On this Tax Day in America we are once again made complicit in crimes against humanity and imperial wars of conquest and dominion by the kleptocracy of hegemonic elites who rule us, and I find it interesting that each of us can quantify our moral harm and complicity in a dollar amount.
Ours here at Dollhouse Park, being my partner Theresa and myself, amounts to more than I ever made as a high school teacher annually, actually close to double a teacher’s salary, a fact I find curious and do not wholly understand though I have worked as a financial consultant. The figure does not disturb me; what it buys does.
Because we all of us are made complicit in the deaths of children, and many others whom we have killed without trial or cause, either simply for being different or because they were in the way of our profits.
This is a ledger I cannot reconcile, nor should anyone. Not and remain human.
It is precisely our humanity they wish to steal from us, in making us accomplices and beneficiaries of atrocities beyond comprehension.
This I cannot abide; can you abide it? So goes the iconic line in the film Inglorious Basterds, and with Ahad I say to all fascists and all tyrants; “To the end, I shall grapple with thee.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, as Nelson Mandela underlined in the play Julius Caesar as he authorized direct action against the Apartheid regime from his abysmal cell in Robben Island. A friend of mine, vanished and presumed dead, tried to liberate the prisoners of Robben Island long ago, as captain of a rebuilt U-32 Nazi submarine which he operated like Nemo against empires of dehumanization; he failed to do so, but this is not the only measure of victory.
Who will liberate us? There is no one but ourselves.
Liberation struggle can consume our lives, but what is the cost if we do nothing?
How we reckon costs of a war is a ground of struggle, but one which we must come to terms with. In dollars alone, the Iran War has already amounted to $52, 332, 150, 926 as I write this; and it will cost us near a trillion dollars as we go on, even if we stop the war now.
But direct costs are hardly all of it. As Elizabeth Warren said on April 13; “Since Trump started his illegal war with Iran, Americans have paid $8.4 billion more at the gas pump. Each American family has also shelled out an additional $1,700 to pay for Trump’s chaotic, illegal tariffs.” And with fuel prices, all goods bought at the grocery store have also risen in price.
In terms of human lives, 13 of ours, twelve Israelis, and over 1,332 Iranians including children and other civilians. These figures will also grow with time.
But there is more, for the Iran War occurs within the context of a war which is far more broad, encompassing the Palestinian Genocide and Israel’s re-Occupation of Lebanon, a war to conquer a Greater Israel paid for with American taxes and American lives.
For which we get nothing. Nothing at all.
As loath as I may be to phrase things in an inelegant manner, such atrocities and crimes against humanity are too monstrous to call out in polite language, and I must say with Ken Kesey as in his iconic speech to end the Vietnam war recounted in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
As written by Joseph Stiglitz, Gabriel Zucman and Zohran Mamdani in The Guardian, in an article entitled Tax day is a reminder of America’s unequal tax system. But we can fix it: There is no justification for a regressive system in which the super-rich contribute less than the rest of us; “Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. New York City’s average household income is $131,000. Without extreme inequality, residents could live reasonably well. Instead, a few people at the top of the income ladder capture enormous wealth, while millions of others struggle just to get by. Some simply can’t make it. For them, New York has become fundamentally unaffordable.
This outsized level of inequality has enormous economic, political and social consequences. It undermines social and political cohesion, erodes trust in institutions and leads people to conclude, correctly, that the system is rigged.
Nearly one-fifth of America’s super-rich live in New York, the highest concentration of wealth in any state. But inequality is not just a New York problem or even an American problem – though the United States is more unequal than almost every other advanced economy. It is a global crisis.
The global inequality report, commissioned during South Africa’s G20 presidency, found that between 2000 and 2024, the richest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth, while the bottom half of humanity got just 1%. This trajectory is unsustainable.
The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of 16% of world GDP in wealth.
As wealth concentrates, so does power – the power to influence elections, shape policy, tilt markets and define the terms of public debate.
One of the main drivers of this trend is our collective failure to effectively tax the super-rich. Until recently, the scale of the problem was difficult to measure. Public data does not track tax contributions of the ultra-wealthy. But recently, there has been a flurry of research looking at just that, and the findings are clear.
In the 1960s, the 400 richest Americans paid about 50% of their income in taxes across all levels of government. Today, they pay about 24%.
This is not unique to the US. Across Europe – including France, Italy and the Netherlands – and in countries such as Brazil, researchers find the same pattern: the super-rich pay lower effective tax rates than almost everyone else. They excel not only at making money, but at avoiding and evading taxes.
Even when they do pay, it falls far short of their fair share – despite the fact that their wealth depends heavily on public investment: government contracts, a highly educated workforce, a rule of law that facilitates business or good infrastructure, or even the basic technology that underlies their “innovation”. Instead, the burden is shifted on to working people whose taxes sustain the very systems that enable extreme wealth.
It is high time we confront this problem collectively.
We can disagree about how progressive tax systems should be – the extent to which the rich should pay more tax, relative to their income, than the rest of us. But there is no justification for a regressive system in which the super-rich contribute less than the rest of us. This is how inequality is deepened and sustained.
For too long, reform has been dismissed as too complex or politically infeasible, even as voters across the political spectrum enthusiastically support the rich paying what they owe.
That is beginning to change.
In 2024, under Brazil’s leadership, the G20 put this issue on its agenda and committed to more effective taxation of ultra-high-net-worth individuals. It commissioned a report that proposed a minimum tax of 2% on the wealth of the super-rich – a straightforward way to ensure they meet their obligations to society.
That powerful idea has had ripple effects. In 2025, Spain and Brazil committed to leading a coalition of countries to implement it. This weekend, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula Silva, will meet in Barcelona with the heads of states of South Africa, Mexico, Colombia and many more countries to press ahead.
In France, a version of this minimum tax passed the National Assembly, though it was blocked by the conservative Senate. Still, it remains central to the national debate – much like the income tax itself, which once faced similar resistance from conservative forces before becoming law. In the US, a paradigm shift is under way. California voters will consider a tax on billionaire wealth this November. Washington state has approved a 9.9% income tax on million-dollar incomes, set to take effect in 2028. In New York, we are calling on the state to increase taxes on the rich and large corporations to close New York City’s budget deficit and fund essential public services like affordable housing and childcare. And we are already making progress with a new pied-a-terre tax in New York City, which will tax the ultra-wealthy and global elites.
These are just the first steps toward restoring a basic social principle: that those with the most should contribute their fair share so that everyone can live with dignity.
The idea that billionaires should pay higher tax rates than working people is not radical. What is radical is allowing a system where extreme wealth exists alongside widespread hardship – and where those billionaires can in effect opt out of contributing to the society that made their success possible.
The longer we wait to fix that, the more entrenched wealth and economic and political power become, further cementing the privileges of our modern aristocracy.”
As written by Bernie Sanders in The Guardian, in an article entitled Yes, the rich must start paying their fair share of taxes; “Never before in American history have so few had so much wealth and power. Today, the top one per cent owns more wealth than the bottom 93%. One man, Elon Musk, worth $805bn, owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households.
And that inequality is getting worse. Last year alone, after receiving the largest tax break in history from Donald Trump, 938 billionaires in America became $1.5tn richer. Since he was elected, President Trump and his family have become $4bn richer.
Never before in American history have we had such concentration of ownership. While profits soar, a handful of giant corporations dominate virtually every sector of our economy, charging higher and higher prices for the products they sell. Four Wall Street firms combined – BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity and State Street – are the major stockholders of more than 95% of American corporations.
Never before in American history have so few billionaires controlled what we see, hear, and read in the media – both legacy media and social media. Never before in American history have we seen a ruling class, within a corrupt campaign finance system, wield the kind of political power it has today. In the 2026 midterm elections, just 50 billionaires have already spent over $433m to influence political campaigns and buy candidates who represent their interests.
Bottom line: the richest people in America have never ever had it so good.
That is one reality. Here’s the other reality.
The American working class has been under savage attack for years. Over the last many decades there has been an explosion in technology and a huge increase in worker productivity. Despite that, the average American worker is making almost $20 a week less today than he or she did 53 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
According to the Rand Corporation, over the last 50 years, $79tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. Almost all of the gains in worker productivity have gone to the top 1%.
Meanwhile, 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck and are struggling to pay the outrageously high cost of rent, healthcare, prescription drugs, groceries, childcare and the basic necessities of life. Nearly half of older workers have nothing saved for retirement, and over 20% of our seniors are trying to make it on less than $15,000 a year. Tragically, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and over half a million go bankrupt each year because of medically related debt.
Why, in a nation of such extraordinary wealth, exploding technology and greatly increased worker productivity, are so many people struggling just to stay alive?
One of the major reasons is that we have a tax code that is totally rigged – written by representatives of the wealthy to benefit the wealthy. Instead of raising enough revenue to meet the needs of working families, corporate lobbyists have riddled the tax code with loopholes, allowing the wealthiest people and largest corporations in our country to avoid paying their fair share.
In 2006, Warren Buffett memorably said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Mr Buffett went on to say that he, a multibillionaire, pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. What Buffett said was true 20 years ago. It is even more accurate today.
In America today, billionaires now pay a lower effective tax rate than the average worker. Elon Musk paid an effective tax rate of less than 3.3%, while the average truck driver paid 8.4%. Jeff Bezos, now worth $223bn, paid an effective tax rate of less than 1%, while the average firefighter paid 8.7%.
Michael Bloomberg, worth $109bn, paid an effective tax rate of just 1.3%, while the average registered nurse paid 13.3%.
And Warren Buffett? His tax rate was just 0.1%, while the average schoolteacher paid 9.8%.
But it’s not just billionaires who are not paying their fair share. Last year, after Trump gave corporate America a tax break of more than $900bn, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Ticketmaster and the company that owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken paid zero in federal income taxes. These companies combined are worth $3.5tn. Their owners are worth over $853bn. They made over $17bn in profits last year. And they paid nothing in federal income taxes.
The American people are catching on.
In California, by a 2-to-1 margin, voters support a tax on billionaires to prevent over 3 million people from losing healthcare.
In New York City, over 62% of residents support Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for a 2% surtax on millionaires and billionaires.
Nationally, more than six out of every 10 Americans believe the amount of taxes paid by the wealthy and large corporations is too low.
That is why I recently introduced a bill that would establish a 5% wealth tax on the 938 billionaires in America who collectively are worth more than $8.2tn. These 938 billionaires constitute 0.000003% of the population.
Over a 10-year period, this bill would raise $4.4tn.
What would this legislation accomplish?
In the first year, we would provide every man, woman, and child in a household making $150,000 or less with a $3,000 direct payment. That is $12,000 for most families of four.
We would end homelessness and the housing crisis in America by building 7m units of low-income and affordable homes and apartments.
We would expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing.
We would provide universal childcare throughout America.
We would strengthen public education by ensuring that no teacher in America makes less than $60,000 a year.
In the midst of a major crisis in home healthcare, we would guarantee that seniors and people with disabilities receive the home healthcare they need through Medicaid.
And let’s not forget: Donald Trump and his Republican friends in Congress threw 15 million Americans off their healthcare in order to provide a trillion-dollar tax break for the top 1%. Through this bill, we would repeal those healthcare cuts and ensure that none of those 15 million people lose their healthcare.
In other words, we would provide all of this help and support to working families, the elderly, the children and the sick through a 5% tax on the wealth of 938 billionaires. Nobody with a net worth of less than a billion dollars would pay a penny more in taxes.
And let me tell you how insane the level of wealth inequality is in America today. If this legislation had been enacted last year, Elon Musk would have owed $42bn more in taxes, leaving him with just $792bn to survive.
Mark Zuckerberg would have owed $11bn more, leaving him with a meager $209bn to feed his family. Jeff Bezos would also have owed about $11bn more, leaving him with just $207bn to put a roof over his head.
In other words, despite raising an enormous amount of money that could improve life for hundreds of millions of Americans, the wealthiest people in this country have so much wealth that they would barely notice the difference.
As Justice Louis Brandeis profoundly said back in 1933: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
Let’s choose democracy over oligarchy.
The wealthiest people in America must start paying their fair share of taxes.
Let’s create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.”
Tax day is a reminder of America’s unequal tax system. But we can fix it
In the shadow of the Fall of America and years of the ICE White Terror, of the systematic destruction of our democracy, our freedoms, and our humanity by the criminal Trump regime’s Fourth Reich, we are confronted with a horrific example of the future to which we may be headed in the legacies of history and systems of unequal power from which we struggle to emerge in the anniversary of the 1873 Colfax Massacre.
Theft of citizenship as vote suppression and as genocidal murder, white supremacist state terror, and police gun violence are among the hungry ghosts who bedevil us still, and should there remain any question of the existential active threat of racist terror and the necessity of resistance by any means necessary, we may look to such examples.
No matter where you begin with divisions of identitarian politics in service to elite wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall and Keri Leigh Merritt in Jacobin, in an article entitled The 1873 Colfax Massacre Was a Racist Attack on Black People’s Democratic Rights: The worst episode of Reconstruction Era violence occurred 150 years ago today in northern Louisiana. The 1873 Colfax Massacre saw white supremacists slaughter 150 African Americans, brutally thwarting their hopes for autonomy and self-governance.; “The Civil War did not end in the Deep South in 1865. The proslavery, pro-Confederate legacies powerfully persisted, shaping the telling of our history and knowledge about people, places, and events: our perception of reality.
This is precisely why many Americans have never heard of one of the most important episodes of mass murder in US history: the racist, bloody Colfax Massacre of April 13, 1873 — exactly one hundred fifty years ago today — when white supremacists slaughtered over one hundred fifty black men in the northwest corner of Louisiana.
Colfax
Located in the heart of the Red River Valley, Colfax was a highly prosperous area in the global cotton economy prior to the Civil War. But flush times for planters ended abruptly after secession. New Orleans fell to the US Army early, in April 1862. After Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed those enslaved in Confederate-occupied territory in 1863, the US Army conducted a ten-day raid up the Red River to Alexandria, where the Confederate governor of Louisiana, Thomas Moore, owned a large plantation.
During the Civil War, the US Army enlisted nearly two hundred thousand armed black men — an astonishing 10 percent of all troops who served. Composed of formerly enslaved men, refugees, and free blacks, these soldiers were tasked with maintaining order, ensuring peace, and protecting polling places.
But when former enslavers began complaining about the black occupation troops, President Andrew Johnson quickly removed them. By the fall of 1867, the number of soldiers in Louisiana had dwindled to only twenty thousand men. The US government decided to redirect its military might toward western colonization, resulting in the murderous removal of indigenous people.
The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
In the Red River Valley, too few troops meant chaos and contention, as there was no longer a functioning home guard, military patrol, or military commission. The US government had abandoned the region, as well the people in it, leaving political, judicial, and police power up for grabs.
The character of wealth changed, as access to goods and supplies became paramount. Within this shifting landscape, a new group of merchants emerged, competing through violent, insurrectionary means. The Red River Valley transformed into a highway of militarized desperados and warring factions, with no clearly established governmental authority. Murder, gun violence, and terror became the order of the day.
Louisiana’s new constitution, enacted in 1868, created an enclave of Republican power along the Red River, an area that was majority-black and deeply divided. Grant Parish was carved out of Rapides and Winn Parishes and named triumphantly for President Ulysses S. Grant. The parish seat, Colfax, took the surname of his vice president, Schuyler Colfax, Jr.
Yet with so few troops to counterbalance the power of former enslavers and their kin, laws enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments — providing citizenship and the right to vote to all men — were applied timidly and to little effect. Federal election supervisors in rural areas had no police power and were reduced to poll watchers.
That same year, to help keep peace, the Louisiana state legislature established a five-thousand-man militia, half white and half black. The white troops were mainly Confederate veterans; the black troops, Union veterans. During bitter struggles over control of the state government, the militia fragmented along racial lines, with one sector becoming the military arm of a terrorist organization called the White League after 1873. The boundary line between these white supremacists and black Republicans was Bayou Darrow, located seven miles north of Colfax.
Freedmen voting in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1867. (Wikimedia Commons)
Violence quickly enveloped the region. The brutality was primarily carried out by the Knights of the White Camelia, a white supremacist organization akin to the better-known Ku Klux Klan.
During the wave of terror unleashed before the 1868 election, the political assassination rates among both black and white Louisianans had been staggering. As an 1875 congressional report later revealed, there were 1,081 politically motivated murders, 137 shootings, and 507 other verified outrages in the state alone.
Still, as brutal as the 1868 election had been in Louisiana, the 1872 election and its aftermath were even deadlier. Not only was the gubernatorial election disputed, but several of the local elections were, too. Like four years earlier, the real political strife seemed to center in the Red River Valley, with Grant Parish the eye of the storm. In tiny Colfax, the county seat, the local elections were hotly contested. A group of armed black Republicans began occupying the county courthouse, claiming political victory.
Then everything exploded on Easter Sunday, 1873.
Massacre
The power struggle in Colfax had first turned deadly earlier in April, when a band of white supremacists murdered a black man in his front yard. Union veteran William Ward, who served as a black state representative, local Radical leader, and militia captain, ordered his company to muster immediately.
Historian LeeAnna Keith estimates that about three hundred black militiamen, along with their families, flocked to Colfax’s town center, occupying the courthouse (which, in the war-torn rural South, was a “repurposed” plantation stable). Ward, who had grown up enslaved as a carpenter in Virginia, began drilling the men openly in the town’s streets, organizing watches to keep families safe. Armed with guns, they quickly dug entrenchments, erected breastworks, and “posted sentries” around their commandeered area.
Judge William Phillips, a white “scalawag” from Alabama who earned a reputation by openly fathering a child with a black woman and by rallying black voters through promises of land, horses, and tools as part of reparations for slavery, joined forces with the black guards. Under the joint leadership of the white Phillips and the black Ward, local African Americans coalesced around what historian Joel Sipress has deemed “a new type of militant Black politics.”
White supremacists in the Red River Valley used these events to incite as much racial fear as possible. Over the next few days, three hundred white men poured into Colfax from Grant and surrounding parishes, forming an all-white paramilitary counterforce. Under the leadership of C. C. Nash, a former captain of the Confederate Army, they ordered the black militia and their families to leave Colfax under threat of violence. With more manpower and weaponry than the Republicans (they even had a small cannon, a relic from the war), white Democrats began the battle just after noon on Easter.
After hours of skirmishing, the former Confederates found a gap in the levee on the riverbank and positioned their single cannon there. While the weapon fired continuously upon the black freedom fighters, a former plantation overseer led a group of thirty whites in a direct attack against the black militia. One group of black Republicans instantly surrendered and was taken prisoner. Although Nash promised to free the men in the morning, a younger band of white terrorists executed them in cold blood, under the cowardly cover of the night.
Roughly sixty Republicans flooded the courthouse, exchanging fire with the white militia, who finally compelled a black captive to set fire to the courthouse roof. Some of the black Radicals perished in the fire. The men who tried to surrender, numbering between fifty and seventy, were ultimately shot to death. As a steamer pulled into Colfax the night of the massacre, one of the terrorists climbed on board, “armed to the teeth,” offering to give the passengers a tour of “dead n—–s . . . for there were a hundred or so scattered over the village and the adjacent fields.”
Nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered.
Only three white Democrats perished during the attack, but the number of African Americans murdered is much more difficult to ascertain. Most of the witnesses were slaughtered. Evidence was lost because bodies were buried in the trenches in front of the courthouse in mass graves or dumped into the Red River.
What we do know is that nearly all the dead were brutally slain after they had surrendered and that almost fifty human beings were callously murdered after being held as political prisoners for hours. We know that not one scintilla of evidence was presented that any of the black men who defended the Colfax courthouse ever committed a single crime. They were simply freedom fighters, assassinated during their quest for independence and political power.
Colfax remains the single largest massacre in Louisiana history. It also spurred one of the worst legal decisions in Supreme Court history, United States v. Cruikshank (1875), which gave control of constitutional amendments and civil rights laws back to the white Confederates that had seceded from the Union. The ruling effectively ended Radical Reconstruction by prohibiting the use of the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute white supremacist terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan. Cruikshank nearly erased the myriad black political gains won after emancipation, re-empowering local white oligarchs — former enslavers.
Legacy
White supremacy has long been an effective tool for US elites to maintain their place at the top of society. Stoking racism and hatred, they have prevented lasting interracial working-class coalitions and managed to keep most black Americans at the bottom of society.
Reactionary forces have likewise been successful at whitewashing history, including that of the Colfax Massacre. Contrary to the historical marker that served as the only headstone for the murdered — erected over half a century later — Colfax was never a riot. As the worst instance of white supremacist violence during Reconstruction, Colfax brutally thwarted black citizens’ hopes for autonomy and self-governance.
One hundred fifty years later, we recognize Colfax for what it really was: a racist massacre and a violent political message to potential black voters throughout the South. And we honor the heroic dead, vowing to continue their fight for democracy.”
I too once bore the icon of Saint Beatrice of the Absurd as did he, following the tracks of Dante through a blighted and ravaged series of otherworlds, bereft of dictums, of referents, a journey in which all the signs had been switched so that self-referential language led outward to realms unknown and the places marked Here Be Dragons had settled into my skin like living tattoos and could only be found by surrendering to the currents of time and dancing untethered like a leaf on the wind, or glimpsed in a mirror of endless reflections.
But unlike Samuel Beckett, grim prophet that he was, I danced in rapture and in joy. Because he who has no hope nor fear, no boundaries to one’s self, is totally free. And in freedom there is as Rudolf Otto teaches us “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”, both terror and rapture as before the monstrosity of the Biblical God or before the Infinite and the Unknown in which we are shattered, destroyed and re-created, all that which is utterly alien and defines the limits of the human.
That his birthday falls shortly after April’s full Flower Moon, with my gardens full of daffodils and hope, now seems a sign of the renewal of the world and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, when long ago it filled me with dread as I did not yet understand the relationship between the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom.
Who cannot be compelled is free, and becomes Unconquered. For Samuel Beckett, this embrace of Sartre’s total freedom lies at the heart of his luminous questioning of human being, meaning, and value. Take away everything a man has or is, possession and mastery of his own body, his memories, histories, identity, and what remains is his Voice, protean and relative though it may be.
Here begins Beckett’s use of language as an instrument of revolutionary struggle interdependent with many of his great themes, which he deployed as Resistance to fascist tyranny during the Occupation, against a brutal conqueror who used terror to subjugate victims through learned helplessness by means of shock and awe; yet in the face of unanswerable force and overwhelming horror Samuel Beckett discovered a way to claw back some of our humanity from the darkness.
Sometimes it’s the best we can do. Yet it remains a power which cannot be taken from us, our refusal to submit, and that is the only power a human being needs.
I think of this tonight as I contemplate the abandonment of our humanity and our principles of universal human rights in the genocidal Gaza War which Biden and now Trump has made America complicit in, as Israel since Black Saturday has attempted to engineer a global war with her criminal violations of international law and provoked Iran into direct regional conflict, and America has granted authorization for this by shielding Israel from the consequences of her actions.
This follows the casus belli of Black Saturday October 7 2023 which the Netanyahu regime orchestrated using infiltration agents within Hamas and a black ops unit of IDF reconnaissance specializing in masquerading as Muslims while committing atrocities against actual Muslim groups to divide them and prevent the emergence of a natural United Front. Que bono? Only Netanyahu and his settler regime of theocratic imperialists benefits from staging an event which abducts Israeli peaceniks; it marginalizes the Israeli Left and secures the power of the regime while manufacturing a just cause of war for the Final Solution of the Palestinians and the imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors as Greater Israel.
Trump has recently coordinated his bombing of Iran as he had previously of Yemen in a failed attempt to destroy our glorious counterblockade of the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid with the Israeli bombing of Lebanon and of Gaza before, designed to divide Palestine into Bantustans modeled on those of the South African Apartheid era state.
We are now directly involved in the broad regional war against the Dominion of Iran, which controls Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, and is Russia’s key ally in Putin’s mad quest to re-found the Russian Empire. Last year began with our stunning victory in the Liberation of Syria, where we proved the enemy, by which in this case I mean the Putin regime of Russia for while an ally and instrument of Russian global power the Dominion of Iran is also our ally versus Israel, is not invincible and can be defeated.
World War Three has now been ongoing for several years in ten theatres of war, including Vichy America as Putin captured the state through propaganda warfare and vast dark money in the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 with his agent Traitor Trump for the purpose of a free hand in the invasion of Ukraine without American intervention, which he got and still gets from his subverted Republican congressmen pawns who rubberstamp everything that has a chance of dismantling our democracy.
Israel and Palestine, one people divided by history, and now Iran and the whole of the Middle East as the Israeli-American Iran War which involves the Iranian Dominion and Axis of Resistance against the Arab-American Alliance as part of the Israeli war to conquer a Greater Israel and also a part of the Russian Third World War, which Israel is doing everything in their power to generalize as imperial conquest and dominion of the whole Middle East. And Netanyahu’s regime has implicated America in unforgiveable crimes against humanity as a strategy of our subjugation and now maneuvers to bring us fully into conflict with Iran, which will bring us into a direct and total war of survival with Russia.
As one may surmise from my frequent use of the phrase Never Again!, I will gladly guarantee the lives of Jewish peoples, be they Israeli citizens or that of any other nation, with my own, and this is unconditional; but applies equally to all human beings. Protecting Israel from the random civilian slaughter of aerial bombardment, yes; but also protecting everyone else from Israeli bombs. Most especially when our tax dollars here in America buy the deaths of children and make monsters of us all.
On this day two years ago I wrote that if America bombs Iran or enables Israel to do so instead of sanctioning Israel for the genocide of the Palestinians and the bombing of the Iranian consulate that provoked this escalation and cycle of retaliation and mutual destruction, everything changes, and the Age of Tyrants begins.
Sadly, I believe I was not wrong in that prediction.
Humankind now faces six to eight centuries of global wars of dominion fought with unimaginable weapons against whole populations by tyrannies of brutal force and control, and in less than two possible futures out of every hundred something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and wonder how and why we destroyed ourselves.
To be clear; nothing human survives the next millennium; the only question now is whether or not we take all life on earth with us. Unless we choose a United Humankind over an Age of Tyrants.
Will posthuman species emerge from our ruins to question and learn from our mistakes? Will we be remembered, all that we have been and all that we have dreamed, or become nothing? This is truly the only fate in question now; will humankind have been for nothing?
If Biden had used Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to stop the Israeli genocide as it began in October, we would not now be on the brink of nuclear annihilation. Instead he, like Netanyahu, and now like Trump, chose to answer death and terror with greater death and terror, and failed to silence the bombs.
Force cannot answer force, but only gathers more as it dehumanizes us. If we can reclaim America and use BDS of Israel to stop the genocide, bring the war criminals to trial, begin reparations and the rebuilding of a sovereign and independent Palestine, and restore the idea of universal human rights, we can still stop a war of survival between Russia and America, and between our respective allies Iran and Israel. I fear instead we will choose the path of evil as we so often have when the lives of others can become fuel for the power of elites and of imperial conquest and dominion. If we cannot find mercy within us, we will exterminate humankind. Today I fear the Age of Tyrants has begun.
Our world has far too many rulers whose fingers rest on the button of nuclear Armageddon, and like an evil jinn in its bottle it whispers to them with its siren call; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
We are all become Death, destroyer of worlds, and we must resist the seduction of power.
Four years ago on this day I wrote to you from a place similar to Palestine today, a field hospital in the tunnels of Mariupol where the wounded were triaged and those who may live chosen from those who will die, surrounded by men burned beyond recognition by the mobile crematoriums called thermobaric weapons, identities stolen by brain damage from shrapnel and concussive force and disconnected from themselves with memories possibly forever lost, missing limbs from the violence of others and parts of their humanity from the violence they themselves have committed for war generalizes moral harm and degradation, many with families annihilated in the cauldron of war, who sing a litany of pain and fear and loss; and I believe I understand the place from which Samuel Beckett speaks to us.
All the works of Samuel Becket are masterpieces, are unparalleled, revelatory and stunning. I would first read Waiting for Godot, as everyone else has, and after that my favorite, The Unnamable.
The Unnamable, final and most ferocious novel of his magnificent and terrifying trilogy, is a monologue summarizing the great themes of his works without characters, plot, or setting in the usual sense of literary devices.
There are many things it is not, as Samuel Beckett’s critique of language as a mechanism of social control and theft of identity recalls that of Gertrude Stein and travels in the direction opposite the joyful myriad experiments of his long collaborator James Joyce; yet it remains a brilliant and stunning set of arguments for the meaninglessness and emptiness of values and of being in a universe empty of imposed meaning in which we are free to create ourselves by our own poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
What else may one expect of an author whose references include Lautréamont’s Maldoror, de Sade, Bataille?
An extension of Sartre’s Existentialism which develops Absurdist Nihilism as a radical notation of its parent philosophy, and reflective aesthetically of the theatre of Eugene Ionesco and Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett’s idea of Negation rests on premises of authenticity and alienation, and is intended as an act of liberation and an answer to human suffering as a condition of being.
For myself, it is also a sustained critique of Hope, that last gift or curse of Pandora’s Box, and whether Hope is a gift or a curse has been a defining question for me across the last forty years of revolutionary struggle and the quest to discover and find solutions for the origins of evil and the social use of force as violence and tyranny.
Beckett’s Principle of Negation finds its form in the art of silences and blank spaces; here we become the disembodied voices of Molloy or the trapped and dehumanized figures of David Rabe’s Recital of the Dog or Kobo Abe’s The Box Man.
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.
Let us pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves.
This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Our performance of identities is a theatre of possibilities, of negotiations and dances with normativity and the transgression of boundaries, of the questioning and reimagination of idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of self-creation as liberation and autonomous total freedom, a quest for our uniqueness and for the human transcendent, and of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
I have often wondered if Samuel Beckett was influenced by Nagarjuna, who denies both the existence of the soul and possibly of existence itself, or other Buddhist philosophers, with which he aligns. Certainly the influence of Nietzsche was formative to his ideas, though the Grief of Influence extends both inwards and outwards..
Samuel Beckett influenced Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze; among the essays of The Infinite Conversation there are dialogues between himself and his friends Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille. Blanchot wrote of him in the essay Where now? Who now?; Alain Badiou’s essay on Worstward Ho, Being, Existence, Thought: Prose and Concept, among the collected essays published as On Beckett, remains unexcelled.
His influence on modern theatre begins with his protege and collaborator Harold Pinter, and includes Sam Shepard and Edward Albee.
Both a direct refutation of the Biblical concepts of sin, soul, cosmological design, historical purpose and teleology, and divine authority, and an original and visionary reimagination of the human condition, the works of Samuel Beckett are integral to our civilization and among its finest achievements.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2023, This Midwinter Solstice, Confront the Meaninglessness of Life Not With Abjection, Despair, and Helplessness But With the Joy of Total Freedom; As we enter the Christmas season on this Midwinter Solstice, the day of most profound and deepest darkness, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
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.
The citizens of Hungary have for days now been celebrating the fall of Victor Orban in this weekend’s elections, long before he conceded defeat, so massive was the movement to restore democracy and liberate Hungary from Russian influence, a tidal change event which will deny the Nazi revivalists a safe haven for the reconquest of Europe and redirect the flow of history to the values of the Enlightenment encoded in democratic societies; liberty, equality, the universal Rights of Man, testable truth, and justice for all.
The Bearded Lady J.D. Vance had been campaigning for Orban and his fascist kleptocracy of white supremacist nationalism and theocratic terror which has been a model for the Trump regime and for all those who would enslave us. And the American Fourth Reich has failed to win allegiance and keep its ally in power, as has Putin’s regime in Russia which also interfered with the Hungarian elections as it did our own in Trump’s Stolen Election of 2016.
Orban has fallen today, will Trump follow? Will the other tyrants of the Fourth Reich, Italy’s Meloni, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and others also be cast down from their thrones of hate, lies, and greed? Will the political parties which threaten imperiled democracies in Europe, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in Britain, Santiago Abascal’s Vox in Spain, and far too many others be prevented from capture of the state such as America has endured?
A post Orban Hungary will face many of the challenges of a post Trump America, and the Restoration of democracy in Europe will be neither quick nor easy, as the failure of the Democrats to hold the Presidency against recapture of the state by Trump in our last election proves.
Can the cordon sanitaire against fascism be restored?
As written by Sreve Benen in The Rachel Maddow Blog, in an article entitled Orbán’s defeat in Hungary is also a major loss for Trump and the right in the U.S.: The ripple effects of Hungary’s lopsided elections will be felt far and wide — including in the White House, where the prime minister had a powerful fan; “Donald Trump has thrown his public support behind plenty of foreign allies ahead of their various elections, but the American president’s support for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán was qualitatively different from anything he’s done before. This was an instance in which the Republican saw a kindred spirit in need of a rescue, which Trump appeared desperate to provide.
To that end, Trump not only deployed his vice president to Hungary to campaign for Orbán, he also publicly pledged, just two days before Election Day, to “use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it.”
The message was not subtle. It also didn’t work. The Associated Press reported:
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán conceded defeat on Sunday after what he called a ‘painful’ election result, ending 16 years in power for a powerful figure in the far-right movement allied with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Partial official results show opposition leader Peter Magyar’s party dominating the vote, in a bombshell election result with repercussions around Europe and beyond.
Orbán, who has long positioned himself as Europe’s most regressive and undemocratic leader, was trailing badly in public opinion polls in the run-up to balloting, but given the degree to which he and his party had manipulated the country’s electoral system, there were still some doubts as to whether the results would reflect the people’s will.
The vote tallies were so lopsided, however, that the center-right opposition party, Tisza, dominated anyway.
The obvious beneficiaries of the election will, of course, be the citizens of Hungary, who should expect to see their country move away from far-right authoritarianism, distance itself from Russia and embrace long-overdue economic reforms, all while strengthening the country’s ties to the European Union.
What’s more, as political scientist Jacob Levy explained, “It’s not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It’s that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he’s been operating as a headquarters and funding source for the international ideological movement.”
It’s a key detail. Under Orbán, Hungary had become an incubator for transforming democratic systems into authoritarian models. His sweeping defeat is a brutal setback for the broader movement. This includes his many admirers in the Republican Party and throughout much of the American right — including Trump, who enthusiastically embraced Orbán and welcomed him repeatedly to the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg noted in a column, published the day before the election, “Orbán has long held out the system he created in Hungary, which he calls ‘illiberal democracy,’ as a workable Christian nationalist alternative to Western liberalism, and its example has proved enormously influential. In 2022, Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, said, ‘Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model.’ More than any other politician, Orbán showed conservatives worldwide how to use government power to wage the culture wars. He crushed a prominent liberal university, banned ‘homosexual propaganda’ in schools — a forerunner of Florida’s infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law — and engineered the takeover of major media outlets by his allies. Steve Bannon once described Orbán as ‘Trump before Trump.’”
By Trump’s own admission, when he publicly touted “a strongman” system and endorsed the idea that democratic traditions needed to be overhauled, he made no effort to hide his belief that Orbán offered a model worthy of emulation.
It was a model, however, that ultimately failed, rejected by its victims.
No wonder the president didn’t want to talk about it on Sunday night.”
As written by Ashifa Kassam and Flora Garamvolgyi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Hungarian opposition ousts Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power
Péter Magyar’s Tisza party wins election as prime minister concedes defeat, in result likely to reshape ties with EU; “Hungary’s opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has won the election, bringing an end to Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power, in a result that is likely to rattle the White House and reshape the country’s relationship with the EU.
Less than three hours after polls closed on Sunday, Orbán conceded defeat after what he described as a “painful but unambiguous” election result.
“I congratulated the victorious party,” the rightwing populist told supporters in Budapest. “We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition as well.”
With 98.74% of the vote counted, Magyar’s Tisza party was projected to have won 138 of the 199 seats in the country’s parliament, giving them a super-majority capable of amending the constitution and key laws, suggesting they would be able to reverse some of the changes made by Orbán and Fidesz, and potentially unlock EU funds.
Fidesz won 55 seats, while the extreme-right Mi Hazánk party won six.
Magyar, who pledged to repair Hungary’s strained relationship with the EU, crack down on corruption and funnel funds towards long-neglected public services, said Tisza voters had rewritten Hungarian history.
“My fellow Hungarians, we have done it!,” he told the tens of thousands of jubilant supporters who had gathered along the banks of the Danube river to celebrate.
“Tonight, truth prevailed over lies,” said Magyar, 45. “Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them – they asked what they could do for their homeland. You found the answer. And you followed through.”
The election was being closely watched around the world as a test of the resilience of the Maga movement and the global far right, many of whom have long looked to Orbán as an inspiration and sought to follow his playbook.
Days before the election, JD Vance had travelled to Budapest, with the US vice-president saying that he had come to “help” Orbán. Donald Trump had also repeatedly endorsed Orbán, most recently on Friday when he vowed to bring US “economic might” to the country if Orbán was re-elected.
US Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, the US House of Representatives minority leader, said the results of the Hungarian election did not bode well for the Trump administration. “Far-right authoritarian Viktor Orbán has lost the election,” he wrote on social media. “Trump sycophants and Maga extremists in Congress are up next in November. Winter is coming.”
In recent months, Orbán, 62, had also been endorsed by rightwing and far-right leaders ranging from France’s Marine Le Pen to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Meloni was among those who congratulated Magyar on Sunday night, promising her country’s continued cooperation and wishing him success. She added: “I thank my friend Viktor Orbán for the intense collaboration over the years, and I know that he will continue to serve his nation, also from the opposition.”
Leaders from across Europe hailed the result, with Keir Starmer describing it as a “historic moment, not only for Hungary, but for European democracy” on social media.
In recent weeks, the antagonistic relationship between Orbán’s government and the EU had plunged to new lows, after Orbán vetoed further EU sanctions on Russia, as well as an additional €90bn (£78bn) loan for Ukraine. Tensions between Budapest and Brussels had since boiled over, following allegations that Orbán’s government had shared confidential EU information with Moscow.
News of the change in government prompted an outpouring of response from across the EU. “Europe’s heart is beating stronger in Hungary tonight,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. “A country reclaims its European path. The Union grows stronger.”
Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, welcomed Magyar with a jibe at Orbán. “Back together! Glorious victory, dear friends!” he posted on social media, adding in Hungarian: “Russians, go home!”
Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, said he had spoken with Magyar to congratulate him, while the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he was “looking forward” to working with Magyar.
From Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the country was ready to advance our cooperation with Hungary, even as Magyar has said he would continue Orbán’s opposition to sending arms to the country and fast-tracking EU entry for Kyiv. “We are ready for meetings and joint constructive work for the benefit of both nations, as well as peace, security, and stability in Europe.”
One poll suggested that as many as 65% of voters under the age of 30 were planning to cast their vote against Orbán. Photograph: Dénes Erdős/AP
As Magyar crisscrossed Hungary during the campaign, holding as many as six rallies a day, Orbán had consistently trailed in the polls, suggesting the election was poised to end his efforts to transform Hungary into a “petri dish for illiberalism”.
His rightwing populist government used its time in office to steadily whittle away at the checks and balances that constrained its power: rewriting election laws to its own benefit, manoeuvring to put loyalists in control of an estimated 80% of the country’s media, and retooling the country’s judiciary.
Ahead of the election, as the government stepped up its efforts to clamp down on dissent, local resistance swelled, bursting into public view as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Budapest in June in defiance of the government’s efforts to ban Pride.
Sunday’s election saw a record turnout of nearly 80%, according to the National Election Office. The result was likely due, in part, to the massive number of youths who mobilised against Orbán. One poll suggested that as many as 65% of voters under the age of 30 – many of whom had come of age as the country plunged in press freedom rankings, was accused of being an “electoral autocracy”, and became the most corrupt country in the EU – were planning to cast their vote against Orbán.
On Sunday evening, many of them thronged the banks of the Danube, chanting “We did it!” while others chanted “It’s over!” as they made their way through the city’s metro stations.
“The dictatorship, rightwing ideology and all of that will disappear now, and we have a chance for a better country,” said Nóri, 24, as tears welled in her eyes. “I’m feeling hopeful and happy.”
The view was echoed by Anna, 24. “I really hope these next four years will be better than the past 16.”
The result was also welcomed by Ervin Nagy, one of Hungary’s most well-known film actors. “For the next four years Hungarians can expect safety, peace, freedom, and that no one will interfere in their lives,” said Nagy, who actively participated in Tisza’s campaign from early on.
Analysts were swift to warn that change would probably come slowly. During Fidesz’s 16 years in power, the party stacked the Hungarian state, media and judiciary with loyalists; how they would respond to a change in government was now up in the air.
“The path ahead for Hungary is a complicated one – Fidesz’s control of the business sector, media, public administration, and the judiciary reaches far and deep,” said Dalibor Rohac, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
“The message of this election, however, is a clear one: Orbán’s (and Trump’s) ideological project has had a test run of 16 years, and it has been a spectacular political, economic and social failure,” he said. “The defeat of ‘Orbánism’ is an opportunity to repudiate its iterations existing in other western democracies and to charter a more constructive, less polarised trajectory for pluralistic societies.”
Others pointed to all that Magyar and Tisza had been up against. In the lead up to the election, billboards generated with AI and paid for by the government became a mainstay across the country, depicting Magyar as a danger to the country and a stooge of the EU and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Tisza could win against all odds: help from the United States and from Russia, a massive state disinformation machinery, and all state institutions helping Fidesz,” said Péter Krekó, the director of the Budapest-based Political Capital thinktank.
While the super-majority would help the party, the expectations would be “huge and it will be difficult to deliver on some campaign promises due to fiscal constraints. But given that it was dominantly an anti-Fidesz vote, the new government can manage expectations.”
Botond Feledy, a Brussels-based Hungarian geopolitical analyst, said the result was likely to reset the relationship between Hungary and the EU.
“We can count on a Hungarian government that is constructive yet critical, but fundamentally pro-EU and acting as a full-fledged member of the European Union. And this also applies to Nato relations,” he said.
He described the result as a lesson to other populist leaders in the EU. “Patriots for Europe certainly need to study a lesson that adds to the list of challenges in the populist playbook,” he said. “It’s not so easy to make promises to people when the system delivers nothing, and it’s impossible to build a virtual reality that is so far removed from reality.”
As written by Ashifa Kassam and Flora Garamvolgyi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Zebras, wealth and power: Hungary’s election tests Orbán’s grip on power; “The drone footage showed a sprawling residence in northern Hungary, complete with manicured gardens, a swimming pool and an underground garage. But it was what came next that captured much of the country’s imagination: zebras darting across the countryside.
The property caught on camera belongs to the father of the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, offering a glimpse of the staggering wealth amassed by his inner circle, even as most in Hungary have become poorer. References to the zebras – which came from a neighbouring property belonging to Orbán’s best friend and Hungary’s richest man, Lőrinc Mészáros – soon began turning up across the country; plush toys were sold at protests, people posted videos of their own treks to spot the animals, and photos of zebras were plastered over government billboards.
“They became a symbol of the limitless corruption of the whole system,” said Ákos Hadházy, a Hungarian independent MP who last autumn organised a series of “safari tours” to the area in protest.
Those protests were just one part of a swelling opposition movement that has left Orbán facing the prospect of being ousted after 16 years in power.
The scope of this movement is set to be laid bare on Sunday, as Hungarians cast their votes in an election widely seen as the most consequential since the country’s transition to democracy in 1990.
Most polls suggest Orbán and his Fidesz party – who have transformed Hungary into a “petri dish for illiberalism” – could lose power, in a result that could rattle global far-right movements and reshape Hungary’s antagonistic relationship with the EU. But opposition supporters fear the polls are underestimating support for Fidesz, or that Orbán will find a way to retain power even if he loses the election.
“Hungary stands at a historic crossroads once again,” said Anita Orbán of the opposition Tisza party, the political force that has shaken up the race and now leads in most polls. “This moment carries powerful echoes of the past.”
The election comes 23 years to the day after Hungarians voted overwhelmingly to join the European Union. “Now, on 12 April, once again, voters are not simply choosing between parties, but deciding the direction, identity, and future of Hungary,” Anita Orbán, no relation to the prime minister, said on social media. “In many ways, this election is a referendum on whether Hungary returns to European values.”
It was a hint of how much has changed in Hungary since Orbán took power in 2010. What followed was, in the words of Zoltán Kész, a former member of the Fidesz party, nothing less than a “coup in slow motion,” albeit one that eschewed tanks for lawyers and clientelism.
The rightwing populist government had used its time in office to steadily whittle away at the checks and balances that constrained its power: rewriting election laws to its own benefit, manoeuvring to put loyalists in control of an estimated 80% of the country’s media, and retooling the country’s judiciary.
“We’ve come to the point in Hungary when we obviously can no longer talk about a real democracy,” said Kész. “It’s really a state capture that has been going on in Hungary with all the institutions that are supposedly independent. Whether it’s the courts or public services, they’ve been captured by one party, basically.”
On the streets and across dining room tables, Hungarians readily shared how this has played out in practice, from the university professor who has lost his job after speaking out against the government, to the music venues shut down after hosting artists who backed the opposition, and journalists whose newsrooms became government mouthpieces overnight after changes in ownership.
When Hungary’s economy was growing, many paid little attention to what was happening, said Kész. But as inflation soared after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and economic stagnation set in, rumblings began over the growing disconnect between ordinary Hungarians and its ruling class.
It was against this backdrop that Péter Magyar, a former member of Fidesz’s inner circle, began speaking out. As he accused Orbán’s party of branding itself as a defender of Hungarians while siphoning off state funds, corruption rocketed to the top of voters’ concerns and Magyar’s hastily formed party climbed to the top of the polls.
Magyar’s lead has held as the government attempted to ban Pride events and mulled hardening its longstanding clampdown on independent media and NGOs.
What Magyar is up against is visible across Hungary: the omnipresent billboards, generated with AI and paid for by the government, depicting him as a danger to the country and a stooge of both the EU and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The result is a campaign that has pitted fear against hope, as one Hungarian news outlet noted this week. Orbán – whose government did not respond to a request for an interview – has sought to convince voters that Hungary’s biggest risk lies in the war in Ukraine, casting himself as the only leader capable of keeping peace. Magyar, in contrast, has focused on domestic issues, promising to crack down on corruption, funnel funds towards long-neglected public services and repair the country’s strained relationship with the EU.
A two-minute video released in January made clear the outsized role that the election in a country of less than 10m people, which produces 1.1% of the EU’s GDP, would play on the world stage.
Nearly a dozen rightwing leaders, from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini to France’s Marine Le Pen, endorsed Orbán, praising the path he had blazed in Hungary. “Europe needs Viktor Orbán,” Germany’s Alice Weidel, a co-leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), tells viewers in the video.
The extent of Orbán’s reach was laid bare this week as JD Vance landed in Budapest with his wife, Usha. As he campaigned with Orbán, the US vice-president parroted much of Fidesz’s campaign strategy, railing against the EU and taking shots at Ukraine. On Friday, Donald Trump posted : “I AM WITH HIM ALL THE WAY!”.
“I think the symbol of Orbán losing should not be underestimated,” said Daniel Freund, a German Green MEP who has long sounded the alarm on democratic backsliding in Hungary. “He is the absolute poster boy of this whole movement of the illiberal, anti-European, extreme right. He is the icon and the example that others follow.”
Vance’s visit was the culmination of years of precise targeting by Orbán, said Dalibor Roháč, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. After Orbán’s allies cast him as a model for Trump and others, the Hungarian government is alleged to have spent millions of euros on US lobbyists, tasking them with peddling this narrative in Washington.
Their efforts soon paid off, with people such as Kevin Roberts, the head of the US Heritage Foundation thinktank that produced Project 2025, describing Hungary as the model for conservative statecraft, “Orbán kept investing in these relationships and bringing people over,” said Roháč.
Budapest has swiftly become a hub of thinktanks and conferences aimed at amplifying the idea of Hungary, in the words of one local journalist, as a “Christian conservative Disneyland” where the global far right feels at home.
The global veneration has continued even as the country plunged in press freedom rankings, faced accusations of no longer being a full democracy, and became the most corrupt country in the EU.
As Orbán’s government cozied up to Vladimir Putin, growing more dependent on its crude oil, Budapest acted as a node between Washington and Moscow and offered Maga a jumping-off point to export Christian nationalist and far-right ideology to the rest of Europe.
Vance’s visit was a demonstration of this. While it made headlines around the world, there’s been no indication that it boosted Orbán’s position.
Instead, momentum seemed to be growing for Magyar. On Thursday evening, his supporters packed the central streets of Györ in north-west Hungary. Images of Hungarian flags prompted comparisons to a March rally in the same town, at which Orbán lashed out at demonstrators who booed him, accusing them of being pro-Ukrainian.
The confidence belies a note of uncertainty that has run through the campaign, as it is anyone’s guess as to whether the opposition surge would be enough to dislodge Fidesz. While the polls suggest a Tisza win, undecided voters and Hungarians abroad could still sway the result, as could the already-swirling claims of vote-buying and gerrymandering.
In the small city of Kecskemét, about 50 miles south of Budapest, many said the campaign had done little to endear them to Magyar. “There’s a level of palpable anxiety among people,” said Katalin, 81, citing fears that Hungary would be drawn into the war in Ukraine. “I don’t think that the Ukrainian people want a war, but their leader might.”
It was a thought that made Zsuzci, 83, shake with fear. “At this point, we can only pray,” she said. “I’m praying to preserve a Christian Hungary. We’ll get dragged into the war in Ukraine if Péter Magyar wins and he’ll also let in the migrants – he does exactly what the European Union tells him to do.”
Regardless of the outcome, it’s clear that Sunday’s vote marks the beginning of a wider reckoning with Hungary’s foray into illiberalism, said Kész. “Under normal circumstances, you lose an election, so what? You go in opposition, you come back in four years. That is a normal democracy, but this is not normal.”
During Fidesz’s 16 years in power, the party stacked the state, media and judiciary with loyalists, suggesting that Orbán’s system could survive him even if he loses.
“Even under the ideal circumstances, change will not happen overnight,” he said. “If you look at the state of the education system, if you look at the state of healthcare, courts, public services, and you name it – these need to be built up again from scratch. There’s a lot of work to be done by a new government.”
As written by Imre Szijarto in Jacobin, in an article entitled Hungary’s Narrow Path Out of Orbánism: Elections on Sunday could finally remove Viktor Orbán from power. Opposition forces have rallied behind rival candidate Péter Magyar, less out of belief in his program than from desperation at the country’s authoritarian turn; “ver since Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party came to power with a sweeping supermajority in 2010, Hungary’s democratic institutions have faced constant pressure. Orbán called his victory a “revolution in the ballot box” and proceeded to systematically dismantle most institutional checks on his personal power. He adopted a new constitution, brought the Constitutional Court under party control, changed the electoral system, and redrew electoral districts to give his party a significant advantage.
There was more. Orbán used his political power to enrich friends and family members, consolidated most of the media market in the hands of loyalists, turned the public broadcaster into a propaganda outlet, and weaponized the state to bully NGOs, academics, labor unions, and the remnants of the independent press into silence.
While elections remained technically free, they were anything but fair. The systematic distortion of the playing field in favor of Fidesz produced three subsequent supermajorities in the 2014, 2018, and 2022 parliamentary elections.
The outlook for this Sunday’s vote, however, looks very different.
In previous “free but not fair” elections, the only realistic question was whether the incumbent ruling party would maintain its two-thirds supermajority. Today all independent polling institutes report a comfortable lead for the opposition, in percentage terms at least. A recent poll by independent pollster Medián showed a 20 percent lead for the center-right Tisza (Respect and Freedom) Party, though government-aligned counterparts continue to report that Orbán’s party remains ahead.
The main opposition runner, the center-right Péter Magyar, also appears to be the bookmakers’ favorite. It is likely no coincidence that Hungarian authorities banned Polymarket for “facilitating illegal gambling” just as the campaign began. Another clue to the genuine unpredictability of this election is that publicly traded shares of Orbán-affiliated companies consistently trended downward in the last weeks of the campaign.
While the outcome remains highly uncertain, that uncertainty itself makes this contest unprecedented in recent Hungarian history.
To make matters worse for Orbán, a sequence of scandals shook Hungary ahead of the vote. In December, leaked video footage revealed severe cases of child abuse in state-run children’s homes. In February, the public learned how the government enabled Samsung to expose workers to toxic chemicals in a battery plant. Some workers were allegedly asked to take rotating shifts within the most contaminated zones, a practice reminiscent of repair works in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. In March, a detective from the National Bureau of Investigation revealed a plot by the country’s secret service to infiltrate and cripple Magyar’s Tisza Party using intimidation, blackmail, and bribes.
Despite his scandals and their own favorable polling, opponents of Orbán still face a challenging period ahead. Due to systematic gerrymandering, Fidesz could secure a parliamentary majority, even if most voters cast their ballots for the opposition. The incumbents can also rely on a neo-feudal network of local elites used to bribe or coerce some rural low-income communities to vote for Fidesz. While the outcome remains highly uncertain, that uncertainty itself makes this contest unprecedented in recent Hungarian history.
(Counter)-Populism
The meteoric rise of Magyar and his Tisza Party has transformed the Hungarian political landscape. In 2024, the public learned that President Katalin Novák had pardoned a man serving a prison sentence for covering up child sexual abuse. Magyar rose to prominence after releasing a taped recording of his wife, the justice minister, implicating other leading politicians in the scandal.
A few months later, the brand-new party of this previously little-known Fidesz member secured nearly 30 percent of the vote in the 2024 European elections and contributed to the near-total collapse of the fractured left-liberal opposition. Magyar positioned himself on the center right, adopted a more pro-EU and pro-NATO stance in foreign policy, and joined the European People’s Party, made up of parties like the German Christian Democrats, in the European Parliament.
Magyar’s Tisza Party is promising something to every electoral bloc, including tax cuts for low-income taxpayers, an increase in pensions, keeping Orbán’s popular tax incentives for families while supplementing them with higher cash transfers, and also maintaining fiscal discipline and avoiding large deficits. These policies would leave working-class Hungarians better off than the status quo, but since increasing the income tax of high earners is not on the agenda, they’d also leave Orbán’s famously regressive tax system largely unaltered.
Péter Magyar positioned himself on the center right and adopted a more pro-EU and pro-NATO stance in foreign policy.
Tisza’s election manifesto promises both tax cuts, increased transfers, and improved public services, while suggesting that anti-corruption measures, a wealth tax on the richest 0.2 percent of households, the confiscation of oligarchs’ illicit wealth, and access to EU funds currently frozen over rule-of-law violations will make these policies fiscally sustainable. Magyar claims to transcend traditional cleavages by populist slogans such as: “There is no left or right — only Hungarian.” If Hungarian Marxist G. M. Tamás were still with us, he would likely repeat his favorite quote from Alain: “Those who cannot decide if they are left-wing or right-wing are right-wing.”
Magyar’s rise coincided with — and contributed to — the fatal decline of various left-liberal formations. Many smaller parties, such as the Hungarian Socialist Party, the neoliberal Momentum Movement, the formerly far-right Jobbik, the Green Party, as well as Budapest mayor Gergely Karacsony’s Dialogue — the Greens’ Party, announced that they will not run in this year’s election to increase Tisza’s chances of ending Orbán’s long tenure. While most leftists and liberals have some reservations about Tisza, most mainstream liberal opinion formers tend to recognize that this is not a normal democratic election and that Magyar might be their only chance of halting further autocratization.
Magyar’s promise of restoring basic democratic standards appears to be enough to rally desperate liberals behind him, while his nationalist rhetoric allows him to gain support among socially conservative voters in Fidesz’s rural heartland. The two small parties left of Magyar that are still running are the Democratic Coalition established by former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, whose unpopular austerity policies directly contributed to Orbán’s first supermajority, and the satirical Two-Tailed Dog Party.
Both are currently polling under the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament. If polls are to be trusted, the only party other than Fidesz and Tisza to surmount this hurdle is the Our Homeland Movement, on the lunatic fringe of the Right, bringing together an eclectic mix of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and unapologetic fascists.
In many respects, the secret of Magyar’s success lies in making Orbán “taste his own medicine” by championing a new style of populism suited to the TikTok age. A charismatic orator, he frequently evokes the heroic struggles of Hungary’s 1848 and 1956 revolutions, while pitting “ordinary Hungarians” against Orbán’s kleptocratic elite.
Magyar presents himself as a more credible nationalist than Orbán. On immigration, his party promises to maintain restrictive policies.
Initially, Magyar posted short videos of himself in everyday settings — in the kitchen, at the gym, or at the barber shop. As the election campaign approached, however, his content shifted toward a more statesmanlike image.
While Orbán cozies up to other illiberal leaders in the region, such as Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Magyar portrays this as a betrayal of Hungarian-speaking minorities in neighboring countries, presenting himself as a more credible nationalist than Orbán. On immigration, Tisza promises to maintain restrictive policies — including the razor wire fence along Hungary’s southern border — but criticizes the government for allowing multinational companies to hire non-EU guest workers on temporary visas.
Civil Society and Mass Mobilization
Hungary’s current chance to democratize does not stem exclusively from the shifts in party politics. It is also contingent on civil society’s ability to mobilize, both to prevent electoral manipulation, if needed, and to ensure that Magyar honors his word once in office. Mass mobilizations already played a significant role in creating a situation in which overturning Orbán is within reach. In March 2025, already trailing in the polls, Orbán announced a sweeping crackdown on the remnants of Hungary’s independent media and civil society. He also warned organizers of the Budapest Pride Parade that any money or effort spent on next year’s event would be wasted.
The effect of these announcements, however, was the opposite of what the government intended. Rather than terrifying civil society actors into submission, the specter of a drift toward open autocracy akin to a country like Belarus reenergized them. The mobilization that followed forced the government to reconsider its promised “spring cleanup.”
To make matters even more embarrassing for the government, the Budapest Pride Parade not only proceeded despite the official ban and threats but became one of the largest public gatherings in recent Hungarian history.
While the Pride ban was likely intended to pressure Magyar into taking a stance on a divisive issue, he stayed out of the controversy, allowing the Green party mayor, Karácsony, to take the lead in making Orbán’s Pride ban unenforceable.
The significance of this massive turnout extends far beyond a show of solidarity with Hungary’s LGBTQ community. Authoritarian leaders have powerful incentives to cling to office by any means available — especially in a kleptocracy like Hungary, where losing control of the justice system could expose corrupt elites to criminal prosecution. In this context, the parade also signaled that any attempt to subvert the election would be a risky gamble, which might not be worth taking, particularly for those with substantial funds in foreign bank accounts.
The Treacherous Path Ahead
Despite the favorable constellation of an opposition in the lead and a mobilized civil society, Hungary’s path toward democratization remains narrow and treacherous. Orban’s camp may opt for dirty tricks out of desperation.
Magyar recently warned the public that Russian-style kompromat may be used against him. He suspects that someone secretly filmed him in an intimate situation. In the current geopolitical climate, fear tactics about war escalation could also frighten voters into supporting the incumbent. Fidesz recently released an AI-generated video depicting the public execution of prisoners of war, implying that Hungary might join the war in Ukraine if voters bring a new government to power.
On Easter Sunday, a week before the vote, Serbian authorities allegedly uncovered a plot to blow up a gas pipeline critical for Hungary’s energy supply. Both Magyar and a former counterintelligence officer suggested that the conveniently timed security threat could be a false-flag operation designed to give Orbán a last-minute boost.
Although largely isolated within the EU, Orbán still has powerful allies abroad, from Moscow to Washington, DC. This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Hungary looked like the “who’s who” of the far-right internationale, with attendees including Javier Milei, Alice Weidel, Eduardo Bolsonaro, and Geert Wilders. Donald Trump assured Orbán of his “total and complete endorsement”; Benjamin Netanyahu thanked him for “standing up for Western civilization, against this tide of radical, fanatical Muslims.” J. D. Vance even visited Hungary just five days before the election to endorse Orbán while also warning of possible interference by “Brussels” — a narrative that could be used to undermine the legitimacy of the results in case Fidesz loses.
Perhaps more worryingly, reports by the Financial Times and the Washington Post suggest that Russian covert operations are currently underway in Hungary to help Vladimir Putin’s most important EU ally stay in power, including by allegedly proposing a plot to stage a fake assassination attempt.
Even in the event of a change in government, democratization remains far from guaranteed. Reversing most of the antidemocratic changes Orbán introduced would likely require a parliamentary supermajority. A new government would also have to govern alongside thousands of Fidesz loyalists deeply embedded in institutions at all levels of the administrative state.
Some polls suggest that a Tisza supermajority is not beyond the realm of possibility. Such a result would allow the new government to enact the institutional reforms needed to restore the rule of law, such as restoring the independence of higher courts, removing the political appointees from the justice system who currently guarantee impunity for corrupt actors, and joining the European prosecutor’s office. Yet it could also tempt Magyar to take control of the very machinery of power Orbán constructed and establish himself as Hungary’s next authoritarian strongman.
In this uncertain climate, civil society organizations that halted Hungary’s slide into “Belarusization” in 2026 must remain vigilant. They will have to prevent potential attempts at electoral manipulation but also pressure a Magyar government to implement the reforms voters mandated.
A Moment of Risk and Opportunity
The weeks ahead carry both significant risks and historic opportunities for Hungarian democrats. While in the worst-case scenario, the regime could cling to power through illegal means, signaling a drift toward open dictatorship, the recovery of Hungary’s diminished democracy is also within reach.
Orbán’s possible departure won’t be a victory for the Left. It would, nonetheless, be a serious blow to the global far right and could offer much-needed hope to citizens in embattled democracies worldwide.”
Should Orban lose his throne, this will be a beginning of the Restoration of Hungary as a democracy and free society of equals, and the path to such a goal will be long and perilous. But a victory today, even a symbolic one, may tilt the balance in favour of liberty and not tyranny.
As written by Gabriela Greilinger and Cas Mudde in The Guardian, in an article entitled Even if Victor Orbán is ousted on Sunday, Hungary’s return to liberal democracy is not guaranteed: Challenger Péter Magyar is no progressive – and after 16 years of creeping authoritarianism, the PM has embedded Fidesz in the Hungarian state; “On Sunday, Hungarians will go to the polls to decide on their country’s direction for the next four years in an election that looks as if it will be a nail-biter. Viktor Orbán, Europe’s longest-serving prime minister – who has been in power for 16 years and transformed his country into an electoral autocracy – could lose the election. Ahead of the vote, EU officials have high expectations for change in Hungary under a potential new leadership. Politico reported that “the Brussels establishment is praying for [Péter] Magyar to win, hoping a Tisza government will deepen ties with the EU”.
Magyar became a trailblazer when he entered the Hungarian political scene in 2024 after a political scandal implicating the former president Katalin Novák and the minister of justice, Magyar’s ex-wife, Judit Varga. By addressing the socioeconomic concerns of ordinary Hungarians, politicising the run-down healthcare and education systems and highlighting the country’s deteriorating economic situation and corrupt government practices, Magyar has steadily risen in the polls.
And yet while an electoral victory for his Tisza party seems within reach, less than a week before the election observers should not set their expectations too high for the election outcome – or for Magyar’s prospects were he to become Hungary’s new prime minister.
First, although all independent pollsters show Magyar and his Tisza party clearly ahead of Fidesz, the prospect of him actually winning the election remains uncertain. While the elections are free, they are unfair, as Orbán has tilted the electoral playing field in his favour over the years, creating an unfair advantage. Measures include repeated gerrymandering, adding “winner compensation” to benefit the strongest party in the districts and granting Hungarian minorities abroad, who are overwhelmingly Fidesz supporters, the right to vote. In addition, investigations have uncovered systematic electoral fraud, including chain voting, voter buying and intimidation, particularly in Hungary’s poorest regions.
Under these circumstances, it remains unclear whether Tisza’s votes will translate into a parliamentary majority, let alone a constitutional majority. Crucially, without a two-thirds majority in parliament it will be near impossible to dismantle the Orbán regime. Over the past 16 years, Fidesz has entrenched its ideas and personnel into Hungary’s political system through cardinal laws that require a supermajority to change or abolish them.
Bringing Hungary back into the fold of electoral democracies would require replacing the Fidesz loyalists who are constitutional court judges and heads of key public institutions, such as the prosecutor general and the chair of the media authority. Making matters worse, Hungary’s president, Tamás Sulyok, elected by parliament, is another Fidesz loyalist who would ordinarily remain in office until 2029. While the president’s role is largely ceremonial, Fidesz has recently passed a bill reinforcing it, possibly in anticipation of being ousted from power in the elections. The president could thus present another obstacle to a Tisza government by sending legislation back or referring it to the Fidesz-packed constitutional court for review.
Given these circumstances, a situation could arise similar to that in Poland when the Law and Justice party (PiS) lost the 2023 elections. After defeating the radical right party, prime minister Donald Tusk was accused of resorting to unlawful means to restore democracy, drawing criticism from legal scholars. In a concerning portent for Hungarian democrats, since the election of PiS candidate Karol Nawrocki as president last year, he has regularly obstructed Tusk’s government by vetoing essential legislation, including a recent judicial reform that was part of the government’s rule-of-law agenda.
A new Hungarian government would face similar obstacles, but an even steeper uphill battle. After 16 years in power, twice as long as PiS in Poland, Fidesz is much more entrenched in the state than PiS ever was, making a return to the status quo ante even more challenging.
Even if Tisza’s vote share translates into a majority in parliament and enables it to implement reforms, democrats should not expect too much from a Magyar government. The leader of the opposition comes from a conservative family and was a member of Fidesz for more than two decades – he spent years working for the Orbán regime and is clearly ideologically aligned with his former party.
In fact, some preliminary analyses of Tisza’s voting patterns in the European parliament suggest that the party mostly aligns with Fidesz, especially on immigration and Ukraine. While this could be tactical, given the sensitivity of these issues in Hungarian political discourse, Tisza’s party programme also vows to reject the EU’s migrant pact and quotas and to oppose Ukraine’s accelerated accession to the EU. So even though Tisza will undoubtedly be a more constructive force in its relations with European partners, some fundamental disagreements will remain.
Finally, although Tisza’s voter base mainly comprises liberal and leftwing voters, progressives should not get their hopes up for a swift transition to liberal democracy in Hungary. According to recent polling, the new parliament will be made up solely of rightwing parties: the rightwing Tisza, the far-right Fidesz and potentially the extreme-right Our Homeland Movement. Magyar, while generally claiming to support equality, has so far avoided taking a clear supportive stance on some core ideological issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights. While this could also be part of a strategic approach to avoid offering Fidesz any vulnerabilities it could exploit for its propaganda, it is also in line with his political history and the rightwing nature of his party’s programme.
Considering the challenges Magyar will encounter if he is elected, not to mention his own rightwing ideology, it seems unlikely that he would prioritise restoring liberal democracy to Hungary beyond trying to undo 16 years of Orbánism. Progressives and democrats need to manage their expectations ahead of Sunday’s vote. As it stands, the best case scenario for Hungary is a return to electoral democracy under a Magyar government. Liberal democracy, however, will probably remain out of reach for now.”
Orban and Trump are linked together as Nazi revivalists committed to the subversion of democracy and the abandonment of the ideas of our universal human rights and of the equality of all human beings. America’s Republican Party has weaponized fear of otherness in service to power much as has Hungary’s Fidesz.
Why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2020, Democracy Falls in Hungary; As the pandemic disrupts and destabilizes the global order, eager would-be tyrants seize the chance to amass and consolidate power against the forces of democracy pulling structures and systems in the other direction.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is among the most venal and odious of democracy’s foes, having already established Hungary as a fascist state which lionizes Nazis and provides a secure base of operations and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe by the Fourth Reich.
Yesterday he seized totalitarian powers as well, making Hungary the first nation to surrender liberty to the fear with which the pandemic has gripped the world.
As described in The Washington Post; “A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.”
In the words of Dalibor Rohac; “COVID-19 is about to claim a new victim: Hungary’s democracy.
The country’s parliament is set to adopt a new law that will give the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban a legal mandate to rule by decree, without any sunset clause and without parliamentary oversight. The government initially sought to fast-track the legislation and adopt it already on March 24, but it lacked the supermajority needed to accelerate the proceedings. The party, however, does not lack the votes to ensure that the legislation is passed through the normal legislative process a few days later.
The brazenness of Orban’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history.
Like Hungary, other European countries have declared a state of emergency and are resorting to draconian measures. They include shutting down air travel, closing borders, restricting personal freedom and even nationalizing sectors of the economy. While all European governments need flexibility in order to respond to the lethal pandemic in real time, any new powers they acquire are subject to parliamentary review and are planned to remain in effect only for limited periods.
Similarly, the Hungarian constitution allows the government to maintain a state of emergency (in place since March 11) only for an initial period of 15 days, after which it must seek parliamentary approval.
Yet instead of asking parliament for an extension for a fixed period, to be followed by another round of parliamentary deliberation if necessary, the new Hungarian legislation would ensure that the state of emergency remains in force as long as the government deems necessary, while normal parliamentary oversight is suspended. Throughout that time, the government would be free to legislate by decree. No snap elections or referendums could be held, and even the rules of procedure of the country’s Constitutional Court could be altered by its president.
The proposed legislation also creates two new crimes. Interfering with the quarantine would lead to a prison sentence of up to five years (eight if anyone dies as a result). More strikingly, to “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” would be punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Section 10 of the law). A government-run news outlet has already called for the prosecution of opposition politicians under the new statute — simply for pointing out the lack of readiness of the country’s public health system.
Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt. His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media. Hungary’s previous moves toward authoritarianism were disguised as a necessary reaction to outside threats: foreign corporate interests during the financial crisis, “cosmopolitan elites” during the refugee crisis of 2016, or, whenever the occasion demands, the philanthropist George Soros (a staple of Orban’s nativist playbook).
True to his past, Orban did not hesitate to connect the virus to migration: “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Indeed, the first patient with covid-19 in Hungary appears to be an Iranian student. The government responded by imposing a travel ban on Iran (among other countries) and expelling 15 Iranian students. Yet, the 2,500-strong Iranian student population in Hungary is not a result of uncontrolled immigration imposed from Brussels but of Orban’s conscious policy choices, especially the gradual warming of Hungarian-Iranian and Hungarian-Syrian relations, visible also in the lenient treatment of wealthy Syrians applying for residency in Hungary.
Hungary’s new Law on Protecting Against the Coronavirus demonstrates that Orban will never let a serious crisis go to waste in the quest to entrench himself as prime minister for life. As of now, there are few reasons to believe that his wager will fail, as the combination of nativism and fear of a deadly yet invisible threat makes for a potent political mix. Unless there is strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator for the reconquest of Europe.
And this is the nightmare which has come to Texas.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
As I wrote in my post of May 21 2022, The World the Fourth Reich Wants to Condemn Us To: Orban’s Hungary; This week’s gathering of global fascist leadership in Hungary holds up a mirror to the world the Fourth Reich and their front organization the American Republican Party wants to condemn us to.
This includes the use of faith and race in divide and conquer strategies of authoritarian state tyranny and terror and the institutionalization of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and Gideonite Christian fundamentalist identity politics, as well as the total control of all information and history by the state as propaganda.
Remember always the names of the fascists attending CPAC, among the most notorious Fourth Reich organizations of global tyranny and terror which in the arrogance of power does not conceal itself and its members, unlike myriads of other such cabals which conceal secret power and agendas of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which wait as ambush predators to pounce on us from the shadows. Remember, and bring a Reckoning.
First we must establish clearly that CPAC is a Nazi revivalist institution, beyond its public identification with White Replacement Conspiracy Theory whose origin is in Nazi antisemitic propaganda. As I wrote in my post of February 28 2021 Nazi Terror and Tyranny: SS Black Magic and Madness at the CPAC Anti-Democracy White Supremacist Rally; When I write of exposure as hunting Nazis, I don’t mean people I disagree with; I mean actual Nazis, members of a network of hate crime organizations committed to our destruction, and only those active threats of hate crime who by mission of action intend death, mass destruction, and harm to others they consider subhuman. This week’s Conservative Political Action Caucus was designed and attended by Nazis as well as ideological fascists, among them the descendants of war criminals our government collected to use against Communists and others they deemed subversive during the Red Scare of the 1950’s McCarthy Era.
They form a global network which I refer to as the Fourth Reich, a secret society whose membership is exclusive to families of the original Nazi loyalists and their allies and minions, thousands and possibly tens of thousands who have had seventy years in which to infiltrate the world’s governments and elites. I say this not as speculation or as a conspiracy theory, but as a simple fact, one which remains a threat to our liberty.
Someone knew enough about black magic as it was practiced by the SS to design the CPAC stage as a Nazi symbol, soul-stealing magic aimed at transferring the life force of the audience to the speaker for the purpose of submission to the leader’s will, exactly as it was used at the Nuremberg Rallies. It is a masterpiece of propaganda, a dog whistle hidden in plain sight which would have gone entirely unnoticed by outsiders but for the many vigilant Norse pagan antifascists who monitor social media.
Among them is my sister Erin, an antifascist and prominent Norse pagan and gythia or priestess, author of Asatru A Beginners Guide to the Heathen Path and manager of the Asatru facebook forum, literate in Old Norse and medieval forms of Gaelic and German among other languages, and practitioner of the traditional arts of galdur or poetic vision, seidr or sacred trance, and berserkergangr or martial arts, and like myself an admirer of Loki the Trickster.
Here is her post on Witches and Pagans entitled The Nazi Symbol That Is the CPAC Stage; “There are photos circulating on social media of the stage of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Caucus. One is included in this blog post. The stage is an odd and awkward looking design that could not have arisen purely from functionality, it looks like “the Odal Rune,” and it appears that the speakers at CPAC will be standing on a Nazi platform.
Let’s talk about Othala as distinct from “The Odal Rune.” The symbol you see in the photo is “The Odal Rune” which is 100% a Nazi symbol. The upturned feet on the ends of the legs appear only on the Nazi version, Odal, not on any version of Othala, the historical rune used in historical heathen alphabets.
A curious thing, though. Modern rune magic has adopted the “symbol upside down = opposite” thing that is common to Tarot cards, aka regular or reversed, and of course the dichotomy between the regular cross and the upside down cross. From the perspective of speakers backstage, the symbol is right side up in this photo, but from the perspective of the audience it’s upside down. Regular Othala in rune readings basically means real estate or psychic inheritance, but the “Odal Rune” is usually said to mean “heritage.” So, whose “heritage” is being protected and encouraged in this photo? Not the audience’s. If whoever designed this stage actually understands magic, the intent is to concentrate power in the hands of the speakers, away from the general public. Magically, it would take heritage energy from the audience and allow the people standing on the platform to vampirize that energy for their own use.
If the intent behind the choice of the shape was not magical, though, it’s probably meant to be a dog-whistle to neonazis. Experts on neonazis are mostly being more cautious about calling this out. American Iron Front tweeted the picture and called it “probably a coincidence.” I’m glad that the anti-fascist community is being careful not to stomp on heathens and pagans when they aren’t sure what symbol they’re looking at. But I’m an expert on heathen symbols and I know this isn’t one. There is no possible way an actual Asatruar drew the footed or winged version on a design program thinking it was a nice historical heathen rune. It’s unlikely the stage designer is heathen, anyway. That is not Othala, the heathen rune, it’s Odal, the Nazi symbol.
You can read about more symbols in my article Heathen Vs. Hate in the latest issue of Witches & Pagans Magazine.”
And why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2020, Democracy Falls in Hungary; As the pandemic disrupts and destabilizes the global order, eager would-be tyrants seize the chance to amass and consolidate power against the forces of democracy pulling structures and systems in the other direction.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is among the most venal and odious of democracy’s foes, having already established Hungary as a fascist state which lionizes Nazis and provides a secure base of operations and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe by the Fourth Reich.
Yesterday he seized totalitarian powers as well, making Hungary the first nation to surrender liberty to the fear with which the pandemic has gripped the world.
As described in The Washington Post; “A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.”
In the words of Dalibor Rohac; “COVID-19 is about to claim a new victim: Hungary’s democracy.
The country’s parliament is set to adopt a new law that will give the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban a legal mandate to rule by decree, without any sunset clause and without parliamentary oversight. The government initially sought to fast-track the legislation and adopt it already on March 24, but it lacked the supermajority needed to accelerate the proceedings. The party, however, does not lack the votes to ensure that the legislation is passed through the normal legislative process a few days later.
The brazenness of Orban’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history.
Like Hungary, other European countries have declared a state of emergency and are resorting to draconian measures. They include shutting down air travel, closing borders, restricting personal freedom and even nationalizing sectors of the economy. While all European governments need flexibility in order to respond to the lethal pandemic in real time, any new powers they acquire are subject to parliamentary review and are planned to remain in effect only for limited periods.
Similarly, the Hungarian constitution allows the government to maintain a state of emergency (in place since March 11) only for an initial period of 15 days, after which it must seek parliamentary approval.
Yet instead of asking parliament for an extension for a fixed period, to be followed by another round of parliamentary deliberation if necessary, the new Hungarian legislation would ensure that the state of emergency remains in force as long as the government deems necessary, while normal parliamentary oversight is suspended. Throughout that time, the government would be free to legislate by decree. No snap elections or referendums could be held, and even the rules of procedure of the country’s Constitutional Court could be altered by its president.
The proposed legislation also creates two new crimes. Interfering with the quarantine would lead to a prison sentence of up to five years (eight if anyone dies as a result). More strikingly, to “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” would be punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Section 10 of the law). A government-run news outlet has already called for the prosecution of opposition politicians under the new statute — simply for pointing out the lack of readiness of the country’s public health system.
Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt. His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media. Hungary’s previous moves toward authoritarianism were disguised as a necessary reaction to outside threats: foreign corporate interests during the financial crisis, “cosmopolitan elites” during the refugee crisis of 2016, or, whenever the occasion demands, the philanthropist George Soros (a staple of Orban’s nativist playbook).
True to his past, Orban did not hesitate to connect the virus to migration: “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Indeed, the first patient with covid-19 in Hungary appears to be an Iranian student. The government responded by imposing a travel ban on Iran (among other countries) and expelling 15 Iranian students. Yet, the 2,500-strong Iranian student population in Hungary is not a result of uncontrolled immigration imposed from Brussels but of Orban’s conscious policy choices, especially the gradual warming of Hungarian-Iranian and Hungarian-Syrian relations, visible also in the lenient treatment of wealthy Syrians applying for residency in Hungary.
Hungary’s new Law on Protecting Against the Coronavirus demonstrates that Orban will never let a serious crisis go to waste in the quest to entrench himself as prime minister for life. As of now, there are few reasons to believe that his wager will fail, as the combination of nativism and fear of a deadly yet invisible threat makes for a potent political mix. Unless there is strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”
As I wrote ion my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe and the world. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
Fascism requires others who define the limits of membership and belonging; to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence and a crime of hate.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Viktor Orbán Turns Texas Conference into Transatlantic Far-Right Love-In; “The authoritarian Hungarian leader was embraced as a kindred spirit by Trump fans at the CPAC event in Dallas.
“The globalists can all go to hell,” declared Viktor Orbán. “I have come to Texas!”
The crowd roared, whooped and gave a standing ovation as if at a campaign rally for former US president Donald Trump. It was evident they saw in Orbán a kindred spirit – a blunt weapon to wield against liberal foes.
The Hungarian prime minister was the opening speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, and perhaps the most vivid demonstration yet of the mutual and rapidly growing affinity between the far right in America and Europe.
Orbán, who has been prime minister for 12 years, boasted about his hardline stance on illegal immigration, law and order and “gender ideology” in schools. He touted a rise in marriages and fall in abortions. He was unapologetic in his defence of blood-and-soil nationalism and contempt for “leftist media”.
And extraordinarily for a foreign leader, he overtly sided with an opposition party – the Republicans – rather than the incumbent Democrats, paying homage to Trump at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey, while ignoring Joe Biden at the White House.
Calling for Christian nationalists to “unite forces”, Orbán told CPAC: “Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance. We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenge.”
He noted that US midterm elections will be later this year followed by the presidential contest and European parliamentary elections in 2024. “These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for western civilisation. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both.”
Rarely has the alliance between nationalist parties across the Atlantic been so bold, overt and unshackled. CPAC was once the domain of cold warrior Ronald Reagan. But in recent years guest speakers have included the Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen.
On Friday the lineup included Steve Bannon, who has worked with openly racist far-right leaders across Europe and once leased a medieval monastery outside Rome to run a “populism bootcamp”.
Bannon is former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he once described as “the platform of the ‘alt-right’”, a movement associated with efforts to preserve “white identity” and defend “western values”. He served as chief strategist in the Trump White House and is now facing prison after being convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the January 6 committee.
CPAC Texas also heard from the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who railed against the media and told the audience: “When I said that I’m a Christian nationalist, I have nothing to be ashamed of because that’s what most Americans are.” The event will close on Saturday with Trump who, like Orbán, has faced scrutiny over his relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the non-profit group Right Wing Watch, said: “Rightwing leaders, and especially the religious right leaders in the US, love Viktor Orbán for the same reasons they love Vladimir Putin. This overt embrace of Christian nationalism, willingness to use strongman tactics and the power of the government to enforce so-called traditional values about family and sexuality.”
Montgomery added: “We’ve actually seen some signs of that illiberalism and authoritarianism on the Trumpist right in their efforts to ban the teaching of racism in schools, in their aggressive attacks against LGBTQ materials and information in schools and libraries, and even their encouragement of harassment and violence that we’ve seen against election officials and school board members.
“All those signs are signs of a disturbing embrace of authoritarianism on the US right and Orbán is a model and a hero for that to them.”
Orbán has few bigger fans than Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host who interviewed him during a week-long broadcast from Hungary last year. Carlson has promoted “great replacement theory” – the baseless claim of a plot to turn white people into a minority through immigration – in 400 of his shows, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
Orbán’s visit to the US came amid backlash over anti-migrant remarks in which he warned that Europeans must not “become peoples of mixed race” and cited The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail that portrays a dystopia in which a flotilla of south Asian people invade France. The novel has also been promoted by Trump allies such as Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Orbán represents a quiet part out loud element of today’s Republican party. That quiet part out loud is the overt appeal to racial politics, the not-bothering-to-hide-it white supremacy element of the global alt-right and authoritarian movement. Donald Trump was the thing that let it loose in the US.
“Orbán has struck a set of blows against the media in Hungary, which is one of their main targets here. He has overtly embraced the sort of white replacement politics that are so popular with the Tucker Carlson set and a lot of the other folks that are members of the American Maga [Make America great again] movement.”
Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, added: “Those things have all added up to giving Orbán a kind of fanboy following in the US of people who were once conservative Republicans and who are now racially driven authoritarian wannabes. He’s the guy who’s pulling it off at a scale that Donald Trump didn’t achieve in the US.”
That appeal includes a stealth attack on democracy. Critics say that Hungary’s judiciary, media and other institutions are suffering death by a thousand cuts as Orbán slowly and surely consolidates power. His rightwing Fidesz party has drawn legislative districts in Hungary in a way that makes it very difficult for opposition parties to win seats – not dissimilar to partisan gerrymandering efforts for state legislative and congressional seats in America. The process currently favors Republicans because they control more of the state legislatures that create those boundaries.
And at CPAC, purveyors of Trump’s “big lie” – the false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – held prominent slots. Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow, pushed preposterous conspiracy theories about voting machines. Several speakers denounced the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection as a sham.
Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said of Orbán: “They see a blueprint for fascism. They see someone who embodies the Republican party’s values of obstructing free and fair elections, of undermining democratic institutions, of expanding government power and politicising the judicial branch, marginalising minority communities and corrupting the pillars of a free society.
“When you talk about an autocratic regime, that’s what Prime Minister Orbán is in Hungary and it’s exactly the blueprint that Republicans are hoping to follow here in the United States of America. It’s not surprising in the least that, especially in a place like CPAC Texas, these rightwing white nationalists are embracing someone like Orbán.”
Earlier this year, when CPAC held an event in Europe, it naturally chose Hungary. Orbán remains an outlier on the continent – for now. Le Pen lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, though she gained the far right’s biggest share of the vote yet. In Italy Giorgia Meloni, leader of a party with neofascist origins, is strongly positioned to become prime minister after snap elections this autumn.
Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, said: “There is this identifiable movement. The difference in many of the European countries is it is represented in minority parties.
“In the US now, I think it’s safe to say that this ethno-religious vision of the country has taken over one of our two major political parties. Even demographically speaking, nearly seven in 10 Republicans are white and Christian today in a country that’s only 44% white and Christian. You can see that identity taking hold as the animating beating heart of the party. It’s a really dangerous situation.”
Why should an American political organization which designates itself as “conservative” find a safe haven for Nazi revivalism, allyship, kinship, and an aspirational figure of the America and global humankind they want to shape as our common future in Viktor Orban’s Hungary?
Because here Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, officially and openly in holidays, parades, and monuments. This is unique among nations in all the world, though fascisms of blood, faith, and soil are now the world’s dominant ideology and tyranny has eclipsed democracy as the system by which we have chosen to be human together.
Hungary in the jaws of Viktor Orban models how fear can be weaponized in service to power and identity politics leveraged to manufacture consent and centralize authority. Of this I say; beware of those to claim to speak and act in your name, for they are trying to subjugate you to their will and uses.
And this we must resist. To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of March 31 2020, Democracy Falls in Hungary; As the pandemic disrupts and destabilizes the global order, eager would-be tyrants seize the chance to amass and consolidate power against the forces of democracy pulling structures and systems in the other direction.
Hungary’s Viktor Orban is among the most venal and odious of democracy’s foes, having already established Hungary as a fascist state which lionizes Nazis and provides a secure base of operations and launchpad for the reconquest of Europe by the Fourth Reich.
Yesterday he seized totalitarian powers as well, making Hungary the first nation to surrender liberty to the fear with which the pandemic has gripped the world.
As described in The Washington Post; “A decade under the nation’s illiberal nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has corroded the state’s checks and balances, cowed the judiciary, enfeebled civil society and the free press, and reconfigured electoral politics to the advantage of Orban’s ruling Fidesz party. So, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Budapest’s ailing democracy proved all too vulnerable.
On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.”
In the words of Dalibor Rohac; “COVID-19 is about to claim a new victim: Hungary’s democracy.
The country’s parliament is set to adopt a new law that will give the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban a legal mandate to rule by decree, without any sunset clause and without parliamentary oversight. The government initially sought to fast-track the legislation and adopt it already on March 24, but it lacked the supermajority needed to accelerate the proceedings. The party, however, does not lack the votes to ensure that the legislation is passed through the normal legislative process a few days later.
The brazenness of Orban’s power grab is without any parallel in recent European history.
Like Hungary, other European countries have declared a state of emergency and are resorting to draconian measures. They include shutting down air travel, closing borders, restricting personal freedom and even nationalizing sectors of the economy. While all European governments need flexibility in order to respond to the lethal pandemic in real time, any new powers they acquire are subject to parliamentary review and are planned to remain in effect only for limited periods.
Similarly, the Hungarian constitution allows the government to maintain a state of emergency (in place since March 11) only for an initial period of 15 days, after which it must seek parliamentary approval.
Yet instead of asking parliament for an extension for a fixed period, to be followed by another round of parliamentary deliberation if necessary, the new Hungarian legislation would ensure that the state of emergency remains in force as long as the government deems necessary, while normal parliamentary oversight is suspended. Throughout that time, the government would be free to legislate by decree. No snap elections or referendums could be held, and even the rules of procedure of the country’s Constitutional Court could be altered by its president.
The proposed legislation also creates two new crimes. Interfering with the quarantine would lead to a prison sentence of up to five years (eight if anyone dies as a result). More strikingly, to “claim or spread a falsehood or claim or spread a distorted truth in relation to the emergency in a way that is suitable for alarming or agitating a large group of people” would be punishable by up to three years of imprisonment (Section 10 of the law). A government-run news outlet has already called for the prosecution of opposition politicians under the new statute — simply for pointing out the lack of readiness of the country’s public health system.
Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt. His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media. Hungary’s previous moves toward authoritarianism were disguised as a necessary reaction to outside threats: foreign corporate interests during the financial crisis, “cosmopolitan elites” during the refugee crisis of 2016, or, whenever the occasion demands, the philanthropist George Soros (a staple of Orban’s nativist playbook).
True to his past, Orban did not hesitate to connect the virus to migration: “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration, and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two, as both spread with movement.”
Indeed, the first patient with covid-19 in Hungary appears to be an Iranian student. The government responded by imposing a travel ban on Iran (among other countries) and expelling 15 Iranian students. Yet, the 2,500-strong Iranian student population in Hungary is not a result of uncontrolled immigration imposed from Brussels but of Orban’s conscious policy choices, especially the gradual warming of Hungarian-Iranian and Hungarian-Syrian relations, visible also in the lenient treatment of wealthy Syrians applying for residency in Hungary.
Hungary’s new Law on Protecting Against the Coronavirus demonstrates that Orban will never let a serious crisis go to waste in the quest to entrench himself as prime minister for life. As of now, there are few reasons to believe that his wager will fail, as the combination of nativism and fear of a deadly yet invisible threat makes for a potent political mix. Unless there is strong pushback from Brussels and Washington — which are both understandably preoccupied by more urgent matters — Hungary is bound to emerge from the current crisis as a full-fledged dictatorship.”
As I wrote in my post of March 15 2020, Hungary: in the Shadows of Nazi Revivalism and Dominion; As Viktor Orban elevates Hungary’s Nazi past to a national mythology, Budapest has become a center and staging area for Nazi revivalism throughout Europe. This has occurred in concert with the weaponization of Christian faith and the use of the Syrian and Libyan refugees from the Turkish-Russian conflict of dominion as a fear factor in the seizure of political power by European fascists.
The Fourth Reich has met varying degrees of success in its attempts to reawaken global fascism; there are now many tyrannies and autocracies throughout the world, including the United States of America under Traitor Trump’s Republican alliance of white supremacist terrorists and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Narendra Modi’s India, and other fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but only in Viktor Orban’s Hungary are actual Nazis celebrated as heroes and zealously sheltered by the power and authority of a government. In Hungary the Fourth Reich has an incubator for the reconquest of Europe.
And this is the nightmare which has come to Texas.
The twilight of democracy looms over the world, and with it comes an age of fascism and of darkness.
To which we may reply with Shakespeare; “”If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Hungarian opposition ousts Viktor Orbán after 16 years in power
Orbán’s defeat in Hungary is also a major loss for Trump and the right in the U.S.: The ripple effects of Hungary’s lopsided elections will be felt far and wide — including in the White House
‘Hungary has chosen Europe’: EU leaders jubilant after Péter Magyar’s victory over Orbán:: Congratulations pour in from across EU, with leaders from Spain, Poland, France, Britain, Denmark, Romania, Sweden and beyond hailing a new chapter
2026. április 12. Győzelem Magyarország! A fasiszta hullám megfordul Európában
Magyarország polgárai napok óta ünneplik Orbán Viktor bukását a hétvégi választásokon, jóval azelőtt, hogy elismerte volna vereségét. Olyan hatalmas volt a mozgalom a demokrácia helyreállításáért és Magyarország orosz befolyás alóli felszabadításáért, egy olyan árapályos esemény, amely megfosztja a náci újjáéledés híveit Európa visszahódításának biztonságos menedékétől, és a történelem folyását a demokratikus társadalmakban kódolt felvilágosodás értékei felé tereli; a szabadság, az egyenlőség, az egyetemes emberi jogok, a tesztelhető igazság és az igazságosság mindenki számára.
A szakállas hölgy, J.D. Vance Orbánért és fasiszta kleptokráciájáért, a fehér felsőbbrendűséget hirdető nacionalizmusért és a teokratikus terrorért kampányolt, amely modellként szolgált a Trump-rezsim és mindazok számára, akik rabszolgasorba taszítanának minket. Az amerikai Negyedik Birodalomnak pedig nem sikerült hűséget szereznie és hatalmon tartania szövetségesét, ahogy Putyin oroszországi rezsimjének sem, amely a magyar választásokba is beavatkozott, ahogyan a miénket is tette Trump 2016-os ellopott választása során.
Orbán ma megbukott, vajon Trump követi-e? Vajon a Negyedik Birodalom többi zsarnokát, Olaszország Meloniját, Oroszország Vlagyimir Putyinját és másokat is letaszítanak a gyűlölet, a hazugság és a kapzsiság trónjáról? Vajon megakadályozzák-e azokat a politikai pártokat, amelyek veszélyeztetik az európai demokráciákat, Marine Le Pen Nemzeti Tömbjét Franciaországban, Németország Alternatíva Németországért pártját, Nigel Farage Reform UK pártját Nagy-Britanniában, Santiago Abascal Vox pártját Spanyolországban és túl sok más pártot abban, hogy olyan államot hódítsanak meg, amilyent Amerika elszenvedett?
Egy Orbán utáni Magyarországnak számos kihívással kell szembenéznie a Trump utáni Amerika számára, és a demokrácia helyreállítása Európában nem lesz sem gyors, sem könnyű, amint azt a demokraták kudarca is bizonyítja, hogy nem sikerült megtartaniuk az elnökséget Trump államvisszaszerzése ellen a legutóbbi választásunkon.
Visszaállítható-e a fasizmus elleni kordon sanitaire?
Hungary, a reading list
History
The Spirit of Hungary : A Panorama of Hungarian History and Culture,
We confront the ICE white supremacist terror force in mass action throughout America today, for while heroes of our universal human rights and the parallel and interdependent rights of citizens in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity have cloned the Minneapolis model of solidarity of action and the championing of our American ideals as codified in the great poem by a Jewish girl which greets migrants in New York harbor inscribed on the Statue of Liberty; “give us your tired, your poor, your huddled m asses yearning to be free”, we must do more than wait for the terror force to come for our neighbors and disrupt their programme of ethnic cleansing; we must take the fight to the enemy.
On this first National Fuck Ice Day we hunt the monsters to their lairs and lay siege to the gates of the concentration camps at every known ICE facility location, here in America and at secret gulags throughout the world.
Let us fight them on the beaches, friends.
To fascist tyranny and state terror and to imperial conquest and colonial dominion by the white supremacist theocracy which has captured America, let us offer no quarter.
For ours is a fight for democracy, civilization, and our universal human rights, and all Resistance is War to the Knife. War to the Knife, krig pa kniven, among the few phrases which comes into English direct from Old Norse, and for us it means liberation struggle without pity, fear, or remorse, for those who respect no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace.
As the fascists who have captured the state as Vichy America begin to collapse, let us unite in solidarity to purge them from among us. Therefore I say; Bella Ciao, Fascists.
As I wrote in my post of April 1 2026, Let Us Enact Reversals of Order and Bring the Chaos: April Fool’s Day; A joke on April Fools Day, because no one would ever do to police terrorists what they do to us all the time.
How to deal with ICE, in a Bizarro World where everything we know is reversed and there is justice for all:
Never let them abduct anyone.
Say nothing to the enemy, and hear nothing they say, because everything the enemy says is a lie.
Never obey, for we are not their property.
Flood them with false leads, fragment their efforts, send up general alarms regarding their movements and actions, set them against each other, rescue and escort their targets to safety, and render them useless and harmless.
Flash mob and capture them. Send them to secret foreign gulags like they do with us at Cecot.
Follow them home and publish their names and addresses. Shame and cast them out.
If they come for us, we come for them.
As the enemy does, so let it be done in return.
This ends the prank part of this communication, which does not authorize direct action in resistance and liberation struggle like Nelson Mandela did against the Apartheid regime on December 16 1977 by underlining a passage of the play Julius Caesar in the Robben Island Bible, a copy of Shakespeare passed among the prisoners;
“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.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
We come now to the Gate of Decision, and must give answer, with our lives if necessary, to the question with which Tolstoy founded the principle of nonviolent resistance with which Gandhi and Martin Luther King defended our common humanity, and with which Lenin began the Russian Revolution; “What is to be done?”
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 and Rapist In Chief, 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. My question for missions of action is, Who is suffering? 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 post of February 6 2025, We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich; We rejoice in the glorious Resistance which arose yesterday in mass actions and protests throughout America, against Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and shuttering of US Aid, and against Musk the Troll King’s monkeywrenching and sabotage of our nation’s social security, medicare, tax, and other financial records, a federal bank heist, espionage, and information warfare performed by his troupe of fascist child soldiers.
In the space of a few days we organized marches on every state capital in America as well as key federal sites in Washington DC, a broad spectrum of alliances and interests which united in solidarity of action to challenge and confront the criminal seizure of our government by the Republican Party, front organization of the Fourth Reich, a liberation movement which parallels legislative and legal actions and theatres of war.
For war is precisely the word for what is now upon us.
America now faces her “fight them on the beaches” moment; though we have been a theatre of the Third World War since the Stolen Election of 2016. But we have never before fought a war of survival against our own captured state.
In this great cause of liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all, of the American Way as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state, I offer us all the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and terror; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He wrote it in Paris 1940 for the new Resistance, rephrased from the oath of the French Foreign Legion he took in 1928; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole. And we now find ourselves in a parallel situation to that of Vichy France, and must engage the imposed conditions of struggle by the same means and strategies as then; hopefully we have learned a few new tricks since then. But Solidarity is the keystone, with Disbelief and Disobedience on either side.
This, this, this.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.
Winston Churchill Speech We Shall Fight On The Beaches
As depicted in the film Darkest Hour
text of the whole speech, The International Churchill Society
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 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.
Becky G – Bella Ciao (From the Netflix Series “Casa de Papel”)
February 11 2025 How To Be An Antifascist: Historical Sources and Contexts For The Resistance
January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children
June 12 2025 Why We Fight: Authorized Versus Chosen And Ambiguous National Identities As a Ground of Struggle, Symbolized By the Mexican Flag In the Battle of Los Angeles
April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García
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.
From the Committee to Fuck Up ICE:
Bring your voice on April 11th. Bring your anger and your humor and your friends. Bring whatever props best express your particular brand of absolutely not. And yes, bring a protest dildo if you have one — because nothing short-circuits the dignity of authority faster than a crowd that is so spectacularly, creatively ungovernable that the cops don’t even know which form to file.
National F%CK ICE Day — April 11th — is a non-violent direct action. Here is what that means in practice:
Do not throw anything at anyone. Not a dildo, not a flyer, not a water bottle, not your feelings. Nothing. The moment a projectile leaves your hand in the direction of a federal agent, you have handed Trump’s goons exactly what they have been waiting for.
Dildos are props. Legally protected, constitutionally enshrined, deeply silly props. Display them with pride. Don’t throw them at anyone.
Know your exit. These agents are trigger-happy. The person running the operation at your location is not the one with the body armor. Know where you’re going if things go sideways and make sure the people around you know too.
You did not sign up for everyone else. If you are personally prepared to get arrested, that is your business and your right. The person standing behind you may not share that risk tolerance. Don’t make decisions for them by escalating.
The world is poorer for her loss. She was a comrade in the Resistance to fascist tyranny and terror, relentless in pursuit of justice, and a champion of our humanity.
My condolences to all her friends and family, but the future does not need our grief; its needs our solidarity of action, refusal to submit, and loyalty to each other of which she remains an example to all who knew her.
Friends, our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus, from which legions arise. And so long as we refuse to abandon our humanity, we shall be victorious.
In memoriam of our comrade Paula Profitt-Cornell I celebrate the grandeur and the glory of all who place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, as did she. While there are those who do so, hope remains, and we may yet change the balance of power in the world and the direction of our fate, and claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Paula, and to all who live as a fulcrum of change, I’ll see you on the other side of forever.
Vanessa Nassif :
“I have sad news. My dear friend Paula has passed away peacefully in her sleep this morning. She was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer back in August. She said she wanted to make it to Easter and she did. Paula always does what she says she’s gonna do. She was surrounded by her partner of 20 years Luann Redmond, her daughter Tana and her fur baby, Toby.
Paula was a wise woman full of love and compassion. Paula and I worked together admining several large political groups starting in 2019. We worked together with a wonderful team of people and became “Brothers in Arms” so to speak. We came from many different backgrounds but we all knew what was coming with Trump so we banded together and did everything in our power to stop the second term. Paula was very proud of the work she did. When she got sick she video called me and said how sad she was that she couldn’t work anymore. She still tried until she physically couldn’t. Paula put her heart and soul into these groups. She would do research and post thought provoking pieces that really made you think. She was deeply loved and will be sorely missed.
Paula cared about her country and she cared about the people in it. The last time I talked to her she said that the thing that made her sad was that she wouldn’t be here to see the world change. She had faith that it would. My deepest condolences to Lu and Tana. All of my love to you.”
Vanessa Contessa;
“I have sad news. My dear friend Paula ProfittCornell has passed away peacefully in her sleep this morning. She was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer back in August. She said she wanted to make it to Easter and she did. Paula always does what she says she’s gonna do. She was surrounded by her partner of 20 years Luann Redmond, her daughter Tana and her fur baby, Toby.
Paula was a wise woman full of love and compassion. Paula and I worked together admining several large political groups starting in 2019. We worked together with a wonderful team of people and became “Brothers in Arms” so to speak. We came from many different backgrounds but we all knew what was coming with Trump so we banded together and did everything in our power to stop the second term. Paula was very proud of the work she did. When she got sick you see video called me and said how sad she was that she couldn’t work anymore. She still tried until she physically couldn’t. Paula put her heart and soul into these groups. She would do research and post thought provoking pieces that really made you think. She was deeply loved and will be sorely missed.
Paula cared about her country and she cared about the people in it. The last time I talked to her she said that the thing that made her sad was that she wouldn’t be here to see the world change. She had faith that it would. My deepest condolences to Lu and Tana. All of my love to you.”
Andrea Boggs;
“Paula has been my friend since we were 9 years old. She is unforgettable. The loss is immeasurable. I pray that the grieving can eventually turn the void into smiles when I remember all of our sleepovers, antics, crazy double dates as teenagers, sharing our stories of love, motherhood, being a grandma, and our mutual commitment to save our democracy.
She found so much love and peace with Luann. I am blessed to have the honor of their friendship. RIP my beautiful friend. Leave the light on and save me a place.”
Starr Helton;
“I only knew Paula from Facebook but when you are connected to someone for over ten years, you get to know their heart and soul. Paula had the unique ability to make everyone feel special or feel like they were the most important person to her. She put her heart and soul into everything that she did. She worked hard in the groups because she wanted a better world for everyone that she loved. She balanced that intensity with a very funny sense of humor. She loved like she worked with great intensity. She deeply loved and was concerned about Luann who has been a rock through this. She adored Tana and her grandson (?) who was in College. She was so proud of him. She would brag about him all of the time.
We were expecting this but it is still really hard. I know that she has had her Peter Pan wings restored and will be looking over our shoulders to make sure that we are all carrying on as she would want us to. I am from Georgia and if I can do anything to help her loved ones then please let me know and I will do my best.”
Vittorio Felaco:
“My most sincere condolences to a wonderful woman who knew how to guide us to resist till the very end.
Hi Paula!
You knew we were going to be with you till the very end… whenever that was going to be… and will continue to think of you even after the end because good friends and good inspirations are rare and hard to come by.
Stay strong and safe as you go into that dark night with courage and strength and send us good vibes so we may know you are now the saint who will always look over us from above and beyond.
You did so well and have been and are a model of humanness and decency! We remain your devoted friends and coworkers on this planet till our days are done always drawing inspiration from your sacrifices and hard work for all human beings.
Far away and long ago now, my Last Stand at Mariupol, but one which resonates with the tragedy of her martyrs in the cause of liberty and the glories of her heroes of Resistance, like the story of Oleksandr and his sister Kateryna, and if my witness of history reaches those who were not there to behold with their own eyes the limits of the human described under the hammer of a Total War as invented by Hitler and Franco, tested at Guernica and recapitulated by Putin at Mariupol, and one day moves others and possibly nations to also resist fascist tyranny and terror beyond hope of victory or even survival, I will count my life well spent and be content.
O my brothers, sisters, and others, may our lives be like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus; from each arise legions.
Among the last things my friend Jean Genet who swore me to the Oath of the Resistance and set me on my life path in Beirut 1982 said to each other were these; I asked; “How do I live, now that I know the world is a lie, and everything I know is an illusion?”. To this he said, paraphrasing the famous line in his novel Miracle of the Rose; “Live with grandeur”.
Live with grandeur, friends.
As I wrote in my post of April 10 2022, Crimes Against Humanity in the City of Ghosts, Mariupol: A Witness of History; “What are you doing in Ukraine?” So cousin Mariah McKay has messaged me, and to this I have but one answer; I am saving what I can of our civilization and our humanity, and I am failing.
This is what I do, and how I have lived. A maker of mischief, I.
Let me tell you a story of the Last Stand at Mariupol; here I speak as a witness of history and what Foucault called a truthteller, of crimes against humanity and the horrors of war. The war crimes perpetrated against the people of Ukraine include things which echo and reflect de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and Georges Bataille’s Story of an Eye; but fear not, I won’t describe such monstrous things here. The story I share with you now is one of hope, and there are heroes in it.
Days ago chance involved me in events which haunt my dreams and will for some time, an incident which typifies the war as a struggle for our humanity against unanswerable force and organized genocidal terror, but also symbolizes liberty as refusal to submit.
While searching through the ruins of a city of ghosts, Mariupol, for survivors who may need help, we have discovered countless scenes of brutality and horror beyond the limits of the human; the Russian army has been systematically looting, raping, and murdering whole families and neighborhoods, and remains suggest cannibalism using mobile factories.
Others have been captured and sent into Russia as slaves and hostages, and members of our peace network within the Russian army report some of their officers are working with criminal syndicates to sell them into sex trafficking, a network collectively known as The Butterfly Collectors.
There has been nothing like this organized sexual terror since the Rape of Nanking, and possibly no similar mass devastation in Europe since Stalingrad; for crimes against humanity and genocidal terror the invasion of Ukraine might compare to the Siege of Sarajevo, speaking as a witness of history to both.
Of Mariupol I dream of the ragged corpse of a hanged girl and her brother at her feet, whose feral howling echoed among the chasms of emptiness and the blasted and hollow ruins of a shattered civilization.
As the story of these two Ukrainian children emerged in fragments of coherent narrative disordered in time from the surviving witness of history, brother and sister whose faces were so alike as to be halves of a whole person, when their home had been invaded by soldiers the family members were first separated from each other.
This is the First Principle of Resistance; never let anyone be taken alone by the police or any agents of the state, and resist division with solidarity.
Next they were told; “We’re going to play a game.”
The Second Principle of Resistance is; never play someone else’s game. When a system is rigged against you, you must change the rules.
In the next stage of fascist tyranny and terror its victims are given a Sophie’s Choice dilemma; obey and your family lives. All of them are offered different scenarios, and none of them know how they are being played against each other as hostages because the perpetrators now hold the most terrible power of all, that of secrecy.
The Third Principle of Resistance is; everything the enemy says is a lie, and we must believe nothing which comes from sources whose intent is to falsify, subjugate, and enslave us.
This is how fascism works; by shifting responsibility for its crimes to its victims and making us complicit in its crimes.
And so the Fourth Principle of Resistance is to resist by any means necessary, for it is the imposed conditions of struggle against unequal power and the tyranny and terror of authority which bears the responsibility for its crimes, and not its victims or those who stand with them and must use violence in liberation struggle and seizures of power to free us from those who would enclave us.
We must also survive by any means necessary, and bring a reckoning for the terms of our survival later as opportunities arise. For the dead have no voice, cannot bear witness nor redeem the future. We must bear forward their silenced and erased truths, and bring meaning to their lives.
Of the last stand of our civilization and our humanity here in Mariupol, the City of Ghosts, I may nearly say with Melville’s Ishmael in Moby Dick, quoting the Book of Job; “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” I have long ago lost count of such Last Stands.
In the case of Oleksandr and Kateryna, we are confronted with the tragedy and horror of war and of the operations of unequal power, and like Picasso’s Guernica with a vision of the future offered us all by fascist tyranny, but also with a song of Resistance and the unconquerable human spirit.
Kateryna’s story remains unclear; she may have hanged herself to escape abduction to Russia as a slave, especially if she discovered or believed that the family whose lives were hostage to her obedience were already dead. The soldiers took no chances with her father, who was bound, blindfolded, and shot in the back of the head on the steps of their home.
Oleksandr was chained to a post opposite another boy whose torso had been flayed, with surgical precision, the head left untouched to convey his agony during the hours or even days it may have taken him to die. Oleksandr’s arm was tied to a log and a gun placed in his hand, aimed at his friend. Later the soldiers simply let him go, laughing.
He has been guiding us these past days, as we bring a reckoning for the crimes against humanity of the Russian invasion.
As the leader of the Matadors said to me when they rescued me from execution by police bounty hunters in Sao Paulo Brazil in 1974, the summer before I began high school; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
I find reflection of my own primary trauma in that of Oleksandr, and echoes of the mock executions of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944, when he was put against a wall and mock-executed by a Gestapo firing squad using blanks, which he described fifty years later in The Instant of My Death, and of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1849 mock execution by the Czar’s secret police as recounted in The Idiot.
And to all tyrants I say with Ahab; “To the end I will grapple with thee.”
From the moment of that day in Brazil nearly 48 years ago when I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased; all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth.
In this great cause of our humanity and of revolutionary struggle we have a power which cannot be taken from us and which can overcome any force regardless of how terrible and overwhelming; our refusal to obey, to submit, or to grant authority power over us through belief.
This is the secret of power and force; it is hollow, brittle, illusory, and fails at the point of disobedience. For whosoever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered and is free.
We can be imprisoned, tortured, killed; but we cannot be conquered if we give no one power over us. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
In Katerina and Oleksandr, and in all the heroes of Ukraine and of oppressed peoples everywhere and throughout history, I read the signs of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, but also of hope for our redemption.
Of Sarajevo I dream of the Jar of Eyes; I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
10 квітня 2026 року. Крізь темне скло; Олександр і Катерина з Маріуполя, казка про надію та опір у часи темряви.
Далеко-давно відбувся мій Останній бій у Маріуполі, але той, що резонує з трагедією його мучеників за справу свободи та славою його героїв Опору, як історія Олександра та його сестри Катерини, і якщо моє свідчення історії досягне тих, хто не був там, щоб побачити на власні очі межі людського, описані під молотом Тотальної війни, винайденої Гітлером і Франко, випробуваної в Герніці та повтореної Путіним у Маріуполі, і одного дня спонукає інших, а можливо, і нації, також чинити опір фашистській тиранії та терору поза надією на перемогу чи навіть виживання, я вважатиму своє життя добре витраченим і буду задоволений.
О, мої брати, сестри та інші, нехай наше життя буде як зуби дракона, посіяні в землю фінікійським принцом Кадмом; з кожного виникають легіони.
Серед останніх слів мого друга Жана Жене, який присягнув мені на Клятву Опору та настав на життєвий шлях у Бейруті 1982 року, було таке: я запитав: «Як мені жити тепер, коли я знаю, що світ — брехня, а все, що я знаю, — ілюзія?». На це він відповів, перефразуючи відомий рядок зі свого роману «Диво троянди»: «Живіть велично».
Живіть велично, друзі.
10 квітня 2022 року Злочини проти людства у місті привидів, Маріуполь: свідок історії
«Що ти робиш в Україні?» Тож кузина Мерайя Маккей надіслала мені повідомлення, і на це я маю лише одну відповідь; Я рятую все, що можу, від нашої цивілізації та нашого людства, і я зазнаю невдачі.
Це те, чим я займаюся, і як я жив. Творець пустощів, І.
Дозвольте мені розповісти вам історію останнього бою в Маріуполі; тут я говорю як свідок історії і того, що Фуко називав правдоказівником, про злочини проти людства і жахи війни. Військові злочини, вчинені проти народу України, включають речі, які перегукуються та відображають «120 днів Содому» де Сада та «Історію одного ока» Жоржа Батая; але не бійтеся, я не буду описувати тут такі жахливі речі. Історія, якою я ділюся з вами зараз, пов’язана з надією, і в ній є герої.
Кілька днів тому випадок залучив мене до подій, які переслідують мої мрії і волю деякий час, інцидент, який характеризує війну як боротьбу нашого людства проти невідповідної сили та організованого геноцидного терору, але також символізує свободу як відмову підкоритися.
Шукаючи в руїнах міста привидів Маріуполя вцілілих, яким може знадобитися допомога, ми виявили незліченну кількість сцен жорстокості та жаху за межами людських; Російська армія систематично грабує, ґвалтує та вбиває цілі родини та околиці, а останки свідчать про канібалізм із використанням пересувних заводів.
Інші були схоплені та відправлені в Росію як раби та заручники, а члени нашої мирової мережі в російській армії повідомляють, що деякі з їхніх офіцерів співпрацюють із злочинними синдикатами, щоб продати їх у сексуальну торгівлю, мережа, відома як The Butterfly Collectors.
Нічого подібного до цього організованого сексуального терору не було з часів зґвалтування в Нанкіні, і, можливо, не було подібного масового спустошення в Європі після Сталінграда; за злочини проти людства та геноцидний терор вторгнення в Україну можна було б порівняти з облогою Сараєво, виступаючи як свідок історії для обох.
Про Маріуполь я мрію про обшарпаний труп повішеної дівчини та її брата біля її ніг, чиє дике виття відлунювалося серед прірв порожнечі та вибухнутих і пустотілих руїн зруйнованої цивілізації.
Оскільки історія цих двох українських дітей постала уривками зв’язної розповіді, невпорядкованої в часі з уцілілих свідків історії, брата і сестри, чиї обличчя були настільки схожі, що були половинками цілого людини, коли їхній дім був захоплений солдатами, члени сім’ї спочатку були відокремлені один від одного.
Це перший принцип опору; ніколи не дозволяйте поліції або будь-яким державним агентам нікого забрати наодинці, та солідарно опирайтеся розколу.
Далі їм сказали; «Ми збираємося зіграти в гру».
Другим принципом опору є; ніколи не грайте в чужу гру. Коли система налаштована проти вас, ви повинні змінити правила.
На наступному етапі фашистської тиранії та терору її жертви ставлять перед дилемою вибору Софі; слухайся і твоя сім’я живе. Усім їм пропонують різні сценарії, і жоден з них не знає, як їх грають один проти одного як заручників, тому що тепер зловмисники володіють найжахливішою владою з усіх — силою секретності.
Третій принцип опору: все, що говорить ворог, є брехнею, і ми не повинні вірити ні в що, що походить із джерел, які мають на меті сфальсифікувати, підпорядкувати і поневолити нас.
Так працює фашизм; переклавши відповідальність за свої злочини на своїх жертв і зробивши нас співучасниками його злочинів.
Отже, четвертий принцип опору полягає в тому, щоб чинити опір будь-якими необхідними засобами, оскільки відповідальність за свої злочини несе нав’язані умови боротьби з нерівною владою, тиранією і терором влади, а не її жертви чи ті, хто стоїть поруч. і повинні застосувати насильство у визвольній боротьбі та захопленні влади, щоб звільнити нас від тих, хто хоче нас анклавувати.
Ми також повинні вижити будь-якими необхідними засобами і розраховуватись за умови нашого виживання пізніше, коли з’являться можливості. Бо мертві не мають голосу, не можуть свідчити і викупити майбутнє. Ми повинні поширювати їхні замовчовані та стерті істини та привносити сенс у їхнє життя.
Про останню позицію нашої цивілізації та нашого людства тут, у Маріуполі, Місті привидів, я можу сказати майже з Ізмаїлом Мелвіла в Мобі Діку, цитуючи Книгу Йова; «І я втік лише для того, щоб сказати тобі». Я вже давно втратив з рахунку такі Last Stands.
У випадку Олександра та Катерини ми стикаємося з трагедією та жахом війни та операцій нерівної сили, і, як Пікассо «Герніка», з баченням майбутнього, яке пропонує нам усім фашистська тиранія, а також з піснею Опору. і непереможний людський дух.
Історія Катерини залишається неясною; вона, можливо, повісилася, щоб уникнути викрадення в Росію як рабиня, особливо якщо
вона виявила або повірила, що сім’я, чиє життя було заручником її послуху, уже мертва. Солдати не ризикували з її батьком, якого зв’язали, зав’язали йому очі й постріляли в потилицю на сходах їхнього будинку.
Олександр був прикутий до стовпа навпроти іншого хлопчика, з тулуба якого зняли хірургічну точність, голову залишили недоторканою, щоб передати свою агонію протягом тих годин або навіть днів, коли він міг померти. Руку Олександра прив’язали до колоди, а в руці поклали пістолет, спрямований на його друга. Пізніше солдати просто відпустили його, сміючись.
Він керував нами протягом останніх днів, коли ми приносимо розплату за злочини проти людства під час російського вторгнення.
Як сказав мені лідер Матадорів, коли вони врятували мене від страти поліцейськими мисливцями за головами в Сан-Паулу в Бразилії в 1974 році, за літо перед тим, як я почав навчатися в середній школі; «Ми не можемо врятувати всіх, але ми можемо помститися».
Я знаходжу відображення власної первинної травми в травмі Олександра та відгомін імітаційних страт Моріса Бланшо в червні 1944 року, коли його приставили до стіни та імітативно розстріляли гестапо за допомогою холостяків, які він описав п’ятдесят років. пізніше в «Митті моєї смерті» та про імітаційну страту Федора Достоєвського в 1849 році царською таємною поліцією, як описано в «Ідіоті».
І всім тиранам кажу з Ахавом; «До кінця я буду боротися з тобою».
З моменту того дня в Бразилії майже 48 років тому, коли я побачив охоронців аристократичної родини, з якою я був гостем, стріляв у натовп безпритульних дітей і жебраків, що кишають вантажівку з їжею біля воріт садиби, голі й скелетні в голодування, шрами, каліки та деформовані хворобами, невідомими людям, для яких охорона здоров’я та основне харчування є безкоштовними та гарантованими передумовами загального права на життя, відчайдушно прагнучи отримати жменю їжі, яка може означати ще один день виживання; в ту мить я обрав свій бік, а мій народ — безсилі й розкуркулені, замовчувані й стерті; всіх тих, кого Франц Фанон називав нещасними землі.
У цій великій справі нашої людяності та революційної боротьби ми маємо владу, яку неможливо відібрати у нас і яка може подолати будь-яку силу, якою б жахливою та переважною вона не була; наша відмова підкоритися, підкоритися чи надати владу над нами через віру.
Це таємниця влади й сили; він порожнистий, крихкий, ілюзорний і виходить з ладу в момент непослуху. Бо кожен, хто відмовляється підкоритися, стає Нескореним і вільним.
Нас можуть ув’язнити, катувати, вбити; але нас не можна перемогти, якщо нікому не дати влади над собою. Як писав Макс Штірнер; «Свобода не може бути надана; його треба вилучити».
В Катерині й Олександрі, і в усіх героях України та пригноблених народів скрізь і в історії я читаю ознаки вад нашої людяності та зламаності світу, а також надії на наше спокутування.
Про Сараєво я мрію про Глек очей; Я не буду говорити тут про жахливі вчинки тих, хто збирався стати завойовниками, ні про мужній опір їхніх жертв, які були вірні своїй вірі та один одному перед обличчям смерті та тортур, ні навіть про доблесть і співчуття. про добровольців Інтернаціональної бригади, які розташувалися між молотом і ковадлом, але про невеликий жах, який став символізувати для мене неймовірні жахи війни; банку очей.
На столі командира ескадрону смерті сиділа повна очей баночка, а біля неї — кулька морозива, якою він грався, гладячи її нержавіючу гладкість з розсіяною і чуттєвою томністю, допитуючи в’язнів.
Усередині банку очі плавали б випадковим чином, гіпнотично, рефлексивно, захоплююче бажання чинити опір з медузичним поглядом об’єктивації та дегуманізації, привласненим у їхніх мучителів, талісманом передачі сили. Глек безмовних криків, стертих життів і втраченого свідка історії; як ми можемо звинувачувати наших руйнівників, коли в нас немає рота?
Тут серед драконів, куди не може досягти верховенство закону, а наші карти сенсу та цінності поступилися місцем спокусливим порожнім просторам, які ваблять сиреною Забороненого, де єдиною валютою є страх, а єдині стосунки – влада та панування, ми кидаємо виклик і визначаємо через їх відсутність і протилежність межі людського.
Бо всі ми потрапили в пастку в банку очей, і якщо ми хочемо прокинутися і прийняти наші справжні форми, ми повинні знайти спосіб порятунку.
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10 апреля 2026 г. Сквозь тусклое стекло: Александр и Екатерина из Мариуполя — притча о надежде и сопротивлении во времена тьмы
Это было давно и далеко — моя «последняя битва» в Мариуполе; битва, в которой эхом отзывается трагедия мучеников, павших за дело свободы, и слава героев Сопротивления — таких, как Александр и его сестра Екатерина. И если мое свидетельство истории достигнет тех, кто не был там, чтобы своими глазами увидеть пределы человеческого духа, испытанные под ударами «тотальной войны» — той, что была изобретена Гитлером и Франко, опробована в Гернике и повторена Путиным в Мариуполе; и если однажды это свидетельство побудит других людей — а, возможно, и целые народы — тоже встать на борьбу с фашистской тиранией и террором, даже когда нет надежды ни на победу, ни даже на выживание, — я сочту свою жизнь прожитой не зря и обрету покой.
О братья мои, сестры и все остальные! Пусть наши жизни станут подобны зубам дракона, посеянным в землю финикийским царевичем Кадмом: пусть из каждого из них восстанут целые легионы!
Среди последних слов, которыми мы обменялись с моим другом Жаном Жене — тем, кто в 1982 году в Бейруте привел меня к Присяге Сопротивления и указал мне мой жизненный путь, — были такие. Я спросил: «Как мне жить теперь, когда я знаю, что мир — это ложь, а всё, что мне известно, — лишь иллюзия?» На это он ответил, перефразируя знаменитую строку из своего романа «Чудо о розе»: «Живи с величием».
Живите с величием, друзья.
10.04.2022 Преступления против человечности в городе призраков, Мариуполь: свидетель истории
«Что вы делаете в Украине?» Итак, кузина Мэрайя Маккей прислала мне сообщение, и на это у меня есть только один ответ; Я спасаю все, что могу, от нашей цивилизации и нашего человечества, но терплю неудачу.
Это то, что я делаю, и как я живу. Озорник, И.
Позвольте мне рассказать вам историю о Последней битве в Мариуполе; здесь я говорю как свидетель истории и, как назвал Фуко, правдолюб, преступлений против человечности и ужасов войны. Военные преступления, совершенные против народа Украины, включают в себя вещи, которые перекликаются и отражают «120 дней Содома» де Сада и «Историю одного глаза» Жоржа Батая; но не бойтесь, я не буду описывать здесь такие чудовищные вещи. История, которой я делюсь с вами сейчас, полна надежды, и в ней есть герои.
Несколько дней назад случай вовлек меня в события, которые некоторое время преследуют меня во сне и в моей жизни, инцидент, который олицетворяет войну как борьбу за нашу человечность против неопровержимой силы и организованного геноцидного террора, но также символизирует свободу как отказ подчиниться.
Обыскивая руины города призраков Мариуполя в поисках выживших, которым может понадобиться помощь, мы обнаружили бесчисленное количество сцен жестокости и ужаса, выходящих за пределы человеческого; Российская армия систематически грабила, насиловала и убивала целые семьи и кварталы, и останки свидетельствуют о каннибализме с использованием мобильных заводов.
Другие были схвачены и отправлены в Россию в качестве рабов и заложников, и члены нашей сети мира в российской армии сообщают, что некоторые из их офицеров работают с преступными синдикатами, чтобы продать их для сексуальной эксплуатации, сеть, известная под общим названием «Коллекционеры бабочек».
Ничего подобного этому организованному сексуальному террору не было со времен Нанкинского изнасилования, и, возможно, не было подобного массового опустошения в Европе со времен Сталинграда; по преступлениям против человечности и геноцидному террору вторжение в Украину можно сравнить с осадой Сараево, выступая как свидетель истории для обоих.
О Мариуполе мне снится оборванный труп повешенной девушки и ее брат у ее ног, чей дикий вой эхом разносится среди бездн пустоты и взорванных и полых руин разрушенной цивилизации.
По мере того, как история этих двух украинских детей возникала из фрагментов связного повествования, беспорядочного во времени, от выжившего свидетеля истории, брата и сестры, чьи лица были настолько похожи, что казались половинками целого человека, когда в их дом вторглись солдаты. члены семьи были сначала отделены друг от друга.
Это Первый Принцип Сопротивления; никогда не позволяйте полиции или каким-либо представителям государства забирать кого-либо в одиночку и солидарно сопротивляйтесь расколу.
Затем им сказали; «Мы собираемся сыграть в игру».
Второй принцип сопротивления: никогда не играй в чужую игру. Когда система настроена против вас, вы должны изменить правила.
На следующем этапе фашистской тирании и террора его жертвы сталкиваются с дилеммой «Выбор Софи»; повинуйся и твоя семья будет жить. Всем им предлагаются разные сценарии, и никто из них не знает, как их настраивают друг против друга в качестве заложников, потому что преступники теперь обладают самой страшной силой из всех — секретностью.
Третий принцип сопротивления: все, что говорит враг, является ложью, и мы не должны верить ничему, что исходит из источников, целью которых является фальсифицировать, поработить и поработить нас.
Вот как работает фашизм; переложив ответственность за его преступления на его жертв и сделав нас соучастниками его преступлений.
Итак, Четвертый Принцип Сопротивления состоит в сопротивлении любыми необходимыми средствами, ибо именно навязанные условия борьбы с неравноправной властью и тиранией и террором власти несут ответственность за ее преступления, а не ее жертвы или те, кто стоит на ее стороне. их и должны использовать насилие в освободительной борьбе и захвате власти, чтобы освободить нас от тех, кто хочет нас окружить.
Мы также должны выжить любыми необходимыми средствами, и рассчитаться за условия нашего выживания позже, когда представится возможность. Ибо мертвые не имеют голоса, не могут ни свидетельствовать, ни искупить будущее. Мы должны нести вперед их замалчиваемые и стертые истины и придавать смысл их жизни.
О последнем рубеже нашей цивилизации и нашего человечества здесь, в Мариуполе, городе призраков, я могу почти сказать, как Измаил Мелвилла в «Моби Дике», цитируя Книгу Иова; «И я только спасся один, чтобы сказать тебе». Я давно потерял счет таким Последним Стендам.
В случае Александра и Катерины мы сталкиваемся с трагедией и ужасом войны и действиями неравных сил, и, подобно Гернике Пикассо, с видением будущего, предлагаемым нам всем фашистской тиранией, но также и с песней Сопротивления. и непобедимый человеческий дух.
История Катерины остается неясной; она могла повеситься, чтобы избежать похищения в Россию в качестве рабыни, особенно если
она обнаружила или поверила, что семья, чьи жизни были заложниками ее послушания, уже мертва. Солдаты не рискнули с ее отцом, которого связали, завязали глаза и прострелили затылок на ступеньках их дома.
Александр был прикован цепью к столбу напротив другого мальчика, с тела которого с хирургической точностью содрали кожу, а голову оставили нетронутой, чтобы передать его агонию в течение часов или даже дней, которые, возможно, понадобились ему, чтобы умереть. Рука Александра была привязана к бревну, а в руку вставлен пистолет, направленный на друга. Позже солдаты просто отпустили его, смеясь.
Он руководил нами в последние дни, когда мы несем расплату за преступления против человечности российского вторжения.
Как сказал мне вождь матадоров, когда они спасли меня от казни полицейскими охотниками за головами в Сан-Паулу, Бразилия, в 1974 году, за лето до того, как я пошел в среднюю школу; «Мы не можем спасти всех, но мы можем отомстить».
Я нахожу отражение своей первичной травмы в травме Александра и отголоски инсценированных казней Мориса Бланшо в июне 1944 года, когда его поставили к стене и инсценировали расстрел гестапо холостыми патронами, которые он описал пятьдесят лет назад. позже в «Мгновении моей смерти» и об инсценировке казни Федора Достоевского в 1849 году царской тайной полицией, как рассказывается в «Идиоте» .
И всем тиранам я говорю с Ахавом; «До конца я буду бороться с тобой».
С того дня в Бразилии почти 48 лет назад, когда я увидел, как охранники аристократической семьи, у которой я был в гостях, стреляли в толпу бездомных детей и нищих, кишащих в грузовике с продовольствием у ворот поместья, голые и костлявые в голодающие, покрытые шрамами, искалеченные и деформированные болезнями, неизвестными никому из людей, для которых здравоохранение и основное питание являются бесплатными и гарантированными предпосылками всеобщего права на жизнь, отчаянно нуждающиеся в горстке еды, которая может означать еще один день выживания; в тот момент я выбрал свою сторону, и мой народ — бессильные и обездоленные, замолкшие и стертые; все те, кого Франц Фанон называл Несчастными Земли.
В этом великом деле нашей человечности и революционной борьбы у нас есть сила, которую нельзя отнять у нас и которая может преодолеть любую силу, какой бы ужасной и подавляющей она ни была; наш отказ повиноваться, подчиняться или предоставлять авторитету власть над нами посредством веры.
В этом секрет власти и силы; оно пустое, хрупкое, иллюзорное и терпит неудачу в момент неповиновения. Ибо тот, кто отказывается подчиняться, становится Непокоренным и свободен.
Нас могут посадить в тюрьму, пытать, убить; но нас нельзя победить, если мы никому не дадим над собой власти. Как писал Макс Штирнер; «Свобода не может быть дарована; оно должно быть конфисковано».
В Катерине и Александре и во всех героях Украины и угнетенных народов повсюду и во всей истории я читаю знаки пороков нашей человечности и сокрушенности мира, но также и надежду на наше искупление.
О Сараево я мечтаю о Банке Глаз; Я буду говорить здесь не о чудовищных деяниях тех, кто хотел стать завоевателями, ни о мужественном сопротивлении их предполагаемых жертв, оставшихся верными своей вере и друг другу перед лицом смерти и пыток, ни даже о доблести и сострадании о добровольцах интернациональной бригады, вставших между молотом и наковальней, но о маленьком ужасе, который стал для меня символом невообразимых ужасов войны; Баночка Глаз.
На столе у командира эскадронов смерти стояла банка, полная глаз, а рядом с ней — ложка мороженого, которой он играл, поглаживая ее безупречную гладкость с рассеянно-чувственной истомой, допрашивая заключенных.
Внутри кувшина плавали глаза беспорядочно, гипнотически, рефлекторно, захватывая волю к сопротивлению медузоподобным взглядом объективации и дегуманизации, заимствованным у их мучителей, талисманом передачи власти. Кувшин безмолвных криков, стертых жизней и потерянного свидетеля истории; как мы можем обвинять наших эсминцев, когда у нас нет рта?
Здесь, среди драконов, где верховенство закона недосягаемо, а наши карты смысла и ценности уступили место дразнящим пустым местам, манящим зовом сирены Запретного, где единственной валютой является страх, а единственными отношениями являются отношения власти и владычеству, мы бросаем вызов и определяем их отсутствием и противоречием границам человеческого.
Ибо все мы заперты в Кувшине Очей, и если мы хотим пробудиться и принять наши истинные формы, мы должны найти способ спастись.
Horrors, atrocities, crimes against humanity; none of this should surprise anyone as Israel breaks the peace accord with mass death and terror, for these terms define the Zionist cause, the state of Israel, and the Netanyahu regime.
If history teaches us anything, it is that victims of abuse and of Holocausts both public and private are in danger of becoming abusers themselves once they have seized power. This is why liberation movements become tyrannies as a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle, especially anticolonial revolutions as a consequence of the imposed conditions of struggle.
Security is an illusion but one which is extravagantly profitable and useful in the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control.
All states are embodied violence.
There is but one escape from the recursive cycles of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and this is love.
How shall we welcome the Stranger? Here is the great question of how to be human together which disambiguates fascist tyranny from democracy as a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity.
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 written by William Christou in The Guardian, in an article entitled The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds: Beirut residents and officials say civilians were main casualties in operation that bombed 100-plus targets in 10 minutes; “It took Israel only 10 minutes to carry out one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990.
Omar Rakha heard the war planes but did not feel the explosions; it was only when he woke up face down on the street, bleeding, that he understood what had happened: the building next to his in the Barbour neighbourhood of central Beirut had been destroyed by two Israeli bombs. He then ran through the flaming wreckage to find his sister, screaming.
Shaden Fakih, a 24-year-old calisthenics trainer, also ran towards the impact site; his friend Mahmoud was inside the struck building. He could only get so close; the multistorey building was a pile of burning rubble. Fakih began to pull people out of the apartments in front of the site, carrying in his arms an old woman who could not walk. There was no sign of Mahmoud and the neighbourhood – once thought to be safe from Israeli bombs – felt like a war zone.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah was in the emergency room when the casualties began to arrive. Among the wounded were children pulled from under the rubble; many arrived alone, without parents, their identities unknown. “The youngest was an 11-month-old. I had to operate on him just to relieve some pressure in the head,” said Abu-Sittah, who works as a surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical College (AUBMC).
The flood of wounded came after Israel bombed more than 100 targets across Lebanon in those 10 minutes on Wednesday, killing more than 300 people and wounding 1,165, according to an initial count by Lebanon’s civil defence. The death toll, which was expected to rise as more bodies were found, was higher than Beirut’s 2020 port explosion – one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history.
The Israeli military said it had hit Hezbollah “command and control centres” in the bombing campaign, which it dubbed “Operation Eternal Darkness”.
But residents and Lebanese officials said the strikes, which used 1,000lb bombs in densely packed residential areas of Beirut, mainly killed civilians. Lebanon’s prime minister, Nawaf Salam, accused Israel in a statement of targeting “densely populated residential neighbourhoods” and killing unarmed civilians in breach of international law.
Abu-Sittah said most of the people were wounded in a very short period of time, which was “intentional to flood the health system”, and he compared the aftermath to the mass casualty events he saw while working in Gaza.
The AUBMC received about 70 wounded people all at once; many critically injured, according to Dr Firass Abiad, a surgeon and Lebanon’s former health minister. Crush injuries, lots of elderly people, a woman who had to have both her legs amputated – Abiad rattled off the toll of the day in a tired voice.
“There was a 90-year-old who I just left a bit ago. He passed away from his wounds … There was nothing we could do,” Abiad said. “These are civilians who, without any warning, their whole apartment building was flattened. So you can imagine the severity of injuries that we’re getting.”
First responders in Barbour worked to find people trapped under the rubble. Firefighters sprayed water on the smouldering remains of the building while forklifts lifted crumpled cars to clear the road for ambulances. An emergency worker on the scene said they had not yet found any survivors, only pieces of people.
A man FaceTimed his son, showing him a crumpled car. “You said it was a Volkswagen?” he said, haplessly looking at the crowd around him as he inspected the car. Its badge had been blown off the bumper and the twisted metal left the car unrecognisable.
Rakha watched as the civil defence worked. “I really didn’t think something like this would happen here. Nothing like this happened in the last war [and] because of that all of the refugees came here for safety,” the 38-year-old supermarket owner said, his head wrapped in a blood-stained bandage.
Barbour, like many of the areas in Beirut that Israel struck on Wednesday, is a mixed neighbourhood where Hezbollah enjoys little support. As more than 1.1 million people were displaced by Israeli bombing over the last month, schools in Barbour opened their doors to shelter the fleeing families.
The neighbourhood had not previously been considered within the scope of Israel’s war in Lebanon. But Israel’s military suggested on Wednesday that such areas had now become targets, claiming they had been infiltrated by Hezbollah fighters.
Israel’s Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee said on Wednesday: “Recently, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] observed the terrorist group Hezbollah began leaving the Shiite strongholds in the suburbs and repositioning itself towards northern Beirut and the mixed areas of the city.” He vowed that Israel would “continue to pursue” Hezbollah fighters wherever they might be located.
The Israeli military’s statements and bombing erased any hope that the ceasefire with Iran might also halt the war in Lebanon. The war, which started after Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel on 2 March prompting an Israeli bombing campaign and invasion of Lebanon, has left around 1,800 people dead and 5,873 wounded in Lebanon.
Barbour’s residents rejected Israel’s explanation of its attacks, saying the strikes were driving even Hezbollah’s critics towards the group.
Fakih said: “It’s getting ridiculous. There’s no Hezbollah here, the Israelis are just getting happy when they bomb people, it’s not about Hezbollah.
“Just stop bombing us. If you want to kill Hezbollah, go for it, but don’t kill civilians, because you’re creating anger in us against Israel and we will have to act like Hezbollah just to defend our country. But I don’t want to do that, I just want to live in peace.”
As night fell, people began to take stock of the dizzying, bloody day. Pictures of dust-covered babies pulled out from under rubble circulated on WhatsApp groups as people searched for their relatives.
People shared a selfie of a smiling elderly couple, Mohammed and Khatoun Karshat, desperately asking if anyone had seen them after they went missing in one of the strikes. Their bodies were found under the rubble late in the night, and people kept sharing their selfie, now in memoriam.
Fakih lingered by the impact site in Barbour as rescuers worked. It had been hours and he had not heard from his friend Mahmoud; his calls went to voicemail.
“It’s been the worst day since the war started,” Fakih said. “And what I’m most sad about is that my pretty Lebanon, our beautiful Lebanon, soon it will all be brought down to the ground.”
As written by Peter Beaumont in The Guardian, In an article entitled Did Israel attack Lebanon to spoil Iran war ceasefire?; “What was the point of Israel’s surprise mass strikes on Lebanon that killed more than 300 people and drew widespread international condemnation?
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have claimed the largest strike against Hezbollah during the month-long war against Iran was carefully aimed at members of the armed group, but the attacks appeared to be as much a piece of violent spectacle to benefit Netanyahu as militarily useful.
Others have speculated that the attack – without warning and initially hitting more than 100 targets in 10 minutes including in densely populated residential areas in central Beirut – was aimed at undermining the US-Iran ceasefire that many see as being imposed on an unhappy Netanyahu.
The version being briefed in the Israeli media is that Hezbollah had sought to move command posts to civilian areas outside its historical centres, such as the sprawling Dahieh suburb, to better conceal and protect them – a claim Israel has previously made about Hamas in Gaza.
But the huge scale of the attack, combined with the lack of the warning and the details of some of those killed – including the Hezbollah secretary general Naim Qassem’s nephew and personal adviser Ali Yusuf Harshi – could point to something more ambitious: a failed attempt to kill Qassem himself. His predecessor, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated by Israel in 2024.
What is clear is that in the half-baked ceasefire negotiations conducted by Donald Trump and his coterie of amateur diplomats, the question of Israel’s war in Lebanon against a proxy of Tehran has – deliberately or not – been left ticking like a timebomb.
The Israeli strikes came despite the fact that Hezbollah had said it had been “notified of a ceasefire” and had been “committed to it since this morning”, according to Lebanese political sources.
By Thursday, Hezbollah and Israel were trading heavy fire again.
Netanyahu’s justification for such a horrific attack on civilian centres hours after the ceasefire had been announced appeared thin at least. His boasts about killing an aide to Qassem and his insistence of Israel’s right to continuing striking in Lebanon suggested to some that it was an attempt to act as a spoiler in a ceasefire he had argued against.
Instead, Israeli officials – despite believing that the wider ceasefire may collapse – appear to believe that they have at least two weeks to continue operations in Lebanon as talks between Iran and the US are due to continue.
The irony not lost on observers is that it is Israel’s continued fighting that could collapse a deal, with senior Iranian figures warning of a response against Israel on Thursday. The president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said the Israeli strikes on Lebanon violated the ceasefire agreement and would render negotiations meaningless.
The Soufan Center thinktank in New York said: “Even if Lebanon was formally outside the deal, the scale of Israel’s strikes was likely to be viewed as escalatory, nonetheless. Israel’s strikes can be understood both as an effort to drive a wedge between Iran and its proxies and as a response to being allegedly sidelined in the original ceasefire discussions.”
In its newsletter, the thinktank added: “The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was informed of the deal only at the last minute and ‘wasn’t happy’. Netanyahu now seems determined to pursue a scorched earth policy in Lebanon, even if – or perhaps especially because – it might scuttle the ceasefire deal.
“At the same time, Iran is likely seeking to exploit and widen any existing tensions between the United States and Israel in an effort to divide the two allies.”
For Marion Messmer, the director of the international security programme at Chatham House, Israel’s strikes on Lebanon point to a deeper issue: Washington’s difficulty in managing its relationship with Israel, its ally in the war against Iran.
In a briefing, Messmer wrote: “Israel’s insistence that its military action in Lebanon is not part of the agreement reveals a key vulnerability and shows the limits of the US ability to manage its allies: the ongoing bombing campaigns in Lebanon could undermine the ceasefire overall and keep the US trapped in a conflict it is now seeking to exit.
“After weeks of President Trump being furious with European allies for not sufficiently supporting the US, it now appears to be the alliance relationship with Israel that provides more of a risk to US interests in the Middle East.”
Underlining questions about the purpose and timing of Wednesday’s strikes are claims that the Israel Defense Forces’ own assessment is that – despite Israel’s latest invasion into southern Lebanon and its bombing campaign – disarming or defeating Hezbollah is unrealistic.”
As I wrote in my post of March 26 2026, Israel Restarts the Cycle of Violence in Lebanon: Echoes and Reflections of 1982 in 2026; “Israel’s war of imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors, purchased with American blood and treasure, now has four theatres; Palestine, Iran, her allies among the Arab-American Alliance and the remaining nations of Iran’s Axis of Resistance in peripheral conflicts, and Lebanon.
Because America refuses to use Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to disarm the Zionist regime regardless of its endless crimes as our taxes buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians, an event of fracture and disruption which has triggered our abandonment of the idea of universal human rights and signaled the collapse of democracy and our global civilization built on the values and principles of the Enlightenment and embodied in our founding documents, Israel now wages Total War against her neighbors to create an Empire of Greater Israel.
America has failed to leash our dog Israel, and its roaming about savagely attacking all and sundry because there are no consequences for evil. This is what the idea of Israel will mean to history and the world; an example of what can happen when a nation no longer believes in good and evil or in human rights. For to a Zionist only fellow Jews are truly human.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies of belonging and otherness, elite membership and dehumanization, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
References
The Stranger trailer
News of the War
The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds
9 أبريل 2026: الجبهة اللبنانية في الحرب الإسرائيلية-الأمريكية ضد إيران، وحرب الغزو من أجل إقامة “إمبراطورية إسرائيل الكبرى”
أهوال، وفظائع، وجرائم ضد الإنسانية؛ لا شيء من هذا ينبغي أن يثير دهشة أحد، في الوقت الذي تنقض فيه إسرائيل اتفاق السلام عبر إشاعة الموت الجماعي والرعب؛ إذ إن هذه المصطلحات هي التي تُعرّف القضية الصهيونية، ودولة إسرائيل، ونظام نتنياهو.
وإذا كان التاريخ يُعلّمنا شيئاً، فهو أن ضحايا الإساءة وضحايا المحارق —سواء كانت علنية أم خاصة— يواجهون خطر التحول هم أنفسهم إلى مُسيئين بمجرد أن يمسكوا بزمام السلطة. ولهذا السبب تتحول حركات التحرر إلى أنظمة استبدادية، في مرحلة يمكن التنبؤ بها ضمن مسار النضال الثوري؛ ولا سيما الثورات المناهضة للاستعمار، وذلك كنتيجة حتمية للظروف المفروضة التي تحكم طبيعة هذا النضال.
إن الأمن ليس سوى وهم؛ ولكنه وهمٌ مُدرٌّ لأرباح طائلة، ومفيد للغاية في عملية تركيز السلطة في يد الدولة، وفي ترسيخ نمط “الدولة السجنية” القائمة على القوة والسيطرة.
إن جميع الدول، في جوهرها، ليست سوى تجسيد للعنف.
ولا يوجد سوى مخرج واحد من تلك الحلقات المتكررة —التي تشبه “حلقة فاغنر” الأوبرالية— والمتمحورة حول الخوف والسلطة والقوة؛ وهذا المخرج هو: الحب.
كيف ينبغي لنا أن نستقبل “الغريب”؟ هذا هو السؤال الجوهري حول كيفية العيش كبشرٍ معاً؛ وهو السؤال الذي يضع حداً فاصلاً ويميز بوضوح بين الاستبداد الفاشي، وبين الديمقراطية باعتبارها مجتمعاً حراً يتألف من متساوين، يتقاسمون ملكية الدولة، ويضمن كل منهم إنسانية الآخر.
وفي نهاية المطاف، كل ما يهم حقاً هو ما نفعله بخوفنا، وكيف نستخدم ما نمتلكه من قوة؛ لذا… اصنعوا شيئاً جميلاً بقوتكم.
Hebrew
9 באפריל 2026 החזית הלבנונית של ישראל-אמריקה מלחמת איראן וכיבוש אימפריה של ארץ ישראל השלמה
זוועות, מעשי זוועה, פשעים נגד האנושות; שום דבר מזה לא צריך להפתיע אף אחד, שכן ישראל מפרה את הסכם השלום עם מוות המוני וטרור, שכן מונחים אלה מגדירים את המטרה הציונית, מדינת ישראל ואת משטר נתניהו.
אם ההיסטוריה מלמדת אותנו משהו, זה שקורבנות של התעללות ושואה, הן ציבורית והן פרטית, נמצאים בסכנה להפוך למתעללים בעצמם לאחר שתפסו את השלטון. זו הסיבה שתנועות שחרור הופכות לעריצות כשלב צפוי של מאבק מהפכני, במיוחד מהפכות אנטי-קולוניאליות כתוצאה מתנאי המאבק המוטלים.
ביטחון הוא אשליה, אך אשליה רווחית ושימושית להפליא בריכוז הכוח לסמכות ובמצבי כוח ושליטה כלואים. כל המדינות הן אלימות מגולמת.
יש רק מפלט אחד מהמחזורים הרקורסיביים של טבעת הפחד, הכוח והכוח הווגנרית, וזו אהבה.
כיצד נקבל את פני הזר? הנה השאלה הגדולה כיצד להיות בני אדם יחד, אשר מבדילה בין עריצות פשיסטית לבין דמוקרטיה כחברה חופשית של שווים, שהם בעלים משותפים של המדינה וערבים לאנושיות זה של זה.
בסופו של דבר, כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו ואיך אנחנו משתמשים בכוח שלנו; לעשות משהו יפה עם הכוח שלך.
Albert Camus, on his birthday November 7 2025 revision
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.
Sartre completely misses the point of Camus’ radical skepticism, though in his review of The Stranger as compared to its coda The Myth of Sisyphus Sartre easily recognizes the edifice of ideas on which Camus has built his system, an extension of Rousseau and Nietzsche.
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 a NeoPlatonism aligned with that of Iris Murdoch and 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 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; this became the cause of the fragmentation of the postwar intellectual Left as typified in the sensational and iconic rupture between Sartre and Camus.
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.
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. St Thomas of Cusa articulates the idea further, and Godel used it as proof of the Infinite though his Theorem only proves the limits of knowledge. 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 imposed purpose, is not a terror but 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 in the transformative change of systemic and structural externalities which determine the imposed conditions of struggle, but within us as a condition of being; we resist to claim ourselves, to seize ownership of our own moment, 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 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.
Albert Camus, a reading list
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, by Robert Zaretsky
Fifty one years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements, wage imperial conquest and dominion, impose and enforce capitalism as a hegemonic system of colonial oppression, and authorize and institutionalize its apex predators and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism. So too with many European democracies, as migration is created and weaponized by fascists in service to power and the subversion of democracy.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist military adventurism, and economic, political, and cultural warfare; ecological devastation with its drought, plagues, floods, and famine, the sixth age of extinction and the death of the seas, poverty, slavery, and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Globally we have refugees of imperial wars of dominion, genocides, and civilizational collapse weaponized by tyrants to shift Europe toward fascist regimes, mainly by America’s key regional ally Turkey in Erdogan’s conflict with Russia for dominion of the Middle East and of Libya and the Mediterranean from which came the Third World War now ongoing in several theatres of conflict, a strategy established by the American model of Operation Condor which created conditions for the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by a theocratic cabal under the crusader’s banner of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and then America with the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 by the Fourth Reich.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
In this crucial year of world-historical significance with the unrestrained sabotage of the institutions of the state by Traitor Trump and his clown show of freaks, white supremacist terrorists, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorists, and amoral grifters, which I believe will determine the fate of humankind for the next several centuries and offers us possible futures of either an Age of Tyranny or a United Humankind, the issue of immigration will be among the binary choices which will continue to inform, motivate, and shape human being, meaning, and value.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state and militarized police as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump is a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas and everywhere on earth, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations which our gun industry has armed, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, as articulated by José García Escobar and Melisa Rabanales in The Guardian; “Martina García grinds just enough maize kernels to make a handful of tortillas which she serves to her children and grandson for breakfast with a sprinkling of salt.
García, 40, must ration the family’s last few sacks of tiny corncobs after drought and prolonged heatwaves linked to the climate emergency devastated crops across Guatemala.
As a result, record numbers of subsistence farming families are going hungry: health officials registered more than 15,300 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five last year – up nearly 24% from 2018. It’s the highest number of acute malnutrition cases since 2015, when a severe drought destroyed harvests across Central America.
Rural communities in the Dry Corridor – a region which stretches through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua – are bearing the brunt, with impoverished indigenous families like García’s in Jocotán, among the hardest hit.
“I’m lucky if I can find pumpkin flowers,” said the emaciated García. “But we mostly just eat tortillas.”
After an irregular rainy season and an unpromising harvest, almost 80% of maize grown in Guatemala’s highland region was lost, according to Oxfam. All that remains for many families are tiny corncobs studded with discoloured grains that look like rotten teeth.
In October 2109, a baby in a nearby community died after not eating for many days. At least 33,000 children need urgent medical treatment due to acute malnutrition, according to Oxfam Guatemala.
Central America is one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee north in search of security.
Now, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.
And it seems to be getting worse: 2019 was the driest year in a decade with only 65 days of rain, according to Guatemala’s National Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology. Guatemala’s subsistence farmers depend on rainfall – which is increasingly erratic – and most lack alternative sources of water.
Around one million Guatemalans – 15% of the population – are currently unable to meet their daily food requirements, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).
Amid the growing threat of famine, almost 265,000 Guatemalans migrants searching for work, safety and food security were detained at the US southern border in 2019 – a 130% increase on the previous fiscal year.
Worsening hunger across the region is a factor in the rise in migrant caravans trying to reach the US overland, according to both analysts and migrants themselves.
The caravans have been met with repression and hostility by Mexican and American authorities who accuse the migrants and refugees of political subversion and criminality.
Hunger is not a new phenomenon in Guatemala: at least 60% of the population live in poverty, hundreds of thousands rely on food aid, and almost 50% of children suffer stunted physical and cognitive development due to chronic malnourishment.
But experts warn that the additional burden of extreme weather is overwhelming these communities, which have been long ignored and repressed by the government.
For García, the situation is desperate: food aid has yet to reach her canton, so once the maize runs out in March, she must find backbreaking work picking coffee – or else risk starvation. There’s no guarantee she’ll even find work, as a leaf-eating fungus known as roya – which thrives in warm conditions – has also devastated coffee crops.
García, who’s weak from chronic hunger, said: “I’ll get paid $4 a day. But if I pick less than 46kg, I won’t get paid.”
These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires white Christian Identity nationalism, our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
This was among the first of my chosen fights, conflicts which I traveled to join in liberation struggle, in the wake of my summer of resistance against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982. After my Baccalaureate graduation the next spring, I embarked on what became a years-long routine of international solidarity and revolution during my summers from various grad schools and teaching high school, and America’s imperial wars in support of tyranny and terror in central America and against liberation movements, especially the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, was among the most horrific of atrocities which I was called to oppose.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, Montt also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation due to policies of privatization, deregulation, and corruption as exported by the Chicago Boys to Latin America generally as imperialist economic warfare.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the monstrous Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past.
Operation Condor and the Pinochet regime, a reading list
The Condor Years: How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents, John Dinges
6 de abril de 2025 Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera: consecuencias de la Operación Cóndor
Este abril se cumplen cuarenta y nueve años de que Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir gobiernos y movimientos socialistas, emprender la conquista y el dominio imperial, imponer y hacer cumplir el capitalismo como sistema hegemónico y autorizar e institucionalizar a sus principales depredadores y sus jerarquías de élite. de riqueza, poder y privilegios.
Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.
Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras décadas de políticas de colonialismo, aventurerismo militar anticomunista y guerra económica, política y cultural; devastación ecológica con su sequía, plagas, inundaciones y hambrunas, la sexta era de extinción y muerte de los mares, pobreza, esclavitud y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal y guerras multigeneracionales.
En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.
A nivel mundial tenemos refugiados de guerras imperiales de dominio, genocidios y colapso de civilizaciones, armados por tiranos para hacer que Europa se dirija hacia regímenes fascistas, principalmente por Turquía, el principal aliado regional de Estados Unidos, en el conflicto de Erdogan con Rusia por el dominio de Siria y Libia, del que surgió la Tercera Guerra Mundial. Ahora en curso en diez teatros de conflicto, una estrategia establecida por el modelo estadounidense de Operación Cóndor que creó las condiciones para la captura del Partido Republicano en 1980 y luego de Estados Unidos con las Elecciones Robadas de 2016 por el Cuarto Reich.
El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico mientras nos morimos de hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. La riqueza y el poder de Estados Unidos son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.
En este año electoral crucial de importancia histórica mundial, que creo determinará el destino de la humanidad durante los próximos siglos y nos ofrece posibles futuros de una Era de Tiranía o de una Humanidad Unida, la cuestión de la inmigración estará entre las cuestiones binarias elecciones que continuarán informando, motivando y dando forma al ser humano, su significado y su valor.
Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario y la policía militarizada como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajadores penitenciarios y la represión del Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.
El Cuarto Reich del que Trump es una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas y en todas partes del mundo. la tierra, porque así como la usábamos para conquistar a otros, ella nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar el problema?
¿Problemas que lo están impulsando?
La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores estresantes desencadenantes de la migración actual, como lo expresaron José García Escobar y Melisa Rabanales en The Guardian; “Martina García muele suficientes granos de maíz para hacer un puñado de tortillas que sirve a sus hijos y a su nieto en el desayuno con un poco de sal.
García, de 40 años, debe racionar los últimos sacos de diminutas mazorcas de maíz de la familia después de que la sequía y las prolongadas olas de calor relacionadas con la emergencia climática devastaran los cultivos en toda Guatemala.
Como resultado, un número récord de familias de agricultores de subsistencia pasan hambre: los funcionarios de salud registraron más de 15.300 casos de desnutrición aguda en niños menores de cinco años el año pasado, casi un 24% más que en 2018. Es el número más alto de casos de desnutrición aguda desde 2015, cuando Una grave sequía destruyó las cosechas en toda Centroamérica.
Las comunidades rurales del Corredor Seco –una región que se extiende a lo largo de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua– son las más afectadas, y las familias indígenas empobrecidas como la de García en Jocotán se encuentran entre las más afectadas.
“Tengo suerte si puedo encontrar flores de calabaza”, dijo el demacrado García. “Pero la mayoría de las veces solo comemos tortillas”.
Según Oxfam, después de una temporada de lluvias irregular y una cosecha poco prometedora, casi el 80% del maíz cultivado en la región montañosa de Guatemala se perdió. Lo único que les queda a muchas familias son pequeñas mazorcas de maíz salpicadas de granos descoloridos que parecen dientes podridos.
En octubre de 2109, un bebé de una comunidad cercana murió después de no comer durante muchos días. Al menos 33.000 niños necesitan tratamiento médico urgente debido a la desnutrición aguda, según Oxfam Guatemala.
Centroamérica es una de las regiones más peligrosas del mundo fuera de una zona de guerra, donde una mezcla tóxica de violencia, pobreza y corrupción ha obligado a millones de personas a huir al norte en busca de seguridad.
Ahora, la sequía, la hambruna y la batalla por los menguantes recursos naturales se reconocen cada vez más como factores importantes del éxodo.
Y parece estar empeorando: 2019 fue el año más seco en una década con solo 65 días de lluvia, según el Instituto Nacional de Sismología, Vulcanología, Meteorología e Hidrología de Guatemala. Los agricultores de subsistencia de Guatemala dependen de las precipitaciones –que son cada vez más erráticas– y la mayoría carece de fuentes alternativas de agua.
Según el Programa Mundial de Alimentos (PMA), alrededor de un millón de guatemaltecos (el 15% de la población) actualmente no pueden satisfacer sus necesidades alimentarias diarias.
En medio de la creciente amenaza de hambruna, casi 265.000 migrantes guatemaltecos que buscaban trabajo, seguridad y seguridad alimentaria fueron detenidos en la frontera sur de Estados Unidos en 2019, un aumento del 130% con respecto al año fiscal anterior.
El empeoramiento del hambre en la región es un factor en el aumento de las caravanas de migrantes que intentan llegar a Estados Unidos por tierra, según analistas y los propios migrantes.
Las caravanas han sido recibidas con represión y hostilidad por parte de las autoridades mexicanas y estadounidenses, que acusan a los migrantes y refugiados de subversión política y criminalidad.
El hambre no es un fenómeno nuevo en Guatemala: al menos el 60% de la población vive en la pobreza, cientos de miles dependen de la ayuda alimentaria y casi el 50% de los niños sufren un retraso en su desarrollo físico y cognitivo debido a la desnutrición crónica.
Pero los expertos advierten que la carga adicional del clima extremo está abrumando a estas comunidades, que durante mucho tiempo han sido ignoradas y reprimidas por el gobierno.
Para García, la situación es desesperada: la ayuda alimentaria aún no ha llegado a su cantón, por lo que una vez que se acabe el maíz en marzo, deberá encontrar un trabajo agotador recogiendo café, o correr el riesgo de morir de hambre. No hay garantía de que encuentre trabajo, ya que un hongo que se alimenta de hojas conocido como roya, que prospera en condiciones cálidas, también ha devastado los cultivos de café.
García, que está débil por el hambre crónica, dijo: “Me pagarán 4 dólares al día. Pero si recojo menos de 46 kg, no me pagarán”.
Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.
Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base segura de operaciones y punto de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como ocurre con aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes ahora forman el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen. .
Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:
La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.
La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam.
El ascenso en 1974 de un oficial de Armas llamado Alarcón a la Presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy un fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.
La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.
Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.
Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta morir en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.
Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.
La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.
El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.
Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.
El gobierno de Brasil de 1964-85 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror estatal que terminó con la bancarrota total de la nación debido a las políticas de privatización, desregulación y corrupción exportadas por los Chicago Boys a América Latina en general como Guerra económica imperialista.
El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich a quienes contratamos más tarde. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.
El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al monstruoso régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.
En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos de Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el lado equivocado y vienen aquí a elegir. la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños que nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en tu cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos haciéndolo ellos mismos.
El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.
Cowering in his benighted palace of fake gold and seized with abyssal nightmares of the crimes against humanity and cruelties he might commit, our pathetic and infantile Rapist In Chief Trump lashes out with obscene tantrums of hate and rage against a nation which defies him, and as he waits for his handlers to change his diapers sends forth a message of doom as if he were not President but Pharoah; “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
In his confusion Trump describes the strike on Karg Island as the obliteration of Iran which he believes he ordered.
As events unfolded, Trump immediately caved and agreed to Iran’s terms for a provisional ceasefire instead of raining nuclear doom on humankind, the trigger event being a massive call within Congress to remove him from office through invoking the 25th amendment. Trump Always Chickens Out when his bluff is called, as we well know from history; but this does not absolve him of his crimes in authorizing the death of a civilization.
Here is proof of intention to commit war crimes as he authorizes the annihilation of a people, of the Iranians as a volk mind you and not of the state of Iran as a theocracy whose collapse I would gladly celebrate as liberation, proof of the nature of his many crimes against humanity as hate crimes motivated by white supremacist ideology.
Yet he has not been arrested and sent to Nuremberg for trial.
Here also is proof of his unfitness to govern, of his imbecile lunacy for which he merits removal from office.
Yet he remains in the White House and not a madhouse.
And because we have not held Trump accountable for his crimes, here finally is proof that America is a failed state, that democracy is no longer viable when it cannot defend itself from capture by a monster.
This has been true during both the entire Second Trump Regime of the Fourth Reich, and can be denied no longer; but it need not remain so.
Not if we unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings to seize our liberty from those who would enslave us and bring the Restoration of America as a free society of equals.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by Robert Reich in an article entitled Trump has really, seriously, frighteningly lost his mind; “Friends, Trump told reporters yesterday that unless Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, “every bridge in Iran will be decimated” and “every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again,” adding that “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.”
What about international law, which makes it a war crime to destroy civilian infrastructure? What about Trump’s repeated assurance that the United States has already “obliterated” the danger Iran poses?
The biggest absurdity here is that Trump is now focusing his war’s endgame on Iran’s willingness to open the strait. But the strait was open before Trump attacked Iran on February 28. Iran blocked it in retaliation for that attack.
Iran said it will reopen the strait only if it gets a guarantee that it will not be attacked again, if Israel ends its strikes against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the U.S. lifts all economic sanctions on Iran. Sounds as if Iran believes it has more bargaining power now than it did before Trump began his war.
Trump also made a stunning admission. “If it were up to me,” he said, “I’d take the oil, I’d keep the oil, it would bring plenty of money.” But he’s not going to do that, he said, because “unfortunately the American people would like to see us come home.”
Hello? Trump is already blaming the American public for his failure to achieve his objectives in Iran?
The problem isn’t that the American public wants this war to end. It does, but most of the public was against the war from its start.
The basic problem is we have a commander-in-chief who took the nation into this unwinnable war for reasons he never articulated, without a strategy for how to respond if Iran did the expected and closed the strait in retaliation, and without an exit strategy if Iran doesn’t surrender.
What if Iran refuses to reopen the strait by Trump’s deadline? Has he really thought through the consequences if he goes through with his threat — likely thousands of Iranian civilians deaths? And what then? Has he thought through what happens if he doesn’t go through with his threat and loses still more credibility?
The problem underlying all this is we have a president who is no longer thinking straight. As Senator Chris Murphy posted, Trump “is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.”
How do we deal with this underlying problem? Murphy suggests the 25th Amendment, section four of which authorizes the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet, or the vice president and a majority of an “other body” created by Congress, to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Doing so would elevate the vice president to acting president.
It won’t happen soon, but if Trump continues to deteriorate — subjecting Americans to ever-higher prices and ever-greater dangers — Republicans won’t have any alternative. Neither will America.”
All of this was true before Trump authorized the destruction of Iran, civilians and all.
As written by Mary Geddry of Oregon’s Bay Area news; “Trump posted one of the most deranged and openly authoritarian statements of the conflict so far: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!” It was the language of apocalypse delivered like reality TV promotion: mass death as spectacle, regime change as a punchline, and the destruction of an entire society treated as a possible prelude to something “revolutionarily wonderful.” This is a man fantasizing about annihilation while pretending to bless the people who would suffer under it.
The appalling part is not only the threat itself, but the theatricality of it. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is apocalyptic spectacle. It turns the possible destruction of millions of lives into a dramatic reveal, then pivots almost immediately to “Complete and Total Regime Change,” as though civilizational annihilation and political opportunity are just two exciting features in the same premium war package. Then comes the grotesque little shrug: “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” It is the kind of phrase you reach for only if you have entirely detached the human consequences from the words leaving your mouth. Even the closing line, “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”, makes it darker, not softer, a fake note of sympathy tacked onto a vision of obliteration. It is blood-soaked grandiosity, genocidal-adjacent rhetoric delivered with the breezy confidence of a man who thinks devastation is just another marketing campaign.”
As written by Gregory Svirnovskiy in Politico, in an article entitled Trump threatens ‘whole civilization will die tonight’ ahead of Iran deadline; “President Donald Trump threatened the death of an entire civilization in a Tuesday morning post on Truth Social, the latest violent warning for the Iranian regime ahead of an 8 p.m. deadline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Tuesday night may well be “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World,” he wrote.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”
The president’s increasingly dire warnings come after he has suggested strikes would hit bridges, desalination plants and energy targets — which could include civilian infrastructure that, if attacked deliberately, could constitute a war crime. Pentagon war planners are revising a list of energy sites, POLITICO previously reported, strikes can target to include ones that provide fuel for civilians and the military as a likely workaround to avoid war crime accusations.
Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz — a critical waterway for the transit of 20 percent of the world’s oil — soon after the U.S. began to strike the country in a joint operation with Israel in February.
The president is now conditioning an end to the war on the reopening of the strait. “Until then, we are blasting Iran into oblivion or, as they say, back to the Stone Ages!!!” he wrote last week on social media.
Trump has also skewered U.S. allies — including NATO — for balking at his calls to help reopen the strait. But he’s trained the bulk of his threats at Tehran.
“We have a plan because of the power of our military where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding, and never to be used again,” Trump said on Monday.
Also on Monday, the president told reporters that negotiations between U.S. and Iranian interlocutors were ongoing “in good faith.” Reopening the strait, he said, is a “very big priority.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. struck dozens of military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island overnight — including bunkers, radars and ammunition storage sites — while avoiding oil infrastructure, according to Vice President JD Vance and a U.S. official who was granted anonymity to provide additional details.
Vance told reporters in Hungary on Tuesday that the strikes did not represent a change in strategy for the U.S. because they were focusing exclusively on military targets.
“The president’s deadline … has been followed by us and everybody else,” he said. “And he said very clearly, we’re not going to strike energy and infrastructure targets until the Iranians either make a proposal that we can get behind or don’t make a proposal. But he’s given them until Tuesday, at eight o’clock.”
Global oil prices have skyrocketed in the wake of the Strait’s closure. Domestically, the price of gas has rocketed up ahead of the midterm elections, which could spell disaster for the GOP.
Trump, meanwhile, has developed a penchant for talking about the conflict in a variety of settings — including, in one instance, in front of a costumed bunny at the annual White House Easter egg roll on Monday.
“They’re capable fighters, they’re very tough people,” he told an audience of parents and children. “And there are others like that. You don’t mind when the enemy is weak, but that enemy is strong. Not so strong like they were about a month ago — I can tell you, in fact, right now they are not too strong at all in my opinion. But we’re soon going to find out, aren’t we?”
Much has been written of the unfitness of Trump as both a mentally retarded imbecile and as a lunatic; here follows my own diagnosis of him and of the peril his particular kinds of unfitness represent for the nation; as I wrote in my post of As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019 Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; “How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, “a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.”
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.”
Next I must quote myself out of chronological order as I applied Waite’s methods to a second set of parallel lives on October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; “The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read as a junior in high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; “How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazified Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.”
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; “After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.”
In my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; “ In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.”
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.”
As written in my post of October 28 2019 Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; “As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.”
As written by George Conway in 2019 in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Unfit for Office: Donald Trump’s narcissism makes it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.; “n a third-down play last season, the Washington Redskins quarterback Alex Smith stood in shotgun formation, five yards behind the line of scrimmage. As he called his signals, a Houston Texans cornerback, Kareem Jackson, suddenly sprinted forward from a position four yards behind the defensive line.
Jackson’s timing was perfect. The ball was snapped. The Texans’ left defensive end, J.J. Watt, sprinted to the outside, taking the Redskins’ right tackle with him. The defensive tackle on Watt’s right rushed to the inside, taking the offensive right guard with him. The result was a huge gap in the Redskins’ line, through which Jackson could run unblocked. He quickly sacked Smith, for a loss of 13 yards.
Special-teams players began taking the field for the punt. But Smith didn’t get up. He rolled flat onto his back, pulled off his helmet, and covered his face with his hands. He was clearly in excruciating pain. The slow-motion replay immediately showed the television audience why: As Smith was tackled, his right leg had buckled sharply above the ankle, with his foot rotating significantly away from any direction in which a human foot ought to point. The play-by-play announcer Greg Gumbel said grimly, “We’ll be back,” and the network abruptly cut to a break. There was nothing more to say.
Even without the benefit of medical training, and even without conducting a physical examination, viewers knew what had happened. They may not have known what the bones were called or what treatment would be required, but they knew more than enough, and they knew what really mattered: Smith had broken his leg, very badly. They knew that even if they were not orthopedists, did not have a medical degree, and had never cracked open a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. They could tell—they were certain—something was seriously wrong.
And so it is, or ought to be, with Donald Trump. You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don’t need to be a mental-health professional to see that something’s very seriously off with Trump—particularly after nearly three years of watching his erratic and abnormal behavior in the White House. Questions about Trump’s psychological stability have mounted throughout his presidency. But those questions have been coming even more frequently amid a recent escalation in Trump’s bizarre behavior, as the pressures of his upcoming reelection campaign, a possibly deteriorating economy, and now a full-blown impeachment inquiry have mounted. And the questioners have included those who have worked most closely with him.
No president in recent memory—and likely no president ever—has prompted more discussion about his mental stability and connection with reality. Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly is said to have described him as “unhinged,” and “off the rails,” and to have called the White House “Crazytown” because of Trump’s unbalanced state. Trump’s former deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, once reportedly discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, the Constitution’s provision addressing presidential disability, including mental disability.
Rosenstein denies that claim, but it is not the only such account. A senior administration official, writing anonymously in The New York Times last September, described how, “given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment”—but “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.” And NBC News last week quoted someone familiar with current discussions in the White House warning that there is “increasing wariness that, as this impeachment inquiry drags out, the likelihood increases that the president could respond erratically and become ‘unmanageable.’” In September, a former White House official offered a similar assessment to a Business Insider reporter: “No one knows what to expect from him anymore,” because “his mood changes from one minute to the next based on some headline or tweet, and the next thing you know his entire schedule gets tossed out the window. He’s losing his shit.”
Even a major investment bank has gotten into the mix, albeit in a roundabout way: JPMorgan Chase has created a “Volfefe Index”—named after Trump’s bizarre May 2017 “covfefe” tweet—designed to quantify the effect that Trump’s impulsive tweets have on interest-rate volatility. The bank’s press release understatedly observed that its “volatility fair value model” shows that “the president’s remarks on this social media platform [have] played a statistically significant role in elevating implied volatility.”
The president isn’t simply volatile and erratic, however—he’s also incapable of consistently telling the truth. Those who work closely with him, and who aren’t in denial, must deal with Trump’s lying about serious matters virtually every day. But as one former official put it, they “are used to the president saying things that aren’t true,” and have inured themselves to it. Trump’s own former communications director Anthony Scaramucci has on multiple occasions described Trump as a liar, once saying, “We … know he’s telling lies,” so “if you want me to say he’s a liar, I’m happy to say he’s a liar.” He went on to address Trump directly: “You should probably dial down the lying because you don’t need to … So dial that down, and you’ll be doing a lot better.”
That was good advice, but clearly wishful thinking. Trump simply can’t dial down the lying, or turn it off—even, his own attorneys suggest, when false statements may be punished as crimes. A lawyer who has represented him in business disputes once told me that Trump couldn’t sensibly be allowed to speak with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, because Trump would “lie his ass off”—in effect, that Trump simply wasn’t capable of telling the truth, about anything, and that if he ever spoke to a prosecutor, he’d talk himself into jail.
Trump’s lawyers in the Russia investigation clearly agreed: As Bob Woodward recounts at length in his book Fear, members of Trump’s criminal-defense team fought both Trump and Mueller tooth and nail to keep Trump from being interviewed by the Office of Special Counsel. A practice testimonial session ended with Trump spouting wild, baseless assertions in a rage. Woodward quotes Trump’s outside counsel John Dowd as saying that Trump “just made something up” in response to one question. “That’s his nature.” Woodward also recounts Dowd’s thinking when he argued to Trump that the president was “not really capable” of answering Mueller’s questions face to face. Dowd had “to dress it up as much as possible, to say, it’s not your fault … He could not say what he knew was true: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ That was the problem.” (Dowd disputes this account.) Which raises the question: If Trump can’t tell the truth even when it counts most, with legal jeopardy on the line and lawyers there to help prepare him, is he able to apprehend the truth at all?
Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”
Trump’s erratic behavior has long been the subject of political criticism, late-night-television jokes, and even speculation about whether it’s part of some incomprehensible, multidimensional strategic game. But it’s relevant to whether he’s fit for the office he holds. Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.
The Framers of the Constitution expected the presidency to be occupied by special individuals, selfless people of the highest character and ability. They intended the Electoral College to be a truly deliberative body, not the largely ceremonial institution it has become today. Because the Electoral College, unlike Congress and the state legislatures, wouldn’t be a permanent body, and because it involved diffuse selections made in the various states, they hoped it would help avoid “cabal, intrigue and corruption,” as Alexander Hamilton put it in “Federalist No. 68,” and deter interference from “these most deadly adversaries of republican government,” especially “from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”
Though the Constitution’s drafters could hardly have foreseen how the system would evolve, they certainly knew the kind of person they wanted it to produce. “The process of election affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”
Hamilton’s use of the word trust in The Federalist Papers to describe the presidency was no accident. The Framers intended that the president “be like a fiduciary, who must pursue the public interest in good faith republican fashion rather than pursuing his self-interest, and who must diligently and steadily execute Congress’s commands,” as a recent Harvard Law Review article puts it. The concept is akin to the law of private fiduciaries, which governs trustees of trusts and directors and officers of corporations, an area that has been central to my legal practice as a corporate litigator. “Indeed,” as the Harvard Law Review article explains, “one might argue that what presents to us as private fiduciary law today had some of its genesis in the law of public officeholding.” The overarching principle is that a fiduciary—say, the CEO of a corporation—when acting on behalf of a corporation, has to act in the corporation’s best interests. Likewise, a trustee of a trust must use the assets for the benefit of the beneficiary, and not himself (a fundamental rule, incidentally, that Trump apparently couldn’t adhere to with his own charitable foundation).
In providing for a national chief executive, the Framers incorporated the very similar law of public officeholding into his duties in two places in the Constitution—in Article II, Section 3 (the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”), and in Article II, Section 1, Clause 8, which requires the president to “solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States.” That language—particularly the words faithfully execute—was in 1787 “very commonly associated with the performance of public and private offices,” the Harvard Law Review article points out, and “anyone experienced in law or government” at that time would have recognized what it meant, “because it was so basic to … the law of executive officeholding.” In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.
But can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct. At the same time, the presence of a mental disorder or disturbance doesn’t necessarily translate to incapacity; to suggest otherwise would unfairly stigmatize tens of millions of Americans. Someone battling a serious psychological ailment can unquestionably function well, and even nobly, in high public office—including as president. The country, in fact, has seen it: Abraham Lincoln endured “no mere case of the blues”; he suffered such “terrible melancholly,” said one of his contemporaries, that “he never dare[d] carry a knife in his pocket.” Many historians speculate that he suffered from what we would now diagnose as clinical depression. Yet Lincoln’s mechanisms for coping with his lifelong affliction may have supplied him with the vision, the creativity, and the moral fortitude to save the nation, to achieve for it a new birth of freedom. As a writer in this magazine once put it: Lincoln’s “political vision drew power from personal experience … Prepared for defeat, and even for humiliation, he insisted on seeing the truth of both his personal circumstances and the national condition. And where the optimists of his time would fail, he would succeed, envisioning and articulating a durable idea of free society.”
More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others. Nevertheless, how the mental-health community goes about categorizing those characteristics and traits can provide helpful guidance to laypeople by structuring our thinking about them.
And that’s where the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders comes into play. The DSM, now in its fifth edition, “contains descriptions, symptoms, and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders,” and serves as the country’s “authoritative guide to the diagnosis of mental disorders.” What’s useful for nonprofessionals is that, for the most part, it’s written in plain English, and its criteria consist largely of observable behaviors—words and actions.
That’s especially true of its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak. If anything, a patient’s confessions in an office may disadvantage a clinician, because patients can and do conceal from clinicians central aspects of their true selves. If you can observe people going about their everyday business, you’ll know a lot more about how they act and behave.
And Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private. Any intelligent person who watches Trump closely on television, and pays careful attention to his words on Twitter and in the press, should be able to tell you as much about his behavior as a mental-health professional could.
One scholarly paper has suggested that accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism. It’s also more important in considering Trump’s fitness for office, because it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.
Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure, was a boy who fell so in love with his own reflection in a pool of water that, according to one version of the story, he jumped in and drowned. Psychiatrists and psychologists now use the term narcissism to describe feelings of self-importance and self-love. As Craig Malkin, a clinical psychologist who has written extensively on the subject, has explained, narcissism is a trait that, to some extent, all human beings have: “the drive to feel special, to stand out from … other[s] … to feel exceptional or unique.”
A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists; presidents seem especially likely to “rank high in extroverted narcissism,” Malkin writes, although they have varied greatly in the degree of their narcissism. But extreme narcissism can be pathological, an illness—and potentially a danger, as it was for Narcissus. “Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,” Malkin says.
The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,” the psychologist Dan P. McAdams wrote in The Atlantic. To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example” of the characteristics of the disorder he displays. “Otherwise,” this clinician explained, “I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.” Another clinical psychologist said that Trump displays “textbook narcissistic personality disorder.”
Not everyone agrees that Trump meets the diagnostic criteria for NPD. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist who helped write the disorder’s entry in the DSM, has argued that a mental “disturbance” becomes a “disorder” only when, as the DSM puts it, the affliction “causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.” The idea behind this threshold is to separate “mild forms” of problems from pathological ones, “in the absence of clear biological markers or clinically useful measurements of severity for many mental disorders.”
In Frances’s view, that dividing line disqualifies Trump from having a disorder, particularly NPD. Trump “may be a world-class narcissist,” he has written, “but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy.”
But from the perspective of the public at large, the debate over whether Trump meets the clinical diagnostic criteria for NPD—or whether psychiatrists can and should answer that question without directly examining him—is beside the point. The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?
Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office.
The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.” The manual sets out nine diagnostic criteria that are indicative of the disorder, but only five of the nine need be present for a diagnosis of NPD to be made. Here are the nine:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
4. Requires excessive admiration.
5. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).
6. Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends)
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others.
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
These criteria are accompanied by explanatory notes that seem relevant here: “Vulnerability in self-esteem makes individuals with narcissistic personality disorder very sensitive to ‘injury’ from criticism or defeat.” And “criticism may haunt these individuals and may leave them feeling humiliated, degraded, hollow and empty. They may react with disdain, rage, or defiant counterattack.” The manual warns, moreover, that “interpersonal relations are typically impaired because of problems derived from entitlement, the need for admiration, and the relative disregard for the sensitivities of others.” And, the DSM-5 adds, “though overweening ambition and confidence may lead to high achievement, performance may be disrupted because of intolerance of criticism or defeat.”
The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements? (2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance? (3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people? That’s Trump, to a T. As Trump himself might put it, he exaggerates accomplishments better than anyone. In July, he described himself in a tweet as “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” (Exclamation point his, of course.) That “stable genius” self-description is one that Trump has repeated over and over again—even though he has trouble with spelling, doesn’t know the difference between a hyphen and an apostrophe, doesn’t appear to understand fractions, needs basic geography lessons, speaks at the level of a fourth grader, and engages in “serial misuse of public language” and “cannot write sentences,” and even though members of his own administration have variously considered him to be a “moron,” an “idiot,” a “dope,” “dumb as shit,” and a person with the intelligence of a “kindergartener” or a “fifth or sixth grader” or an “11-year-old child.”
Trump wants everyone to know: He’s “the super genius of all time,” one of “the smartest people anywhere in the world.” Not only that, but he considers himself a hero of sorts. He avoided military service, yet claims he would have run, unarmed, into a school during a mass shooting. Speaking to a group of emergency medical workers who had lost friends and colleagues on 9/11, he claimed, falsely, to have “spent a lot of time down there with you,” while generously allowing that “I’m not considering myself a first responder.” He has spoken, perhaps jokingly, perhaps not, about awarding himself the Medal of Honor.
Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians. Trump described his admission as a transfer student into Wharton’s undergraduate program as “super genius stuff,” even though he didn’t strike the admissions officer who approved his candidacy as a “genius,” let alone a “super genius”; Trump claimed to have “heard I was first in my class” at Wharton, despite the fact that his name didn’t appear on the dean’s list there, or in the commencement program’s list of graduates receiving honors. And Trump, through an invented spokesman, even lied his way onto the Forbes 400.
(4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump was. When his own father died, in 1999, Trump gave one of the eulogies. As Alan Marcus, a former Trump adviser, recounted the story to Timothy O’Brien, he began “more or less like this: ‘I was in my Trump Tower apartment reading about how I was having the greatest year in my career in The New York Times when the security desk called to say my brother Robert was coming upstairs’”—an introductory line that provoked “‘an audible gasp’ from mourners stunned by Trump’s self-regard.” According to a Rolling Stone article, other eulogists spoke about the deceased, but Trump “used the time to talk about his own accomplishments and to make it clear that, in his mind, his father’s best achievement was producing him, Donald.” The author of a book about the Trump family described the funeral as one that “wasn’t about Fred Trump,” but rather “was an opportunity to do some brand burnishing by Donald, for Donald. Throughout his remarks, the first-person singular pronouns—I and me and mine—far outnumbered he and his. Even at his own father’s funeral, Donald Trump couldn’t cede the limelight.”
And he still can’t. Here’s a man who holds rallies with no elections in sight, so that he can bask in his supporters’ cheers; even when elections are near, and he’s supposed to be helping other candidates, he consistently keeps the focus on himself. He loves to watch replays of himself at the rallies, and “luxuriates in the moments he believes are evidence of his brilliance.” In July, after his controversial, publicly funded, campaign-style Independence Day celebration, Trump tweeted, “Our Country is the envy of the World. Thank you, Mr. President!” In February 2017, Trump was given a private tour of the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture, and paused in front of an exhibit on the Dutch role in the slave trade. He turned to the museum’s director and said, “You know, they love me in the Netherlands.”
(5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” (8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death; his jealousy led White House staff to direct the Pentagon to keep a destroyer called the USS John S. McCain out of Trump’s line of sight during a presidential visit to an American naval base in Japan. And Trump, despite being president, still seems envious of President Barack Obama. (6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape. (Trump has denied all their claims.)
Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy. By empathy, psychologists and psychiatrists mean the ability to understand or relate to what someone else is experiencing—the capacity to envision someone else’s feelings, perceptions, and thoughts.
The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound. Trump himself has told the story of a charity ball—an “incredible ball”—he once held at Mar-a-Lago for the Red Cross. “So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head, and I thought he died … His wife is screaming—she’s sitting right next to him, and she’s screaming.” By his own account, Trump’s concern wasn’t the poor man’s well-being or his wife’s. It was the bloody mess on his expensive floor. “You know, beautiful marble floor, didn’t look like it. It changed color. Became very red … I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s disgusting,’ and I turned away. I couldn’t, you know, he was right in front of me and I turned away.” Trump describes himself as saying, after the injured man was hauled away on a makeshift stretcher, “‘Get that blood cleaned up! It’s disgusting!’ The next day, I forgot to call [the man] to say is he okay … It’s just not my thing.”
And then there was 9/11. Trump gave an extraordinary call-in interview to a metropolitan–New York television station just hours after the Twin Towers collapsed. He was asked whether one of his downtown buildings, 40 Wall Street, had suffered any damage. Trump’s immediate response was to brag about the building’s brand-new ranking among New York skyscrapers: “40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.” (This wasn’t even true—a building a block away from Trump’s, 70 Pine Street, was a little taller.)
That human empathy isn’t Trump’s thing has been demonstrated time and again during his presidency as well. In October 2017, he reportedly told the widow of a serviceman killed in action “something to the effect that ‘he knew what he was getting into when he signed up, but I guess it hurts anyway.’” (Trump later claimed that this account was “fabricated … Sad!” and that “I have proof,” but of course he never produced any.) On a less macabre note, on Christmas Eve last year, Trump took calls on NORAD’s Santa Tracker phone line, which children call to find out where Santa Claus is as he makes his rounds. Trump asked a 7-year-old girl from South Carolina: “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?”
According to Woodward’s Fear, when Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, resigned, he found out about his replacement when he saw a tweet from Trump saying that he had appointed John Kelly as the new chief of staff—moments after Priebus and Trump had spoken about waiting to announce the news. Kelly was appalled, and that night apologetically told Priebus, “I’d never do this to you. I’d never been offered this job until the tweet came out. I would have told you.” His predecessor, though, wasn’t surprised. “It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’”
Priebus apparently isn’t the only White House staffer to have learned this; in February 2018, when Trump met with survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting and their loved ones, his communications aide actually gave him a note card that made clear that “the president needed to be reminded to show compassion and understanding to traumatized survivors,” as The New York Times put it. The empathy cheat sheet contained a reminder to say such things as “I hear you.” One aide to President Obama told the Times that had she and her colleagues given their boss such a reminder card, “he would have looked at us like we were crazy people.”
Most recently, in July of this year, in a stunning scene captured on video, Trump met in the Oval Office with the human-rights activist Nadia Murad, a Yazidi Iraqi who had been captured, raped, and tortured by the Islamic State, and had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for speaking out about the plight of the Yazidis and other victims of genocide and religious persecution. Her voice breaking, she implored the president of the United States to help her people return safely to Iraq. Trump could barely look her in the eye. She told him that ISIS had murdered her mother and six brothers. Trump, apparently not paying much attention, asked, “Where are they now?” “They killed them,” she said once again. “They are in the mass grave in Sinjar, and I’m still fighting just to live in safety.” Trump, who has publicly said that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, seemed interested in the conversation only at the end, when he asked Murad about why she won the prize.
Another equally unforgettable video documents Trump visiting Puerto Rico shortly after Hurricane Maria, tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd of victims. He later responded vindictively to charges that his administration hadn’t done enough to help the island, prompting the mayor of San Juan to observe that Trump had “augmented” Puerto Rico’s “devastating human crisis … because he made it about himself, not about saving our lives,” and because “when expected to show empathy he showed disdain and lack of respect.”
In October 2018, a gunman burst into Shabbat morning services at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh and sprayed worshippers with semiautomatic-rifle and pistol fire. Eleven people died. Three days later, the president and first lady visited the community, and the day after that, the first thing Trump tweeted about the visit was this: “Melania and I were treated very nicely yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Office of the President was shown great respect on a very sad & solemn day. We were treated so warmly. Small protest was not seen by us, staged far away. The Fake News stories were just the opposite—Disgraceful!” Similarly, after gunmen killed dozens in the span of a single August weekend in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, Trump went on a one-day sympathy tour that was marked by attacks on his hosts and on political enemies, and an obsessive focus on himself.
What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.
Yet pathological narcissism is not the only personality disorder that Trump’s behavior clearly indicates. A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder. As described by Lance Dodes, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, “sociopathy is among the most severe mental disturbances.” Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”
The question of whether Trump can serve as a national fiduciary turns more on his narcissistic tendencies than his sociopathic ones, but Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands. Aliases? For years, Trump would call journalists while posing as imaginary PR men, “John Barron” and “John Miller,” so that he could plant false stories about being wealthy, brilliant, and sexually accomplished. Trump was, and remains, a con artist: Think of Trump University, which even Trump’s own employees described as a scam (and which sparked a lawsuit that resulted in a $25 million settlement, although with no admission of wrongdoing). There’s ACN, an alleged Ponzi scheme Trump promoted, and from which he made millions (he, his company, and his family deny the allegations of fraud); and the border wall that hasn’t been built and that Mexico’s never going to pay for. Trump is a pathological liar if ever there was one.
Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.” Check, check, and check: As for social norms and lawful behaviors, there are all the accusations of sexual misconduct. Also relevant is what the Mueller report says about Trump’s efforts to derail the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the last presidential election. And given what federal prosecutors in New York said about his role in directing hush money to be paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels, a strong case can be made that Trump has committed multiple acts of obstruction of justice and criminal violations of campaign-finance laws. Were he not president, and were it not for two Justice Department opinions holding that a sitting president cannot be indicted, he might well be facing criminal charges now.
As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s. In “response to his surging celebrity,” Trump, “acquisitive to the point of recklessness,” engaged in “a series of manic, ill-advised ventures” that “nearly did him in,” Politico reported. His impulsiveness has buffeted his presidency as well: Think of his first ordering, then calling off, the bombing of Iran in June, and his aborted meeting with the Taliban at Camp David just last month. And remember the racist tweets he sent in mid-July in which he told four nonwhite representatives—three of whom were born in the United States—to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from.” Those tweets were apparently triggered by something he saw on TV.
Or consider his impetuous, unvetted personnel decisions, such as his failed selection of Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician, as Veterans Affairs secretary, and his choice of Representative John Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence. It was just so on The Apprentice, where editors and producers found that “Trump was frequently unprepared” for tapings, and frequently fired strong contestants “on a whim,” which required them “to ‘reverse engineer’ the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage … in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense.” One editor remarked that he found “it strangely validating that they’re doing the same thing in the White House.” Trump sees none of this as a problem; to the contrary, he prides himself on following his instincts, once telling an interviewer: “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody’s brain can ever tell me.”
And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October 2016, Trump expressed regret for the Access Hollywood video. But within weeks, almost as soon as the campaign was over, Trump began claiming, to multiple people, that the video may have been doctored—a preposterous lie, especially since he had acknowledged that the voice was his, others had confirmed this as well, and there was no evidence of tampering. “We don’t think that was my voice,” he said to a senator. The “we,” no doubt, was a lie as well.
Again, as with his narcissism, all this evidence of Trump’s sociopathy only begins to tell the tale. The bottom line is that this is a man who, over and over and over again, has indifferently mused about the possibility of killing 10 million or so people in Afghanistan to end the war there, while allowing that “I’m not looking to kill 10 million people”—as though this were a realistic but merely less preferred option than, say, raising import tariffs on chewing gum. As a 1997 profile of Trump in The New Yorker put it, Trump has “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”
In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism. Take the pathological lying. Extreme narcissists aren’t necessarily pathological liars, but they can be, and when they are, the lying supports the narcissism. As Lance Dodes has put it, “People like Donald Trump who have severe narcissistic disturbances can’t tolerate being criticized, so the more they are challenged in this essential way, the more out of control they become.” In particular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.
The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality. As Craig Malkin puts it, when pathological narcissists “can’t let go of their need to be admired or recognized, they have to bend or invent a reality in which they remain special,” and they “can lose touch with reality in subtle ways that become extremely dangerous over time.” They can become “dangerously psychotic,” and “it’s just not always obvious until it’s too late.”
Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in. One psychoanalyst explains that “the malignant narcissist is pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioural regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism.” In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”
Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline. This is a serious matter: Trump seems to be continually slurring words, and recently misread teleprompters to say that the Continental Army secured airports during the American Revolutionary War, and to say that the shooting in Dayton had occurred in Toledo. His overall level of articulateness today doesn’t come close to what he exhibits in decades-old television clips. But that could be caused by ordinary age-related decline, stress, or other factors; to know whether something else is going on, according to experts, would require a full neuropsychological work-up, of the kind that Trump hasn’t yet had and, one supposes, isn’t about to agree to.
But even that doesn’t exhaust all the mental-health issues possibly indicated by Trump’s behavior. His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”
This is a lot to digest. It would take entire books to catalog all of Trump’s behavioral abnormalities and try to explain them—some of which have already been written. But when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.
To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard. For Trump, Trump always comes first. He places his interests over everyone else’s—including those of the nation whose laws he swore to faithfully execute. That’s not consistent with the duties of the president, whether considered from the standpoint of constitutional law or psychology.
Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect. Bad faith? Trump has repeatedly used executive powers, threatened to use executive powers, or expressed the view that executive powers should be used to advance his personal interests and punish his political opponents. Thus, for example, he has placed restrictions on disaster aid to Puerto Rico in apparent response to criticism of him and his administration; directed the Pentagon to reconsider whether to award a $10 billion contract to Amazon because its CEO owns The Washington Post, whose coverage he doesn’t like; threatened to take “regulatory and legislative” action against Facebook, Google, and Twitter, because of their supposed “terrible bias” against him; tried to get White House staff to tell the Justice Department to try to block the merger between AT&T and Time Warner in order to punish CNN for its coverage; attacked his first attorney general for allowing the indictment of two Republican congressmen who had supported him; and ordered the revocation of the security clearance of a former CIA director who had criticized him.
And now, in just the past two weeks, we’ve seen the pièce de résistance of bad faith, the one that’s brought Trump to the verge of impeachment: Trump’s efforts to use his presidential authority to strong-arm a foreign nation, Ukraine, into digging up or concocting evidence in support of a preposterous conspiracy theory about one of his principal challengers for the presidency, former Vice President Joe Biden. As one political historian has put it, Trump’s use of his Article II authority to pursue vendettas is “both a sign of deep insecurity … and also just a litany of abuse of power,” and something no president has done “as consistently or as viciously as Trump has.”
Profit? Self-dealing? Look at the way Trump is using the presidency to advertise his real-estate holdings—most notably and recently, his apparent determination to hold the next G7 summit at the Trump Doral resort in Florida. Ultra vires? Trump has made the outrageous claim that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” Consistent with that view, he has repeatedly suggested that, by executive order, he can overturn the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship—an utterly lawless assertion. His core constitutional obligations flow from Article II’s command that he faithfully execute the laws, yet he has told subordinates not to worry about violating the laws. According to one former senior administration official quoted in The New York Times, Trump’s “constant instinct all the time was: Just do it, and if we get sued, we get sued … Almost as if the first step is a lawsuit. I guess he thinks that because that’s how business worked for him in the private sector. But federal law is different, and there really isn’t a settling step when you break federal law.” Federal law is also different, one might add, because he’s in charge of upholding it.
Facing the approach of the 2020 election with not a single new mile of his border wall having been built, Trump, as reported in The Washington Post, has urged his aides to violate all manner of laws to expedite construction—environmental laws, contracting laws, constitutional limitations on the taking of private property—and “has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing” they commit along the way.
A duty of diligence and carefulness? Trump is purely impulsive, and incapable of planning or serious forethought, and his compulsion for lying has enervated any capacity for thoughtful analysis he may have ever had. He apparently won’t read anything; he himself has said, in regard to briefings, that he prefers to read “as little as possible”—despite occupying what David A. Graham calls “one of the most demanding jobs in the world” precisely because its “holder is expected to consume, digest, and absorb prodigious amounts of information via reading.”
And then there’s the question of honesty. Fiduciaries must be honest. The Framers understood, based upon the law of public officeholding in their time, that “faithful execution” of the laws requires “the absence of bad faith through honesty.” In the private realm, fiduciaries owe a duty of candor, of truth-telling; the standard of behavior was once memorably described by the renowned jurist Benjamin Cardozo as “not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.” Today, in my own practice area of corporate litigation, corporate officers and directors, as fiduciaries, owe duties that include a duty to disclose material information truthfully and completely. Trump, whose lawyers wouldn’t dare allow him to speak to the special counsel lest he make a prosecutable false statement, couldn’t pass this standard to save his life.
Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security. Presidential narcissism and personal ego have frequently displaced the national interest. Today, the most obvious—and stunning—example is his conduct toward Ukraine: While trying to pressure the Ukrainian president to restart an investigation against Biden, Trump ordered the withholding of vital military aid to that country, thus weakening its ability to withstand Russian aggression and undermining the interests of the United States. But the list goes on: Last summer, in a narcissistic effort at self-aggrandizement, Trump told the Pakistani prime minister about a conversation he had with the Indian prime minister—leading India to deny, indignantly, that any such conversation had ever taken place. Trump reportedly even lied about trade talks with China—announcing that phone calls had occurred that never occurred and that the Chinese denied took place—in an apparent attempt to pump up the stock market and take credit for it.
Trump’s penchant for vendettas also doesn’t stop at the water’s edge—American interests be damned. When confidential cables sent by the United Kingdom’s ambassador to his government were leaked, and were revealed to contain uncomplimentary (but obvious) observations about Trump’s ineptitude and emotional insecurity, and the dysfunction of his administration, Trump went on an extended Twitter tirade against the ambassador, calling him “wacky” and “a very stupid guy,” “a pompous fool,” and ultimately declared: “We will no longer deal with him.” When reports surfaced that Trump was interested in having the United States purchase Greenland from Denmark, and the Danish prime minister understandably described talk about such a purchase as “an absurd discussion” in light of Greenland’s position on the matter, Trump canceled a visit to Denmark, and then attacked the prime minister, calling her comments “nasty”; for good measure, he also attacked some of America’s NATO allies.
At the same time, Trump happily succumbs to flattery from America’s enemies; he received “beautiful … great letters” from North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, and therefore “fell in love” with him, and rewards him with kind words and meetings even as North Korea continues to develop new nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, Trump once said on television: “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.”
Putin, of course, did more than say great things about Trump, which brings up what was, until the Ukraine scandal surfaced, the most significant way in which Trump’s extraordinary narcissism influenced his presidency—the Russia investigation. Trump made that investigation about himself, and in the course of doing so, committed what appear to be unmistakably criminal acts. At the outset, the Mueller investigation wasn’t about what Donald Trump had done during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. It was primarily an investigation about what the Russians had done to interfere with that election and to help the Trump campaign. At its core, it was a counterintelligence investigation—an effort to protect the country, to defend our democracy. An effort to find out exactly what a hostile foreign power had done to attack the United States, so that our nation could fight back, and so that it could take measures to ensure that such an attack never happened again.
But Trump didn’t see it that way. The Mueller report repeatedly describes Trump’s self-obsession, and his disregard for the national interest. Trump viewed “the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference as a threat to the legitimacy of his electoral victory.” He is said to have “viewed the Russia investigation as an attack on the legitimacy of his win.” He thought it would “tak[e] away from what he had accomplished.” The Washington Post has now reported, moreover, that in the Oval Office in May 2017, Trump told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador that he was unconcerned with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
And so, contrary to his obligation to act in the nation’s interests rather than his own, and contrary to the criminal code, he repeatedly tried to obstruct the investigation—and therefore, ironically, put himself in the crosshairs of the investigation. Thanks to Trump’s narcissism, the special counsel was forced to devote an entire volume of his report—some 182 pages of single-spaced text—to Trump’s repeated and persistent efforts to derail the investigation. And persistent, Trump was. He tried to get Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from the investigation, to violate ethics rules and unrecuse himself, so that he could get rid of the special counsel and limit the investigation to future election interference only. Trump tried to get his White House counsel to have the acting attorney general remove Mueller on a ridiculous pretext, prompting the counsel to threaten to resign. Trump tried to encourage witnesses to refuse to cooperate with the very government that Trump himself heads. As I’ve argued elsewhere, in his efforts to derail the Mueller investigation, Trump “did much more than this, but all of this is more than enough: He committed the crime of obstructing justice—multiple times.” Trump even obstructed justice about obstructing justice when he tried to get the White House counsel to write a false account of Trump’s efforts to remove Mueller.
All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation. How else could one describe the attitude Trump expressed when, sitting next to Vladimir Putin in late June, he was asked whether he would tell Putin not to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election? Trump smirked, wagged his finger playfully at Putin, and said, “Don’t meddle in the election.” Putin smirked too. The Russian president was in on the joke—the punch line being how Trump treats America’s interests versus his own.
What constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account? One mechanism discussed with great frequency during the past three years, including within the Trump administration, is Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. That provision allows the vice president to become “Acting President” when the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” But it doesn’t define what such an inability entails; essentially, it lets the vice president and the Cabinet, the president himself, and ultimately two-thirds of both houses of Congress decide.
Certainly it would cover a coma. Had the amendment been in effect in 1919 through 1921, it presumably could have been used to deal with President Woodrow Wilson. A severe stroke had rendered Wilson paralyzed on the left side, but he could still speak, and he could still sign documents with his right hand. Nevertheless, although Wilson had “relatively well preserved intellectual function,” the stroke rendered him “subject to ‘disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment.’”
Sound judgment, of course, is what a president’s job is all about. And as Jeffrey Rosen has explained, “nothing in the text or original understanding of the amendment” would prevent the vice president, the Cabinet, or Congress from deciding that Trump has disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, defective judgment, or other behavioral or psychological issues that keep him from carrying out his constitutional duties the way they were meant to be carried out.
The problem is one of mechanics. Section 4, quite understandably, was designed to be extremely difficult to implement. The vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can determine that the president isn’t able to carry out his duties; if so, the vice president immediately becomes acting president. But if the president doesn’t agree—and you know what Trump’s view will be, no matter what—then a constitutional game of ping-pong starts: The president can certify that he is capable, and he can reassume his authority after a four-day waiting period, unless the vice president and the Cabinet, within that period, recertify that the president can’t function. (As a new book on Section 4 explains, this waiting period exists in part because “a deranged President could do a lot of damage if he could retake power immediately,” and, in particular, he “would also be able to fire the Cabinet, which would prevent it from contesting his declaration of ability.”) If that happens, the vice president continues as acting president, and the whole matter gets kicked to Congress, which must assemble within 48 hours and decide within 21 days: If two-thirds of both houses agree that the president can’t function, then the vice president continues as acting president; if not, the president gets his authority back.
No matter how psychologically incapable of meeting his constitutional obligations Trump may be, that route is virtually certain not to work in this case. Would a vice president and department heads who have shamelessly slaked Trump’s narcissistic thirst at Cabinet meetings by praising his supposed greatness, and who of course owe their jobs to Trump, dare incur his wrath by sparking a constitutional crisis on the basis of what they must surely know about his unprecedented faults? Doubtful, to say the least. They would know full well that, if their decision weren’t sustained by Congress, the first thing that Trump would do after reassuming power would be to fire every department head who sought to have him sidelined. (He can’t fire Vice President Mike Pence, of course.) Which brings up the ultimate question upon which successful invocation of Section 4 would turn: whether two-thirds of both houses of Congress would vote to remove Trump. That’s harder than impeachment, which requires only a simple majority of the House in order to bring charges of impeachment to a trial in the Senate (which in turn can convict on a two-thirds vote).
And so it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism for addressing the fact that Trump’s narcissism and sociopathy render him unable to comply with the obligations of his office. It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.
The phrase high Crimes and Misdemeanors was dropped into the draft Constitution on September 8, 1787, during the waning days of the Constitutional Convention. The discussion before the Convention’s Committee of Eleven was extremely brief. The extant version of what became Article II, Section 4 provided for impeachment merely for treason and bribery. George Mason objected, and proposed adding “maladministration.” Elbridge Gerry seconded Mason’s proposal, but James Madison objected that it was too vague. Gouverneur Morris chimed in, arguing that having a presidential election “every four years will prevent maladministration.” Mason moved to add, according to Madison’s notes, “other high crimes & misdemeanors (against the State).” The motion passed, eight to three. And so, as a result of that brief exchange, Article II of the Constitution of the United States provides that “the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
As Yoni Appelbaum has observed in this magazine, “constitutional lawyers have been arguing about what counts as a ‘high crime’ or ‘misdemeanor’ ever since.” One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’” Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.
Just as the Framers viewed the presidency as fiduciary, they understood the offenses that might disqualify the incumbent as breaches of that fiduciary duty. And that may well be why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament.” Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury. In other ways, it is quite different. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.” As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.
So the congressional judgment in the impeachment process necessarily includes the number and seriousness of offenses, and even extends well beyond those calculations. Congress must also, in particular, weigh the chances of recidivism; that possibility is precisely why the Constitution provides for removal as the principal sanction upon conviction on impeachment charges. As Charles Black Jr. explained in his classic 1974 book on impeachment, “We remove him principally because we fear he will do it again.” Or as George Mason put it during the Constitutional Convention, “Shall the man who has practised corruption … be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?”
In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into play. From the evidence, it appears that he simply can’t stop himself from putting his own interests above the nation’s. Any serious impeachment proceedings should consider not only the evidence and the substance of all impeachable offenses, but also the psychological factors that may be relevant to the motivations underlying those offenses. Congress should make extensive use of experts—psychologists and psychiatrists. Is Trump so narcissistic that he can’t help but use his office for his own personal ends? Is he so sociopathic that he can’t be trusted to follow, let alone faithfully execute, the law?
Congress should consider all this because that’s what the question of impeachment demands. But there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer. Not only because of the evidence itself, but because Donald Trump will respond in pathological ways—and in doing so, he’ll prove the points against him in ways almost no one will be able to ignore.”
And now its so much worse.
As I wrote in my post of October 2025, In This Halloween Season, Remember and Beware; Real Monsters Walk Among Us; Who is Donald Trump? Glowering, feral, with the dead eyes of a cornered but dangerous animal, his fake blond hair, fake history of success, and fake identity? Traitor Trump has been the cuckoo in our nest, ambush predator and pathological liar, rapist and enemy agent, worshipper of Moloch, Demon of Lies, and disciple of Adolf Hitler.
Who are we Americans, with our government a captive state by the Party of Treason’s confederacy of theocratic sexual terrorists, white supremacist terrorists, and the nihilistic grifters and carnival sideshow freaks who are its star performers?
In this Halloween season, as we enact seizures of power through embrace of our monstrosity and dancing our demons, let us remember and witness, expose and call out the real monsters who walk among us beneath their human masks; the secret Nazis who call themselves Republicans, loathsome and degenerate conspirators in theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, moral lepers consumed and disfigured beyond the limits of the human by an ideology which infects and destroys its host like zombies or vampires.
Among the true horrors of the Trump regime’s Fourth Reich is the awareness and certainty that they live and are real, and may be anyone anywhere; a stranger in line behind us at the grocery, or next to us at a family dinner. But knowing this, we may be on guard and ready when those who would enslave us attack.
And when we go Trick or Treating, let no one go alone.
Of the Trump regime carnival freak show I have written in my post of January 31 2025, Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies; Trump unfurls his Tongue of Lies like a red carpet for celebrities of wickedness, marked with the sigil of the demon he worships and is possessed by; Moloch the Deceiver.
Pestilence comes forth wearing the zombie form of Robert F Kennedy Jr the Truly Awful, his brain eaten by a swarming mass of worms and bearing his Plague Doctor’s mask at the ready.
Here follows his comrade Civil War possessing the leering and drunken Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth, dragging behind him the shadows of the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, patriarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings, bearing the Cross he wishes to nail us all to.
Famine appears as Tulsi Gabbard, Russian spy, collaborator in Assad’s regime of torture in Syria and in Putin’s atrocities of imperial conquest in Ukraine, whore of tyranny who seeks our ruin for the benefit of her evil paymasters, not to protect American interests and markets but to undermine and sell them off as we wither and become Hollow Men, gaunt and starving, consumed from within by the hunger and avarice which consumes them like the cannibal Wendigo while our enemies fatten as we die and become nothing, bearing a wizened apple doll like the picture of Dorian Gray as a sign of our future ruin and moral collapse and hissing serpentine curses like the figure of Hunger in the film Pan’s Labyrinth, a perfect allegory of the Trump regime.
Death of the state and nation of America arrives with the fanfare of trumpets as an all-conquering shadow of our darkness, fears and self-hatred and internalized oppression made manifest in the figure of the fake Jethro of questionable pronouns and tattooed eyeliner JD Vance, whose mission is the fall of the world order of democracy, the dismantling of the American state, and its replacement with a plutocracy of tyrant CEO’s wherein citizenship is meaningless and we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white male privilege, bearing the manacles which symbolize terminal stage capitalism as it seeks to free itself of its host political system.
A parade of fools follows the Four Horsemen of Our American Apocalypse, each representing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, their praises sung by the multi-headed beast of fascist propaganda led by X CEO Elon Musk and others yapping in chorus and jostling for position.
And last, crawling on his belly like a submissive dog, comes the husk of Rudy Giuliani, utterly vacuous and eaten from within by the demons he serves. Such is the fate of all who serve and are loyal to Traitor Trump, who serves and is loyal only to himself.
Truly, “Hell is empty and all the devils are here” as Ariel’s line in The Tempest goes, prancing and capering in their many guises.
In the audience the treasonous and dishonorable brutes of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who voted for a Rapist In Chief that he may grant them permission for the same and of white supremacist terror who voted for a Nazi Revivalist that they may imagine themselves superior to anyone else in their wretchedness and degenerate villainy and enact genocide and slavery, both forms of power as subjugation and dehumanization of others born of fear and weaponized in service to the centralization of authority to a carceral state of force and control, hooting and champing and each bearing a sign and flaw of their subhuman degenerate nature, a tail or a horn, seize upon the prancing embodied lies with avarice and eat them up in the primary ritual of a Trump rally black mass.
Thus for an America and ideals of human being, meaning, and value rendered meaningless by misdirections and distortions of the truth, captured and lost in the myriad reflections, echoes, and false images of Trump’s funhouse mirrors of lies.
Lies are all Trump has; strip him of his Cloak of Illusions and Lies and his true nature as a monster and predator is revealed to the world.
This week Trump and his clown show caused a nationwide panic by defunding, deregulating, abolishing independent oversight, trying to force mass resignations of federal workers, and shutting down the government. Among the first side effects of the federal spending freeze was the medicare portal for payments going down which shut down our nation’s hospitals and healthcare system and the crash of a jet in Washington DC because no one was in the flight control tower or at the helm of the FAA. This is only the beginning of what a nation which abandons the institutions of state entirely looks like; the nation falls apart. And this is exactly what the Trump regime wants, as capital tries to free itself of its host political system.
We see you, enemies of democracy and humanity, and we will neither believe your lies not obey your commands.
And while our systems of oppression and unequal power are doomed and must inevitably collapse, our seizures of power and liberation struggle cannot be defeated while we disbelieve and disobey, refuse to submit and unite in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
What is the meaning of the Trump regime in the story of America and our future possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals?
In all the madness of the ICE white supremacist terror force campaign of ethnic cleansing, repression of dissent, and theft of meaningful citizenship and our inalienable and universal human rights, and of the deranged perversions and assaults upon our liberty, equality, truth, and justice of our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump’s kleptocracy of state terror and tyranny, we must not forget that though he exploited the flaws of our society to orchestrate the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world, he did not originate them.
Trump has revealed, tested, and hammered at our flaws, yet we remain unbroken and unconquered. This we should celebrate; having just held the most massive single day protest in our history with zero violence on the part of the protestors, engaged in electoral process and solidarity action as guarantors of each other’s rights, 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.
Trump and his cabal of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, white supremacist terrorists, and plutocratic robber barons have violated everything about America which is noble and true, plundered the public wealth, dehumanized and divided us, sabotaged and subverted the institutions of our freedom, equality, truth, and justice, betrayed our allies and emboldened our foes, lost the American hegemony of global power and privilege and our position as a guarantor of democracy and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us never forget the bottomless depravities, treasons, and amoral predation and greed of Trump’s many enablers and conspirators in the Fall of America as we struggle in the years ahead to reclaim our nation and our souls. We must hold them to account, but we must also reimagine our society and the many systemic and structural flaws by which we came to this broken and lost state.
In this time of darkness, our puppets will dance upon the stage of history and our imaginations, while a chiaroscuro of light as truth and democracy versus darkness as fascist tyranny and falsification, lies, illusions, rewritten histories, alternate realities, conspiracy theories and propaganda play for the kingdom of our souls and the fate of America and the world.
Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a prison planet of masters and slaves?
Now begins a great Reckoning, and we shall see.
As I wrote in my post of January 21 2025, Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House; Depravities, violations, sadism, monstrosity; the horrors of opening night spew forth from the diseased and rotting mind of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief of a fallen America as our deranged idiot mascot of fascism and theocracy returns to the White House with his Theatre of Cruelty.
Elon Musk’s Nazi salutes typify the minions of the Clown and will be remembered forever as a symbol of the Party of Treason and the Deplorables who voted it into power, who slavering and ululating with mindless abandon cheer him on to greater performances of the grotesque and the bizarre.
After preening before the crowd and dropping his pants so that various wellwishers could kiss his grublike white butt, Trump grinned, leered, grunted like a pig and hopped up on a table to squat and excrete a mass of Executive Orders which like Thing One and Thing Two immediately set about creating chaos.
Then he summoned one of the migrant children he had stolen from their parents, cleverly tied up Shibari style and prodded along by handlers in KKK hoods with fireplace pokers, who made their prisoner jump through hoops like lion tamers to resounding applause. “Here’s my very first Executive Order, ladies and gentlemen; we’re going to round up all the migrants, only the ones who aren’t white mind you, just so nobody worries that we’re treating people unfairly because they’re not people, and we’re selling the bond of their labor on an open exchange so you can all buy some, everyone can buy some slaves, and you can do anything you want with them, anything at all, because I said so just now, and it doesn’t matter anyway because only our kind are really truly human. And you can forget about legal and illegal immigrants, or if they were born here or not, because it’s the bad blood I’m worried about and not what it says on paper, we’re just starting with the immigrants but don’t worry, we’ll get to the rest of them eventually”.
And the crowd laughed and threw money, which Trump snapped out of the air like a dog catching treats.
Trump’s America: Pan’s Labyrinth trailer
Trump’s Presidency: Patterns of Force, Star Trek season two episode 21
References
Step-by-Step: Inside the Failed US Raid on Isfahan
February 25 2026 State of Disunion: Russia’s Puppet Tyrant of Vichy America Conjures Illusions As He Sabotages Democracy and Meaningful Citizenship, Abandons Our Universal Human Rights In America, Ukraine, and Palestine, Dismantles Our Institutions of Public Service, Enacts Massive Transfer of Wealth From the Poor to the Rich Elites Through Tariffs, Pursues A Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing With His ICE White Supremacist Terror Force, Commits Piracy On the High Seas In An Undeclared War On Venezuela and Cuba, and Fails To Conceal Or Misdirect Attention From His Role As Kingpin of a Global Human Trafficking and Child Predation Syndicate
Torch of Liberty 
