May 26 2024 The Art of Revolution

Tomorrow is Memorial Day in America, a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, multiplicities of history from which conflicting and ambiguous narratives of identity can be forged, stories we live within and inhabit and those which possess and falsify us, both those we must claim and those from which we must emerge.

This holiday codifies national identity as veneration of the sacred dead who died to win our liberty, for myself primarily a celebration of antifascist struggle in World War Two and in the ongoing theatres of World War Three in Russia, America, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Mali and the whole of sub Saharan Arica and the region of Lake Chad, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and now Gaza and the divided nation of Israel and Palestine, and should we fail to turn the tide of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Putin’s mad dreams of empire and a conflict which will engulf the whole of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, in which case civilization collapses and the world begins an age of tyranny and total war which humankind will not survive.

A spectre of our doom made all too real and timely as one year ago this week Putin began positioning his nuclear arsenal in Belarus for the Final Solution to the Ukrainian problem, and then Moldova and Poland, then NATO and the EU. Here is bottled death, the death of cities, nations, peoples, our species, and it calls to him like an evil genie, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”

We must stop it here, this massive failure of our humanity which is the Russian conquest of Ukraine and the Israel genocide of the Palestinians, because from this point of no retreat history collapses and we become nothing.

History, memory, identity; our symbols and holidays are a ground of struggle, which open and close doors to possible futures.

Who do we want to become, we humans? This is the question which drives and organizes our interrogations of the past and the future possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; not our addiction to power and wealth which the family storyteller of my youth William S. Burroughs called the Algebra of Need in his reimagination of Marx nor the processes of dehumanization of capitalism, imperialism, and carceral states of force and control which my friend Jean Genet described as necrophilia in his famous 1970 May Day speech at Yale in support of the Black Panther Party. These too are crucial to understanding why we are rushing blindly to our extinction, as we are falsified, commodified, and dehumanized by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, force, and power.

In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

Such questions illuminate the interdependence of our social and material systems, and the bidirectionality of forces of action and reaction. For our politics reflects and echoes our relationship not only with ourselves and each other, but with nature itself; our fear or embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.

As I wrote in my post of September 7 2019, As the Amazon Dies in a Bonfire of Our Vanities, a Final Message From Its Indigenous Peoples; Vast tracts of priceless and irreplaceable resources are now burning to clear the land for cattle and palm oil monoculture, in the Amazon and Borneo, and so many other sacred places of the earth, its beautiful wildness and glorious marvels sacrificed to profit and greed.

Jean Genet was right to call capitalism a kind of necrophilia; capitalism is a pimp at a bus station, an ambush predator waiting to cut the vulnerable out of the herd and convert beauty into profit, life into dead money. And what is money but a belief system, the promise to pay of a government and its value nothing more than the faith of those who trade with it in the reliability of that promise?

It is insubstantial as the wind, its value shifting with the confidence of those who use it, while real things, a leopard, a hornbill, an orchid, a tribal people living in harmony with nature, have intrinsic value which relies on nothing beyond themselves.

Which kind of things shall we value and preserve, the illusionary or the real, the impermanent or the eternal, the living, transcendent, and ineffable or the dead, meaningless, and profitable?

As I wrote in my post of August 1 2022, Politics Is About Fear as the Basis of Human Exchange, the Origins of Evil In the Wagnerian Ring of Fear, Power, and Force, and the State As Embodied Violence, and Revolution is the Art of Freeing Ourselves From It; A friend whom I regard as wise has asked me the question which redeems the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; are you all right?

Such questions become a moral compass which can reorient us when we are lost among the unknowns and nameless places of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value, for the bearers of questions as truthtellers perform the functions of the Just Humans in Jewish mythology who maintain the world and actualize its ongoing regeneration, an idea which references Maimonides’ principle of continual creation, that the universe is destroyed and recreated with each moment and must be remembered and renewed through tikkun olam or repair of the world lest we be consumed by the darkness of grief and despair, the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, the guilt of survivorship, and our helplessness and meaninglessness before the unanswerable tidal forces of death.

Here is my reply; As the line in Hamlet goes, “The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to” remain with us always as an imposed condition of struggle; yet I shall resist and yield not, and abandon not my fellows in their hour of need, as I was sworn to do by Jean Genet, nor shall I go quietly into the night which beckons, but rage against the dying of the light, of the fall of civilization, and of the negation of our humanity.

It gladdens me to hear that you are well in the wholeness of your soul; I am not, for in Mariupol the darkness began to look back at me as Nietzsche warned us.

There I tried to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, and failed. But as the Matadors said to me in Brazil the summer before high school when they welcomed me into their society, “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”

The question for me now is whether this is enough to tip the scales of history toward democracy and away from fascism and tyranny, enough to salvage some fragment of my humanity as a balance against degeneration, to remain a man and not become a monster and a beast.

As with our myriad futures and limitless possibilities of becoming human, we begin the journey of each new day toward the discovery of ourselves, a grand and fearsome thing which requires the transgression of boundaries and the testing of unknowns. And so hope remains for us all, for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

Be well, my friend, and never let our duty of the repair of the world become a task of abjection and despair, for it is a labor of Sisyphus shared by all humankind.

Thank you for your question, Professor Levine. I am not okay, and neither is America nor humankind okay; but one day, if we keep asking questions, we will be.

As I wrote in my post of August 1 2021, Freedom and Revolution as an Art of Fear and Pain: “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free,” so John Stuart Mill exhorts us in Principles of Political Economy, and I am thinking of this in terms of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and the primary strategic problem of how to delegitimize authority and demonstrate the meaninglessness of its power, how to seize power against impossible odds and in the face of twin threats of force and control, the brutal repression and massive military resources of state tyranny and terror and the pervasive surveillance and thought control of propaganda, lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls.

My father once said to me; ‘Never play someone else’s game. Whoever sets the terms and the rules of a game wins, so this is what you must seize first, and change the rules.” This wisdom was imparted as an observation of the differences between sports of personal combat, which have rules, and combat in war and revolution or anywhere beyond the boundaries of law or games with rules, which has none. In this it is like the distinction between politics and revolutionary struggle.

The Olympics playing out before us now offer us spectacles of excellence and the limits of human achievement, and I have been watching the fencing competition with great interest as performances which enact metaphors and tactical principles of struggle, a background against which a great theatre of shadow puppets is unfolding here in Brazil where mobilization for the re-election of Lula to the Presidency is coordinated with mass actions of the precariat underclass and workers unions, the resistance of indigenous peoples to genocide, and direct action against the institutions of state terror and tyranny.

As my father was a fencing coach, whose right arm was magnificently adorned with scars from actual sword duels, who taught both privately at our home and as a club at our high school where he also taught Forensics, English, and Drama, it was inevitable that I would have participated to some degree, but I loved saber and was reasonably good at it. How I came to discover this, and what it came to mean to me in time, is a story relevant to my understanding of freedom and the art of revolution as its praxis.

It was the Incident of the Bubble Gum which brought the disciplines of fencing and martial arts into my life, and changed how I was raised and who I became as a scholar and warrior.

As a nine year old I spent recess at elementary school either playing chess with the Principal in his office, reading in the library, or experimenting with the chemistry set in the lab, which doubtless seemed unfriendly and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals in bottles marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.

To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.

Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?

Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Membership, too, is a means of exchange. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong.

Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.

What you need now is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”

So my father described to me Sartrean authenticity and freedom as an escape from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a philosophy of total Resistance.

From this time I was engaged in the study of martial arts, fencing, and wilderness survival. Martial arts is a vast subject, and I trained in a number of fighting arts, but competitive saber fencing is a game with a very specific set of conditions which are directly relevant to actual combat, because like politics and war it is an Art of Pain and Fear.

Politics and how we choose to be human together, and the arts of revolution and war as seizures of power when we can no longer hear and speak to one another’s pain and dialog and negotiation finds its limit; these are arts of swallowing pain and metabolizing it as power and freedom.

To be clear, these are arts of power as intimidation, subjugation, and dominion through inflicting pain, and freedom won through discipline in embracing it. A fencing saber is a semi flexible steel whip with which we inflict pain to establish dominance; fencers run at each other and deliver punishing hits that feel like real cuts, a white hot searing pain so intense it can disrupt consciousness.

On the first pass I preferred trading hits or counterattack to any defense; why defend and be reactive and controlled when you can teach your enemy to fear you? On the second pass a weak opponent will hesitate, betrayed by his flesh and the fear of remembered pain it holds, and be lost. If he is without fear we meet as equals in the second and third engagements, and the game becomes one of chesslike multilayered strategies, diversion and surprise, timing, precision, and control through continuous assault and patterns of attack and entrapment which set up multi-staged openings by making the opponent react in defense to establish habits and expectations of action as norms and misdirection which one then violates with an unpredictable surprise. An art of politics, war, and revolution.

I love saber because it is primarily a contest of will and only secondarily of skill, in which ferocity in attack and willingness to accept pain to achieve victory are decisive, though guile, deception, concealment of intent, and an ability to think moves ahead of one’s opponent improvisationally in a time-compressed fluid and dynamic situation define greatness in this arena.

So also with the arts of revolution as both war and political struggle.

To be beyond control by pain and fear is to be free from the limits of our form and from subjugation by authority, for who cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered. As Jean Genet said to me when we were trapped by soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

To once again tell the tale of how Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982:

Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.

We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said with an ironic smile; “Fix bayonets?”

And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.

This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death and pain over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and to the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.

It is a principle of action I recommend to you all, for when we eliminate personal survival from our victory conditions, when we accept death and “the many ills to which the flesh is heir” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, as imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force and power, authority, and state terror and tyranny, we free ourselves from the limits of our flesh and can turn pain and fear as the means of enslavement against the tyrants of our dehumanization as forces of liberation and seizure of power. Freud called this death transcendence, and it is a precondition of autonomy in revolutionary struggle as self ownership of identity.

As Max Stirner said, “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized”.

Let us resist authority whenever it claims us, by any means necessary, and become exalted beyond ourselves in a liberty which cannot be taken from us.

As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.

What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance before his capture and imprisonment by Israel, 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.

To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.

Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;

“Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.

Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad

I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness. A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”

A fascinating essay by Cecil Bloom published in the Jerusalem Post, entitled The 36 Just Men Who Save the World, examines the mythic idea that existence is perpetuated not by the mighty, by Plato’s Philosopher-Kings or Hegel’s World Geniuses, not by Nietzschean Supermen or hegemonic elites, but by ordinary people through everyday acts of kindness toward others, as the movements of a butterflies’ wings may create whirlwinds.

This I call becoming Living Autonomous Zones rather than lamedvavnikim, and among the origins of the idea of mutualism and interdependence as the moral basis for society, one owned and originating in the unauthorized identities of the underclasses as a primary seizure of power from imposed ideas of virtue as submission to authority, the myth of Good Acts as the force which creates and maintains the material universe remains a compelling vision.

“There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints (lamedvavnikim) on whose piety the fate of the world depends. The Book of Proverbs provides an early source for the belief that the just man is the basis of the existence of the world: “When the storm wind passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation” (10:25). That is to say, that the righteous man holds up and supports the world just as the foundations of a building support it. Another source for the legend is from the Mishnaic period (1st-2nd century): “When the righteous come to the world, good comes to the world and misfortune is removed but when the righteous pass away disaster comes and goodness leaves the world” (Tosefta, Sofa 10:1). The specific reference to this phenomenon is in the Babylonian Talmud, which attributes to a fourth-century Babylonian teacher, Abbaye, the statement: “There are not less than 36 righteous men in every generation who receive the Shechina (the Divine presence). It is written, happy are all they who wait for Himâ” (Sanhedrin 97b; Sukkot 45a).

The Hebrew for Himâ (lamed vav) also represents the number 36 in Hebrew numerology (Gematria) and this provides the basis for the number of saints. The number may also be derived from the verse “Happy are all they who hope for Himâ” (Isaiah 30:18), which has been interpreted to mean: Happy are all they who hope for the 36,â€ that is, who depend or rely on these 36 just men.

There is a less well-accepted belief that there are 72 saints. The Zohar points to Hosea 10:2, which reads: “Their heart is divided.” The gematria of their heart in Hebrew is 72, which some have interpreted as representing 36 saints in Eretz Israel and 36 in the Diaspora.

At first the Talmud viewed lamedvavnikim merely as being good individuals, but later they began to be seen as hidden saints and many legends then circulated about them. Unrecognized by their fellow men and unknown even to each other, they are said to pursue humble occupations such as artisans or water-carriers. They do not admit their identity to anyone and, if challenged, would deny their membership. The Almighty is said to replace a lamedvavnik immediately upon death. A just man is believed to emerge and use his hidden powers when a Jewish community is threatened and return to obscurity once his task has been completed. This belief has given rise to the suspicion that a stranger who suddenly appears and who seems mysterious may be a lamedvavnik. Several legends claim that one of the 36 is the Messiah, who will reveal himself when the time is ripe. Others contend that as soon as a hidden just man is revealed, he dies.

It has been argued that the number 36 derives from sources other than those discussed above. One is that it comes from ancient astrology where the 360 degrees of the heavenly circle are divided into 36 units of dean and these deans were looked upon as guardians of the universe. Another theory is that 36 is the square of six which is said to be the symbol of the created world in Alexandrian Jewish philosophy but both these theories are not convincing.

Little research, however, seems to have been carried out to conclusively identify the legend’s origin. The lamedvavnik tradition is an Ashkenazi belief Sephardim do not recognize it but it has been present in Kabbalistic literature from the 16th century and in hassidic legends from the late 18th century. There are two 18th-century kabbalistic books whose authors, Rabbi Neta of Szinawa and Rabbi Eisik, a shohet from Przemysl, have been described as being lamedvavnikim. Hassidim recognize two categories of saint: those who work in full view and the hidden ones who belong to a higher order of men. Tales of the lamedvavnikim are widespread, particularly in hassidic literature. The noted hassidic scholar, Martin Buber, also introduced the lamedvavnik into some of his writings. Some hassidic tales emphasize the role of the saint behind a boorish or uncouth facade, a theme also used in some stories of the Baâl Shem Tov. Apparently, this was to make people believe that a noble soul could live within every man and that one should not draw conclusions from appearances.

Prominent writers, from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in the 18th century to 20th-century writers of the stature of S.Y. Agnon and Elie Wiesel have been attracted to the subject. Rabbi Nachman’s The Prince who was made entirely of precious stones introduces us to two lamedvavnikim who, on different occasions, helped a king to beget a daughter and a son and also to save the son from disaster. In Agnon’s The Hidden Tzaddik, the lamedvavnik is a stovemaker who wants to be buried in a plot where the stillborn are buried and whose grave should not be marked with a tombstone. Agnon followed the tradition faithfully, but Rabbi Nachman’s tale indicated that others knew of the identity of the two lamedvavnikim because it was only when the king ordered the Jewish community to help him that the two saints were produced. Elie Wiesel’s One of the Just Men also abandons the idea that the identity of these men is hidden, but Albert Memmi keeps to the traditional view in his The Unrecognised Just Men.

One novel on the subject, Andre Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, achieved best-seller status in 1960. Ernie Levy, a descendant of the 12th-century R.Yom Tov Levy is depicted as being one of the Just Men, inheriting the honor through his family line. The story of the Levy family begins in York in 1185, covers the Inquisition and pogroms in Kiev and describes many other indignities. Ernie is the last of the line and he is destroyed in Hitler’s gas chambers. Schwartz-Bart’s interpretation of the legend is a controversial one because the honor of being a lamedvavnik is not handed down from father to son. Nevertheless, this novel that won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary award, gave rise to much interest in the legend.”

Here is my witness of history regarding how I learned the principles of revolutionary struggle at the age of nine; I spent recess at school during fifth grade either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked as poison with the skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing ball at recess would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.

To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.

Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and fear becomes a lever you can use to seize power and win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”

Suicide Squad film trailer