Atlanta is a ground of struggle which symbolizes the whole civilizational crisis we are in the midst of globally between democracy and tyranny, expressed in its most terrible form as white supremacist terror and theft of citizenship through vote suppression and gerrymandering, key forms of subversion of democracy perpetrated by the Party of Treason as institutionalized racist terror and enslavement.
Though I’ve written much about these strategies of tyranny, my subject today is the universality of state terror as enforcement of divisions of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness in racist identitarian politics, and strategies of resistance we may use in liberation struggle against such systems of oppression.
Herein I make comparison between the white supremacist police state in Atlanta and throughout the former Confederacy which is now waging a Second Civil War in America, and in Serbia and Mariupol, for the strategies of both tyranny and resistance are the same.
We must be very clear where this kind of theft of citizenship and othering leads; for I have witnessed its inevitable consequences in both Sarajevo and Mariupol. To matter where you begin with racial and ethnic hierarchies of belonging and otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2023, The Battle For Atlanta: the Fight to Save a Forest From Destruction and Democracy From White Supremacist Police Terror; In Atlanta an American citizen has been assassinated by the police for the exercise of his rights of free speech and assembly in protest, and now open battle rages in the streets and in the forest under threat of destruction where Cop City is planned to be built.
This is now the Defining Moment of the Biden Presidency, which threatens the Restoration of America and typifies the historic confrontation of fascist tyranny and democracy in which we all live, a Rashomon Gate Event bearing change wherein we may reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
In effect, the police have seized the state in Atlanta, and are building a city for themselves from which to dominate the institutions of a free society of equals and steal both freedom and equality from us and our future.
Like the Roman Empire whose institutions we cloned in creating America, we now have a Praetorian Guard problem.
A private organization, the Atlanta Police Foundation, has co-opted the Atlanta City Council and Mayor of Atlanta in a scheme of institutionalized white supremacist terror and subversion of democracy which uses fear of otherness in the guise of crime to legitimize the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control in building a Cop City training facility for the repression of dissent and the enforcement of elite white power, wealth, and privilege.
While the conspirators in fascist tyranny have the money, the guns, and for the moment control political power, authority, and the institutions of the state they have infiltrated and captured, we the people have only our refusal to submit, our disbelief in the lies of those who would enslave us, our disobedience to unjust power, and our solidarity of action.
We choose a future for America and humankind in the Battle For Atlanta; who do we want to be, we Americans, we human beings? Masters and slaves ruled by tyranny and terror, or a free society of equals?
As I wrote in my post of September 16 2022, The Limits of the Human and Strategies of Subjugation and Resistance: the Case of Serbia; The mad dreams of a tyrant become the delusions of grandeur and jealous obsessions of a reviled former lover on a national scale; Putin and the Russian quest for imperial dominion and the legitimation of a criminal regime in its death throes reach out to engulf Serbia and her neighbors much as they did thirty years ago.
I speak here as a witness of history, having survived the sieges of both Sarajevo and Mariupol, which are parallels of the depravity, psychopathy, nihilism, and dehumanization of war; the origins of evil lie in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, in the weaponization of identities of faith, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, and nation in service to power and the centralization of authority to elite hegemonies and to the carceral and military state, and it is in submission to authority that we reach the limits of the human.
There is no just authority.
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 for their preferences for children.
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, like Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive.
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 Surrender. Never let anyone be taken alone by the police or any agents of the state, fight to the death to escape capture, escape is most possible in the first moments of arrest, abduction, or capture, and resist division with solidarity and coordinated action.
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. Enforced choice wins obedience for captors and far for importantly admission of subjugation by captives, and scenarios which make us complicit in evil inflict abjection, learned helplessness, and despair while erasing boundaries between good and evil as moral harm. This is common to all systems of oppression and unequal power, and is a key strategy in the seizure of authority by tyrants and police states. 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. 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; Resist By Any Means Necessary. 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.
We are the Spartans, and our lives must buy time for our civilization to awaken to its peril; this means some of us must escape to bear witness as at Marathon, or Mariupol.
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 while the children were forced to watch.
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.
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A timeline of voting restrictions passed by US states since 2013
Ten years of a crippled Voting Rights Act: how states make it harder to vote
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/star_trek_ii_the_wrath_of_khan/trailers/yKTLeLFT5rm6
Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, by Michel Foucault
Moby-Dick or, the Whale, by Herman Melville
The 120 Days of Sodom, by Marquis de Sade
Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface)
The Ego and Its Own, by Max Stirner
Torch of Liberty 
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