On this anniversary of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, an incident of white supremacist terror of which the ICE white supremacist terror force now unleashed upon us in a mad campaign of ethnic cleansing is an echo and reflection, I find new relevance of the principle By Any Means Necessary.
For all Resistance is War to the Knife, and who respects no laws and no limits, no bonds of brotherhood, may hide behind none.
History shadows our lives, and can teach us much that remains relevant and useful; but only if we bear witness, seek the truth, question and expose authority, and remember.
For Silence Is Complicity.
We wander in a Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, falsifications, illusions, diversions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, wherein each other’s voices are the only lighthouses of warning and guidance, and we must hold our voices as fragments of ourselves which we cannot abandon while remaining human.
Let us amplify and exalt each other in solidarity, for we are all embedded in multiple systems of oppression whose objective is to dehumanize us and steal our souls.
As written by Daniel R Biddle in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Wilmington massacre of 1898: a shocking episode of racist violence:
North Carolina city marks 125th anniversary of the white-supremacist attack with a week of memorial events; “In the late 1890s, Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city between the Atlantic’s barrier islands and the banks of the Cape Fear River, became an island of hope for a new America.
Residents of the city’s thriving Black community made themselves a political force, exercising the rights of citizenship guaranteed to them after the civil war by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Across the south, such activity had triggered deadly white violence against Black voters, organizers and officeholders in the decades since the war. But in Wilmington, a city of 20,000, the votes of 8,000 Black men helped a rare biracial “Fusion” alliance elect candidates of both races.
Three of the 10 aldermen were Black. The city had Black health inspectors, postmasters, magistrates and policemen, albeit under orders not to arrest anyone white. The county coroner, jailer and treasurer were Black, as was the register of deeds. Black businesspeople pooled their money in three Black-owned banks. Families a generation removed from enslavement owned their homes and read a local Black newspaper.
As modern-day Wilmingtonian Tim Pinnick, a genealogist, put it: “Things functioned the way they were meant to function as a result of Emancipation.”
Planning a coup
But if Wilmington looked to some Americans like a model for the south, powerful white leaders, including the president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company, the editor of the Raleigh News & Observer and the chairman of the state Democratic party, could not abide it. They set out to topple what the newspaper editor labeled “Negro rule”.
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on 10 November 1898, a shocking coup d’état was executed.
The plotters had set the stage by creating what they called the “white supremacy campaign”. They printed falsehoods about Black men preying on white women and stockpiling guns. They targeted the Fusion officeholders and the Black newspaper, summoned militias and white vigilantes known as Red Shirts, and terrorized Black voters at the polls.
“If you see the negro out voting tomorrow, tell him stop,” one of the leaders, former Confederate colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, told a gun-waving white audience on the eve of Wilmington’s 1898 election. “If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.” Waddell vowed to “choke the current of the Cape Fear River” with Black bodies if he had to.
On 10 November, Red Shirts, militiamen and white mobs surged through Wilmington’s streets and massacred 60 or more Black men. “They gave their lives to vote,” said Hesketh “Nate” Brown, a retired New York City transit manager whose great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, tried to flee the militiamen.
The Red Shirts torched the Black newspaper’s office, posed for pictures in front of its smoking ruins, installed Waddell as mayor, and sent hundreds of Black residents fleeing into the woods. Some ran west toward the river; others, east to the Black cemetery. Athalia Howe was 12 when her family and others took refuge in Pine Forest, a cemetery that dated back to the period before Emancipation. It was said that families sheltered next to graves of their loved ones.
Uncovering a history of racial injustice
For years no one in Howe’s family said much about those events, as her great-granddaughter, Cynthia Brown, told the Washington Post. But one day, when she was about eight years old, a distant look filled her great-grandmother’s eyes and she grabbed Brown’s wrist.
“If it ever happens again, run!” Brown remembered her shouting. “Don’t let it happen to you!”
Brown set out to discover what “it” was.
So did Pinnick, the genealogist and Black schoolteacher from Illinois who learned of the coup in recent years when he retired to Wilmington. And Nate Brown, the retired transit manager who found his great-great-grandfather’s name in an 1898 newspaper clipping about the “race war”. (The article blamed Black “aggressors”.) And Sonya Patrick-AmenRa, who counts among her ancestors four soldiers of the United States Colored Troops who helped win the civil war.
Now, Brown, Brown (they are not related), Pinnick, AmenRa and other Wilmingtonians, along with ministers, activists, authors, educators and a documentary film-maker whose ancestor aided the plotters, are helping change the historical narrative.
Over the last two decades, a school and park named after leaders who directed the murder of dozens of Black people have been renamed. Community activists have set out to learn the names of everyone who was killed and every Black Wilmingtonian who survived the 1898 massacre. They are marking the coup’s 125th anniversary, 10 November, with a week of events that include “racial-equity and trauma training”, documentary film showings and descendants’ stories.
“There is a need to focus on that horrible day to understand it,” Pinnick said. “And yet, it’s a testimony to surviving that the story should be told.”
For nearly a century the story was told falsely – in textbooks, clippings and memoirs that cast the horrific violence as a spontaneous “riot” and the plotters as heroes who restored racial order to Wilmington.
In 2006, a state-commissioned report debunked the longstanding false narratives about Wilmington’s history.
Even so, Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the county’s NAACP chapter, said many local residents still don’t know about it. “This is Wilmington,” she told USA Today last year. “There’s a distance to progress.”
That was evident in the unguarded words of three white Wilmington police officers in 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s killing. A routine audit of patrol-car videotapes revealed the longtime officers discussing killing “f—ing n—s”.
A civil war was coming, Officer Michael Piner said: “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f—ing n—s.” The officers told investigators they had been “venting” and blamed the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement”.
Wilmington’s first Black police chief fired them in his first week on the job.
Their words were “painful, hurtful”, Chief Donny Williams, a Wilmington officer for nearly three decades, told NPR. “Being from this community, and then working alongside these people for so long, so just hurt – and not just me.”
A legacy of political violence
The full toll of the 1898 massacre and the political legacy it created is still not known.
Estimates of the number of Black people killed range from dozens to hundreds. The state’s 2006 study described the coup in detail and blamed all levels of government for not intervening; it said Black merchants and workers “suffered losses after 1898 in terms of job status, income, and access to capital”. Black businesses moved or closed. Some 2,100 Black residents fled. Black literacy rates plunged.
By the turn of the century, southern states were using poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses to deny Black men the right to vote, which the 15th amendment had guaranteed them since 1870. Between 1896 and 1902, the number of Black voters registered in North Carolina fell from 126,000 to 6,100. Wilmington did not elect another Black candidate until 1972.
The violence in Wilmington was not unique. Historians and EJI researchers have documented at least 34 instances of mass violence during Reconstruction where scores of Black people were murdered by white mobs intent on re-establishing white supremacy and resisting Black political participation. It is a history that is not well-known but critically relevant for understanding the continuing struggle for racial justice and the many obstacles that still remain.”
Becky G – Bella Ciao (From the Netflix Series “Casa de Papel”)
The Wilmington massacre of 1898: a shocking episode of racist violence:
North Carolina city marks 125th anniversary of the white-supremacist attack with a week of memorial events
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Herein I interrogate the arts of politics, personal combat, war, Resistance, and revolutionary struggle as illuminated through the metaphor of fencing; and this in the wake of the Day of the Dead, as we honor our history and the ancestors whose stories we bear written in our flesh, and as we fight for the survival of humankind, democracy, and the Restoration of America in the wake of our victorious midterm elections.
In this liminal Defining Moment of what it means to be an American and a human being, our nation wrestles with the balance between Restoration of democracy and bringing a Reckoning to collaborators of the Trump regime and change to the inherent contradictions of a system which is failing and has produced the monstrous Trump regime as a symptom of collapse, and here I wish and intend to provide strategic and ideological policy guidance toward healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As we begin the great task of the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of how we choose to be human together as political and social process and as liberation struggle, as we act in solidarity to seize the momentum of our glorious triumph and bring change to our systems of oppression and the institutions and purposes of the state as we hunt and purge those who would enslave us and all those complicit in the crimes of the Trump Regime from among us, how can we shape ourselves to this historic mission?
All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none, as is true of our criminal and perverse Trump regime and his Party of Treason. But how precisely are we to resist?
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, which I once paraphrased in reply to Jean Genet, 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 of dissent 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 or beyond the boundaries of the arena, which has none. In this it is like the distinction between politics and revolutionary struggle.
There is a beautiful allegory of this principle in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as Kirk defeats the unwinnable scenario Kobayashi Maru by changing the rules of the game and applies this strategy to defeating Khan.
Combat sports like fencing offer us spectacles of excellence and the limits of human achievement, which I study with great interest as performances which enact metaphors and offer tactical and strategic principles of struggle, like the movements and methods of predators in nature which form the basis of my kung fu.
Such are the material basis of my arts of seizures of power as war, revolution, and political struggle as much as the systems of oppression and imposed conditions of struggle in which we are embedded in chiaroscuro.
All Resistance is War to the Knife, as I have often written; herein I offer a model of what I mean by this.
As my father was a fencing coach, whose right arm was magnificently adorned with scars from actual 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.
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. 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. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange. 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 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 and fencing. Martial arts is a vast subject, and I also trained in a number of fighting arts with swords and other ancient historical weapons, 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.
Precisely what did I train in as my father’s student under the name of fencing?
All modern Olympic rules fencing is built on the foil and epee, thrust-only sport forms of Smallsword dueling which replaced the rapier as firearms obsolesced swords in war during the 18th century. The historical genesis of the art reached its final form in France and was codified in 1891 as an Olympic sport, now called Classical fencing. If you study fencing anywhere on earth, this is what you learn. Its simply more efficient than anything else you can do with an edged weapon, once firearms made armor obsolete. Seriously, I will choose a rapier or other thrusting weapon like a dagger against any other contact weapon in single combat, and a saber or other cutting weapon like a tanto in melee, having studied any art which might offer the possibility of surprise for decades, and nothing compares to the precision and subtlety of classical fencing.
We also practiced Spanish rapier and dagger or la verdadera destreza which is fought in a circle using lateral evasion and angles of attack rather than on a strip like Olympic competitive fencing, which one can see in the matador’s art and represents a direct evolution from Roman gladiatorial games, and later during high school I studied the Filipino espada y daga derived from it. Where the primary weapon dominates the enemy through presence or reach, the secondary is used to savage an enemy inside the guard of a long pointy sword like a rapier, a problem which the sabre with its continuous cutting edges does not have; closing against a cutting weapon is a death sentence. Normally I carry both thrusting dagger and cutting knife, as part of my rule for everyday carry which requires three contact and three distance weapons. A dagger or any knife can countercut and also entrap a weapon or be used as a lever for armlocks and disarmaments, but it does not parry except in emergency, and its best at unpredictable angles of attack when you are slammed right into the enemy, or to gut them like a fish when grabbed from behind.
Here I should note that from my teens onward I also practiced Close Quarters Combat with the Applegate-Fairbairn knife whose grip and techniques are derived from foil and court sword fencing as the legacy of a time when all gentlemen and members of the officer class were assumed to have been raised with fencing, the wonderfully versatile tanto which can be used as a primary or secondary weapon in either hand and both point forward and reverse gripped when on uncertain ground, and the Chinese Snake style’s signature dagger, near identical in blade form with the AF or any double edged combat knife and employed with darting thrusts to vital points from concealment, which I also studied in my thirties in Malaysia at the Snake Temple in Georgetown on the isle of Penang from which I sailed as a home port, a style based on the pit viper.
So my knife fighting is influenced by foil fencing and the Applegate-Fairbairn CQB derived from it, the Spanish sword and dagger style that preceded modern fencing and the Filipino art derived from it, the Japanese tanto, the Chinese Snake dagger, and the karambit which is the reverse gripped weapon of the Raja Harimau art I studied in Sumatra, used like a tiger’s claw in grappling.
The sabre has an entirely different historical origin and genesis, as a cavalry weapon designed for mounted horse combat and influenced by the Persian shamshir and the later Pan-Islamic scimitar which dates from the ninth century, though the ur-source may be the curved sword named Dhu’l-Fiqar used in battles by the Prophet Mohammed himself Peace Be Upon Him, and was assimilated and dispersed by everyone they fought for or against, much like the similar Mongol sword which influenced that of the Russian Cossacks in their long war against the Golden Horde, especially during the Crusades, the last of which was in Hungary in 1716. It was in Hungary during the centuries of conflict between the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires that the sabre reached its final form, and by the Napoleonic Wars had come to be universalized in Europe as the prestige weapon of hussars and other mounted warfare and its fighting art codified into a syllabus, with national variations in both form and use, as this light, fast cutting weapon replaced thrusting swords in war. The officer’s dress sword of the US Marine Corps is a Mameluke scimitar adopted in 1825 after the Barbary War; as is the British General Staff sword adopted after the Egyptian Campaign versus Napoleon. Add a handguard and the unique sabre ground edge and you have the modern sabre used from the Napoleonic Wars through the American Civil War and into World War One. In Europe national styles persist; the fearsome Polish crosscut style is still a living national art, which I had the honor of studying while we organized Resistance operations versus the Putin regime and the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Warsaw.
As previously noted, the sabre is sharp along the curving front and a third of the way down the back, meaning one can attack from any angle and at any distance. Actual battle sabres differ from competition fencing in being far heavier and less flexible, meaning one must conserve angular momentum and strike through targets, seeking a beheading or gutting hit, instead of tap tap tapping for points or recovering to guard after each strike. This also changes how one parries and ripostes; because in actual combat you must do so in one continuous motion, often circular. It’s the same difference between kendo sparring and use of an actual samurai katana, which like the sabre is a cutting weapon that can also thrust.
To be clear, these are arts of power as intimidation, subjugation, and dominion through inflicting pain and terror, and freedom won through discipline in embracing it. A fencing saber is a flexible steel whip, much like a sjambok, with which we inflict pain to establish dominance; fencers run at each other and deliver punishing hits that feel like real cuts, a white hot brand so intense it can disrupt consciousness in momentary blackouts.
On the first pass I preferred trading hits to the usual two movement parry and counterattack, or to any defense which does not inflict pain on the enemy as its goal; why defend and be reactive and controlled when you can teach your enemy to fear you? I trust not in parry and riposte but in the countercut, and in simultaneous counterattack to keep the enemy on the defensive, seize the momentum, and set the terms of struggle.
On the second pass a weak opponent will hesitate, ruled by the pain his flesh remembers, and be lost. If he embraces his pain and is without fear we meet as equals in the second and third engagements, and the game becomes one of chess like multilayered strategies, diversion and surprise, timing, precision, and control through continuous assault and patterns of attack and entrapment which set up a multi-staged opening 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. My art of Resistance is shaped by my doctrine of personal combat derived in part from saber fencing.
Regardless of anything else, whoever achieves surprise wins. This is why I practice the violation of normalities and transgression of the Forbidden as sacred acts; anything is possible in the space of the Unknown marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human.
And one thing more wins fights; not staying down, which in the context of revolutionary struggle I call Refusal to Submit. We can be killed, imprisoned and tortured, inflicted with horrors; but we cannot be conquered, if we refuse to submit, to believe the lies of the enemy, or to obey his commands. This is our victory, and it cannot be taken from us.
I love saber because it is primarily a contest of will and only secondarily of skill, in which ferocity in attack, by which I mean achieving shock and awe through maximum savagery and without warning, and willingness to eat 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 fluid, time compressed, 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 subjugation by authority, for who cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered. As Jean Genet said to me when we were trapped by Israeli 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, where the invasion and siege had disrupted my culinary tour of the Mediterranean.
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; “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for forty four years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the second of 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 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 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.
Inglourious Basterds, Lt Aldo Raine’s speech
The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine in the film Inglorious Basterds wears the crossed arrows patch of the First Special Service Force, the Black Devils, whose daring exploits inspired it. After the war the Black Devils were unified with the OSS Jedburg teams and other elements to become our Green Berets, the US Army Special Operations Force; this is the tradition of service which I call upon now, and look to for inspiration in combating ICE fascist terror today.
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The first lesson of the art of war is Diversion and Surprise. This involves a cornucopia of misdirection, illusion, concealment, and the arts of ambush and improvising channels, traps, and arenas to escape pursuit.
The second lesson is to Be Unpredictable, and use your enemy’s routines against him to create windows of opportunity. Change your patterns and routines, your playbook, rules, strategies and tactics. Surprise yourself, and the enemy too will be surprised.
The third lesson is to Seize the Rules; never play someone else’s game, on their terms or by their rules, but on ground and at a time of your choosing. If you become trapped in such a game, change the rules and make it yours.
The fourth lesson is to Seize Initiative and Control through continuous attack and patterns of action; make the enemy react to you and you will tie up his resources in defense which may otherwise be free to threaten and attack you. Plan ahead of the enemy’s moves, and use patterns and expectations to create dilemmas, openings, ambushes, and traps.
The fifth lesson is to Seize the Timing, or wrongfooting the enemy. No one can be everywhere at once with equal force, and one must gather maximum force and strike where least expected and where the enemy is weakest. This means luring the enemy into being where you want him to be, such as massing forces where they are useless while exposing strategic targets.
The sixth lesson is to Seize the Momentum and point of balance when attacked; defend nothing, but neutralize greater force and power through evasion and redirection. The principles of simultaneous counterattack to seize control as momentum, and of continuous attack as conservation of momentum, work together in this as a Doctrine of No Defense or pure counterattack and ambush.
The seventh lesson is to Embrace Your Fear and use your pain. Why defend when you can counterattack and teach the enemy to fear you? As my father said; “Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
The eighth lesson is to Seize the Narrative of the conflict, for all conflict is theatre. Here we instrumentalize history, famously described by CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton as the Wilderness of Mirrors.
Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.
Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through narratives of victimization and solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us. For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity with his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.
The last lesson is the same as the first; diversion and surprise.
All else is the will to resist and refusal to submit, beyond victory or even survival.
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I sing of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, Transformation, Magic, Chaos, Darkness and Dreams, Battle and seizures of power as Liberation, twin of my demon lover Desire who define each other as negative spaces and inhabit our bodies as forces and instincts and the endless chasms of our souls as archetypes, myths, symbols, metaphors and allegories of the oceanic vastness of the unconscious.
Myriads of such primal forces exalt us beyond ourselves as motivating, informing, and shaping sources which arise from and dwell within the collective unconscious of humankind as transpersonal interconnectedness, an immense component of ourselves and our personae which float upon its surface like flotsam on a vast sea of being.
Our greater being lives not within the surfaces of our forms and the flags of our skin, but as networks of consciousness and abstract information distributed throughout the universe beyond the gates of Time. Our universe is a system of signs, and we among the dreams of the Infinite.
We are illusions, transitory and ephemeral, stories, histories, memories, always in motion as processes of change, which arise from our true ground of being and to which we will one day return.
Death is a terrible destroyer but also a liberator, who frees us from the limits of our flesh.
Our celebration of Kali occurs during the five days of Diwali, the Festival of Lights wherein we celebrate the triumph of hope over fear, love over hate, and faith in each other as solidarity over division.
Diwali is a celebration rooted in the founding myth and epic of India, the Ramayana, of the liberation of humankind from the tyranny of our demons as the victory of Rama and Hanuman, man and his animal nature, over the demon king Ravanna, to reclaim his wife or female half Sita, an allegory of unitary wholeness and the birth of consciousness from the realm of dreams as well as of the emergence of the human from the animal, and an underworld journey which finds echoes in the myth of Orpheus and in Dante’s quest to free Beatrice in The Divine Comedy.
Herein goddesses as archetypal figures regulate ritual enactments and processes of transformation and act as gatekeepers and guides through the labyrinth.
The third day of the Festival of Light honors Lakshmi, who appears as the figure of Fortune in our tarot cards, goddess of random chance, wealth, and fate whom we invoke as Lady Luck in gambling, games of probabilities, and actions involving risk. And who doesn’t need all the luck they can get?
In honor of Lady Luck and the Liberation of Humankind through unification with our animal nature in this Festival of Lights, I offer you a game of chance and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; for which you will need only a six sided dice, pen, and paper.
Write down six characters as identities you would like to perform, from literature or film, whomsoever you wish. In the context of this festival, partners and teams may become avatars of gods and goddesses and perform a kind of live action theatre. Then cast the dice to discover which of them you will live as for the day. No matter who you perform today, you have five other selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day, in which we may wear a different mask.
As to whose voice I hear in my head when I write, and characters on whom I model my performance of myself in my primary life roles, that would be Patrick Stewart’s Jean Luc Picard from whom I learned the art of command, and of remaining human while doing so, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, from whom I learned to use my flaws as strengths.
Happy festival of hope, chance, and liberation, and may you find joy in the discovery of your best self.
But with the sunset all this is changed, for the night belongs to Kali.
The third night of Diwali becomes Kali festival with the moonrise, and through the day which follows; herein we celebrate the goddess of death, time, darkness, magic, sex, rebirth, and transformation; a warrior protectress of all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth. We place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, with all who are outcasts as their allies and champions. As a figure of liberation and empowered femininity she has many guises; Liberty herself in New York Harbor among them, a guardian shared by both America and India as an archetype of revolutionary and anticolonial struggle against a common historical enemy, the British Empire.
Her warrior brotherhood fought the British Raj with ferocious tenacity and guile, pervasive now throughout the Indian diaspora as a secret society of guardians, liberators, and avengers of the powerless very like the chasseurs of Haitian Voodoo, and interdependent with the cult of the Rakshasas or were tigers / lions whose founding progenitor she rides into battle.
Herein I write as a member of the Kali Aghora or Brotherhood, which in Hinduism is unusual in its total rejection of caste, having studied with a priestess of Kali, and with her warriors. Kali welcomes all.
In balance with this aspect of Time as Death is that of Desire; shakti or life force and transformative rebirth, for Kali is central to the arts of Tantra, especially as transgression of the Boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, the embrace of the monstrous, and the pursuit of truths of ourselves immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Both of her forms as Death and Desire represent unlimited feminine power free of any patriarchal systems of oppression, though in Shiva whose dance creates the universe she does have a male partner, especially in his form as Bhairava. For those like myself who invite possession as an avatar of the Bhairav during Kali Puga or as transformative battle magic, I have some thoughts on death and desire, the wildness of ourselves and the wildness of nature, truths written in our flesh and immanent in nature, and the embrace of our monstrosity.
Herein I offer you a song in celebration of Death and an invocation of its power of reimagination and transformation, part of the great rite with which I honor the destruction and recreation of the universe each year. It is a ritual which reflects the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Chod, the offering of one’s body as a sacrifice to our demons as the legacies of history which falsify and enslave us but once seized as our own instruments of self creation can also free us from the ideas of others to reclaim our true selves as exaltation, and the atavisms of instinct and degradation which once embraced as ours can reveal truths written in our flesh as illumination and rapture, and embodies Death as a kind of tulpa in a form of immortality magic as described by Oscar Wilde in his anarchist codex of liberation from authorized identities, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
A Song to Kali
Each of us has our own
Angel of death
As a secret partner,
Negative spaces of each other
Which define the limits of our form
The boundaries of which are interfaces
Liminal realms of being
Filled with powers of reimagination and transformation;
Unknowns among the limitless possibilities
Of becoming human
places marked Here Be Dragons
on our maps of being, meaning and value
Here is the world where I live,
Among the Dragons,
In the unknown spaces
Of our topologies of becoming human,
Beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden
And the tyranny of normality
Here is the rapture and terror of the Infinite;
that which defiles and exalts us
beyond the limits of ourselves
Death has been my partner in this dance for so long now
you’d think we would be on better terms,
But Death is a rough lover
To whom our flesh is a sacrifice
That our dreams and wishes may take flight
And become real, eternal, and true.
As I wrote in my post of June 1 2021, Death is a Secret Twin; Death is a secret twin which shares our face but not our dreams which lift and exalt us beyond the limits of our flesh, so Death must steal the echoes and reflections of ours, a thing of shadows filled with secret histories, unspoken truths, unsworn oaths, thousands of myriads of loyalties to private loves and desires betrayed by our failures to make them live and become real by action.
Death is the terror of all that we may have been but did not become, the loss of our disconnectedness and the emptiness of meaning in a world where love cannot redeem us, the grief for beauty which loses context when it is no longer shared and is lost with the fragments of memories which like the genie of perfume escape their bottle to trigger moments out of time and then evanesce like the ghost of a beloved hand which no longer grasps ours back.
We are tattered and broken things, our secret shadows and ourselves, who live in the incandescent now with these repositories of our beautiful dreams and our terrible nightmares, bearing them on into eternity; for this is the great secret of being, that our best selves are formed of all we would deny and keep hidden, and which live beyond us as figures of our glorious sins.
Death is an ambush predator made of our histories, memories, and identities, which must steal these things to become real in the moment of our awakening into its realm of beautiful and terrible dreams, a realm of true being beyond the illusions of our lives which bears names including the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism and the alam al mythal in Islam as codified by ibn Arabi, called by Coleridge the Primary Imagination, the Logos in neo-Platonic philosophy and the Gospel of John, and by Jung the Collective Unconscious, and waits to seize us unawares and carry us off to eternity while it replaces us like a faery changeling with the image of our unrealized hopes and unexpressed desires.
Death is a unique and personal demon created by our denial of ourselves, such denial acting as a parasite which destroys its host and operates through a process of falsification like the distorted and captured images in a wilderness of funhouse mirrors, but it can become instead a symbiote, a terrible and monstrous guardian spirit and a guide of the soul which speaks from within our greatest darkness with Forbidden wisdom, like a remora borne by a shark on its journeys through chasms of the abyssal unknown not as its nemesis and conqueror but as a servant which grooms from us that which we must cast down from the thrones of our hearts; we humans and our silent and unseen partners the angels of our deaths whom we must wrestle not for victory, for everything in life is more powerful than we are, but to become Unconquered in resistance and free.
Thus may we bear without breaking the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, become greater and more real and alive than we were born, transcend the limits of our form, and become sublimed as figures of our truths in Sartrean total freedom and authenticity as an art of life, for all true art defiles and exalts.
Here is a faith which asks us to renounce nothing and embrace our true selves, to reimagine and transform ourselves; and offers a path of working with grief process and death transcendence not of control of our passions and dominion of nature, but as seizure of power and autonomy, of the embrace and celebration of our wildness as beings of nature and of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
Let us embrace our monstrosity and say of this secret twin who knows no limits and is free as Prospero says of Caliban in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
How shall we answer death and the terror of our nothingness? Let us challenge and defy such death, and while it waits to claim us with its cold hand of entropy and unraveled time we must seize and shake our shadow and secret twin of longing to become, transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and perform our best selves, our hopes and our desires, as a guerilla theatre of identities upon the stage of the world in fearless grandeur, and let nothing be lost or remain untested among the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us answer death as Bringers of Chaos and Transformation, and make of our world and humankind a thing of beautiful, terrible truths written in our flesh, and of our dreams and nightmares a brave new world.
As I wrote in reflection on my mother’s death, now years ago; Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.
To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?
October 4 2026 Dancing With Death, Not In Horror, Fear, and Despair But In Joy, Wonder, and Hope
12 नवंबर 2025 इस काली पूजा पर, मृत्यु के जश्न में एक गीत
मैं मृत्यु और पुनर्जन्म, परिवर्तन, जादू, अराजकता, अंधेरे और सपने, लड़ाई और मुक्ति के रूप में शक्ति की जब्ती की देवी के बारे में गाता हूं, जो मेरे दानव प्रेमी इच्छा के जुड़वां हैं जो एक दूसरे को नकारात्मक स्थानों के रूप में परिभाषित करते हैं और हमारे शरीर में शक्तियों और प्रवृत्तियों के रूप में निवास करते हैं और अचेतन की समुद्री विशालता के आदर्शों, मिथकों, प्रतीकों, रूपकों और रूपकों के रूप में हमारी आत्माओं की अंतहीन खाइयाँ।
ऐसी असंख्य आदिम शक्तियाँ हमें प्रेरित करने, सूचित करने और आकार देने वाले स्रोतों के रूप में खुद से परे ले जाती हैं, जो मानव जाति के सामूहिक अचेतन से उत्पन्न होती हैं और ट्रांसपर्सनल इंटरकनेक्शन के रूप में उसमें निवास करती हैं, हमारे और हमारे व्यक्तित्व का एक विशाल घटक जो एक विशाल समुद्र की तरह इसकी सतह पर तैरता है। प्राणी।
हमारा महानतम अस्तित्व हमारे रूपों की सतहों और हमारी त्वचा के झंडों के भीतर नहीं रहता है, बल्कि समय के द्वार से परे पूरे ब्रह्मांड में वितरित चेतना और अमूर्त जानकारी के नेटवर्क के रूप में रहता है। हमारा ब्रह्मांड संकेतों की एक प्रणाली है, और हम अनंत के सपनों में से हैं।
हम भ्रम हैं, क्षणभंगुर और क्षणभंगुर, कहानियां, इतिहास, यादें, परिवर्तन की प्रक्रियाओं के रूप में हमेशा गति में रहते हैं, जो हमारे अस्तित्व की वास्तविक जमीन से उत्पन्न होती हैं और जिस पर हम एक दिन लौट आएंगे।
मृत्यु एक भयानक विध्वंसक होने के साथ-साथ एक मुक्तिदाता भी है, जो हमें हमारे शरीर की सीमाओं से मुक्त करती है।
काली का हमारा उत्सव दिवाली के पांच दिनों के दौरान मनाया जाता है, रोशनी का त्योहार जिसमें हम भय पर आशा की जीत, नफरत पर प्यार और विभाजन पर एकजुटता के रूप में एक-दूसरे पर विश्वास की जीत का जश्न मनाते हैं।
दिवाली भारत के संस्थापक मिथक और महाकाव्य, रामायण में निहित एक उत्सव है, जो हमारे राक्षसों के अत्याचार से मानव जाति की मुक्ति के रूप में राम और हनुमान की जीत, मनुष्य और उसके पशु स्वभाव, राक्षस राजा रावण पर, पुनः प्राप्त करने के लिए है। उनकी पत्नी या अर्धांगिनी सीता, एकात्मक पूर्णता का एक रूपक और सपनों के दायरे से चेतना का जन्म और साथ ही जानवर से मानव का उद्भव, और एक अंडरवर्ल्ड यात्रा जो ऑर्फ़ियस के मिथक और दांते के मिथक में गूँज पाती है द डिवाइन कॉमेडी में बीट्राइस को मुक्त कराने की खोज।
इसमें आदर्श आकृतियों के रूप में देवी-देवता अनुष्ठान अधिनियमों और परिवर्तन की प्रक्रियाओं को नियंत्रित करते हैं और भूलभुलैया के माध्यम से द्वारपाल और मार्गदर्शक के रूप में कार्य करते हैं।
प्रकाश उत्सव का तीसरा दिन लक्ष्मी का सम्मान करता है, जो हमारे टैरो कार्ड में फॉर्च्यून की आकृति, यादृच्छिक अवसर, धन और भाग्य की देवी के रूप में दिखाई देती है, जिसे हम जुए, संभावनाओं के खेल और जोखिम से जुड़े कार्यों में लेडी लक के रूप में बुलाते हैं।
रोशनी के इस त्योहार में लेडी लक और हमारी पशु प्रकृति के साथ एकीकरण के माध्यम से मानव जाति की मुक्ति के सम्मान में, मैं आपको मौका का एक खेल और मानव बनने की असीमित संभावनाओं की पेशकश करता हूं; जिसके लिए आपको केवल छह तरफा पासा, पेन और कागज की आवश्यकता होगी।
साहित्य या फिल्म से छह पात्रों को पहचान के रूप में लिखें जिन्हें आप प्रदर्शित करना चाहते हैं; पारंपरिक रूप से ये तीन पुरुष और तीन महिला भूमिकाएँ हो सकती हैं, लेकिन जब तक आप न चाहें, ऐसा होना ज़रूरी नहीं है। फिर यह पता लगाने के लिए पासा फेंकें कि आप उस दिन उनमें से किसमें जीवित रहेंगे। इससे कोई फर्क नहीं पड़ता कि आप आज कौन सा प्रदर्शन करते हैं, आपके पास आरक्षित रूप में पांच अन्य स्वयं हैं, और कल एक और दिन है, जिसमें हम एक अलग मुखौटा पहन सकते हैं।
आशा, अवसर और मुक्ति का शुभ त्योहार, और आपको अपने सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्व की खोज में आनंद मिले।
लेकिन सूर्यास्त के साथ यह सब बदल जाता है, क्योंकि रात काली की होती है।
दिवाली की तीसरी रात चंद्रोदय के साथ काली उत्सव बन जाती है, और उसके बाद पूरे दिन; यहां हम मृत्यु, समय, अंधकार, जादू, सेक्स, पुनर्जन्म और परिवर्तन की देवी का जश्न मनाते हैं; उन सभी की एक योद्धा रक्षक, जिन्हें फ्रांत्ज़ फैनन ने पृथ्वी का मनहूस कहा था। हम अपना जीवन उन लोगों के साथ संतुलन में रखते हैं जो शक्तिहीन और वंचित हैं, खामोश हैं और मिटा दिए गए हैं, उन सभी के साथ जो बहिष्कृत हैं, उनके सहयोगी और चैंपियन हैं। मुक्ति और सशक्त नारीत्व की एक मूर्ति के रूप में उनके कई रूप हैं; उनमें से न्यूयॉर्क हार्बर में स्वयं लिबर्टी भी शामिल थीं, जो एक साझा ऐतिहासिक दुश्मन, ब्रिटिश साम्राज्य के खिलाफ क्रांतिकारी और उपनिवेशवाद-विरोधी संघर्ष के आदर्श के रूप में अमेरिका और भारत दोनों द्वारा साझा की गई संरक्षक थीं।
उनके योद्धा भाईचारे ने ब्रिटिश राज से क्रूर दृढ़ता और छल के साथ लड़ाई लड़ी, जो अब पूरे भारतीय प्रवासी में हाईटियन वूडू के पीछा करने वालों की तरह शक्तिहीनों के संरक्षकों के एक गुप्त समाज के रूप में व्याप्त है, और राक्षसों के पंथ के साथ अन्योन्याश्रित या बाघ/शेर थे जिनके संस्थापक पूर्वज वह युद्ध में उतरती है।
इसमें मैं काली अघोरा या ब्रदरहुड के सदस्य के रूप में लिख रहा हूं, जो हिंदू धर्म में जाति की पूर्ण अस्वीकृति में असामान्य है, मैंने काली की एक पुजारिन के साथ अध्ययन किया है।
समय के इस पहलू के साथ संतुलन में मृत्यु इच्छा का पहलू है; शक्ति या जीवन शक्ति और परिवर्तनकारी पुनर्जन्म, क्योंकि काली तंत्र की कलाओं का केंद्र है, विशेष रूप से निषिद्ध सीमाओं का उल्लंघन, सामान्यता का उल्लंघन, राक्षसी का आलिंगन और पीछा करना
प्रकृति में अन्तर्निहित और हमारे शरीर में लिखित स्वयं के सत्यों के बारे में।
मृत्यु और इच्छा के रूप में उनके दोनों रूप उत्पीड़न की किसी भी पितृसत्तात्मक व्यवस्था से मुक्त असीमित स्त्री शक्ति का प्रतिनिधित्व करते हैं, हालांकि शिव में, जिनके नृत्य से ब्रह्मांड का निर्माण होता है, उनका एक पुरुष साथी है, खासकर उनके रूप में भैरव के रूप में।
इसमें मैं आपको मृत्यु के जश्न में एक गीत और उसकी पुनर्कल्पना और परिवर्तन की शक्ति का आह्वान प्रस्तुत करता हूं, जो उस महान संस्कार का हिस्सा है जिसके साथ मैं हर साल ब्रह्मांड के विनाश और मनोरंजन का सम्मान करता हूं। यह एक अनुष्ठान है जो चोद की तिब्बती बौद्ध प्रथा को दर्शाता है, इतिहास की विरासत के रूप में हमारे राक्षसों को बलिदान के रूप में अपने शरीर की पेशकश जो हमें धोखा देती है और गुलाम बनाती है लेकिन एक बार आत्म निर्माण के हमारे अपने उपकरणों के रूप में जब्त होने से हमें इससे मुक्ति भी मिल सकती है। दूसरों के विचारों को हमारे सच्चे स्वयं को उत्थान के रूप में पुनः प्राप्त करने के लिए, और वृत्ति और पतन की नास्तिकताएं जो एक बार हमारे रूप में अपनाई जाती हैं, वे हमारे शरीर में लिखी सच्चाइयों को रोशनी और उत्साह के रूप में प्रकट कर सकती हैं, और अमरता के जादू के रूप में मृत्यु को एक प्रकार के तुल्पा के रूप में प्रस्तुत करती हैं। ऑस्कर वाइल्ड द्वारा अधिकृत पहचानों से मुक्ति के अराजकतावादी कोडेक्स, द पिक्चर ऑफ डोरियन ग्रे में इसका वर्णन किया गया है।
हममें से प्रत्येक का अपना है
मौत का दूत
एक गुप्त साथी के रूप में,
एक दूसरे के नकारात्मक स्थान
जो हमारे स्वरूप की सीमाओं को परिभाषित करते हैं
जिसकी सीमाएँ इंटरफ़ेस हैं
अस्तित्व के सीमांत क्षेत्र
पुनर्कल्पना और परिवर्तन की शक्तियों से भरा हुआ;
असीमित संभावनाओं के बीच अज्ञात
इंसान बनने का
यहां चिह्नित स्थान ड्रेगन बनें
अस्तित्व, अर्थ और मूल्य के हमारे मानचित्रों पर
यहीं वह दुनिया है जहां मैं रहता हूं,
ड्रेगन के बीच,
अज्ञात स्थानों में
मानव बनने की हमारी टोपोलॉजी में,
निषिद्ध की सीमाओं से परे
और सामान्यता का अत्याचार
यहाँ अनंत का उत्साह और आतंक है;
वह जो हमें अशुद्ध और ऊंचा करता है
खुद की सीमा से परे
इस नृत्य में मृत्यु इतने लंबे समय से मेरी भागीदार रही है
आपको लगता होगा कि हम बेहतर शर्तों पर होंगे,
लेकिन मौत एक कठोर प्रेमी है
जिसके लिए हमारा मांस बलिदान है
कि हमारे सपनों और इच्छाओं को उड़ान मिल सके
और वास्तविक, शाश्वत और सत्य बन जाओ।
जैसा कि मैंने 1 जून 2021 की अपनी पोस्ट में लिखा था, मृत्यु एक गुप्त जुड़वां है; मृत्यु एक गुप्त जुड़वां है जो हमारे चेहरे को साझा करती है लेकिन हमारे सपनों को नहीं जो हमें हमारे शरीर की सीमाओं से परे उठाती और ऊंचा उठाती है, इसलिए मृत्यु को हमारी प्रतिध्वनियों और प्रतिबिंबों को चुरा लेना चाहिए, गुप्त इतिहास, अनकहे सत्य, अनकही शपथों से भरी छाया की चीज़ , निजी प्रेम और इच्छाओं के प्रति हजारों असंख्य निष्ठाएं उन्हें जीवित रखने और कार्रवाई द्वारा वास्तविक बनाने में हमारी विफलताओं के कारण धोखा खा गईं।
मृत्यु उन सभी चीजों का आतंक है जो हम थे लेकिन नहीं बने, हमारे वियोग की हानि और एक ऐसी दुनिया में अर्थ की शून्यता जहां प्यार हमें छुटकारा नहीं दिला सकता, सुंदरता के लिए दुःख जो संदर्भ खो देता है जब इसे अब साझा नहीं किया जाता है और है यादों के टुकड़ों के साथ खो गया है जो इत्र के जिन्न की तरह समय के क्षणों को ट्रिगर करने के लिए अपनी बोतल से बाहर निकलता है और फिर एक प्यारे हाथ के भूत की तरह लुप्त हो जाता है जो अब हमारे हाथ को वापस नहीं पकड़ता है।
हम फटी-पुरानी और टूटी हुई चीजें हैं, हमारी गुप्त परछाइयाँ और हम स्वयं हैं, जो अपने सुंदर सपनों और अपने भयानक दुःस्वप्नों के भंडार के साथ अब गरमागरम में रहते हैं, उन्हें अनंत काल तक ले जाते हैं; क्योंकि यह अस्तित्व का महान रहस्य है, कि हमारा सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्वयं उन सभी से बना है जिन्हें हम अस्वीकार करेंगे और छिपाकर रखेंगे, और जो हमारे गौरवशाली पापों के आंकड़ों के रूप में हमसे परे रहते हैं।
मृत्यु हमारे इतिहास, यादों और पहचानों से बना एक घात शिकारी है, जिसे हमारे जागने के क्षण में सुंदर और भयानक सपनों के दायरे में वास्तविक बनने के लिए इन चीजों को चुराना होगा, हमारे जीवन के भ्रम से परे सच्चे अस्तित्व का एक क्षेत्र जो तिब्बती बौद्ध धर्म में बार्डो और इस्लाम में आलम अल मिथल सहित कई नाम हैं, जिन्हें कोलरिज ने प्राइमरी इमेजिनेशन कहा है, नव-प्लेटोनिक दर्शन में लोगो और जॉन के गॉस्पेल और जंग ने कलेक्टिव अनकांशस कहा है, और हमें अनजाने में पकड़ने का इंतजार करता है और हमें अनंत काल तक ले जाता है, जबकि यह हमारी अवास्तविक आशाओं और अव्यक्त इच्छाओं की छवि के साथ एक परी परिवर्तन की तरह हमारी जगह ले लेता है।
मृत्यु एक अनोखा और व्यक्तिगत दानव है जो हमारे खुद को नकारने से निर्मित होता है, ऐसा इनकार एक परजीवी के रूप में कार्य करता है जो अपने मेजबान को नष्ट कर देता है और फ़नहाउस दर्पणों के जंगल में विकृत और कैप्चर की गई छवियों की तरह मिथ्याकरण की प्रक्रिया के माध्यम से संचालित होता है, लेकिन इसके बजाय यह एक बन सकता है सहजीवी, एक भयानक और राक्षसी अभिभावक आत्मा और आत्मा का मार्गदर्शक जो निषिद्ध ज्ञान के साथ हमारे सबसे बड़े अंधेरे के भीतर से बोलता है, जैसे कि एक शार्क द्वारा अज्ञात की खाई के माध्यम से अपनी यात्रा के दौरान अपने शत्रु और विजेता के रूप में नहीं बल्कि एक सेवक के रूप में। जो हमसे वह तैयार करता है जिसे हमें अपने हृदय के सिंहासन से उतार देना चाहिए; हम इंसान और हमारे खामोश और अनदेखे साथी हमारी मौत के देवदूत हैं जिनसे हमें जीत के लिए नहीं, बल्कि जीवन में हर चीज हमसे अधिक शक्तिशाली होने के लिए कुश्ती लड़नी चाहिए, बल्कि प्रतिरोध में अजेय और स्वतंत्र बनने के लिए लड़ना चाहिए।
ऐसा हम भी कर सकते हैं
हमारी मानवता की खामियों और दुनिया की टूटन को तोड़े बिना सहन करें, हम जितना पैदा हुए थे, उससे कहीं अधिक वास्तविक और जीवंत बनें, अपने रूप की सीमाओं को पार करें, और सारत्रियन में हमारी सच्चाई के आंकड़ों के रूप में पूर्ण स्वतंत्रता और प्रामाणिकता के रूप में उदात्त बनें। जीवन की कला, सभी सच्ची कलाओं के लिए अपवित्र और उत्कृष्टता।
यहां एक विश्वास है जो हमें कुछ भी त्यागने और अपने सच्चे स्वरूप को अपनाने, खुद की फिर से कल्पना करने और बदलने के लिए कहता है; और दु:ख की प्रक्रिया और मृत्यु के साथ काम करने का एक मार्ग प्रदान करता है, न कि हमारे जुनून पर नियंत्रण और प्रकृति पर प्रभुत्व के रूप में, बल्कि शक्ति और स्वायत्तता की जब्ती के रूप में, प्रकृति के प्राणियों के रूप में हमारे जंगलीपन के आलिंगन और उत्सव के रूप में और प्रकृति में निहित उन सच्चाइयों के रूप में। और हमारे शरीर में लिखा है.
आइए हम अपनी राक्षसीता को अपनाएं और इस गुप्त जुड़वां के बारे में कहें जो कोई सीमा नहीं जानता और स्वतंत्र है जैसा कि प्रोस्पेरो विलियम शेक्सपियर के द टेम्पेस्ट के एक्ट वी, दृश्य 1 में कैलीबन के बारे में कहता है; “अंधेरे की इस बात को मैं अपना मानता हूं।”
हम मृत्यु और अपनी शून्यता के आतंक का उत्तर कैसे देंगे? आइए हम ऐसी मौत को चुनौती दें और चुनौती दें, और जब यह एन्ट्रॉपी और अनसुलझे समय के अपने ठंडे हाथों से हम पर दावा करने की प्रतीक्षा कर रही है, तो हमें अपनी छाया और बनने की लालसा के गुप्त जुड़वां को पकड़ना और हिला देना चाहिए, निषिद्ध की सीमाओं का उल्लंघन करना चाहिए और अपना सर्वश्रेष्ठ प्रदर्शन करना चाहिए , हमारी आशाएँ और हमारी इच्छाएँ, दुनिया के मंच पर पहचानों के एक गुरिल्ला रंगमंच के रूप में, निडर भव्यता में, और मानव बनने की असीमित संभावनाओं के बीच कुछ भी खोने या अप्राप्य न रहने दें।
आइए हम मौत को अराजकता और परिवर्तन लाने वाले के रूप में जवाब दें, और अपनी दुनिया और मानव जाति को हमारे शरीर में लिखी सुंदर, भयानक सच्चाइयों की चीज़ बनाएं, और हमारे सपनों और बुरे सपनों को एक बहादुर नई दुनिया बनाएं।
जैसा कि मैंने वर्षों पहले अपनी माँ की मृत्यु पर चिंतन करते हुए लिखा था; तो फिर हम कौन बनें? हमसे उन सतहों, छवियों और मुखौटों के बारे में पूछता है जो हर पल दूसरों के साथ हमारी सीमाओं पर बातचीत करते हैं।
जिस पर हमारा गुप्त स्व, अंधकार और जुनून का स्व, वह स्व जो दर्पण से परे रहता है और कोई सीमा नहीं जानता, समय और स्थान से असीमित और संभावनाओं में अनंत है, उत्तर देता है; आप कौन बनना चाहते हैं?
Any cursory eye overlooking a list of the Absurdists reveals one defining characteristic and primary insight; other than its flagbearer Camus, they are mostly playwrights. Absurdism regards the world in which we must live as a stage, and we but players in a theatrical performance, as Shakespeare wrote in MacBeth;
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
But it is crucial to recognize that this applies to our political life as well; it is a performance on the stage of history and the world, and in America our democracy is performative and designed to deceive us into belief that we are in control.
If the re-election of Trump teaches us anything, it is that no one is in control.
Like security, control is an illusion, and a dangerous one which offers leverage and influence to those who would enslave us.
Lies and illusions born of fear and faith in those who claim to speak for us and as interpreters of divine will in service to the centralization of power to authority, and the hollowing out of human being, meaning, and values through our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization; this is the path we have chosen for our future, and possibly for all humankind as the futures which offer us freedom are destroyed and go dark and we are cast down into inchoate chaos and degeneration into things less than human.
What remains of us, once we have abandoned each other and our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice?
America has elected our destroyer, and we will find out.
So I wrote in 2024 in the wake of Trump’s election and the capture of America by the Fourth Reich. Thus far the Second Trump Regime has exceeded even the depravities, violations of our ideals and values, and subversion and destruction of the American Way and of our institutions of government, no less than I had feared and envisioned.
In this time the poor starve, as Americans are denied the SNAP funds which are preconditions of the right to life as a basic living stipend just as some 800,000 of the poor beyond our shores were starved to death by the Trump-Musk cabal and Theatre of Cruelty through denial of food aid, all while plutocrats dance at a Gatsby Party full of strippers in the White House, a White House being demolished at the whim of a Nero-like tyrant who wants a golden ballroom for elites to dance in while the nation starves.
The poor are not equal; there was never true equality in America, merely a seductive lie at our founding; “All men are created equal”, written by slaveowners. In this nothing has changed in 250 years.
But we can make it real, if we act in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and our universal human rights.
A few days ago the stunning victory of The Blue Wave proved this is still possible, that democracy and a free society of equals is still possible among our infinite futures and possibilities of becoming human. Now we must build momentum and seize power through a reimagination and transformation of our society including legislative and legal actions as our system provides opportunity, and in Total Resistance against the tide of fascist tyranny and terror.
A political awakening gathers momentum as calls for Israeli agents Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jeffries to be barred from leadership of the Democratic Party, who have done nothing to end our complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians and the abandonment of our principle of universal human rights upon which any just society must be built. As this is the birthday of Camus, this dilemma which threatens ideological fracture of our Party, the only viable major force opposing fascist tyranny and terror in America, I cannot imagine it without reflection on the split between Camus and Sartre over Algeria which removed the Left from de Gaulle’s path to power. Similar ideological fracture broke the Industrial Workers of the World in America and the Social Democrats in Germany over the question of World War One, and was used extensively by the FBI to break the Black Panthers, the Students For A Democratic Society, the American Indian Movement, and other bright embers of hope and joy in the vast darkness of Nixon’s America. This is the most vulnerable point of fracture in the Democratic Party as an opposing force to the Fourth Reich, and I cannot overstate its peril.
This does not mean we must prefer collaboration to bringing a Reckoning, as Hakim Jeffries has announced and the entire Collaborationist wing of our Party represents. We must move swiftly to seize the moment and purge our betrayers from among us, the choice of Party leadership being both de facto and symbolic power. Let us make no compromise with evil.
Ours is an unfinished revolution, and while we enact the Restoration of Democracy we must also bring a Reckoning to the enemies of liberty and equality, for All Resistance is War to the Knife.
And in Resistance Camus can help us.
Here I began, at the door to the Absurd, and I look back now from the other side, after a lifetime of strangeness, among the freaks and monsters myself; America was always an illusion, a figment of lies, distorted shapes in the funhouse of our Wilderness of Mirrors, echoes and reflections which capture, possess, and falsify, but which also reveal truths and extend us into the Infinite among chasms of darkness.
The works of Albert Camus have become foundational to me personally and to our civilization, studied in every high school in America as core curriculum and by anyone else pursuing an education; these include the great novels The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, as well as the philosophical essays in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, and The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.
Albert Camus constructed his philosophy as a direct reply to his model Dostoevsky’s arguments in The Demons, was influenced by Augustine, and as a literary stylist was influenced by the poetry of Rene Char and, a most singular decision for an ars poetica, modeled his prose on American noir crime fiction. As an Absurdist he belongs to the tradition of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Ionesco, and Beckett.
Far from nihilistic, Camus references Nicholaus of Cusa on the Conservation of Ignorance and parallels the mission of Godel in his mathematical proof of the Infinite; his conclusions are diametrically opposite those of Sartre, and therein lies all the difference. Like Plato and Aristotle or Freud and Jung, they share a common ground of ideas but face the world Janus-like as dyadic forces, divided by questions of political and philosophical ideology. Neither is entirely comprehensible without the other.
The Absurdism of Camus borders on the Pauline Absurdism of Flannery O’Connor; I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”
Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut 1982, when we were trapped by Israeli 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.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for forty four years now.
Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
Albert Camus shares many of the sources and references of Vladimir Nabokov and his theme of the flaws of Idealism which led him to mistrust any state which centralizes power and authority and enforces virtue, including both fascism and Stalin’s totalitarian perversion of communism, and embrace the inherent ambiguity of revolutionary France whose glorious Resistance to the Nazis coexists with her colonial and racist dominion of Algeria and French Indochina as a mirror of Nazi Occupation; this became the cause of the fragmentation of the postwar intellectual Left as typified in the sensational and iconic rupture between Sartre and Camus over Algeria and the question of power as a system of oppression.
I believe the origin of evil is in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, not in an innate depravity of man or evil impulse or personal sin but in the systems and structures of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, in generalized and overwhelming fear shaped by authority in service to power through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, especially in fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. This is why revolutions, especially anticolonial ones, become tyrannies as a predictable phase of struggle.
Camus offers us a similar schema of revolutionary struggle and liberation based on the primary value of freedom which hinges on two key ideas; hope and the unknown.
Unknowability defines the Infinite and our relationship to it, but also the boundaries of ourselves and the limits of the human beyond the flags of our skin; one recalls the thought experiment known as The Spear of Archytus. He throws the spear, and where it lands defines the limits of knowledge, the area that can be mapped. Then he does it again; doubling the known. And so on; but no matter how much we learn, the Unknown remains as vast as before. This I call the Conservation of Ignorance, which as with Camus I hold as the First Principle of any future epistemology.
We who live among the dragons on the maps of our topologies of becoming human, in the blank spaces of unknowns marked Here Be Dragons where all things become possible, know that the total freedom of a universe empty of any meaning or value but that which we create, a universe without Laws to bind us, with no Good or Evil but in our actions toward others, with no imposed purpose or design, is both a terror and an endless joy. And we call to you with songs of freedom and agency and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, songs which say; Come dance with us.
How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?
Albert Camus forged an ideology of rebellion which locates freedom not exclusively in the Sartrean-Marxist Revolutionary and transformative change of systemic and structural externalities such as capitalism and the cash nexus of exchange which determine the imposed conditions of struggle, but also within us as a condition of being; we resist to claim ourselves, to seize ownership of our own moment and the skin in which we live, and in this primary human act we become Unconquered. By our choosing to be free we achieve our freedom, for who cannot be compelled is free.
Here also is a great secret of power; no one has power over us unless we give it to them, and without legitimacy power is hollow and brittle, for the tyranny of brutal repression and a carceral state of force and control fails when met with disbelief and disobedience.
So also is authority delegitimized when we no longer trust and believe in it; when we perform the four primary duties of a citizen in forging a free society of equals; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
For authority defines an unequal relationship, and as such there is no just authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Of those who would enslave us and claim the throne of the Great and Powerful Oz, whether tyrant or god, we may say with Dorothy; “You’re just an old humbug.”
We are the inheritors of Prometheus, undaunted by the threat of punishment and death, for in our defiance of authority and refusal to submit we are victorious over those who would dehumanize, falsify, commodify, and subjugate us.
Let us give to those who would steal our souls to power the mechanisms of their own wealth, power, and privilege the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The Zero Theorem official trailer
Albert Camus, a reading list
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, by Robert Zaretsky
And his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason,
For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.
The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.
The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.
Primary Existentialist Works and Studies, listed by Author
Existentialism is a Humanism, Nausea, No Exit, The Wall, Being and Nothingness, To Freedom Condemned, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, Literary Essays, Truth and Existence, Existential Psychoanalysis, Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, The Family Idiot, Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn
The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, The Rebel, The Possessed, Albert Camus
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky
Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, C.G. Jung
On Nietzsche’s Side, The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot
Thomas the Obscure, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Infinite Conversation, The Space of Literature, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Community of Lovers, Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, Christophe Bident
The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, Treasures of the Night: collected poems, The Declared Enemy, Fragments of the Artwork, Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet
Genet: a biography, Edmund White
The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida
Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Verena Andermatt Conley
The Magic Lantern, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews, Ingmar Bergman
The Odyssey, a modern sequel, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Essential Kierkegaard, Hong eds.
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard,Clare Carlisle
I and Thou, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber
Martin Buber, Diamond
The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Steven Kepnes
Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom, Kenneth Paul Kramer
Waiting for Godot, The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner
Kangaroo Notebook, Beyond the Curve, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, Woman of the Dunes, Kobo Abe
The Idiot, The Crocodile, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Diary of a Madman, Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Strange Library, 1Q84, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Trial, The Castle, The Complete Stories, The Zürau Aphorisms, Franz Kafka
Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch
Franz Kafka: a biography, Max Brod
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel
Existentialist Psychotherapy, a reading list
Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek
The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, Paul Rabinow
Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida
Desert Islands: And Other Texts, 1953-1974, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Gilles Deleuze
Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Žižek
The Theory of the Novel, Soul and Form editors John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, The Historical Novel, Goethe And His Age, Essays on Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, György Lukács
Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, First as Tragedy Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, by Jean Baudrillard, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor)
What are they all arguing about? Origins of Existentialism in Husserl’s Phenomenology: an outline
Phenomenology: The Basics, Husserl’s Phenomenology, by Dan Zahavi
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Maurice Alexander Natanson
Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
by Jacques Derrida
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, by Leonard Lawlor
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, by Theodor W. Adorno
We celebrate the triumph of hope over despair, love over fear, and solidarity over division in our electoral seizure of power from the Fourth Reich.
We may be about to enter a Gold Rush era of general prosperity and a Golden Age of well being, humanity, and compassion with the collapse of the Trump regime and its voodoo economics of tariffs and the Iran War, privatization and deregulation, and the loss of quasi-slave migrant labor on which so many of our markets rely, but this also creates uncertainty as yesterday’s stock market fluctuation regarding the tech industry illustrates.
Yes, we are dismantling Peter Thiel’s Panopticon and the data center and AI infrastructure of the surveillance state and universal thought control of which the Republican Party dreams as instruments of turning citizens into subjects.
So also shall we bring a Reckoning to the tech bros who stood with Trump at his inauguration, as his financiers and beneficiaries if not his puppetmasters in the realization of a white ethnostate and theocratic patriarchy of fascist tyranny and terror and principal signatories and co-conspirators of the Big Brother Accords. Why did Face Book’s Mark Zuckerberg stand with Trump at the Inauguration, literally with him as did Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Tik Tok’s Shou Zi Chew, and X’s Elon Musk, with Peter Thiel’s protégé and proxy JD Vance the Bearded Lady as his second in line to the regime, if not to endorse Trump’s capture of the state as institutional insurrection, Project 2025, and the subversion of democracy?
We live now within Jeremy Benthem’s Panopticon, the state as a prison and system of control through total surveillance, originally designed as a model for Czarist Russia and realized by big data, propaganda disguised as news, and the profit scheme of social media to commodify and influence its users. To this we must bring change.
As I wrote in my post of February 28 2026 On this Anniversary of the National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators and Tech Bro Sponsors of Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us
On this Anniversary of the National Boycott of Trump co-conspirators in fascist tyranny and terror and the subversion of democracy, which began a whole tradition throughout our nation, let us bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Utterly destroy and pursue to extinction all financiers, apologists, enablers and co-conspirators of Trump in the subversion of democracy. Let us purge our betrayers from among us and bring a Reckoning to each and every one.
Why should we be merciful to those who do not regard us as fellow human beings and offer us no mercy?
Or who believe that mercy itself is a flaw which we must remove from our species, as does the Tech Bro wing of the Republican Party who bankroll the sabotage of democracy as a counter revolution against not merely America but the whole of Enlightenment philosophy which our nation embodies?
Herein I mean not only Paypal’s Peter Thiel and his protégé J.D. Vance, but also those who stood with Trump on his second inauguration, notably Face Book’s Mark Zuckerberg who now throttles content critical of the regime, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos whose labor exploitation provides the wealth with which he purchases political influence, and the Troll King himself, Elon Musk, who bought the Presidency for Trump, sabotaged our institutions of government, stole our private data, and murdered 800,000 nonwhite persons globally by denial of food and medical aid in ending US Aid.
And I find most interesting the correlations between the Tech Bro clique of plutocrats and the Apartheid Revivalist faction of South African expats in the Republican Party, our modern counterpart to the slavemasters who fled the Haitian Revolution to the American South and formed the ruling class of the Confederacy.
By Any Means Necessary, friends; let us not make false moral equivalence between the violence of the slavemaster and the violence used by a slave to break his chains. We have no use for anything which limits our actions against fascists and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, tyrants and their carceral states of force and control, enforcers of authority and repression of dissent, propagandists and co-conspirators of theocracy and patriarchal sexual terror and of white supremacist terror, the amoral plutocrat class who enable and sponsor fascist tyranny and terror, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the systems of unequal power and oppression which they create and maintain through our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Everyone who goes hungry today, whose loved ones die from denial of medical care by insurance, whose children are crippled from not being vaccinated for polio and other catastrophic diseases, who is homeless, all who are the waste products of capitalism have a hunting license for plutocrats signed by the Infinite.
Of the many strategies and tactics of revolution and liberation struggle, boycotts and general strikes provide force majeure leverage in bringing change to systems of oppression. Together with victory on the battlefield, this economic warfare brought down the Apartheid state in South Africa, an example relevant today as the Trump regime plans to model America on it.
Let us remember also our heroes, allies, and angels of mercy who have placed their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, the marginalized, forgotten, and exploited masses of the untouchables and the underclasses whose labor creates the wealth for predatory hegemonic elites; the “huddled masses yearning to be free” whose liberation as equals is the central idea of what it means to be American.
So I wrote as the year began, in a time of darkness and state terror we have only now renounced and escaped.
But our liberty and our lives as inalienable rights inherent to all human beings, principles which founded and define America, will not be the only benefits of the coming Restoration we intend, because our new wave of elected representatives will be micro focused on bringing social justice to their constituents as well as to the Restoration of America as a beacon of hope to the world.
As an example I offer the case of Texas, which flipped Blue because of one specific set of errors among thousands of Trump’s attempts to sabotage democracy, cripple our institutions of state, violate our values and ideals, alienate our allies and cultivate our enemies; the mass purchase of Argentine beef to support his fellow tyrant and proxy without labeling of national origin or inspections by a monkeywrenched FDA, beef that China refused to buy due to contamination. People stopped buying beef, the beef industry tanked, and then Texas flipped. A simple legislative fix of labeling and the rebuilding of the FDA to provide a guarantee of safety to consumers through inspections will reverse the economic doom spiral in Texas, and stop our dismal return to the era of .
Thousands of such acts of sabotage of America by the Trump regime and his loathsome party of kleptocrats, degenerates, criminals, and traitors which have imperiled and impoverished us all await repair.
Rejoice therefore and fear not, because whatever our future holds will be vastly better than before.
Among the last words Jean Genet and I said to each other in Beirut 1982, I asked “What do I do with my life, now that I know everything we think we know is a lie? How do I live when the world is a lie?” To which he replied; “Live with grandeur.”
Yet all light and darkness balance each other and are never found alone and unshadowed by their opposing force, and with the joy and hope of our historic victory in the turning of the tide from fascism to democracy is entangled with its co-evolutionary partner terror and abjection, and we must embrace our monstrosity and the perils of the unknown if we are to shape from this event a better future. For with a greater horizon opens a longer road and its perils, and we must seize the future in solidarity of action.
On the previous occasion of our November elections, which brought us a Second Trump Regime, I also interrogated the dialectics of hope and despair, but from the other direction.
As I wrote in my post of November 6 2024, Now is the Time of Monsters: Hope and Despair In the Wake of Our Elections; “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.” Thus goes the famous paraphrase of Antonio Gramsci, a lens through which this moment of shared public trauma and grief may be seen and understood.
Ours is also a time of chaos, disruption, and fracture of our norms and ideals, our values and our institutions of democracy, and of our history. As such it is also a measure of our adaptive potential, a liminal space between bounded realms which defines limits but also communicates as interfaces, and in which new possibilities of becoming human are created as old orders are destroyed.
When they come for us and for one another, as they always have and will, let them find not an America defeated in submission to terror and tyranny with learned helplessness, but united in solidarity as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights. Now is the time of monsters; but also of organizing resistance.
Let us speak, write, teach, organize, and act in solidarity for a free society of equals and a United Humankind; because silence is complicity.
As Alan Moore teaches us 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.”
Chaos is the great hope of the powerless, as Guillermo del Toro teaches us in his epic of migration and diversity Carnival Row. In this moment we can bring change, though we have lost our best chance to do so while voting and action within our system is possible and meaningful.
Do not despair. Evil prevails when good people do nothing. Use your fear and loathing and rage in refusal to submit.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power. Do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of March 10 2023, On Hope and Despair: Surviving Life Disruptive Events; To a friend with suicidal ideation and facing multiple trauma, life disruptive events, and institutional catch 22s which include class and patriarchal oppression enforced by rentier capitalism and the political theft of our right to life through failure to provide the universal healthcare which is its precondition, I have written this brief message:
Now is the time to reach out, make connections, and build community. Isolation is dangerous in the extreme for you in this moment. A sea of fellow humans surrounds us, all of whom must wrestle with the flaws of our humanity as imposed conditions of struggle. I hear you in this message, and am afraid. Choose life, my friend, as precarious and filled with pain and fear as it may be; our stories can always change, regardless of the limits of our scope of action and agency.
It may now become possible to reclaim the life which has been stolen from you, and begin to heal and reinvent yourself. May you find peace and joy in this terrible world, my friend.
All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.
We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.
A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.
And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.
As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times, a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion.
History begins with us, or ends with us.
What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?
So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.
Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
What is hope, and how is it useful?
Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.
Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.
Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.
These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.
How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three Last Stands which created and defined me; when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969, when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.
In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power.
First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”
One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?
Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.
True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.
Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”
It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.
Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.
Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections. And this tertiary principle, which concerns our interconnectedness and social frames, can produce conflicts with the secondary principle of memory and history.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it.
As the Wizard of Oz said of himself it’s a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
As we believe, so we may become.
Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flag of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy.
This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift.
Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020 Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice. During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor I wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.
One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.
It happened like this; one day I was driving from my day job teaching high school as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my very elegant office in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.
I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”
We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?
So I took a wrong turn to the airport and bought a ticket to the other side of the earth. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia I found a bus station with a map that showed all the routes ending in the mountains, which were an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. There I boarded the Bus to the Unknown, among the incense and purple smoke of the Ganesh temple across the street and I believe now with his blessing on my journey, and got off where the road ended in a dirt trail leading into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and began walking into an unmapped wilderness.
So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, a Great Trek across Asia which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”
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 told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, 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 before his capture and imprisonment by Israel, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
It may have begun in Mariupol when the horror was given form as I spent hours in utter darkness crawling through partially collapsed tunnels after an artillery shelling, through the bloody piles of entrails and savaged parts of the dead among echoes of the sounds of the dying whom I could not help; this bothered me not at all, being far from the worst I have survived, but I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when later I discovered what the Russian Army was doing with some of the children it had stolen.
These days its mostly the oracle of a disembodied head that bothers me, in the wake of my expedition to Beirut from September 23 to the second week of October; when a family searching for a missing child found only his head, Israel having erased the rest of him with their bombs. It feels like a pomegranate in your hands, such a tiny head, and I fear what its seeds may one day bear. In my dreams it tells me things, and I do not like the truths it speaks.
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 long forgotten why. 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 wild things who are masterless and free.
As the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
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.
Postscript and Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance in direct action and general principles of Resistance to tyranny in antifascist action and revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters here in America and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action which became a moving street fight in over fifty cities for several months with forces of repression including deniable assets of state repression of dissent including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys and other white supremacist cadre, and their co conspirators and infiltration agents within the police, 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 and the Black Lives Matter movement through state terror and learned helplessness.
We Antifa networks of alliance are the only forces to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on its own ground since Little Bighorn, in actions following the watershed event in which the counter revolutionary forces of state terror, including the most brutal criminals from our prisons and the most elite special operations hunter killer teams from our military and police merged into a national terror force of Homeland Security, broke and ran from us. This resulted after two months more of fighting in the articles of surrender offered us by President Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, and recognition of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones ceded to the people from the United States.
Friends, the Fourth Reich can be victoriously Resisted and defeated.
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.”
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
References
V For Vendetta (2005) Official Trailer “The time has come for you to live without fear”
V For Vendetta, Alan Moore, David Lloyd (Illustrator)
February 28 2026 On this Anniversary of the National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators and Tech Bro Sponsors of Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us
In the wake of our stunning and historic victory, the Democratic Party of which I am an elected representative must now give answer to two existential and strategic questions; What are our policy goals, and who will lead us into the future?
First we must pursue Trump and all his filthy pervert minions til the end of their days, and make each moment of their lives a hell. Let us found a Tribunal as in Nuremberg, outside of state control if necessary, and bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us.
Second, as our last two elections, including the one that brought rump (a typo, but I’m keeping it) to power again, were in large part simply referendums on America’s relationship with Israel and our despicable history of the abandonment of our universal human rights. To win a better future for us all and immediately to unify the Democratic Party as a guarantor of our humanity, we must enact Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and bring her war criminals including Netanyahu to trial.
Third, we must purge from the Democratic Party any and all representatives who are controlled by Israeli interests or in the service of AIPAC and not of the American people, including the loathsome Chuck Schumer and Hakim Jerries.
Let us no longer buy the deaths of children with our taxes.
Beyond this simple defense of our humanity and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and as human beings which should be an unquestionable principle of action and of democracy, what policies can unite us as guarantors of each other’s rights?
To this end I have offered my Plan 2028 which follows, and I believe we may need an open congress of all members of the Democratic Party in virtual session to create and vote on the policy guidelines with which we will seize the Presidency in 2028.
July 19 2026 Plan 2028: A Vision of Transformative Change For America and the Democratic Party, Part One of Nine A Postmortem of Our Failure to Stop the Trump Fourth Reich’s Second Capture of the State in 2024
July 20 2025 Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Two: Disarm and Abolish Police, Dismantle the Carceral State and Its Prisons, and Abandon the Social Use of Force
July 23 2026 Plan 2028 A Platform For Change Part Five: No Human Bodies Are Property of the State, and No Women Are the Property of Men; On Women’s Rights of Bodily Autonomy
July 27 2026 Plan 2028 Part Nine: What Does It Mean To Be An American, and Where Do We Go From Here? Balancing the Legacies of Our Past With the Dreams of Our Future
Hakeem Jeffries has repeatedly failed to offer a serious opposition to Trump, while remaining hostile to socialism, unreliable on labor, and deeply committed to U.S. support for Israel. Democrats should not reward that record by making him Speaker.
Our revels now have lasted fully twenty four hours, and bids fair to run for days as my neighborhood like our nation explodes in joy at the Fall of the Trump Regime and the Fourth Reich, as We The People have seized back our power from those who would falsify, commodify, dehumanize, and enslave us.
We have turned the tide of fascist tyranny and terror, and now that power is ours we must seize the momentum of this historic victory and bring the Restoration of Democracy both here at home and throughout the world, where ever men hunger to be free.
Last night and this we gathered round a bonfire leaping fifty feet into the darkness, a small band of us who have placed our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, and without regard to divisions or authorized identities of race, gender, faith, or nation, some of whom I have fought alongside for decades in liberation struggles throughout the world, and many strangers whom we welcome as allies in the realization of the American Dream of the equality of all human beings. We share our stories, envision possible futures, and make our plans for solidarity actions in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and of how we choose to be human together, and I know one true thing which I cherish and will forever hold in my heart as a hope for the future possibilities of becoming human; this is happening throughout America, in networks of alliance large and small, and this is a genie which cannot be put back in its box, because in this election we have proven that victory against the Fourth Reich is possible.
We have created a new America and a new future, friends; let us run with it as far as possible, so that the state can never again be captured by a hostile enemy.
Much work remains to be done; but for now in this liminal moment let us celebrate our triumph and our humanity. Tomorrow begins a new stage of the mission of being human as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, of the Restoration of America, of the Repair of the World, and of bringing healing to the flaws of our humanity.
As written by Moira Donegan in The Guardian, in an article entitled The death knell of Trumpism has finally sounded; “There’s a certain freedom in low expectations. Going in to Tuesday’s midterm elections, forecasts were so grim for the Republicans that poll watchers started trading a kind of knowing joke: that the results would either mean the end of the Trump era, or the end of the polling profession.
Amid those sorts of predictions, any Republican victories would have seemed like a minor miracle. The expectation was that Democrats would have a blowout; Republicans, counting on the final tally to be a bit more mixed, would therefore almost certainly have the freedom to claim that they’d done better than anyone had thought they would.
It will be difficult to credit those spins today. The electorate issued the president a message of dissatisfaction with the second Trump term, and voted decisively to curb his power.
Now, with a Senate majority, Democrats will be able to investigate the president and his cabinet members, draw public attention to their own agenda items, assert Congress’s constitutional prerogatives, and block Republican judicial appointments.
In the coming days and weeks, Trump will alternately say that the Republican losses were fake – the result of fraud by a nefarious but ill-defined conspiracy of Democrats and illegal immigrants – and that they were real, but somebody else’s fault.
His administration has signaled over the past weeks that it could make efforts to contest the certification of especially close Senate races, notably Alaska.
But the wind may have gone out of the sails of that plan for now: for what it’s worth, which isn’t much, Trump told the New York Times on Tuesday night that he would accept the results of the midterms. What’s certain is that he will rail into microphones and complain in all caps on social media. But it is not likely that any of that will go anywhere. Because Tuesday night – almost exactly 10 years after he won the presidency in an upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – the Trump era effectively came to an end.
The next two years will look nothing like the previous two. In the first several months after his return to power, when he controlled a unified government and was said to have won a restoration in 2024 on the heels of widespread cultural discontent and anti-“woke” sentiment, Donald Trump seemed momentarily as if he might succeed in his efforts to consolidate an authoritarian regime in America.
He purged the federal bureaucracy, eliminating hundreds of jobs and stuffing thousands more with his loyalists and incompetent cronies. He imposed his will and social agenda on non-governmental institutions, from large tech companies to major universities, which complied in part because they feared retaliation from a strong Trump regime if they refused.
He snatched the power of the purse away from Congress like a thief yanking a pocketbook away from an old lady, and reappropriated taxpayer money as he saw fit, disregarding the intentions of the people’s elected representatives.
And he did all this – he was able to do all this – because he seemed powerful, and his opposition seemed weak. For the first year of his second term, he bet that he could get people to obey him because he could threaten consequences for refusal, and because the Democrats could not credibly threaten consequences for complicity.
That credibility has flipped. Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 seems, now, less like a broad cultural realignment and more like a product of material factors, namely inflation. Those same material factors have come back to bite Republicans now, as staggering gas prices, consumer disempowerment, persistent unemployment and visible, egregious inequality outrage voters.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, seemed indifferent, if not oblivious, to these concerns – that is, when he was not actively making them worse. His reckless and needless war on Iran is broadly blamed – largely correctly – for driving up gas prices.
Donald Trump will enter 2027 with a hostile Congress, noticeably diminished cognitive power and physical stamina, a cratering approval rating, and a term limit
Meanwhile, Trump busied himself by draping large banners of his own face over federal buildings, remodeling the White House in gold, and making bizarre diatribes on rally stages about male politicians’ backsides. He seems frivolous and out of touch, like Marie Antoinette in a bad toupee.
Donald Trump will enter 2027 with a hostile Congress, noticeably diminished cognitive power and physical stamina, a cratering approval rating and a term limit.
Moreover, he will enter the new year with a fractured coalition: his decision to pursue a war with Iran has split his inner circle and destroyed his credibility with the Republican rank-and-file for whom his “no new wars” pledge in 2016 had signaled a break with the neoconservative establishment.
Ambitious Republicans – younger Republicans – will sense blood in the water. They will begin to turn on him in an effort to shore up their own prospects; he will rage at their betrayal and rally his base against them, like some sort of stupid King Lear. But his efforts to crown kings and exact revenge may be severely diminished after tonight.
Trump’s strength was always the hold he seemed to have over the Republican base, the degree to which his charisma could compel voters to follow him anywhere. If the margins of the Democratic victories on Tuesday night are any indication, they are not following him any more.”
As written by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, in an essay entitled New Beginnings; “Landslide. Tsunami. Earthquake.
In this historic night, Americans took their country back, making epic changes to the political map, putting blue back in places that had been solid red for decades. Everyone I knew was almost afraid to hope, auspicious though the polls and other signs were, afraid to set themselves up for disappointment, and then last night came report after report of almost unbelievable victories, the Senate retaken, the House retaken.
It is a profound repudiation of Trumpism, helped along by Trump’s unerring ability to pick truly despicable candidates, from Texas’s criminal Ken Paxton to Ohio’s creep Vivek Ramaswamy to South Carolina’s inane Darline Graham.
In that it’s the end of something, and when the celebration is over, it’ll be time to remember it’s the beginning of something, of rebuilding this country in all the ways it’s been broken and corrupted. So tonight there was a finish line, and tomorrow or the day after it’ll be our starting line.”
As written by Robert Reich in The Guardian, in an article entitled The great sleeping giant of the US has awakened; “The great sleeping giant of the US has awakened, taken a hard look at what’s become of the nation, and roared a thunderous “NO!”
What occurred on Tuesday was not – as some are saying – the inevitable midterm swing of the pendulum against the party in power. Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988. The last time Kansas elected a Democratic senator was 1932.
Nor was it just the economy. Americans are unhappy with high prices, to be sure, but inflation isn’t out of control. The country is not in a depression or recession. Unemployment remains quite low.
Nor, finally, was it all due to Donald Trump. Despite Trump’s repeated efforts to get voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot, he was not. Most Republican candidates barely mentioned him and many Democratic candidates stressed local or statewide issues rather than fixate on him.
Something much larger is responsible for what occurred: anti-establishment populism. It’s burst forth against the mammoth corporations that have scored record profits while most Americans have had to pay more. Against the mega donors and super Pacs that have flooded US politics with more campaign money – legalized bribes – than ever before.
And against the big tech billionaires who have become the most powerful force in the US economy and society – as well as Trump’s and the Republican party’s most visible backers.
The irony is that anti-establishment anger propelled Trump into the presidency in 2016 and again in 2024. Many Americans had found his politically incorrect rants and “America first” nativism to reflect their own anger at being disrespected and left behind. “I am your warrior,” he told supporters when he announced his candidacy for the 2024 election.
But during his second term, Trump has morphed into the very establishment he had railed against. He gave tax cuts and subsidies to tech billionaires. He’s promoted their AI, pushed their datacenters, put Elon Musk in charge of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), advocated their crypto, and went to war in the Middle East – not only causing gas prices to soar but making big oil billions (or, as Trump bafflingly boasts, “we’re making an absolute fortune in our country”) and enriching big tech weapons makers and investors, including his family.
Many who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024 have now abandoned him because of this blatant corruption, crony capitalism and eagerness to be on the gilded side of the US’s new Gilded Age. According to CNBC’s late October poll, corruption was the top issue on voters’ minds.
Meanwhile, anti-establishment populism has taken firm hold in the Democratic party. “The biggest divide in this country is not left versus right,” said the newly elected Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. “It’s top versus bottom.”
Sherrod Brown regained his Senate seat from Ohio largely due to voter anger at datacenters and the big tech billionaires behind them.
Abdul El-Sayed never tired on the campaign trail of reminding Michigan voters that his opponent, Mike Rogers, was backed by big corporations and mega donors.
Even Kansas’s victorious Adam Hamilton – who during his run for the Senate adamantly rejected the leftist label his opponent wanted to impose on him – campaigned on making datacenters pay for their own energy, banning lawmakers from trading stocks, expanding Medicare drug-price negotiations, and cracking down on price-gouging.
Hamilton also rejected money from corporate Pacs, as did most Democratic candidates for the Senate.
The real question in my mind is whether, come January when they control Congress, Democrats will take advantage of the new populism to enact measures most Americans need, such as Medicare for All, and reforms most Americans want, such as tougher anti-monopoly laws and limits on campaign contributions (even if this requires a constitutional amendment).
Trump is likely to veto any such initiatives, of course, but at least they’ll lay down markers for the 2028 presidential election – which, judging from what we’ve seen in the midterms, is likely to be a populist doozie.”
Armed white supremacist terrorists in mock-military camouflage uniforms stand guard over our ballot drop offs while Trump’s Department of Justice minions fire a barrage of bogus lawsuits to intimidate election officials in a campaign of vote suppression far beyond the normal gerrymandering of districts to erase nonwhite votes while assassins hunt our elected officials, as once again Musk the Troll King lavishes a fortune in dark money to rig the elections in tandem with his propaganda campaign on his platform x, and all of this in a diabolical plot to steal our citizenship and enslave us to the will of plutocrats and once more capture the state; welcome to America in the time of democracy’s greatest peril.
This was not in the mirror of remote history but today as it was during Trump’s Second Stolen Election two years ago, though the mechanics of totalitarian state terror and tyranny were codified by Trump’s idol Hitler long before, and the social divisions exploited by both have been with us since Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar.
We are now turning the tide of fascist terror in America and globally, when for many years we have been losing the battle for the soul of America and the future of humankind because we are playing a game by rules which no longer exist, as our opponents intend to subvert and destroy democracy as our terms of engagement.
As humankind awakens to its peril, we must diagnose the flaws of our political system and our society which have brought on this existential crisis, and through reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value bring change to how we choose to be human together.
Rules may be what make us the good guys, but good cannot win if evil has no rules but merely goals, and those of our subjugation to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and the centralization of power to authority and a carceral state of force and control.
Unless we too enter the space of play where there are no rules; for all Resistance is War to the Knife. Should we fail to seize back our power and reclaim our nation, this may be the only course left to us.
Our institutions of government are designed to balance forces which are both committed to the ideals, values, and structures of democracy; but this system functions only when democracy and a free society of equals founded on freedom, equality, truth, and justice are goals common to all, when we share a definition of terms as well as respect for the institutions and deliberative process of our government.
What today is true, just, equal, and free? Our political tribes no longer mean the same things when they speak of these values and ideals. We have lost democracy as a Forum of Athens when we can no longer debate how to be human together.
This is the true goal of the Republican Party, in our elections now and since its 1980 capture by the Fourth Reich. And we must cede nothing to the enemy; no ground of struggle, no symbol, no history, no idea.
We must win our adversaries back to the debate as partners, for if we cannot democracy is lost and America fallen, and we devolve to an age of tyrants and centuries of war from which we humans may never emerge, if against all odds we survive.
We have an excellent example of the costs of failure in the anniversary of racist terror we remember today, the Ocoee Massacre. It is a future we must avoid at all costs.
So today I have two kinds of policy guidance to share with you as thesis and antithesis, for which we must find synthesis. First, who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none, and we must bring a Reckoning as War to the Knife to those who would enslave us; and second, that we must avoid this fate and the Second Civil War and global civilizational collapse it will trigger by making democracy and our elections real, meaningful, just, and true.
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
As I wrote in my post of November 3 2020, One Hundred Years of Racist Vote Suppression and White Supremacist Terror: Anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre; This election has seen attempts at vote suppression unknown in our lifetimes; Trumps mission to subvert democracy includes intimidation by calling for armed white supremacists to deny nonwhite citizens access to the polls, an attack on Biden’s campaign caravan by the Trump Train mobile terror force, failed assassination attempts against Biden and other political figures, sabotage of the postal system, politization of the Justice department, and his farcical declaration of victory before the vote is counted, among his many treasonous crimes.
Today liberty and tyranny play for the soul of America and the freedom of the world.
I spent some time today at a Trump rally trying to defuse a hate crime in the making. A hey rube went up that a rally staged in a parking lot between our local mosque here in Spokane and a Middle Eastern grocery which sometimes functions as a community center was becoming a violent mob; while others responded as a protection detail and placed themselves with great courage between potential perpetrators and their victims, I blended into the rally to assess and shape its development as an incubator of violence through dialog and negotiation.
Today these angry young men chose not to allow fear, rage, and hate to master and dehumanize them, nor provoke them into violence which would be the ruin of their lives; what will all of the other angry young men choose tomorrow?
I’d like to believe this incident is atypical and not being played out a thousand times over across America; but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Tyranny weaponizes overwhelming and generalized fear as an instrument of subjugation. And fascism has a primary strategy of power and the manufacture of consent to be governed in claiming to speak and act in the name of those they would enslave; so also with the perpetration of atrocities and unforgiveable crimes against humanity which makes us complicit and creates walls of identity controlled by authority. This we must resist, but unless we speak directly to those fears we cannot heal the divisions of our society which authority has so skillfully manipulated.
In the words of Sigmund Freud, “Civilization begins when we throw words instead of stones.” Sadly, we humans have often chosen stones when words would serve us better.
In all the madness of this election and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of theocratic-fascist state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; in the main we are voting and not shooting, because our faith in one another and in the ideals on which our society is founded remain intact, though the institutions of our government may need radical and revolutionary change.
Nor is there anything new in the threat to democracy of vote suppression; today is the one hundred year anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre, the most terrible incident of racist vote suppression in the history of our nation since the Civil War. What may give us hope now that failed us then is the emerging consensus of racial equality and the mass coalition for racial justice won for us by the Black Lives Matter movement and its predecessor in Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement by the heroic citizens who have seized the streets of our cities in an unparalleled months long mass action.
Regardless of the election results, anyone who wishes to actually govern must do so at the head of these protests and not barricaded against the will of the people. This is the true meaning of this years seizure of power by our citizens, and it is a genie which cannot be returned to the prison of its lamp, for each of us is now a Living Autonomous Zone.
As written by Harmeet Kaur for CNN; “On November 2, 1920, African American residents of Ocoee, Florida, went out to cast their ballots in the presidential election — no small task at the time.
In the decades since Reconstruction, Florida politics had been dominated by White Southern Democrats, who fought to preserve slavery in the 1850s and had since obstructed African Americans from exercising their constitutional rights through violence, intimidation and legislation.
But in the run-up to the 1920 election, Black people in Ocoee were registering to vote in droves — a reality that threatened the grip of white supremacy, wrote Paul Ortiz, a history professor at the University of Florida, in a 2010 essay.
“State and local officials — along with the Ku Klux Klan — understood that white supremacy was in trouble,” Ortiz wrote. “They responded mercilessly.”
In an attempt to prevent Black people from voting, a White mob in Ocoee killed dozens of African Americans, set fire to their houses and drove them out of the community.
It was “the single bloodiest day in modern American political history,” Ortiz wrote.
It stemmed from one Black man’s attempt to vote.”
“According to several histories of the massacre, it started when Moses Norman, a prominent Black landowner in the Ocoee community, turned up to the polls and attempted to cast his ballot.
Norman was turned away by poll workers who told him that he hadn’t properly registered or paid the poll tax, according to a 2014 article in the Florida Historical Quarterly. So he took the issue to a prominent Orlando lawyer and Republican Senate candidate, who advised that Norman return and demand he be allowed to exercise his right to vote.
Norman returned, with some reports indicating that he had a gun with him as he went up to the poll workers and others saying that White people found the gun in his car. Ultimately, he was again driven away by White residents and went to take refuge at the house of his friend July Perry, another prominent Black man in the community.
A White mob formed and set out to find Norman, eventually arriving at Perry’s home, where a group of African American residents had assembled. It’s unclear who fired first, but violence broke out, leaving two White men dead and Perry injured, the authors of the Florida Historical Quarterly article wrote.
After the initial gunfight, the mob called in reinforcements and came back with a vengeance.
More than 250 White people, among them members of the Ku Klux Klan, torched rows of houses where African Americans lived, and set fire to other community buildings. Perry was lynched in Orlando. It’s not clear how many African Americans were killed, though estimates range from about 30 to as many as 50.
Despite their efforts to fight back, nearly all of the African Americans in Ocoee were driven out of town and didn’t return to live there for decades.”
Here in our celebration of the Day of the Dead my hopes and fears for the future of humankind become manifest and dance with us in the streets, and speak to us in our dreams of secrets and the silences of our history.
This as we rise and resist Trump’s ICE white supremacist terror force and campaign of ethnic cleansing, in what looks to be a historic Blue Wave in tomorrow’s midterm elections which will turn the tide of fascist tyranny in America.
I hope we are at the beginnings of our story of becoming human, and not at its end. 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, fragmented identities, and dangerous illusions.
Divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging, including those of race, gender, class, nationality, faith, and the tyranny of history, not only subjugate us to authority through the pathology of our disconnectedness from others but also alienate us from ourselves.
Authorized identities, rewritten histories, and the performance of our honored ancestors as subversions of imposed orders of being and meaning work like the discontiguous timelines of alternate histories and realities; there are myriads of such universes, and they are all right here, layered one within another. Here is a ground of struggle between falsification and authenticity, subjugation and liberation as ownership of ourselves. What has always interested me are the interfaces and boundaries between them as belief systems, and the possibilities of unknown silences and empty spaces.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
How may we grow into the Unknown spaces and discover, create, reimagine, and transform our true and best selves in becoming human, and in how we choose to be human together?
This is one of the true purposes and functions of our celebration of our ancestors; seizure of power as reclaiming our histories. With this is its interdependent and parallel praxis of social action; emergence from the legacies of our history as epigenetic and multigenerational trauma, among these harms and systems of oppression being racism, patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, our identities shaped by memory and history and the echoes and reflections of our ancestors. Disrupt or falsify this continuance and we become unmoored from our anchorages and set adrift; while this can be used intentionally to seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, it can also be used by others as an instrument of conquest and subjugation.
As examples we may look to the Pandemic and the generalized and overwhelming fear it unleashed, when weaponized by elite interests as a tool of division, repression, erasure, and colonization as in our border with Mexico which weaponizes disparity to create a vast underclass of exploitable labor, or one of fascism and tyranny as in America, as used by Trump and the amoral plutocracy of a theocratic, patriarchal, white supremacist, kleptocratic, and totalitarian police state he represents against humankind to centralize wealth and power.
The first day of the Dia de los Muertos festival is sacred to all children as holy innocents, whose lives are seeds like the dragon’s teeth sown by the Phoenician prince Cadmus in the earth from which warriors arise, and may bear forward and realize our dreams of liberation struggle against regimes of unequal power. Herein I honor as I have for far too many years now the migrant children stolen from their parents by order of Traitor Trump for his unspeakable perversions and those of his Epstein co-conspirators and still missing; now also do I remember the children of Ukraine abducted into slavery and torture brothels by the Russian military and the Butterfly Collectors syndicate, and the mass murder of Palestinian children in Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide ongoing in Gaza, a genocide and purchased with our tax dollars. These three regimes of tyranny and terror together represent the abandonment of our humanity and collapse of our civilization, and define the limits of the human; but sadly are far from unique in human history.
We grieve, but in this public ritual of grieving let us hold fast in solidarity to the purpose of remembrance and witness. For the dead and the past we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future that must be redeemed.
The world does not need our grief; the world needs our solidarity of action.
As long ago, in an America which now seems remote, I wrote to Kamala Harris on the occasion of her visit to the concentration camps we maintain at our border as instruments of racist state terror and colonial exploitation;
Dear Vice President Harris,
As long as you’re going to look into the faces of our victims, whose nations we have devastated economically, ecologically, and politically and left in the wake of our greed as a shattered postapocalyptic region of blighted doom, then left abandoned to the mercies of a Mexico whose government is powerless before its criminal syndicates, you might as well end our program of genocide and enslavement, tear down the Wall, disarm and repurpose the Border Patrol to provide humanitarian aid and help refugees reach the safety of our shores, rebuild democracy, the sacrosanct rights of humankind, the inviolability of unionized labor, and the material basis of wealth in the ecologies of the Dry Corridor of Central America, enact citizenship by declaration, and restore to our nation our heart.
Very Truly Yours, Jay Lale
To this I received no reply.
We are all of us engaged in the great struggle of our time between authority and autonomy, waged in the streets and in our hearts, which will define what is human and either dehumanize and enslave us or liberate us and the infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Authority will use lies and illusions to deceive us, but their true motives cannot survive exposure, nor their legitimacy survive disbelief, nor their power withstand disobedience.
On this and every day let us remember who we truly are, dance the ghosts of those who made us possible and helped create us as informing, motivating, and shaping forces, recite and perform their stories, and renegotiate the boundaries of human being, meaning, and value which they offer us.
LA MARTINIANA | Canción de día de Muertos
‘See death in a different way’: The history of Day of the Dead and how to celebrate this year
1 de noviembre de 2026, Día de los Muertos: En honor a nuestros ancestros
En esta celebración del Día de los Muertos, mis esperanzas y temores por el futuro de la humanidad se manifiestan y danzan con nosotros en las calles, y nos hablan en nuestros sueños de secretos y silencios históricos.
Espero que estemos en los albores de nuestra historia de humanidad, y no en su fin. Temo que nuestros legados históricos se conviertan en trampas, falsificaciones, narrativas asimilacionistas y colonizadoras donde la tiranía de las identidades autorizadas robe nuestras almas. Este es el problema del espejo roto del Duende Verde en La Reina de las Nieves de Anderson; estamos perdidos en un mundo de imágenes distorsionadas, ecos capturados, identidades fragmentadas e ilusiones peligrosas. Las divisiones de la alteridad excluyente y las jerarquías de pertenencia, incluidas las de raza, género, clase, nacionalidad, fe y la tiranía de la historia, no solo nos subyugan a la autoridad mediante la patología de nuestra desconexión con los demás, sino que también nos alienan de nosotros mismos.
Las identidades autorizadas, las historias reescritas y la representación de nuestros venerados ancestros como subversiones de los órdenes impuestos del ser y el significado funcionan como las líneas temporales discontinuas de historias y realidades alternativas; existen miríadas de tales universos, y todos están aquí, superpuestos unos dentro de otros. Aquí reside un terreno de lucha entre falsificación y autenticidad, subyugación y liberación como propiedad de nosotros mismos. Lo que siempre me ha interesado son las interfaces y los límites entre ellos como sistemas de creencias, y las posibilidades de silencios desconocidos y espacios vacíos.
Como aprendemos de John Cage en la música, Harold Pinter en el teatro y Piet Mondrian en el arte, son los espacios en blanco los que definen y ordenan el significado. Y en la historia, son las voces silenciadas y borradas a las que debemos escuchar con mayor atención, pues en ellas el vacío nos habla del poder oculto y de las funciones y relaciones clave que la autoridad debe encubrir para mantener su hegemonía.
¿Cómo podemos adentrarnos en lo desconocido y descubrir, crear, reimaginar y transformar nuestra verdadera esencia, nuestra mejor versión, al humanizarnos y al elegir ser humanos juntos?
Este es uno de los verdaderos propósitos y funciones de nuestra celebración de nuestros ancestros: la toma del poder como reivindicación de nuestra historia. A esto se suma su praxis interdependiente y paralela de acción social: el surgimiento de los legados de nuestra historia como trauma epigenético y multigeneracional, entre cuyos daños y sistemas de opresión se encuentran el racismo, el patriarcado, la esclavitud y el colonialismo.
Siempre persiste la lucha entre las máscaras que otros nos imponen y las que nos imponemos nosotros mismos; esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar. Somos las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos, a nosotros mismos y a los demás; nuestras identidades se moldean por la memoria, la historia y los ecos y reflejos de nuestros ancestros. Si se interrumpe o falsifica esta continuidad, nos desarraigamos y quedamos a la deriva. Si bien esto puede usarse intencionalmente para apropiarnos de nosotros mismos y reinventarnos, también puede ser utilizado por otros como instrumento de conquista y subyugación.
Como ejemplos, podemos observar la pandemia y el miedo generalizado y abrumador que desató, cuando fue instrumentalizada por intereses de élite como herramienta de división, represión, invisibilización y colonización, como en nuestra frontera con México, donde se instrumentaliza la desigualdad para crear una vasta subclase de mano de obra explotable, o una de fascismo y tiranía, como en Estados Unidos, utilizada por Trump y la plutocracia amoral de un estado policial teocrático, patriarcal, supremacista blanco, cleptócrata y totalitario que representa, para centralizar la riqueza y el poder contra la humanidad. El primer día del Día de los Muertos es sagrado para todos los niños, considerados inocentes, cuyas vidas son semillas como los dientes de dragón sembrados por el príncipe fenicio Cadmo en la tierra, de las cuales surgen guerreros que pueden seguir adelante y hacer realidad nuestros sueños de lucha por la liberación contra regímenes de poder desigual. En este día, honro, como lo he hecho durante demasiados años, a los niños migrantes arrebatados de sus padres por orden del traidor Trump para sus indescriptibles perversiones y las de su círculo de Epstein, y que aún permanecen desaparecidos; recuerdo también a los niños ucranianos secuestrados y convertidos en esclavos y torturados en burdeles por el ejército ruso y el sindicato de los Coleccionistas de Mariposas, y el asesinato en masa de niños palestinos en la campaña de limpieza étnica y genocidio que Israel lleva a cabo en Gaza. Estos tres regímenes de tiranía y terror representan juntos el abandono de nuestra humanidad y el colapso de nuestra civilización, y definen los límites de lo humano; pero, lamentablemente, no son casos únicos en la historia de la humanidad. Nos afligimos, pero en este ritual público de duelo, mantengámonos firmes en solidaridad con el propósito de recordar y dar testimonio. Por los muertos y el pasado no podemos hacer nada; es a los vivos a quienes debemos vengar, y al futuro al que debemos proteger.
El mundo no necesita nuestro dolor; el mundo necesita nuestra solidaridad y acción.
Hace mucho tiempo, en una América que ahora parece lejana, le escribí a Kamala Harris con motivo de su visita a los campos de concentración que mantenemos en nuestra frontera como instrumentos de terror estatal racista y explotación colonial;
Estimada Vicepresidenta Harris:
Ya que va a mirar a los ojos a nuestras víctimas, cuyas naciones hemos devastado económica, ecológica y políticamente, dejando tras de sí, fruto de nuestra codicia, como una región postapocalíptica desolada y abandonada a merced de un México cuyo gobierno es impotente ante sus sindicatos criminales, bien podría poner fin a nuestro programa de genocidio y esclavitud, derribar el muro, desarmar y reconvertir a la Patrulla Fronteriza para que brinde ayuda humanitaria y ayude a los refugiados a llegar a la seguridad de nuestras costas, reconstruir la democracia, los derechos humanos fundamentales, la inviolabilidad del trabajo sindicalizado y la base material de la riqueza en los ecosistemas del Corredor Seco de Centroamérica, promulgar la ciudadanía por declaración y devolverle a nuestra nación su esencia.
Atentamente, Jay Lale
No recibí respuesta. Todos estamos inmersos en la gran lucha de nuestro tiempo entre autoridad y autonomía, librada en las calles y en nuestros corazones, que definirá nuestra humanidad y que o bien nos deshumanizará y esclavizará, o bien nos liberará y nos abrirá las infinitas posibilidades de la humanidad.
Prestemos siempre atención a quien está detrás de la cortina. La autoridad usará mentiras e ilusiones para engañarnos, pero sus verdaderos motivos no pueden sobrevivir a la exposición, ni su legitimidad a la incredulidad, ni su poder a la desobediencia.
Hoy y siempre, recordemos quiénes somos en realidad, honremos la memoria de quienes nos hicieron posibles y contribuyeron a nuestra formación como fuerzas inspiradoras, motivadoras y transformadoras, recitemos y representemos sus historias, y redefinamos los límites del ser humano, el significado y el valor que nos ofrecen.
On the third of November we have a chance to take back our power from those who would enslave us, and to begin the Restoration of democracy and turn back the tide of fascist tyranny and terror of the Trump regime’s Fourth Reich.
In this historic moment, possibly the last chance to seize back our power by voting rather than civil war, let us stand together in solidarity of action and get out the vote like this was the final hope of our humanity and of America as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
As Buffy teaches us in season seven episode eleven Showtime, quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Payer; “If we all do our part, we’ll be the ones left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
As I wrote in my post of November 8 2024, Elegy For the Fall of America; In the wake of the Fall of America to the Fourth Reich and the advent of the Age of Tyrants, of the obliteration of possible futures in which humankind survives the terrors and cataclysms to come, our shared public trauma, grief, and rage gathers us all together as it generates waves of consequences which will reach their limit not in the destruction of our nation, nor of our civilization throughout the world, but only in the extinction of humankind.
We are now all of us prisoners of a madhouse run by its most brutal, degraded, perverse, and delusional inmates, the mask of the Fourth Reich which is the Republican Party, and set to enact our authorized identities and declaim our lines with gibbering whimsy by the sadistic fiend who modeled himself on Hitler, lost and won several fortunes as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate and launderer of Russian oligarchs secret wealth, whose mission as a Russian spy is the subversion of democracy, and worships only Moloch the Seducer, demon of lies; Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump.
This we must Resist; but how?
First, everything the enemy says is a lie. Question, seek proof, test, and share your truths as a witness of history and a truth teller, for to become human is to pursue the truth. Perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Beware of those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism. Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Speak, write, teach, organize. And remember always, silence is complicity.
Second, let us act in solidarity and as guarantors of each other’s parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and universal human rights. Such action gathers momentum and becomes an unstoppable force.
Third, refuse to submit to authority. Never stay down, regardless of the costs, the fear and pain, ostracism and brutal repression. Claw your way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. This is our victory, for it is a power which cannot be taken from us.
So, Resistance is asking questions, witness, and truth telling; solidarity of action, and refusal to submit.
All Resistance is War to the Knife; those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
Herein two warnings I give; the first is that violence and the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and always operates in both directions, so you must know precisely what consequences you are trying to achieve. My question for the use of force is simple; who holds power? Not who is innocent or the victim, for as Shaw teaches us in My Fair Lady this places a moral burden of judgement on victims, and often there are no innocent. And because we must avoid the false dilemma of moral equivalence, my rule for changing the balance of unequal power is Malcolm X’s dictum; By Any Means Necessary.
The second is to remember always Nietzsche’s principle; “He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.”
As I wrote in my literary publication Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium; Peter Weiss, on his birthday November 8; Surrealist-Absurdist narratives of Kafka-esque nightmares, the theatrical techniques of Brecht, Artaud, Ionesco, and Beckett, and a prose aesthetic developed from Genet, Robbe-Grillet, and Queneau, with a vast intellect and command of history and culture; Peter Weiss has created treasures of world literature and theatre whose power to motivate change and transform meaning will endure forever.
The great and stunning play and film Marat/Sade is an apex achievement and immortal classic of the theatre. Also, the music for the Brooks film production is a masterpiece in itself.
Peter Weiss’ magnum opus is The Aesthetics of Resistance, a thousand page historical novel of the fight for freedom, both against the Nazis and later the Communists. Only the first of the three volumes have been translated into English; hopefully this will change, but its more fun to read books in their original languages if one can. In it he argues that art prolifically generates new forms of resistance to authority, having a defensive function like a shell protecting our humanity. His many critical passages on art and literature are insightful and enliven this three volume Proustian work.
The story begins with the missing figure of Hercules in the Pergamon frieze, and three men who begin a conversation about it in 1937 Berlin, then recounts and examines the lives of hundreds of historical figures throughout all of Europe, encompassing the war and beyond. It’s been compared to Ulysses as a sea of words, and is among the most important novels of the Second World War and European history in general, but its also some of the most compelling writing about the value and meaning of art, literature, and culture I’ve ever read.
The Investigation records the testimony of the Auschwitz War Crimes Tribunal as observed by the author, who wrote this play from the actual evidence. Constructed in eleven cantos and modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy, it is a stark and chilling interrogation of guilt and responsibility, and the rhetoric used by the perpetrators to avoid confronting their own evil. Herein we now are reflected, as the election of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump a few days ago echoes and reflects the German election of Hitler in 1933.
Holderlin portrays the iconic poet in a hallucinatory play of violence, maladaptive sexuality, class struggle, and a descent into madness. Among the characters are important and insightful portrayals of Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte, and the play contains a brilliant exposition of Holderlin’s play Empedocles.
Shadow of the Coachman’s Body, Trotsky in Exile, Discourse On Vietnam,
and his revised stage adaptation of Kafka, The New Trial, are all wonderful.
In The New Trial, Peter Weiss has recast Joseph K as the lawyer for an ominous corporation, which exploits his idealism to mask its true intentions in a game of smoke and mirrors.
We are lost among the systems of signs in which we wander like a Wilderness of Mirrors, propaganda and falsifications of ourselves, our images captured and grotesquely distorted as in a funhouse maze, alternate realities and conspiratorial provocations of fracture and division, and faith weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2021, Allegories and Symbols of the Fall of America: the January 6 Insurrection as Theatre of Cruelty; Here is an expanded version of my post of January 6 on the Surrealist film Gummo as a satire of the Deplorables who committed treason and armed insurrection against our nation at the command of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump; On Insurrection Day, I offer for your consideration the film Gummo, a sensitive and elegant documentary of the Deplorables from whom the Fourth Reich cadre who staged the assault on Congress were recruited, and an allegory of America.
Bacon? Stapled to the wall, a strip of bacon captures ones attention as a symbol of degeneration and barbarian atavisms of instinct. Werner Herzog signposted it for our attention, and it persists as a symbol of degeneration to an animal state, like a trophy of wealth which is also offal above a bathtub filled with filth as our young protagonist eats spaghetti, his mouth smeared with red like a cannibal; an unforgettable image of the fallen American Dream.
It is the little things which disturb, provoke, and incite us to challenge normality, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the authorized identities of hegemonic elites and divisions of otherness, and to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden with glorious sins of beatification.
Here as always, all true art defiles and exalts.
We dine in filth on the carrion of others lives and by their labor. This is a Surrealist film intended as an allegory of America and a thematic interrogation of our flaws and dark legacies of injustice, and in large part restates Nietzsche’s critique of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and the idea of the innate depravity of man, an extension of the doctrine of original sin, on which all our law is based, as Nietzsche argues in The Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.
So also does the film restate William S. Burroughs’ analysis of capitalism and imperialism as the Algebra of Need, in which drug addiction becomes a metaphor of our addiction to wealth, power, and privilege, an engine of self-destruction, commodification, and dehumanization which feeds on and worsens our most atavistic instincts. Here the flaws of our humanity, fear and rage, vanity and jealousy, the need to dominate and control, become the instruments of our subjugation to hegemonic elites through divisions of exclusionary otherness and to tyrants of force and control and the imperial and carceral states of those who would enslave us.
The film itself is brutally shocking, grotesque, and borders on the obscene; which is why I adore it so. I must warn you that while I like it as an allegory of America’s flaws, and to poke fun at Trump’ s followers, this is brutal and depressing; anyone with suicidal ideation should avoid it. This debut of a heralded wonder of the new age as director was not understood as a critique of state power as a force of dehumanization and regression to an animal state, like that of the Deplorables, and unjustly derailed a promising career; a historical injustice I would like to redeem, because Gummo is a film we need now.
We must see the enemies of Liberty as they truly are, if we are to heal our nation from the primary trauma of fracture they enacted in the January 6 Insurrection.
Both the Insurrection and the film Gummo, like the Trump presidency as a whole, must be interpreted as performances of the Theatre of Cruelty as articulated by Antonin Artaud in his manifesto The Theatre And Its Double. Trump is a figure of the mad emperor from his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist; his performances as a clown of terror, disruption, and sadism were also brilliantly prophesized by Robert Coover in The Public Burning, A Political Fable, written as a satire of Nixon.
Let us see beyond the lies and illusions with which Trump and his Deplorables conceal their subversions of democracy, sabotage of our institutions, and violations of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s never anything but “just an old humbug.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror; The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.
As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.
The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services, in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.
The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.
And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?
This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.
When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.
The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.
Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.
Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.
So I wrote in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection, but our nation has chosen to elect Trump once again this November 5 2024, and there will never be a Restoration of Democracy in America or anywhere on earth, as the lights go dark one by one and the Age of Tyrants begins.
But we can bring a Reckoning for the Fall of America to fascist tyranny and of our global civilization, and for the extinction of our species which will end six to eight centuries of totalitarian states and imperial wars of conquest and dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable and fearsome horror.
As the Matadors said when they rescued me from a police death squad in Brazil 1974; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
We cannot hold back the tides of history, but we can refuse to submit or abandon each other, and this is a kind of victory and of freedom which cannot be taken from us.
So once again I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand which confers our being human and Unconquered; “We swear our loyalty to one another, to Resist and ceased not, and abandon not our fellows.” He repurposed it from the oath of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 under circumstances very much like those we now face in America; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
And he gave me a principle of action on that day, as we were about to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers; “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things.” For forty two years now I have lived by this rule and dared much, and though I have often failed to claw back something of our humanity from the Abyss, as I did in Mariupol Ukraine, Panjshir Afghanistan, and far too often in Palestine, I remain to defy and defend, unbroken and Unconquered, and can tell you as a witness of history that it is possible to challenge vast unanswerable force and win, as we did when we brought down the system of Apartheid in South Africa and the Berlin Wall in Europe.
The great secret of power, force, and control is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disbelief and disobedience. And if we but refuse to submit, we cannot be defeated, subjugated, enslaved.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
“If we all do our part, we’ll be the ones left standing”
Buffy Season 7 episode eleven Showtime
Marat/Sade (1967) complete film
Gummo – The Cruel Reality Of Decay
The Aesthetics of Resistance Series, by Peter Weiss
