March 18 2024 Anniversary of the Founding of the Paris Commune

We celebrate today the one hundred fifty second anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, a glorious legacy of resistance in which all humankind shares. It conjures for me visions of the Bacchantes, a society of women revolutionaries who printed tickets with an image of the god of ecstasy and poetic vision on one side and the address of an enemy of the people on the other, bearing the legend “good for burning”. Distribution of the lottery tickets was through street runners as if it were an illegal gambling ring, something of no real interest to the police; teams bearing axes and torches would converge on the target as a flash mob.

An ancestor of mine was one of them, called the Red Queen in reference to the character in Alice in Wonderland due to her signature method of assassination, a friend of figures of the Commune including Karl Marx, Gustave Courbet, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and a comrade of Louise Michel; she was among the members of the Garde Militaire of the Commune who later immigrated to San Francisco as an intact unit, with their banners and uniforms.

The secret society of revolutionaries descended from the original Garde Militaire of the Commune throughout the world remains among the most influential of covert military organizations independent from and not authorized by any nation, though clearly not unique in this. I have always enjoyed the splendid irony that many of the world’s criminal syndicates originate exactly as the intelligence and special operations communities which are their counterparts and opposing forces do, as a final court of appeal of the people against tyrants and systems of oppression; crime and law enforcement, revolution and tyranny, the secret policeman and the rebel, arise together and are interdependent. As I have often written, the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce of resistance.

As her descendent and successor in revolutionary struggle, the Red Queen provides me with an informing, motivating, and shaping source; among her principles of action are, always go for the enemy leadership and decapitate the bosses, always strike without warning and anonymously with overwhelming force when the enemy is weakest, and never use the same trick twice.

I imagine her as a combination of Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes, which depicts the key figures of Suffragette history Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns.

When you dream of ur-sources of historical identity and archetypal figures who can act as guardians and guides of the soul and provide spaces to grow into, dream big.

Sustained and relentless waves of liberation actions and revolutionary struggle continue to hammer the world’s tyrannies of authoritarian force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil with massive protests and electoral activism, and as we did in the Autonomous Zones of Seattle, Portland, and New York and hundreds more throughout the world, we will emerge victorious from the fight against unequal power and oppression because whosoever refuses to submit to force and defies authority and those who would enslave us becomes Unconquered and free. Each of us is a Living Autonomous Zone, ungovernable as the tide, uncontrollable as the wind; we are wild things, who serve no masters.

The Black Flag flies from the barricades in al Quds-Jerusalem, Moscow, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and dozens of other cities in every continent of earth, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and by Louise Michel, veteran of the Paris Commune entitled the Red Virgin of Montmartre, who first flew it as an anarchist banner when she led the Paris worker’s revolt of March 9 1883; freedom versus tyranny, refusal to submit to authority, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of fear as the basis of human exchange and the social use of force as a principle of human organization.

With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by none.

Vive la Commune!

Ideas of my ancestor the Red Queen

Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes