellular level, we know America and we know that we will see another Black person die on video again. And that has absolutely nothing to do with Black people.
And so, it is in this weird moment — between the slight beginnings of a White reckoning and the evermore Black activism that has always been this country’s moral North Star — that the afterlife of George Floyd begins.
He is a child of Texas, a son of Houston’s Third Ward, Cissy Floyd’s firstborn, and as the sun set on June 9, 2020, he returned to them. Watching the procession of Floyd’s horse drawn recalled Ossie Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X: “and we will know him then for what he was and is — a prince.” Indeed, Floyd’s homecoming was fit for a king; this has always been the visual thesis of African-American funerary, especially when someone has been stolen from us. The horse-drawn carriage, the gold casket, the choir, the Appian Way procession of the last mile to his grave; George Floyd was given a state funeral by the people, his people.
For it is in the visuals and the iconography of the homecoming — so called by enslaved people because they believed, upon death, their soul would return to Africa — that the person, the human, the humanity reemerges. The last moments of Black life under the duress of unpoliced imaginations, to paraphrase Claudia Rankine, have very little to do with Black life. And if the afterlife is a journey that is filled with abundance, beauty, and absent of all the ignorant, cruel, and dull things that make this physical one at times unbearable, it would make sense that the beginnings of the Black afterlife have absolutely nothing to do with White people. And yet, it is also never not complicated and complex; the Houston Police Department escorted his cortege on its final journey. Make of that what you will.
The visual foundation of Floyd’s afterlife incorporates themes of majesty, splendor, and nobility that are a deeply historical call-and-response to Blackness in funerary and the afterlife across time. It recalls the ancient Egyptians, New Orleans’s jazz funerals, the funeral pageantry of West African tribes, Geechee and Lowcountry funerals, the work of photographer James Van Der Zee and the promised abundance of the “upper room” in works such as Alma Thomas’s painting “Resurrection.” Floyd returned home to the very specific African-Creole corridor of East Texas and Western Louisiana is worth considering. Here, his iconography and afterlife begins in one of the most stunning ancestral regions for African-Americans — and one of the most infamously racist. A place from which the most desperate domestic refugees fled and still, to this day, flee up North for a different type of racism. Floyd himself had fled up North, to Minneapolis, like Mamie Till went up to Chicago. Further east, Emmett Till’s afterlife had its beginnings in this corridor too in the Mississippi Delta — in the Tallahatchie River, to be exact.
Where is George Floyd? How do we find him? We have no clue how and where he will settle in history, art history, how his last moments will enter a canon of filmed death. What we are looking for, beyond the momentum of canonization and movement, is him. Those intimate, quotidian, and mundane things which begrudgingly and solemnly construct a life and one’s work in it. Who will replace his hello to the people who are used to seeing him every day? If he is that person in the neighborhood who takes out the trash for the elderly women who live alone on the block, who will take his place? Who will lead George Floyd’s Bible studies or be the gentle giant in the barbershop, on the block, and at the corner store? How do a community and a family replace what is irreplaceable? Reed’s photographs began looking for these unanswerable questions.
His images recall the tenderness and difficulty of a watercolor portrait. A watercolor portrait is a small miracle; a painter must work quickly, with sustained velocity and controlled chaos, to bend the fluidity of water and the subject’s essence to reveal something luminous, telling, and coherent. Maybe it is the same mastery of application at work here; Reed’s camera captures the uncapturable, what it meant to be in the sticky humidity of that Houston evening that smelled like grief, mosquito repellent, candle wax, and cedar wood. For those not there, Reed’s work acts as a bridge to translate the mourning, the prayer circles, the enormous and quotidian worries of those there — the traffic afterwards, if the chicken left in the sink had fully thawed by the time they got home, if something calamitous would happen on the way back, what would happen now to George’s family, now that he was in the ground and the real shattering, breaking, and healing (maybe) begins. The luminosity of the human experience is here in the artist’s offering to George Floyd, a lion in the winter of his years who has captured wars at home and abroad, still working, this time in the looming discontent of Juneteenth, a plague, and the knocking knees of an empire in collapse. Somewhere in there is a radical love, a belief that George is still owed more, that Black people are deserving of more and that they must have it, and they must have it yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever. Like watercolors, the fervency of this simple truth is hard to capture. It is that love for, and of, and by Black people at the very root of it all which propels the people to the street, prepared to die if it should come down to it. And it is because, like Ossie Davis said of Malcolm, they love us so.
It is, as they say down South, truly something.”
Voices from the Black Lives Matter Protests (A Short Film) | Vanity Fair
Hearing From the Founder of Black Lives Matter
I Am Not Your Negro – Official Trailer
13th full documentary Netflix
The Hate U Give Official Trailer
Get Out Official Trailer
What lies behind America’s mask of equality?
How did 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement change the world? Our panel responds : Osita Nwanevu, Fabiana Moraes, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Zanele Mji, Abeo Jackson and Daniel Gyamerah
One year on, how George Floyd’s murder has changed the world
This article is more than 3 years old
The killing of Floyd by a white officer reflected a common history of violence against Black people that united protesters in a renewed global movement
We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial
Day weekend, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars, both to liberate and colonize others, both for the profit of elites and for the liberty and equality of all humankind, including the Second World War and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and Palestine ongoing now, and countless others including the kleptocratic forever war which looms in Iran and threatens the fall of civilization through global economic collapse.
At this moment humankind is engaged in eight major wars including the Israeli Conquest of Palestine and Iran which directly involves the armed forces of twenty nations including America, civil wars in Somalia, Myanmar, and Sudan, complex wars in the Congo region, Islamist insurgencies in the Sahel, wars of criminal cartels versus the state in Mexico, and Ukraine.
Our twelve mid level wars now ongoing include insurgencies in Iran and Ecuador, civil wars in Ethiopia, Yemen, Nigeria, Central Africa, and Syria, and conflicts in Columbia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Cameroon, and the anti-colonial war of liberation in Haiti versus America.
No one’s counting America’s attempt to starve and freeze Cuba into submission as an imperial conquest, except the Cubans, nor Trump’s bizarre gestures toward conquering Greenland or to open a North Atlantic route of conquest for Russia to conquer the Britain.
And I count ten theatres of World War Three being fought by and versus Russia as she attempts to re-conquer her former Empire including here in the captured state of Vichy America under the puppet tyrant Trump, Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate, Apartheid, and Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of being an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the Russian conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016 and again in 2024, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine nor in Palestine, and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-theocratic, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
We now face certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an Age of Tyrants and imperial wars fought with weapons of unimaginable horror and civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. When I began my publication Torch of Liberty in October of 2018 in reply to an assassination attempt (if they’re going to kill you, there is no longer a motive to keep the whole secret history of one’s life, and the secret history of America and the world, a secret), a sniper’s bullet that ripped through my car with explosive force and missed only because a momentary flash of light from a scope gave warning for evasive jinking before or as the shot was fired, I calculated the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred.
As of now we are at a point of no return with zero or negative one to two in one hundred futures. The rate of change and degradation and the speed of our extinction is still compounding, bringing the last day of humankind ever closer. America may only have one more Presidential election before she ceases to exist as a nation, if our species as a whole still survives, though this can change. Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom.
What does our future look like? To this end I have assembled here my references in iconic films of war, with a word of caution; the wars of the Age of Tyrants will be fought with weapons unimaginable to us now and incomparably destructive as measured against those of the Second World War.
In America we have tracked and briefly brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Now all are pardoned by the mad tyrant who commanded them, and he has taken legislative action to support them materially with our tax dollars to institutionalize a new cadre of Stormtroopers modeled on the SA while Homeland Security functions as our SS. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies. Again, both of these factors can be changed; in Europe’s elections the tide of fascism may just now have been turned, and a new alliance without America may be forming to liberate Ukraine.
In Ukraine and the Third World War of Russia versus humankind and the elections of democracies which are still viable, appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. The first rule of Resistance is: everything the enemy says is a lie. Ukraine is a test of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe, and as in Gaza and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians paid for by our taxes and granted permission and immunity by American complicity, genocide being a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
What is the origin of Memorial Day, and what does this history tell us about ourselves now?
As written by Bruce Smith for the Associated Press, in an article entitled Charleston can lay a claim to 1st Memorial Day; “The city that plunged the nation into its bloodiest conflict can also lay a claim to holding the first Memorial Day observance honoring the dead from the Civil War.
In a little known event, as many as 10,000 people, many of them black, gathered May 1, 1865, to hold a parade, hear speeches and dedicate the graves of Union dead in what is now Hampton Park in Charleston.
A number of towns around the nation claim holding the first Memorial Day, although the distinction generally goes to the town of Waterloo, in upstate New York.
“What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters,” said David Blight, a history professor at Yale who has extensively researched the Charleston event.
“It involved several thousand freedmen. It had all sorts of official involvement by Union troops and it had the involvement of northern missionaries and teachers who had been teaching at freedmen schools for months,” said Blight, also director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
Hampton park was originally the Planters Race Course and, during the final months of the Civil War, a hellish open-air Confederate prison. A total of 267 Union troops died at the camp, some of whom had been moved from infamous Andersonville in Georgia before it was liberated.
The dead were originally buried in a mass grave by the Confederates, but after the war, members of black churches buried them in individual graves at the site of the camp.
An arch over the graveyard entrance identified those buried there as “The Martyrs of the Race Course.” The Union dead were later moved to national cemeteries.
The Charleston commemoration was referred to at the time as Decoration Day, as were other early Memorial Day observances.
Blight, who became familiar with the event while doing research in the late 1990s, said although the Charleston commemoration was reported in the national media it quickly passed from official memory in South Carolina.
The northern troops went home and the memory remained generally with blacks.
“As the Lost Cause tradition — the Southern, Confederate version of the meaning and memory of the war — set in, no one in white Charleston or the state was interested in remembering the war through this event,” he said.
He said memory of the event was suppressed when white Democrats took back control of the state in 1876 and Southern states held their own Confederate Memorial Days.
Blight gave a seminar on the Charleston event here nine years ago and a marker has been placed at the park proclaiming it the site of the nation’s first Memorial Day.
In the North, in 1868, the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, ordered the graves of the war dead be decorated with flowers and memorials.
Two years earlier, in 1866, Waterloo held its first Memorial Day.
The entire community has celebrated the day every year since and, 100 years after that first observance, then-President Lyndon Johnson signed a proclamation designating the town as the birthplace of Memorial Day, said Nancy Newland, the executive director of the Waterloo Library and Historical Society.
“At the end of the day you have to ask does it really matter who is first. But if the issue is what is the first event, Charleston occurred a full year earlier,” Blight said.
Memorial Day through the years was generally celebrated May 30. Beginning in 1971, the federal holiday was designated as the last Monday in May.”
So our Memorial Day celebrates the reburial of the Black Union soldiers who died in hellish Confederate prisoner of war camps and were buried in a mass grave to be forgotten; but the black people of the community, now free because of their sacrifice, remembered and honored them.
Today far too many black people remain in America’s prisons, re-enslaved as bond labor, and the tragic fact that this day also falls on George Floyd Day, with America under Occupation by the ICE white supremacist terror force and imperiled by its campaign of ethnic cleansing, and with the elite white male hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege enforced by police armed to sow terror with random gun violence as repression of dissent and maintenance of hierarchies of belonging and otherness including race, reminds us of the distance we have yet to travel to become a true free society of equals.
References
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You Cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow “Turncoat” Season 2 Episode 11
Postscript: Historical Memory as shared public trauma
How shall we see and understand images of war, death, pain, horror, and evil such as those of war films, which both glorify and authorize violence and the use of social force in the manufacture of virtue and national identity, and interrogate, subvert, and liberate us from such systems of control as stories which possess us and from which we must emerge?
How can we give answer to such darkness in our own lives?
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West: North Africa, 1942-1943, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned Britain’s War in the East, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom, The Murderers Among Us, Krystyna: The Tragedy of the Polish Resistance, Simon Wiesenthal
Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens
Auschwitz, Laurence Rees
Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
America and the Second World War in the Pacific
But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, John Toland
Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–41, Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943, Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, Peter Harmsen
The Eagle & the Rising Sun: The Japanese-American War 1941-43: Pearl Harbor through Guadalcanal, Alan Schom
Torch of Liberty 