Fracture, disruption, death and rebirth, transformation, the triumph of our Shadows and the embrace of our monstrosity, and sacred acts of the violation of normalities and transgression of the Forbidden; when the Wolf catches and devours the Moon in his eternal chase through the celestial spheres, it becomes a Blood Moon, harbinger of Chaos unleashed.
In the simultaneity of the Blood Moon and the Corn Moon, death and rebirth converge as reimagination and transformation.
A Corn Moon signals the harvest of crops planted during the festival of Demeter and the embodiment of the Grandmother, the Cailleach or Baba Yaga, in a corn doll to be replanted in the spring as regenerative magic during Walpurgisnacht, and for myself the harvesting of legacies of history from which we wish to escape and liberation from all laws and all limits as systems of oppression and from the tyranny of Authority and other people’s ideas of virtue.
The mythic functions, symbols, and rituals of the Corn Moon harvest also mirror and are interdependent with one of the central stories of humankind, the descent of Dread Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and of the Dead, as the Grandmother assumes her throne in our world for the winter. I like the versions of Persephone’s myth performed in the telenovelas Buffy the Vampire Slayer Once More With Feeling episode and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Hadestown musical and Stravinsky’s ballet, and I always eat the pomegranate seeds which grant passage to the Underworld on my hummus with crudities.
My aunties from my paternal grandmother’s family, the Noche of Genoa who had been members of the Jacobin Revolt of 1797 and came to America in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, living in a stilt house in Bayou La Teche Louisiana built from their ship with ancient canon guarding the approach when my family visited them in 1962, claimed to my mother to be hereditary priestesses of Persephone. They actually did all wear tall pointy hats and ankle length black dresses, and hovered around a giant iron cauldron kept boiling all day, though I have never found any evidence that our modern image of witches derived from fact other than my mother’s witness. The family had little contact with the outside world for over one hundred fifty years, and so may practice a form of magic uncontaminated by modern reconstructionist wicca; they spoke the Zeneize dialect of Ligurian, as well as the premodern Italian of Dante’s Florentine vernacular and Italian itself, and fragments of French as it was transitionally standardized under Napoleonic law with archaisms from the older Romance language Occitan; all of this they code switched freely with Latin, just as they wrote, which tells me more about the family history than any of their stories did. Like the layers of their language, it is possible that they retained genuine historical elements of classical paganism while adapting to successive changes in culture; including medieval ceremonial magic and the alchemy and Egyptian Freemasonry influences of the Enlightenment as typified by Cagliostro.
For the rites of Persephone, we can return to their classical sources as encoded in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and in the Roman period given in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Hyginus’s Fabulae, and Nonnus’s Dionysiaca.
Together they make a wonderful, terrible thing, the Blood and Corn Moons, to quote the Grinch who was quoting Rudolf Otto regarding immersion in the Infinite through ecstatic trance and vision, described as fascinans et tremendum, wonder and terror. A marvelous way to spend these three nights, while running amok and being ungovernable as a wild thing, exalted by the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Buffy – Once More, With Feeling – Dawn’s Ballet with the Dancing Demon
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix
“Our Lady of the Underground” – Sung by the Cast of Hadestown on Broadway
We celebrate this weekend twelve years of Resistance in Hong Kong to the Occupation by the Chinese Communist Party, the loss of liberty and the equality of all human souls, especially the rights of voting for their own leaders and those of a free press and free speech, and the theft by Chinese Communist Party imperial conquest and dominion in collaboration with the British state of what should have become an independent and sovereign nation and a free society of equals.
Hong Kong may yet achieve the dream of democracy, for though she is Occupied she is unbroken and unbowed. Who resists and refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free; and as such is also a bearer of the Promethean Fire of Liberty and able to set others free as Living Autonomous Zones.
What must be done, as Lenin asked in the essay that ignited the Russian Revolution? First America and the free world must recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong; second we and our allies must enact a total Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of all trade and manufacture with mainland China until the forces of Occupation withdraw.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As written by Helen Davidson in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘I was so naive’: 10 years after Umbrella protests, Hongkongers remember China’s crackdown: Anniversary of pro-democracy demonstration takes place in city where protest has been largely criminalised and activists silenced; “A decade ago today Hong Kong’s Central district filled with protesters, angry at Chinese government plans to renege on a promise of a fully democratic vote. What became known as Occupy Central, or the Umbrella protests, paralysed the city’s financial centre and galvanised a generation of young people.
Today Hong Kong’s streets are quiet. Protest has been largely criminalised, and many of the leaders of the Umbrella movement have been exiled, jailed or otherwise silenced.
Looking back, Wendy* remembers the feeling of that first day of Occupy. She was 25 and believed in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, and its promise to deliver universal suffrage to the people now that the territory had been returned from British to Chinese control. But instead, China’s government announced that in elections people would only be able to choose from a few candidates handpicked by a mostly pro-Beijing committee.
“It seemed that the government wanted to break their promise,” Wendy tells the Guardian from Hong Kong. “So I went out.”
Protest action against Beijing’s plan had long been in the works. Three activists known as the Occupy Trio – academics Benny Tai and Chan Kin-man, and reverend Chu Yiu-ming – had for months been training a few thousand people in non-violent resistance to occupy Hong Kong’s finance district as a last resort if demands weren’t met. But student protests earlier that week had escalated to the storming of a public square, and the Occupy start date was brought forward. Thousands more joined.
It was 28 September. Wendy thought it would be peaceful, but stayed clear of the frontlines just in case. Then at 5:58pm, police fired teargas into the peaceful crowd.
“I smelled some strange scents and my eyes got uncomfortable,” Wendy says. “I looked up to the bridge over me, seeing a group of police holding shields and stepping forward to the protesters. The scene was frightening. I just kept asking in my mind ‘Why do they treat us in that way?’.”
Emily Lau, a veteran pro-democracy advocate and then a sitting legislator, had gone to speak to police earlier that day about bringing in some equipment for the Occupy Trio. Instead, they arrested her. By the time she was released later that night “the whole world had changed”.
Lau and a colleague took a taxi from the police station to the top of a hill overlooking Central.
“When we looked down, we were shocked because the roads were blocked and there were people just everywhere occupying Connaught Road,” she says.
‘The first step in a bigger war’
The police force’s decision to use teargas on day one against a peaceful crowd had just brought more people to the streets. Soon a vast self-sufficient tent city took over the Admiralty district. Other camps formed in Mong Kok and Causeway Bay. Volunteer groups took care of provisions, sanitation, and tutoring of students, while calling for Beijing to reverse its plans and for Hong Kong’s chief executive, CY Leung, to step down.
Tony*, then a “regular office worker”, joined the camp in his lunch breaks and evenings. He describes what he saw as “astonishing”.
“It was a completely new Hong Kong, a beautiful Hong Kong that I had never seen before. We saw Hong Kong people were really passionate about democracy, about their future and having a say in how the city is run.”
Thomas*, a Hong Kong writer now based in London, says a lot of people got engaged in the movement for the first time because of how government and authorities had responded to their concerns.
“There wasn’t any attempt [by Beijing] to just sort of say: I understand this isn’t quite what you want, but this is the best we can get … It was literally: thank us and love us for it, aren’t we wonderful,” he says.
But as Occupy stretched on, the public’s tolerance waned and divisions deepened among protesters. The government remained unmoved, and police became more aggressive. Court injunctions ordered sections of the camps to clear, and Joshua Wong, a leader of the student protesters, ended his hunger strike. Numbers dwindled as the Trio urged people to leave, but the more radical student groups were determined to stay.
“T[he trio] didn’t think the whole thing should drag on for so long,” says Lau. “I supported ending it because it doesn’t mean ending the whole thing. You just go home and prepare to fight another day.”
It ended on 15 December after 79 days, without having achieved its stated aims and with deep fissures between pro-democracy factions, but still with a sense of hope.
“There was a big banner that said ‘We will be back’,” recalls Tony. “People were hugging each other and saying farewells. There was a sense that the battle hadn’t succeeded but it might be the first step in a bigger war.”
In an editorial one year later, the South China Morning Post said the outcome of the Occupy protests “proved that Beijing will not yield to confrontational tactics”. Protest leaders from both the older and student cohorts, including Tai, Chan and Wong, were eventually convicted and jailed.
But, Lau says, “the protests had woken up the young people”. New political parties and activist groups emerged. In June 2019, millions took to the streets again in massive pro-democracy protests. Participants used tactics and strategies fine-tuned during Occupy.
But there was less of the hope and fight of 2014. Instead, the 2019 protests felt like a defiant “last cry of an animal that was dying”, says Thomas. Again Beijing did not yield, launching a crackdown that shocked even the most pessimistic observers.
“The atmosphere and political reality today are totally different [to 2014],” says Willy Lam, a senior non-resident fellow and China specialist at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington.
Wendy looks back at how she felt in 2014 and laughs a little.
“I thought 2014 was shit at that time, but compared to 2019 it was just a piece of cake,” she says. “I was so naive, believing the government would be sensible, respect people’s voice, and abide by the promise in the Basic Law. But now I can say I was totally wrong.”
Tony, now a lawyer based in the UK, says the Occupy protests left an important legacy, strengthening Hongkongers self-identity and their aspirations for democracy, human rights, and rule of law.
“Now I see that as part of the diaspora … and I hope people in the free world don’t forget Hong Kong. There is still something to be fought for.”
As written in the Hong Kong Free Press, in an article entitled 10 years on, where are the leaders of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement now? ; “Saturday marks the 10th anniversary of the start of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, which saw protesters occupy major thoroughfares in key districts to call for the right to elect their own leader.
The 79-day civil disobedience campaign was launched in response to a ruling from Beijing that would allow Hongkongers to vote for their chief executive, but only from among candidates vetted by the central government.
The occupation of major roads was largely peaceful and leaders of the movement received relatively light sentences for the 2014 offences. Their political demands were not met. Huge protests which swept the city almost five years later, resulting in widespread damage and mass arrests and injuries, resulted in more than 10,000 arrests and saw hundreds sent to jail.
In 2020 a Beijing-imposed national security law came into force, prescribing penalties of up to life imprisonment and effectively ending public displays of dissent.
The movement began on September 28, 2014, when police fired tear gas at protesters who had gathered on Harcourt Road in Admiralty. It was the first time the chemical agent had been used on Hongkongers since the leftist riots in 1967. By the next day, protesters had occupied sites in Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok, where they would stay for weeks. The Umbrella Movement ended that December, after public transport companies affected by road closures obtained injunctions.
A number of protest leaders emerged during the civil disobedience campaign, some becoming household names in the city and beyond. Of the 12 activists charged in two high-profile trials in the years after the movement, two have spent the past few years in detention.
Others have left Hong Kong for places such as Taiwan and the US, and some appear to have withdrawn from politics entirely.
HKFP looks at the their involvement in one of Hong Kong’s biggest pro-democracy movements, where they are today, and their thoughts on how the city has changed.
Joshua Wong
Joshua Wong, in secondary school at the time and a leader of student group Scholarism, led a class boycott in the lead-up to the protests. He was arrested on September 24, 2014, after he and others stormed Civic Square outside the government headquarters.
Conviction and sentence: Wong was in July 2016 found guilty of taking part in an unlawful assembly at Civic Square and handed an 80-hour community service order. He was found not guilty of inciting others to take part in an unlawful assembly. The government then challenged the sentence in the Court of Appeal, with a Department of Justice (DOJ) representative arguing for the immediate imprisonment of the activists. The DOJ won and Wong was handed a six-month jail term in August 2017, but it was quashed in February 2018, when the Court of Final Appeal reinstated the original non-custodial sentences.
Where is he now? Wong has been detained since November 2020, when he was denied bail ahead of sentencing for a 2019 protest charge. In March 2021, he was charged with conspiring to commit subversion under the national security law imposed by Beijing in June 2020. He has since served prison terms for other protest-related offences, and is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to the subversion charge as part of the city’s largest national security case.
Nathan Law
A university student in 2014, Nathan Law was also a member of the Hong Kong Federation of Students. He was arrested over the storming of Civic Square.
Conviction and sentence: Law was in 2016 found guilty of inciting others to take part in an unlawful assembly over events at Civic Square and handed a 120-hour community service order. Following a government appeal, he was given an eight-month jail term, though that was quashed by the Court of Final Appeal.
Where is he now? Law announced in July 2020, days after Beijing imposed its national security law, that he had moved to the UK. Last year, the city’s national security police issued arrest warrants for Law and 12 other overseas pro-democracy figures for alleged violations of the security legislation, placing bounties of HK$1 million on each of their heads. He continues to be involved in activism, though in August the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC) – a Washington DC-based advocacy group which he co-founded – cut ties with Law. Media outlets reported that the development was related to allegations of sexual harassment made against Law, which he has denied.
Alex Chow
Alex Chow was a University of Hong Kong student and secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students during the Umbrella Movement, and like Wong and Law was arrested over the Civic Square storming. He told HKFP he spent the early weeks of the protests sleeping outside the Legislative Council and meeting pro-democracy lawmakers, activists and other civil society groups.
Conviction and sentence: Chow was found guilty of taking part in an unlawful assembly and given a three-week jail term suspended for one year. Upon a government appeal, the Court of Appeal handed him a seven-month jail term, which was later overturned by the city’s top court, ruling that the original suspended term was sufficient.
Where is he now? The 34-year-old lives in the US, where he researches Hong Kong’s civil society for a doctorate degree in geography, and sits on the board of the Hong Kong Democracy Council.
Chow told HKFP earlier this month it was “devastating” that there had been no large-scale protests in Hong Kong since national security laws came into effect. In 2014, there remained room to debate the possibility of democratic reform under Hong Kong’s governing One Country, Two Systems framework. Now, Chow said, that room had disappeared.
Chow added that he had no plans to return to the city as he did not think it would be safe for him to do so.
Benny Tai
Benny Tai, then a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, headed the Occupy Central With Love and Peace campaign, which advocated non-violent civil disobedience. A well-known pro-democracy activist, he was one of the most recognisable faces of the 79-day movement.
Conviction and sentence: Tai was charged with conspiring to commit public nuisance, “incitement to commit public nuisance” and “incitement to incite public nuisance,” and tried alongside eight others – known as the Occupy Nine – over their roles in the Umbrella Movement. In April 2019, Tai was found guilty of the first two charges and sentenced to one year and four months in jail.
Where is he now? Tai was among 47 pro-democracy figures charged with conspiring to commit subversion in the city’s largest national security case. He has been detained since being taken into police custody on February 28, 2021, ahead of a marathon bail hearing in early March that year. He pleaded guilty to the charge, and was described by prosecutors as the “mastermind” of the conspiracy to subvert state power. Like all the 45 convicted in the case, Tai faces up to life imprisonment.
Chan Kin-man
Chan Kin-man, then a sociology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, led the Occupy Central campaign with Tai and Chu Yiu-ming.
Conviction and sentence: Chan faced the same three charges as Tai, and was also convicted of the first two, receiving a 16-month jail term. The only one of the campaign’s three leaders to personally testify during the trial, Chan said in court that the Occupy trio had lost control of the movement after it escalated into a full-blown street occupation.
Where is he now? Chan moved to Taiwan in 2021 to take up a visiting professor position at the National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he taught courses on social movements and China. Last month, he said in a Facebook post that his stint had ended, and that he was joining the sociology department of Academia Sinica, a research school in Taipei.
Chu Yiu-ming
Chu Yiu-ming was a pastor with a long history of working with the underprivileged in society. A veteran activist, he helped pro-democracy supporters in China flee amid Beijing’s crackdown in 1989, as part of Operation Yellowbird.
Conviction and sentence: Chu faced the same three charges as Tai and Chan, but was found guilty only of conspiracy to commit public nuisance. The pastor, who was 75 at the time, was handed a 16-month jail term suspended for two years. The judge said he was impressed by Chu’s commitment to social justice, adding that he opted for leniency due to his age, health and contributions to society that spanned three decades.
Where is he now? The reverend left Hong Kong for Taiwan in December 2020, according to media reports. Earlier this month, Chu and Chan hosted a sharing and book signing in Taipei for a collection of essays they contributed to. The book was published in August to mark 10 years since the movement.
Raphael Wong
Activist Raphael Wong was a vice-chairperson of pro-democracy party the League of Social Democrats (LSD) during the Umbrella Movement. During his trial, he was said to have called on protesters to block roads near the government headquarters on the first day of the protests.
Conviction and sentence: Wong was found guilty of incitement to commit public nuisance and incitement to incite public nuisance. He was the only one of the Occupy Nine to have a criminal record, having been jailed for protest-related offences before, but the judge said he would not impose a heavier sentence on account of that. Wong was jailed for eight months.
Where is he now? Wong is still in Hong Kong and still a member of the LSD, continuing to take part in small scale protests staged by the group. In May, he and other LSD activists were arrested outside the court building where the verdict in the 47 democrats case was being handed down. They were released without charge.
Wong told HKFP in September that he could never have imagined the political developments seen in Hong Kong in recent years – that the protests and unrest in 2019 would happen the way they did, or that such demonstrations would essentially be made illegal. Looking back at the Umbrella Movement, Wong said it had been neither a success nor a failure, but “had its own significance.”
Shiu Ka-chun
Shiu Ka-chun was a social work lecturer at the Hong Kong Baptist University during the Umbrella Movement. According to the judgement in the Occupy Nine case, he was among the activists to call on protesters to occupy roads near the government headquarters on the first day of the Umbrella Movement.
Conviction and sentence: Shiu was found guilty of inciting others to commit public nuisance and “incitement to incite public nuisance.” He was jailed for eight months.
Where is he now? Shiu was elected as a lawmaker as a representative of the social welfare sector in 2016. He later founded a prisoners’ rights support group focused on helping those jailed over the protests in 2019, but which shut down in the wake of Beijing’s national security law. Shiu is still in Hong Kong and continues to support prisoners’ rights. He declined to comment on the Umbrella Movement.
Tommy Cheung Sau-yin
When the 2014 protests began, Tommy Cheung Sau-yin was a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he was president of the student union. He was also one of the leaders of the Hong Kong Federation of Students.
Conviction and sentence: Cheung was found guilty of “incitement to commit public nuisance” and “incitement to incite public nuisance,” and was jailed for eight months.
Where is he now? The former student activist was elected as a district councillor in Yuen Long in 2019 but resigned in October 2021. Last year, journalists reported that Cheung had written an article in a patriotic publication, which said he was affiliated with the Basic Law Student Centre, under pro-Beijing company the Hong Kong Basic Law Foundation.
Cheung has also made headlines due to racking up debt and was declared bankrupt by the High Court in July.
Eason Chung
Eason Chung was a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement. He was also a member of the Hong Kong Federation of Students.
Conviction and sentence: Chung was found guilty of “incitement to commit public nuisance” and “incitement to incite public nuisance.” He was jailed for eight months but sentence was suspended for two years, with the judge citing his motivation behind the offence, his age and “lack of experience in life.”
Where is he now? Chung moved to Taiwan in 2021, and to the UK in 2022, according to an essay he wrote for Taiwan media outlet The Reporter. Since March, the former student activist has been sharing his writing on social media under the handle “Yiuwa.is.writing,” where he explores topics such as travel and books.
Lee Wing-tat
A former Democratic Party lawmaker, Lee Wing-tat was a research officer during the Umbrella Movement.
Conviction and sentence: Lee was found guilty of “incitement to commit public nuisance” and jailed for eight months. The judge noted that Lee had served Hong Kong through “various public offices he held for over 30 years.”
Where is he now? Lee moved to the UK in 2021, according to Points Media, a UK-based news outlet covering Hong Kong. Having retired some years ago, he supports advocacy campaigns founded by Hongkongers in the UK, including one that called on people to vote for politicians who supported Hong Kong’s pro-democracy cause during the recent UK general election. In mid-September, Lee attended a birthday gathering of Hong Kong’s last British governor Chris Patten, which was organised by NGO Hong Kong Watch.
Tanya Chan
Tanya Chan was a lawmaker with the Civic Party when the Umbrella Movement began. She is also a barrister.
Conviction and sentence: Chan was found guilty of “incitement to commit public nuisance” and “incitement to incite public nuisance.” Her sentencing came about a month after the other eight in the Occupy Nine trial because she had to undergo surgery to remove a brain tumour. The judge handed Chan an eight-month jail term, suspended for two years in light of her health condition.
Where is she now? Chan announced in September 2020 that she would withdraw from politics and quit the Civic Party. Media outlets reported that she moved to Taiwan in 2021 and has taken up cooking as a hobby. Last April, a restaurant in Taipei announced that she was doing a one-day shift as a guest chef.”
As I wrote in my post of July 1 2024, This July, the 27th Anniversary of the Abandonment of Hong Kong to China and of Democracy to Tyranny; We mourn and organize resistance for the liberation of Hong Kong as a sovereign and independent nation from the imperial conquest and dominion of the loathsome Chinese Communist Party, throughout this July the twenty seventh anniversary of the abandonment of Hong Kong by Britain to a carceral state of force and control which was never a legitimate successor to the China with whom the original lease of 1898 was made, and the iconic fall of democracy to tyranny and state terror which it signifies.
On the first of July last year the despicable tyrant and criminal of violations of human rights Xi Jinping walked the streets of Hong Kong, an ambush predator wearing the face of a man which cannot conceal his intent to conquer and enslave the world, beginning with Hong Kong as a launching pad for the conquest of the Pacific Rim.
Why had he come to hold a triumphal march in imitation of Hitler in his 1940 visit to Paris; to terrify the people into submission, to claim it personally as a conqueror and imperial occupied territory, to reinforce an illusory legitimacy when all China has is fear and force? All of these things, and one thing more; this is also a marketing stunt aimed at the one partner in tyranny which can bring his regime down and liberate the peoples of both Hong Kong and China, the international business community. Send us your manufacturing jobs, he offers; we have slaves.
If we do not free Hong Kong from his talons, we will be fighting for our survival in the streets of San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle, in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Kolkata, Bangkok, in Sydney and Melbourne, Tokyo and Yokohama, any city which is home to a community of Overseas Chinese, which the government of the Chinese Communist Party considers their own citizens, whether or not they consent to be governed by Beijing. The CCP is uninterested in consent; for a vision of the world they would bequeath to humankind, we need only look at the vast prison and slave labor camp of Xinjiang. Or to the regimes of their partners and allies, such as Pol Pot, North Korea, and the ruling junta of Myanmar.
When our tiny community of Sonoma was sent a wave of Cambodian refugees in the 1980’s, my mother who like myself taught English at the high school was assigned to acculturate them. When the whole group vanished for weeks during an election, returning only after a scouting pair had determined it was safe, she asked where they all went. “To the hills” he was informed. “New President, soldiers come now.”
“That can’t happen here,” she said.
“That’s what we thought, before Pol Pot” was the reply. It’s what Hong Kong thought before the Great Abandonment and Occupation, and what we all thought about America, before Trump.
Let us stand in solidarity with the people of Hong Kong and of China in the cause of Liberty and a free society of equals.
When will the free nations of the world recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong and take action shoulder to shoulder with its people to throw off the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party?
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in Hong Kong, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and the veterans of the Paris Commune; freedom versus tyranny, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of the social use of force.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by ourselves and no other.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of February 15 2022, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals the embodied truth of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confers authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and delegitimizes tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Hong Kong; I do not like thee, Xi Jinping; and unlike Dr Fell in the beloved poem of 1680 by Tom Brown, I both know and can tell why as a truthteller and witness of history; state terror and tyranny, carceral states of force and thought control, disappearance and torture by police, universal surveillance, and the falsification of propaganda and alternate histories, imperial conquest and colonial exploitation, slave labor and genocidal ethnic cleansing, and fascisms of blood, ideology as a faith, and soil; of all this I accuse Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
These things I am able to say because of the freedom of access to information which I enjoy as an American citizen, because the transparency of the state in America and the legal protection and heroic stature in our society of whistleblowers and truthtellers is a firewall against secret power, and because the sacred calling to pursue the truth as both a right of citizens and a universal human right are among those parallel and interdependent sets of rights of which the common defense is the primary purpose of the state.
So are legitimacy, trust, and representation conferred to any state which is a guarantor of the rights of its citizens; the corollary of this is that any state whose primary purpose is not to guarantee the rights of individuals has no such legitimacy.
We must be a democracy and a free society of equals, or the slaves of tyrants.
And this we must resist.
Why we fight: the stakes of the Hong Kong liberation struggle can be seen in the corpses of political prisoners which toured the world as the CCP’s threat of terror and atrocities to silence global dissent.
They are coming for us and for all democracy protestors with teams of assassins throughout the world, and we must come for them first and bring regime change to the Chinese Communist Party.
As written by Helen Davidson in The Guardian, in an article entitled Hong Kong: Stand News journalists given jail terms for ‘sedition’; “The former editor-in-chief of Hong Kong’s Stand News has been sentenced to jail on sedition charges for the publication of news reports and other articles that prosecutors said tried to promote “illegal ideologies”.
Chung Pui-kuen, 55, the former editor-in-chief and the former acting editor-in-chief Patrick Lam, 36, were found guilty of conspiring to publish seditious materials in late August after almost a year of delays. The parent company of the now-defunct Stand News, Best Pencil Ltd, was also convicted.
The pair have been on bail since the conviction but both spent almost a year in jail since they were arrested.
On Thursday, the district court sentenced Chung to 21 months in prison, meaning he will have to serve another 10 months. Lam was released after the judge said he had factored in his poor health and other mitigating factors, including his short time in the role overseeing the outlet. Lam’s defence team had told the court earlier that a deteriorating kidney condition meant “any mistakes or delay in treatment could endanger his life”, according to the Hong Kong Free Press.
The judge, who was more than two hours late to proceedings, ordered Lam to be released immediately.
Chung and Lam were first arrested on 29 December 2021 after police raided the outlet’s newsroom. In October 2022, they pleaded not guilty. Chung chose to testify in court and spent 36 of the trial’s 57 days in the witness box and defended Stand News and its commitment to press freedom.
“The media should not self-censor but report,” Chung said. “Freedom of speech should not be restricted on the grounds of eradicating dangerous ideas, but rather it should be used to eradicate dangerous ideas.”
However, the court had found 11 articles – mostly opinion pieces – published by Stand News to be seditious. The 11 were drawn from 17 that prosecutors had said sought to promote “illegal ideologies” and to incite hatred against the governments in Hong Kong and China and the 2020 national security law. The judge found Chung responsible for publishing 10 of the offending pieces, and Lam one.
The Stand News case has been seen as a bellwether for Hong Kong’s diminishing media freedoms, and the increasing risk for journalists continuing to operate in the city. The sentencing comes a week after revelations that dozens of journalists had been harassed in a “systemic and organised attack” that included death threats and threatening letters sent to their employers, families, and landlords.
Stand News was raided six months after authorities raided and shut down the pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily, and arrested its founder, the media mogul and activist Jimmy Lai, as well as several executives and editors including his son. In the wake of the raids on Stand News, which also targeted the home of its news editor, Ronson Chan, the outlet removed its content from online and shut down.
The raid on Stand News prompted the independent outlet Citizen News to announce within days that it would cease operations, citing the increasingly risky media environment.
Launched in 2014, Stand News had been a significant source of news about the 2019 pro-democracy protests and the harsh crackdown by authorities, and was seen by Hongkongers as one of the city’s most credible outlets, according to surveys. Its reporters had been on the frontline of reporting protests including those that turned violent.
Its then-reporter Gwyneth Ho livestreamed her reporting from Yuen Long station as gangs attacked protesters and commuters and then the reporter herself. In 2020 Ho announced herself as a candidate for Hong Kong’s legislative elections but was later disqualified. In 2021 she was jailed for taking part in an “unofficial assembly” at a Tiananmen Square massacre vigil, and this year was convicted as one of the “Hong Kong 47” for running unofficial pre-election primaries in 2020.
A profile of Ho as an election candidate was among the 11 articles deemed seditious by the court. Others included a feature on student protests, three commentaries by the self-exiled former legislator and pro-democracy campaigner Nathan Law, and four others by veteran journalist and journalism teacher Allan Au. Au’s subjects included a piece on “new words in 2020” relating to the national security crackdown, and criticisms of the national security law and a related trial. Another article by Au accusing authorities of using the sedition law – under which the Stand News editors were convicted – as “lawfare”.
The sedition law dates back to the British colonial era and had been little used until authorities began charging pro-democracy figures with its crimes after the 2019 protests. It was repealed in March after Hong Kong introduced its own domestic national security law.”
‘I was so naive’: 10 years after Umbrella protests, Hongkongers remember China’s crackdown
In a free society of equals, only we ourselves have the right to choose who we will become, and no one may authorize or limit our possible identities, for this is falsification, enslavement, and theft of the soul.
When subversive organizations of white supremacist terror, patriarchal theocratic sexual terror, and tyranny as the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control with all its attendant evils and paraphernalia of thought control, surveillance, and repression of dissent infiltrate our institutions to enact book bans and other censorship, let us expose and challenge them for what they are; attempts to pervert education from the teaching of questioning to produce citizens who are co owners of the state and guarantors of each others rights into obedience to authority.
And remember children; they only ban books that can give you the power to see through the lies of those who would enslave us, and to free yourself from systems of oppression, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
For an example of how theocratic and fascist organizations pursue the subversion of democracy through book bans as part of a broad assault on our liberties and freedoms, we may look to the odious Moms For Liberty.
As written by Mark Romano in MSN, in an article entitled 10 Examples of How Moms for Liberty are the Real Threats to our Freedoms; “Moms for Liberty has positioned itself as a champion for parental rights and freedom in education, but their actions often tell a different story. This group, while claiming to advocate for liberty, promotes policies that restrict personal choice and challenge diverse perspectives in schools. Many parents and educators question how a movement that rallies against certain books and ideas can truly call itself a defender of freedom.
With chapters across 45 states, Moms for Liberty has gained visibility in education politics. Their push for influence in school districts raises concerns about the limits they want to place on curriculum and expression. This blog post explores ten notable examples that highlight how their agenda can contradict the very values of liberty and freedom they purport to support.
As this discussion unfolds, it becomes clear that the issues at stake go beyond educational choices. They touch upon broader themes of inclusivity, freedom of speech, and the diverse fabric of American society.
Defining ‘Liberty’ and ‘Freedom’
Liberty and freedom are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct meanings.
Liberty refers to the protection of individual rights and the absence of oppression. It’s about having the legal and social space to make choices.
Freedom, on the other hand, can mean the power to act, speak, or think without hindrance. It’s more about the ability to pursue personal desires.
In a democratic society, both are essential for human dignity.
Moms for Liberty positions itself as a champion of parents’ rights. Yet, their actions often contradict their claims about supporting true liberty and freedom for all.
By limiting access to certain books or topics in schools, they restrict the freedom of students to learn and explore. This creates a tension between their stated goals and the actual impact of their actions.
Understanding these terms helps clarify the debate around organizations like Moms for Liberty. It shows how their belief system can shape policies that may not align with broader definitions of liberty and freedom.
Educational Censorship
Educational censorship is a growing concern as different groups push to control what students learn. This movement often focuses on banning books and shaping classroom discussions, which can limit students’ exposure to diverse ideas.
Banning Books
Banning books has become a notable strategy. Groups like Moms for Liberty often target specific titles that address topics like race, gender, and sexuality. They argue that these subjects are inappropriate for students.
Many schools have faced pressure to remove certain books from libraries and reading lists. This action creates gaps in education. Students miss out on important discussions about society and history. For instance, classics that tackle civil rights issues may get pulled. This not only limits freedom of choice but also diminishes critical thinking skills in young readers.
Controlling Classroom Content
Controlling classroom content is another tactic used by Moms for Liberty. They advocate for removing lessons that introduce concepts related to social justice and identity. Their focus is often on ensuring that political views align with specific ideologies.
Teachers may find themselves restricted in how they address topics in class. This can lead to a watered-down curriculum that avoids important issues. For example, discussions about historical injustices might get minimized or skipped altogether. When educators cannot discuss various perspectives, students lose the chance to develop a well-rounded understanding of the world around them.
Opposition to Inclusive Policies
Moms for Liberty often challenges inclusive policies, focusing on LGBTQ+ rights and racial equity. Their stance leads to heated debates within communities, limiting the support for diversity in schools.
Resistance to LGBTQ+ Rights in Schools
Moms for Liberty has actively opposed policies that support LGBTQ+ students. This includes pushing back against discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms.
They argue that these topics should not be part of school curriculums. Their campaigns often focus on banning certain books or materials that include LGBTQ+ narratives.
Many school board meetings see strong vocal opposition from Moms for Liberty members. Their influence raises concerns about students feeling safe and represented, as they push for a more traditional approach to education.
Challenging Racial Equity Initiatives
Moms for Liberty also opposes racial equity initiatives in schools. They argue that these programs create division.
Members often claim that teaching about systemic racism is anti-American or promotes “critical race theory,” even when such teachings are not part of the curriculum.
This opposition can lead to the rejection of programs aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion. They seek to eliminate discussions that highlight historical injustices, which can prevent students from understanding different perspectives.
This resistance can limit resources meant to support marginalized students, impacting overall school culture.
Parental Rights Overreach
Moms for Liberty often advocates for parental rights in ways that some see as overstepping boundaries. This can affect health and safety measures in schools and infringe upon the choices of other families. The implications of these actions are significant and raise questions about individual freedoms.
Health and Safety Measures
In their push for parental control, Moms for Liberty has challenged essential health and safety protocols in schools. One notable example is their opposition to mask mandates during health crises. They argue that parents should decide whether their children wear masks, but this stance can compromise the safety of the entire student body.
Additionally, this group has pushed back against vaccination requirements. By questioning established health guidelines, they risk creating environments where preventable diseases could spread. Their actions often ignore the broader public health implications, focusing solely on individual parental choice.
Infringing on Other Parents’ Choices
Moms for Liberty’s focus on parental rights can inadvertently affect other families’ rights. For instance, when advocating for book bans in schools, they impose their values on all students. This limits access to diverse perspectives and important topics, which can help shape young minds.
Moreover, their initiatives can place undue pressure on educators. Teachers may feel forced to avoid certain subjects to comply with parental demands, impacting the quality of education. In this way, the push for expanded parental rights can lead to a narrowing of educational content, which can harm all students.
Interference with Curriculum Development
Moms for Liberty often challenges curriculum decisions in schools. Their actions raise concerns about how their involvement affects educational choices.
Critique of Curriculum Experts
Moms for Liberty has taken steps to question the expertise of curriculum designers. They believe that parents should have a strong say in what children learn. This point of view often leads to dismissing input from educational professionals.
For example, when schools adopt certain materials, these parents might push back, labeling them as inappropriate. This can create tension between educators and parents.
The result? Educators may feel pressured to alter lesson plans to appease concerned parents. This interferes with the educational process.
Limiting Teacher Autonomy
Teacher autonomy can take a hit when groups like Moms for Liberty get involved. Teachers typically select materials and methods to suit their students’ needs. When parental groups pressure schools, it can limit educators’ choices.
For instance, teachers may shy away from diverse perspectives in literature or science due to fear of backlash. Instead of encouraging open discussions, they might stick to safer, less controversial topics.
This restricts students’ learning experiences. A narrow focus on certain viewpoints can limit critical thinking and understanding. It affects the overall educational environment, making it harder for students to explore complex issues.
Advocacy Against Evidence-Based Education
Moms for Liberty actively challenges the principles of evidence-based education. Their actions raise concerns about the reliance on established research and factual history in schools. Here’s a closer look at two significant aspects of this advocacy.
Rejecting Scientific Consensus
Moms for Liberty has been known to oppose scientific findings, especially those related to health and education. They tend to favor personal beliefs over the conclusions supported by experts.
For example, this group often questions the importance of mental health initiatives that rely on data-driven approaches. They argue against programs that highlight the impact of social and emotional learning, dismissing them as unnecessary. This kind of rejection can limit students’ understanding of crucial topics like mental health and wellness.
Promotion of Historical Misrepresentations
The group also promotes selective versions of history that misrepresent facts. In efforts to influence school curriculums, Moms for Liberty pushes for bans on teaching slavery and civil rights topics. They believe these subjects create discomfort for students and parents alike.
This advocacy can lead to an incomplete education. Omitting such key historical events prevents students from understanding the complexities of race and society. Instead, students may be presented with a sanitized view of history that ignores significant struggles and achievements.
Political Maneuvering
Moms for Liberty actively engages in political strategies to influence local education. They focus on targeting school boards and use emotional tactics to push policy changes.
Electioneering School Board Campaigns
Moms for Liberty aims to place their candidates on school boards across the country. They have launched campaigns to support candidates who align with their conservative values.
Their strategy involves grassroots efforts in communities, mobilizing parents and like-minded individuals. They organize events to drive voter turnout and raise awareness about school issues. This focus on local elections has made them a notable player in education politics.
With over 275 chapters in 45 states, they work to ensure representation that echoes their vision. This approach creates a network that can effectively challenge opposing views.
Policy-Making Through Fear
Another tactic employed by Moms for Liberty is using fear to influence policy decisions. They often highlight issues such as critical race theory and gender identity in schools. These topics can evoke strong emotions among parents.
Moms for Liberty calls for book bans and strict policies regarding curriculum content. By framing these actions as necessary for children’s safety, they gain support from concerned parents. This fear-based strategy is effective in achieving their goals.
Their messaging resonates with many who feel anxious about modern education. By capitalizing on these fears, they seek to reshape public education to fit their ideals.
Undermining Professional Educators
Moms for Liberty has been criticized for actions that challenge the authority and expertise of teachers. This approach can create a hostile environment for educators and diminish the quality of education students receive.
Dismissal of Teacher Expertise
Moms for Liberty often questions the qualifications and methods of professional educators. They argue that teachers are not to be trusted with sensitive topics, claiming these professionals push certain ideologies.
Teachers spend years studying and training to understand how to educate their students effectively. By undermining this expertise, the group can create a divide between parents and educators. This can lead to conflicts at school board meetings and an atmosphere of suspicion.
Such actions might result in teachers feeling unappreciated and undervalued. When teachers worry about their job security or reputation, it can lead to less effective teaching practices.
Encouraging Distrust in Educators
Moms for Liberty advocates for transparency in schools. While this sounds good, it often breeds distrust among parents towards educators.
By promoting ideas that teachers are responsible for indoctrinating students, they create fear and concern among parents. This makes parents more likely to challenge teachers’ decisions or methods without a clear understanding.
Such distrust can harm the classroom environment. Educators might feel the need to look over their shoulders, impacting their teaching style. Instead of focusing on learning, teachers may spend time justifying their choices to parents and school boards.
This breakdown in trust not only affects teachers but can also create a negative atmosphere for students trying to learn.
Stifling Student Expression
Moms for Liberty has faced criticism for actions that seem to limit student expression in schools. This includes restricting student speech and discouraging critical thinking. These actions raise concerns about how students engage with different ideas and perspectives.
Limiting Student’s Speech and Clubs
Moms for Liberty has been linked to efforts that restrict student speech. This includes challenges to student-organized clubs that promote diversity and inclusion.
For example, some schools have seen pushback against clubs that focus on LGBTQ+ issues. Members of these clubs often face strong opposition, limiting their ability to create a supportive environment.
Parents have voiced concerns about these clubs, saying they conflict with their values. Consequently, school administrators sometimes feel pressured to remove or limit these clubs.
This creates an environment where students may feel unsafe expressing their identities and beliefs. Many students cherish these clubs as their safe spaces to discuss important topics.
Discouraging Critical Thinking
Another concern is the trend of discouraging critical thinking in classrooms. Moms for Liberty promotes a certain viewpoint on various issues, often pushing back against curricula that include diverse perspectives.
For instance, they have challenged books and educational materials that present different historical viewpoints or explore complex social issues.
This can lead to a narrow understanding of important topics for students. It limits their ability to engage in discussions and form their own opinions.
When students are not exposed to a wide range of ideas, they miss out on essential skills needed for critical thinking. Encouraging curiosity and questioning is crucial for their development.
Promotion of Homogeneous Ideology
Moms for Liberty’s actions often reflect a consistent pattern of promoting a narrow set of beliefs. This approach can lead to a lack of diverse educational experiences for students. Here are two key areas where this ideology is evident.
Advocating for ‘One-Sided’ Learning
Moms for Liberty pushes for educational policies that favor specific viewpoints. This often means supporting curricula that highlight conservative perspectives while sidelining alternative ideas. For example, they have opposed lessons that include topics like critical race theory and sexual orientation.
This focus can create a limited view of history and social issues. When students only learn about one perspective, they might struggle to understand broader societal dynamics. Effective education thrives on presenting a variety of viewpoints.
Opposing Diverse Perspectives
The organization frequently challenges programs that aim to include diverse voices. They argue that introducing concepts related to race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities threatens traditional values. For instance, Moms for Liberty has taken steps to block LGBTQ+ protections in schools, claiming these measures infringe on free speech.
Such actions can lead to an environment where students feel excluded or marginalized. By opposing a rich tapestry of perspectives, they limit students’ ability to engage with the world around them. This stance raises concerns about inclusivity and understanding in educational settings.”
As I wrote in my post of September 8 2024, International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?; In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.
What is a library for?
Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.
At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?
Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated meaning and value.
This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban; Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:
Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community
Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles
Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us
Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.
The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.
As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.
That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.
Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.
Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.
In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”
As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.
One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”
On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”
Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).
A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.
These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.
In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.
In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”
In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.
Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.
It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.
If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”
As I wrote in my post of October 4 2021 What is the True Purpose of Public Education in a Democracy?
In The Addams Family Goes to School, wherein the truant officer is dispatched to bring Pugsley and Wednesday, aged 6 and 8 who have never been to school, our introduction to this family of glorious misfits, monsters, and forgotten gods, we are presented with a morality play of revolutionary struggle and a recurring theme of the series in which individuals and society are locked in a titanic battle for ownership of identity, with the stakes being autonomy or theft of the soul.
What is the true purpose of public education?
School is the forge of normality, authorized identities of sex and gender, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, the institutionalization of nationalist values and narratives of exclusivity, valorization of competition, violence, militarism, and the apologetics of capitalist elitism as meritocracy, and of hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness and divisions of race. Here we sort future masters from those who will serve them.
Public education is also our one chance to reimagine and transform our civilization through its members, to produce citizens of a free society of equals who can fulfill the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Tyranny cannot withstand exposure, truthtelling, and the witness of history.
Can democracy function as diversity and inclusion, or does throwing all the children in a pen together to sort themselves out always result in assimilation and hierarchies of exclusionary division or making everyone the same?
The politization of public education has become national news recently with violent and disruptive confrontations during school board meetings, but this is nothing new. Education is a ground of struggle; who is chosen to succeed and take their place among our elite and who will clean their houses, serve their food, produce the goods and material basis of their survival. At stake here is nothing less than the definition of our humanity, of freedom and equality, of who will manage systems, process symbols, ideas, and information, create and have the power to change civilization, and who will service them.
Every aspect of education as a social system, textbooks and the canon of literature, how history is taught, tests and success filters for access to power and wealth, class stratification or mobility, patriarchy, racial divisions, language, all of it is volatile and of crucial importance to the project of democracy.
As written by Sherman Dorn in The Washington Post; “Chaos and violence seem to be the themes of the first month of school. To many observers, these may appear to be exceptional, unprecedented times. But there’s a long history of public schools serving as ideological and physical battlegrounds, particularly when it comes to conflicts over citizenship and civil rights.
The violent response this fall by some Americans to public health measures and teaching our history of racism is an echo of violent responses in the past to efforts to broaden the reach and mission of schools. And this history also shows that how government reacts is not foreordained, and that the choice of responses will play a major role in determining the long-term consequences of this violence.
In the 1830s and 1840s, industrialization in Massachusetts triggered civil disorder, including the Boston riots between Protestants and immigrant Catholics. State Secretary of Education Horace Mann thought he had a solution to this strife, arguing for educating all children together in what he called common schools designed to foster a background that all children would share.
But this concept proved fractious from the start.
No sooner did common schools emerge than violence engulfed them. In 1844, Catholic families in Philadelphia sought representation in the schools. Yet many White Protestants saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to a burgeoning national identity, and nowhere was that assault clearer than in their supposed attempts to take over the public schools. So nativists spread false rumors that Catholic immigrants were pushing local public schools to remove Bibles.
These rumors, fear and anger spread and neighbors took to the streets. Multi-day riots in May and July resulted in the burning of multiple Catholic churches and the deaths of more than two dozen people.
Violence at and around schools became even more widespread after the Civil War. As newly elected Black politicians joined with community members to create a system of public schooling in the South, they fused schooling and citizenship. All the Reconstruction-era state constitutions that Congress approved had education embedded as a right. The appearance of public schools for Black children and the promise of access to all aspects of society enraged some White Southerners who feared the erosion of a social order that gave them privilege and power. Those fears translated to direct attacks.
Because of the central role of public education in the new definition of American citizenship, Southern racists targeted schools as part of an explicit counterrevolution to undermine Reconstruction and civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan regularly attacked schools, and being a teacher in a Black community was one of the most vulnerable occupations throughout the late 19th century.
For a brief period in the early 20th century, school violence dissipated, but for the worst of reasons. Across the South, White elites imposed systems of disfranchisement and segregation; systematically and structurally disadvantaged, Black schools became less of a visible threat to White supremacy and reigning power arrangements.
But schooling became the center of widespread community conflict and violence again in the early 1940s. When two Jehovah’s Witness children, Lillian and William Gobitas, refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in their Minersville, Pa., public school classroom, they were expelled. Their case wound through the federal courts, finally reaching the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the school district.
In the wake of that decision, Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in communities across the country, often with members of the American Legion as leading local vigilantes. Coming to the schools with a mob mentality, Legionnaires and others identified the pledge in public schools as fundamental to American identity and those who refused to say it as national threats. In wartime, the mobs — and many other Americans — viewed dissent as suspicious and unpatriotic.
From Litchfield, Ill., to Kennebunk, Maine, entire towns were wracked by anti-Witness mobs. Children who refused to say the pledge for any number of reasons faced expulsion and threats of incarceration, as did their parents for encouraging juvenile delinquency.
In part shamed by the violence following their earlier decision, the majority of the court reversed itself three years later. As Justice Robert Jackson explained in his majority decision, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Despite this shift and the protection of students’ right to dissent, public schools remained figurative and literal battlegrounds in the fight over American identity and rights.
In the fall of 1957, White mobs in Little Rock, Ark., turned out in protest of the nine Black students desegregating Central High School. As Melba Pattillo Beals described in her memoir, on the first day of school her classmate Elizabeth Eckford was sandwiched between Arkansas National Guard members refusing to let her enter the school and “a huge crowd of white people screeching at her back … [having] closed in like diving vultures … [who] shouted, stomped, and whistled as though her awful predicament were a triumph for them.” The mobs dispersed only after President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to enforce federal court orders to desegregate.
In Nashville the same month, a violent opponent of desegregation bombed Hattie Cotton Elementary School. No one was hurt in the late-night bombing, but as historian Sonya Ramsey explained, the single Black student in the school stopped attending.
In the 1970s, White mobs attacked buses carrying Black students as they arrived at South Boston High School.
Across American history, schools have been vulnerable to periodic violence that surrounds debates about citizenship and equal rights in education, including the role of schools in fostering shared childhood experiences, in building citizenship and equal education regardless of race, and in allowing principled dissent from rituals.
The strife this year fits into that broader pattern. To the parents and politicians angry or confused about critical race theory, like the parents and politicians angry or confused about mask mandates and health policies, the public schools are a key front in a battle for their rights and standing as citizens.
Debate over the role and purposes of public schools is a healthy sign of a functioning democracy. But violence around schooling is fundamentally at odds with the give-and-take of democratic decision-making. And it demands a strong response from authorities.
In 1943, the Supreme Court reversed the decision that had triggered mob violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1957, Eisenhower responded to the resistance to desegregation in Arkansas by dispatching federal troops.
Yet when the government has failed to confront violence, the consequences have been severe. In 1833, abolitionist Prudence Crandall opened her Canterbury, Conn., boarding school to Sarah Harris and other Black girls and women. Public officials responded by making it illegal for her to admit students from out of state without town permission, prosecuted her and stood by while a mob destroyed much of her school in 1834. Crandall moved to Illinois the next year, costing Connecticut a dedicated educational leader and beginning two centuries of a long troubled history of school segregation in New England.
The history of education teaches us that violence surrounding democratic schooling is part of a recurring pattern and that we have a choice to passively accept or assertively confront violent impulses.”
As I wrote in my post of March 22 2020, The Subversion of our Education System and Democracy; The suspension of our national standardized testing has revealed a failure of our education system; the commodification and privatization of learning and the modeling of our schools on factory production has produced a generation of Americans who can follow orders, perform routine tasks, and parrot facts, but whose abilities to create, invent, reason, and analyze and interpret facts have been crippled. This is intentional.
Educatus, the Greek word origin of education, means to bring out rather than to stuff facts in. It is an idea bound together with that of citizens as co-owners of their own government in a democracy, and equally responsible for one another and for the stewardship of its four pillars of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
Our civilization is founded and premised on its ability to question itself; this capacity for adaptation and transformation sets democracy apart from the tyrannies of priest-kings which had come before. From our origin in the Forum of Athens, the dialectics of Socratic method has been the forge of our identity as an anti-hierarchical culture, a free society of equals in which the greatest duty of a citizen is to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, to incite, provoke, and disturb, and we must return this process to its central role in education if liberty is to survive and flourish in this age of state terror and control.
We have permitted the subversion of our education system and democracy by those who would enslave us. And we must take it back.
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2021, Truth, Lies, and History as a Ground of Struggle; the Case of Critical Race Theory Repression; We are confronted today with the realization of a nightmare and prophetic vision written by George Orwell in 1984, the classic novel of unequal power and the authoritarian nature of government which rendered in the chiaroscuro of a newsreel depicting the liberation of concentration camps a fictional interrogation of totalitarianism as a companion volume to Hannah Arendt’s nonfictional The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The remnants of the Fourth Reich and the organizations of white supremacist treason and terror within our government who remain loyal to Trump’s vision of a white ethnostate want the government to control what is taught as history in our schools, which would be the death knell of freedom and equality in America, and are enacting a furious assault on our values and on public education as a guarantor of an informed electorate in order to render meaningless the idea of citizenship, the co-ownership of the state by its members, in parallel with vote suppression legislation.
As I wrote in my post of June 22 2021, Our History Swallows Us Like An Infinite Moebius Loop and We Become Prisoners of Its Gordian Knot: the Case of Kurdistan; History becomes a wilderness of mirrors; of lies and illusions, distorted and captured images endlessly reflected which violate our uniqueness, falsify us, limit and entrap us in authorized identities and narratives which serve the interests of elite power and not our own.
Our histories and memories are the anchorages of our identity and the wellspring of our becoming, networks of connectedness which sustain our harmony and wholeness; but such nets can ensnare us as well, and become atavisms we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
Our history swallows us like an infinite Moebius Loop, and we become prisoners of its Gordian Knot; the case of Critical Race Theory repression illumines the vicious cycle of fear, power, and force as racism and fascist tyranny overlap and intermingle hideously, consuming its most vulnerable population as sacrifices on the altar of wealth and power.
As I wrote in my post of December 5 2020, Whose Story Is This?; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post of June 19 2020, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary 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.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education in the discipline of history asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, and the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
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.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
Fahrenheit 451 1966 Trailer | Oskar Werner
US public schools banned 10,000 books in most recent academic year
Survey by PEN America suggests bans nearly tripled nationwide from previous year’s figure
Banned Books in US Tripled to at Least 10,000 Last Year Under GOP State Laws: Iowa and Florida alone banned around 8,000 titles in libraries and public schools during the 2023-2024 school year.
Book bans use ‘parental rights’ as cover to attack civil liberties, Democrat warns: Florida congressman Maxwell Frost, who introduced Fight Banned Books Act, says bans are ‘baseless attack on our civil rights’
August 12 2024 A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth: the Case of Salman Rushdie, Champion of Our Liberty In Writing As A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; so also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
On this day six years ago the people of the New York, Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones were victorious over the federal government of the United States and the forces of occupation which attempted to seize our cities using an illegal secret army of Homeland Security and their deniable forces among white supremacist terrorist organizations including the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, Patriot Prayer, and others created as fronts or acting under Homeland Security command and control to disrupt the Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice and equality through random abduction, torture, and assassination to repress dissent, and a national campaign of arson, looting, and violence to capture the narrative of the protests and discredit the cause of equality and the abolition of racist police violence and state terror. Over these brutal and criminal attempts to impose racist tyranny on our nation by the Fourth Reich, the people of America emerged triumphant as the federal government formally and publicly ceded control of these three key cities to the people as Autonomous Zones.
In accord with Trump’s Directive of Surrender, the US Department of Justice swiftly designated three cities, including Seattle, Portland, and New York City, as “anarchist” jurisdictions, officially ceding control to the free peoples who have seized their birthright and returned private and state property to the commons from which it was stolen and legitimacy from the government which has squandered it.
Henceforth let us call those cities for which power and ownership has been transferred to us by the Triumvirs of the American Fourth Reich, the President of the United States, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, by their true names; the New York, Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones.
May they be the first of many, throughout America and the world.
Let us honor all those who have made the liberation of America from the grip of the Fourth Reich possible, both in their successes and in their sacrifices for the cause of democracy and humankind. Especially our hope for a better world owes a tremendous debt to the people of these Autonomous Zones which have led the charge into the future, to the largely anonymous and wonderfully diverse and nonhierarchical networks of alliance and mutual aid, resistance and revolution, including those like myself who identify as Antifa and the network of which my publication Torch of Liberty is a voice, and the visionary and transformational leaders of the New York Democratic Socialists of America including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar, Alessandra Biaggi, Jamaal Bowman, Jabari Brisport, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, and Zohran Mamdani.
Here is my initial response posted on September 21 2020; Thanks for official recognition of public ownership of our areas of control, federal government. Now get out of our cities and leave us in peace.
We need nothing from you, nothing but a Reckoning for the inequalities and injustices of a history from which we must emerge.
A motto from our antiquity surfaces in this context, originally a call to action of the general strike of the armed forces which allied with the mass civilian peace movement at universities and ended the Vietnam War; We are coming for you, Uncle Sam.
Our next step should be establishing international community and Living Autonomous Zones, waging revolutionary and liberation struggle for democracy and our universal human rights and resistance against fascism and tyranny, and conducting independent local, national, and foreign policy and diplomacy.
For this next part I have edited my original essay of 2020 to reflect new developments which include the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine which I founded and the many International Brigades which others founded in my wake independently and splendidly beyond my knowledge or control, all of which hearken and render homage to those of the Spanish Civil War. Also I have clarified the structure of the system which I hope one day will emerge as a United Humankind and a successor to the United Nations; a dyadic polity of Autonomous Zones and their praxis or action, on three orders of scale.
Herein I envision a system of liberation struggle without hierarchy, which respects and fosters the equality, liberty, sovereignty, and independence of all human beings, and as a temporary stage of struggle.
Three parallel and interdependent spheres of action, local, national, and global, suggest themselves.
Locally as city Autonomous Zones and the direct action teams which defend the people such as Lilac City Autonomous Zone which was originally established in 1930 in Spokane by John F. McKay, protégé and friend of Eugene V. Debs and Industrial Workers of the World labor organizer, and grandfather of my partner Dolly, as a free market and people’s collective of the Socialist Party and his local All Worker’s Party, and in alliance with the anarchist communes of Seattle’s Red Coast, and Lilac City Antifa of which I am the founder.
Nationally as Communes of Autonomous Zones functioning as congresses of political, economic, and social action and their networks of mass and direct action teams, as for example here in America the Commune of the American Autonomous Zones and the Abraham Lincoln Brigades.
Globally as a United Humankind in its forms and constituencies as the Antifascist International Directorate for sharing resources and providing policy guidance and strategic intelligence, a World Commune of Autonomous Zones for ideology and praxis on a global scale, and networks of alliance between International Brigades, which in the wake of the two I founded, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine and the ALB of Palestine, have spontaneously arisen and proliferated in wonderful and strange ways everywhere.
Yes, we are a long way from a United Humankind and a world government in which we are all of us co owners of the state and guarantors of each others universal human rights, but I have now attended a number of annual Antifascist World Congresses, in Berlin last year and always held under cover of a major festival, and we are making progress. A key speech at an allied event of 2025 was made by UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, with whom I flirted outrageously.
Because I live and write in accord with Virginia Woolf’s principle; “If you cannot tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about others”, I digress now in memories of Berlin, once home to the most wicked and transgressive clubs on earth on one side of the Wall and a regime of tyranny and darkness on another. Here was where I made mischief for tyrants with Bluey’s crew of gypsies posing as a circus, during Putin’s reign as kingpin of the East Berlin black market, and loved a strange and wild girl among them, named Khelipe e Correnca, Dances With Crows. We were lost to each other when fate trapped us on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall during a firefight with the KGB, though we triumphed in the end when we brought down the Wall to set her and all its captive peoples free.
Later, having returned from Europe and driving to work in San Francisco from my home in Sonoma, I realized I was going to have the same day as I had lived more times than I could recall, that I was trapped in Nietzsche’s Hell of Eternal Recurrence, and took a wrong turn to the airport.
That’s when like the Grinch I had a wonderful, terrible thought; why not bring down all the Walls, everywhere, my own most especially?
At the airport the ticket agent asked where I wanted to go, and I said the other side of the earth. So began my Great Trek, and I did not return on a permanent basis for ten years, during which I developed a vision of a best possible future humankind and a path of least resistance in becoming human.
This I have articulated for you here as an Art of Revolution and a system of Living Autonomous Zones, communes of mutual aid, and networks of alliance in the realization of a United Humankind.
All of this has an immediate and special purpose as well as long range goals; to counterbalance the nationalist and imperialist militarism, capitalist plutocracy, and most especially the racist fascism and white supremacist terror of the United States as Vichy America, a captured state of the Fourth Reich of which the Trump regime is the current figurehead.
We Antifa liberators of New York, Seattle, and Portland are the only force to have defeated the federal government of the United States in open battle on American ground since Little Bighorn in 1876; people who may need us will listen when we speak.
We must become fulcrums of change, our lives like the dragon’s teeth sown into the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which multitudes arise.
Each of us who in refusal to submit has become Unconquered and free is a Living Autonomous Zone, able to bring change as a bearer of Liberty, and this is a power which no one can take from us.
And I personally want a full partnership with Cuba, and one day America with Cuba and all the peoples of the world as brothers, sisters, and others in a United Humankind and free society of equals, a day I now look forward to with greater hope that I may live to see it realized. The February 2025 Antifascist World Congress in Berlin reminded me of a Congress of the Joint Revolutionary Council I once attended in Cuba, Raul Castro presiding, during the 1983 fight against the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala versus America and her proxy forces. I recall with fondness a day much like today when I had opportunity to enjoy one of those marvelous Cuban cigars, during the celebrations for our victory over the South African and American forces of Apartheid at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola 1988, and this is another such moment, to be savored with utter joy.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
This in reaction to the article written by Alan Smith of NBC News; “The Justice Department released a list of cities Monday that it has deemed “anarchist jurisdictions” under President Donald Trump’s instructions this month to review federal funding for local governments in places where violence or vandalism has occurred during protests.
That memo directed Attorney General William Barr, in consultation with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, to identify jurisdictions “that have permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract these criminal activities (anarchist jurisdictions).”
On Monday, the Justice Department labeled New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle as such areas. It said it was still working to identify other jurisdictions that meet the criteria outlined in Trump’s memo. The president has made ridicule of those cities a regular feature of his campaign appearances, and he has mocked their top officials for their responses to the violence that has taken place during the protests.
Barr said in a statement accompanying the announcement: “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance. It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”
As part of its rationale for labeling the cities, the Justice Department cited city councils’ voting to cut police funding, the refusal to prosecute protesters on charges like disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly, the rejection of federal intervention, and injuries suffered by law enforcement officials during violent outbursts.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan issued a joint statement calling the administration’s move “thoroughly political and unconstitutional,” adding that “the president is playing cheap political games with congressionally directed funds.”
“Our cities are bringing communities together; our cities are pushing forward after fighting back a pandemic and facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, all despite recklessness and partisanship from the White House,” the mayors said. “What the Trump administration is engaging in now is more of what we’ve seen all along: shirking responsibility and placing blame elsewhere to cover its failure.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement Monday that Trump is “using the last few months of his presidency to sow more chaos, more hatred, and more fear,” and she pledged to defeat the administration in court over any such withholding of funding to the city and the state.
“This designation is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to scare Americans into voting for a commander-in-chief who is actually incapable of commanding our nation,” she said, adding that Trump “should be prepared to defend this illegal order in court, which hypocritically lays the groundwork to defund New York and the very types of law enforcement President Trump pretends to care about.”
Democratic mayors and governors this month bashed Trump over his latest effort aimed at what he calls “Democrat-run” cities and states. They said that it was illegal for the executive branch to unilaterally withhold funding from their jurisdictions and that Trump was merely seeking another distraction from the U.S. coronavirus death toll, which has topped 200,000.
“It is another attempt to kill New York City,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told reporters during a late-night conference call this month, adding that Trump “better have an army if he thinks he’s going to walk down the streets in New York.”
Of course, an army of Occupation was exactly what Trump thought he commanded, and which he later used in the failed coup of the January 6 Insurrection.
Yet there is truth in this wild allegation of anarchy, for in these and some fifty other cities throughout America protests for equality and racial justice have triumphed over brutal repression and state terror and tyranny to seize actual control of key government administrative landmarks and business districts for over one hundred days now. And the federal government has been powerless before the solidarity and united will of the American people, and admitted defeat in their efforts to take our cities from us.
Therefore I declare victory, and celebrate the triumph of autonomous individuals as citizens of a free society of equals, each of us a Living Autonomous Zone, wild and ungovernable as the tides like a force of nature.
As I wrote in my post of June 8 2021, Anniversary of the Liberation of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and the Birth of a Global Autonomous Zones Movement; A year ago today we launched one of the greatest experiments in liberty the world has seen since the founding of America itself in liberation from the British Empire; the Seattle Autonomous Zone. We seized and held from those who would enslave us and their police forces of tyranny and state terror six blocks of Capitol Hill.
These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
Within a fleeting moment of joy Autonomous Zones sprang up in Washington DC encircling the White House, Portland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Austin, and throughout the fifty cities across America where the Black Lives Matter protests had taken control from the government through mass action, and then throughout the world as the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Franz Fanon named the Wretched of the Earth arose in solidarity and for a glorious moment spoke to Authority with one voice, a voice that said; We refuse to submit, and we are free.
Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Here is a journal entry of mine speaking as a witness of history to that time of revolutionary struggle and liberation; as I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance becomes Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
The people of Seattle have answered brutal repression and police violence, an attempt to break the rebellion against racial injustice and hate crime enacted by the police throughout America and the world led by Trump and his white supremacist terrorists both within the police as a fifth column and operating in coordination with deniable forces like the gun-toting militias now visible everywhere, by storming the citadel of city government with waves of thousands of citizens demanding the right to life and liberty regardless of the color of our skin.
The people have seized control of six city blocks, including the police precinct and City Hall, and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a name which rings with history as a development of the Occupy Wall Street movement and reflects both the Paris Commune and the Italian Anarcho-Syndicalists of the 1920s. For a brilliant alternate history which reimagines and illuminates the latter, and possibly the goals and motives of the young revolutionaries of CHAZ today, see Bruce Sterling’s novel Pirate Utopia.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
When the people have reclaimed the government of which they are co-owners and this new phase of protest, a movement to Occupy City Hall in defiance of tyranny, has seized every seat of power in the nation and restored democracy to America, we can begin the reforging of our society on the foundation of equality and racial justice, and of our universal human rights.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by the Fourth Reich.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As written by Robert Evans in New Lines, in an article entitled How Portland Stopped the Proud Boys: Portland, Oregon, witnessed early versions of the Proud Boys events that culminated in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; years of anti-fascist organizing and the belated intervention of law enforcement halted their activities in the city; “his was the first summer since 2019 that I have not needed to don armor, strap on a gun or load up a first aid kit to go and report in downtown Portland, Oregon. Since 2017, the Rose City has hosted regular gatherings of far-right militant groups, like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, that degenerate into mass brawls with anti-fascist activists. Violence has been regular enough that some local left-wing activists refer to summer as the “fighting season.” But this year, there were no protests or rallies of note.
While the Pacific Northwest, true to its reputation, has an assortment of bespoke local fascist groups, the Proud Boys, a far-right gang that has been labeled a “terrorist entity” in Canada and New Zealand, have been present at nearly every event.
Their absence from Portland this summer is noteworthy. The opposite has been true for much of the rest of the country. There are more Proud Boys chapters now in the United States than there were on Jan. 6, 2021. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project has tracked more than 200 of their public events around the country since they stormed the U.S. Capitol.
And these events have only grown more violent. In 2020, only 18% of Proud Boy-involved events ended in violence. In 2021, 25% ended in blood and beatings. The range of acceptable targets has broadened as far-right political violence has become normalized. The Proud Boys and other right-wing paramilitary groups have disrupted school board meetings in at least 12 states. They have crashed LGBTQ-oriented book readings at libraries and harassed pride rallies.
But in 2022, they didn’t show up in Portland. It’s worth looking into why. But if you want a quick answer, here it is: Portland fought back.
The Rose City has a long history as a hotbed of radical activism amid one of the most conservative parts of the country. Portland is the city where local police officers deputized for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and that President George H.W. Bush nicknamed “Little Beirut” after intense protests against his visit following the Gulf War. In the 1990s, it was a breeding ground for fascist violence following the murder in 1988 of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, by members of the White Aryan Resistance. Tom Metzger, the group’s founder and a famous Nazi organizer from California, recruited heavily from disaffected young men in Portland. Anti-racist skinheads started organizing in opposition, and over the course of several bloody years, far-right groups were prevented from rallying openly in the city.
This started to change in 2016 with the founding of Patriot Prayer by Washington State native Joey Gibson. Gibson lived in Vancouver, Washington, which is across the river from Portland and effectively a suburb of the city. Like most of non-urban Oregon, it is extremely conservative. At first, Gibson claimed that his organization’s purpose was to “liberate conservatives” from oppression in liberal-dominated cities by hosting prayer vigils, free speech marches and pro-Second Amendment rallies.
The first Patriot Prayer event was a rally in the wealthy neighborhood of Lake Oswego in March 2017. It followed a series of left-wing and liberal protests that were held on Inauguration Day and Presidents Day, which ended in police violence against demonstrators. The Oswego rally ended with lots of yelling but no violence. In April 2017, Gibson organized the “Rally for Trump and Freedom,” attended by roughly 300 people. The Three Percenters, a right-wing militia that played a major role on Jan. 6, provided “security” for the conservatives in an early example of the sort of intergroup organizing that characterized the Capitol insurrection.
Fistfights and mass brawls became more common at every event that followed. When I’ve talked to anti-fascist activists in Portland, there’s one fight from these days that comes up more than any other: the Aug. 6, 2017, mass brawl at the waterfront. Members of recognized Nazi groups fought alongside those from Patriot Prayer, and members of the Three Percenters again handled security as hundreds of people exchanged strikes with fists, batons and mace.
The left-wing response to these rallies escalated after May 2017, when former Patriot Prayer marcher and white supremacist Jeremy Christian stabbed two men to death on a train. The attack started with Christian hurling racial epithets at two teenage girls, one of whom was a Somali Muslim wearing a hijab.
To Portland’s anti-fascists, the attack was evidence of everything they’d been saying for months: Patriot Prayer rallies were breeding grounds for racist violence. More people started donning black hoodies and crafting makeshift weapons. (“Black bloc,” initially a tactic to protect activists’ identity by wearing identical all-black outfits, became something of a uniform for Portland’s anti-fascists.)
From the end of 2017, livestreams and tweeted video clips from Portland street fights became a reliable content stream for local journalists and right-wing media figures. Many people made an excellent living from simply filming violence and letting the money roll in from various crowdfunding sites. (By 2020, left-wing livestreamers grew more common as well.) The spectacle around these events was a draw for right-wing activists around the country. Portland “antifa” became the boogeymen of the right-wing media, and for some activists loyal to then President Donald Trump, it was de rigueur to be seen opposing them.
Nothing embodied this stage more clearly than an August 2019 Proud Boys rally. The city government decided to wall both sides off from each other using huge numbers of police officers. This effectively meant that the police acted as an escort while several hundred Proud Boys and their allies marched across a bridge. There were still several clashes that day, but it was less violent than past rallies. The whole mess cost the city of Portland at least $3 million. Joe Biggs, an influential leader of the Proud Boys, called the event a success and gloated about costing the city money. He threatened to hold follow-up events with the goal of eventually bankrupting Portland.
It was around this time that I moved to town. I’d attended a few of the earlier protests, but by late 2019, what struck me most was the fatalism so many of Portland’s left-wing protesters seemed to feel. There was a strong belief that the national media was constantly on the lookout for evidence of “antifa” violence, which the police and the federal government would use as a pretext for a crackdown.
Black bloc anarchists, often filmed in direct combat with far-right brawlers, made the news. But Portland’s anti-fascist community was much deeper than that. At their large rallies, between 10% and 15% of the crowd would be actively prepared, if not eager, for a fight. This core of militant activists was supported by a larger community that engaged in nonviolent organizing. There were people who showed up as medics, and others who brought food and water. Some activists would show up with bubble-wrap screens to block the cameras of livestreaming right-wingers. Others came with musical instruments, dressed as bananas or clowns to distract attention and drown out right-wing speakers on megaphones.
Portland protest moments constantly went viral, but one fact that never quite made it outside the local media bubble was how many anti-fascists were older — parents, even grandparents. Several of my sources among the anti-fascists were former Republicans, frightened of what people like Biggs and Gibson might represent. In interview after interview people expressed variants of the same fear: They won’t stop in Portland.
They didn’t. Biggs was indicted for seditious conspiracy earlier this year, along with four other Proud Boys, for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Three out of five of the Proud Boys charged with sedition had attended multiple Portland protests and rallies. Before they tried to overturn a democratic election, they were fighting in downtown Portland next to Gibson.
Portland was the first wave, the test case. Oregon fascists even breached the state Capitol building in Salem roughly two weeks before Jan. 6. The escalating attacks on school boards and LGBTQ events, the integration of Proud Boys into local parties in multiple states and the growing “political marriage” between the Republican Party and militias mean it’s an open question as to whether individuals like Biggs will go down as simple criminals or harbingers of future doom. But as more cities experience the violence and threats Portland lived with for years, it’s worth asking why it stopped happening there.
Veteran anti-fascist activists are extremely cagey with the media. You don’t have to look far to find cases of them attacking cameras and sometimes the people with the cameras. Many anti-fascists are also cagey with each other, and the anti-fascist community in Portland has more schisms and divisions than is possible to describe here. But if you get any of the folks who’ve been around a while to open up and answer when the tide turned, they’ll say Aug. 22, 2020.
Portland’s response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 received extensive news coverage. There were more than 100 consecutive nights of protest, most of which ended with the use of tear gas and horrific police violence. Again, the right grew obsessed with Portland. Trump took to constantly threatening anti-fascist protesters. Federal agents were called in. I can remember a moment during the second night of the protests, looking across the street and seeing two men in body armor, with rifles and American flag gaiters covering their faces, standing outside a local business.
Yet through most of it, groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys stayed away. I think they were temporarily awed by the sheer weight of public support behind the first protests.
In time, the conservative media ironed out their angle. Portland’s racial justice protesters were dangerous anarchists and domestic terrorists who had hijacked legitimate protests, the argument went. Many of the most dedicated protesters were, in fact, anarchists. They responded joyfully when Trump declared Portland a “beehive of terrorism.” Bee-themed costumes and shields filled the streets the next night.
The protests got smaller and smaller over time and, by August, local far-right organizers decided it was safe to move in.
It had been a long, frustrating summer for them, cooped up inside and watching the left march through the streets. Everyone from the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer to the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and active neo-Nazis rallied their people to action. Most attendees showed up for the “Trump 2020 Cruise Rally,” but there was also a “No Marxism in America Rally” at the same place and time. As we would see again on Jan. 6, the division between these groups was academic at this point.
Hundreds of right-wing street fighters showed up bright and early on Aug. 22, armed with clubs, knives, firearms, hundreds of cans of mace and paintball guns loaded with frozen paintballs. Portland anti-fascists were initially caught off guard by the size of the rally. When I arrived on scene, they were badly outnumbered. But within two hours, more than 1,000 anti-fascists had flooded the square. A summer fighting the police and federal agents had given Portland a sizable base of people who were used to violence and had access to good defensive gear.
Right-wing brawlers had spent years using mace as an offensive weapon. Once they were outnumbered and the fight turned against them, they started spraying madly in all directions around them. Few had thought to bring gas masks, which most anti-fascists had. After blinding themselves with mace, they broke and ran. My strongest memory of that day is a crowd of terrified right-wing activists, waving Gadsden flags, running to the nearby IRS building to beg federal agents for protection.
The police didn’t show up to the 1,000-person street fight taking place at their front door. That was fine with most people: In retrospect, the day had a sense of inevitability. We had all spent the past few years bracing for impact. Now it had come, and we had won the fight.
It’s hard for me not to use “we” at this point. My hand was broken that day by a far-right protester holding a baton and a shield with “God Bless America” painted on it. Journalistic detachment is all well and good but see how far it gets you with the crowd who built gallows on the Capitol lawn.
The very next week, the right came through in larger numbers. A caravan of thousands of cars locked down the streets. Right-wing demonstrators shot at activists and random passersby with paintball guns, carried real guns and sprayed mace as their cars gridlocked downtown. And, just as things seemed to ebb, anti-fascist Michael Reinoehl shot and killed Patriot Prayer member Aaron Danielson.
When you boil out everything but the facts, the story is pretty simple. Danielson and Chandler Pappas (currently doing time for assaulting multiple police officers at an attack on the Oregon Capitol) were both armed with mace and batons and carried loaded handguns on their hips. Reinoehl was carrying a concealed handgun. The shooting occurred outside a downtown parking garage that was a regular scene of street fights. Reinoehl, who claimed self-defense, drew and fired a concealed handgun, killing Danielson. He then fled the scene.
The shooting sent shockwaves through the Portland protest community. Everyone was certain reprisals were coming. And they came: Trump himself bragged about having federal marshals kill Reinoehl a week later. But despite widely publicized outrage by his fellow brawlers, there was no further right-wing counterattack in Portland that year.
This was not for lack of effort.
With the national spotlight back on Portland, the Proud Boys’ chairperson, Enrique Tarrio, ever the media junkie, put out the call for every Proud Boy he could gather. The event, which was to be held at Delta Park, was billed as revenge for Aug. 22 and the killing of Danielson. There were credible fears that it might be a bloodbath. Large numbers of people on both sides would be carrying firearms.
And then, for the first time since 2017, the state of Oregon intervened.
This may have had something to do with the fact that a local anti-fascist collective leaked chats related to planning for this event from a group called Patriot Coalition. This group included a number of Proud Boys and people who had fought alongside them in various rallies. The leaked chats included threats to attack Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and kidnap Oregon Gov. Kate Brown. For the first time in four years of violence, Brown declared a state of emergency over what she called a “white supremacist” rally. Police surrounded the Proud Boys event, arresting several.
By all accounts this was an extremely mild “crackdown,” but it occurred alongside a whole raft of felony charges for Alan Swinney, a right-wing demonstrator who had shot bystanders in the face with paintballs and menaced a crowd with a firearm on Aug. 22. Prior to this, Portland police had often colluded with the far right, even allowing a member of the Oath Keepers militia to assist with an arrest. In 2018, they nearly killed an anti-fascist demonstrator by hitting him in the back of the head with a tear gas grenade.
The long, friendly relationship between police and the far right allowed the fascist street movement to establish itself in Portland. But it also meant that when the police finally turned on them, it came as a titanic shock. The fact that right-wing brawlers were being charged with felonies made Portland a less desirable place to rally. It is, however, worth noting that police and local governments intervened against members of the far right only when elected leaders were threatened.
Exactly one year later, the Proud Boys came back again. Wheeler asked the city to “choose love” ahead of the anniversary rally planned by the Proud Boys and their allies. Portlanders chose to strap on their body armor, load fire extinguishers with paint and head into battle one more time. Again, about 1,000 people rallied to support the anti-fascist cause downtown.
Traditionally, the rallies in which the right has been outnumbered have involved the least violence. They tend to attack only if they think they have an advantage. So at the last minute, the Proud Boys changed the location of their rally from the heart of downtown to an abandoned Kmart in North Portland.
Most anti-fascists remained downtown. But a few traveled to Kmart, where a vicious street fight ensued. There was no clear victory in the resulting brawl. But the violence that day, particularly the destruction of two vehicles by far-right fighters, was well documented. And after being criticized for their “hands-off” approach on the day of the rally, Oregon law enforcement again dropped a range of felony charges on the most prominent attendees.
While the Proud Boys refused to go downtown, one individual with a handgun opened fire on left-wing protesters. They shot back, and the shooter fled before being intercepted by police. Since the killing of Danielson, gunfire has been a regular feature of protests in the Pacific Northwest.
But at the same time, the far right has been notably reluctant recently to attack the Rose City. There have been rallies nearby, in Olympia, Washington, and in Oregon City and Salem. But no meaningful right-wing protest has taken over downtown Portland in over a year. On the second anniversary, nothing happened.
There’s one other data point here. It’s horrible and tragic, but it’s crucial if you want to understand why the right wing’s street movement is scared to act in this city.
In 2018, Patrick Kimmons, a Black Portlander, was shot in the back nine times while fleeing from the Portland Police. Ever since, his mother has hosted near-weekly justice marches in North Portland. Because of their consistency, the events have developed their own protest culture; medics show up each week, “corkers” handle traffic safety, and armed security open-carry firearms in compliance with state laws.
This made them a target for far-right provocateur Andy Ngo, who highlighted the group regularly in his tweets. One of his followers, Benjamin Smith, lived nearby. An avowed fan of Kyle Rittenhouse (who was found not guilty of homicide in 2021 after fatally shooting two men during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin), Smith verbally accosted and then opened fire on several unarmed people doing traffic security for the justice march. June Knightly, 60, known as T-Rex in the Normandale protest community, died from Smith’s gunfire. Four other protesters were injured. One woman is still paralyzed from the neck down.
Before Smith could reload his .45-caliber handgun, an activist armed with a semi-automatic weapon stopped him by shooting him twice in the hip. It was, and remains, a searing and traumatic night for the entire Portland protest community. Few people I know can talk about it without crying.
But it was also part of a pattern of effective, forceful resistance. The story the right took from Normandale was not easy to propagandize. One of their own had committed murder, and he had been shot by a leftist using the same Second Amendment they had rallied to support. After the 2017 train murders by Christian, Gibson had hosted a “free speech rally.” In 2022, neither Gibson nor anyone else was willing to rally in Portland.
Historically, fascists win when they decide to go for it, to throttle democracies, believing that no one is organized enough to fight them. They take advantage of the fact that most people fear confrontation and that the police tend to tolerate their activism. In Portland, people stood up and opted to call their bluff.
Diligent research, nonviolent organizing and the eventual acquiescence of the state and federal government to enforce the law against right-wing agitators were all factors in the success we see now. But none of it would have happened if an awful lot of people hadn’t shown up, for five years straight, ready to fight.
If the rest of America wants to get through the present crisis, they might learn something from that.”
September 3 2025 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others
Herein I offer my own story of how I became motivated to rejoin local political action as part of the biggest and most powerful lever I could find to grab hold of, the Democratic Party, as an example of the principle think globally, act locally. My hope is that it may inspire others to do what can be done to turn the tide of fascism which has captured our nation and threatens the viability of civilization throughout the world based on the idea that each of us bears an equal share of human value and universal human rights, which no state may legislate away nor subjugate us by force and control, nor by means of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslave us and steal our souls.
It’s a story with a villain named Matt Shea, a fascist and white supremacist terrorist who typifies the degenerate thugs and perverse and dishonorable Republican freak show led by Trump, and whose loathsome, criminal, and treasonous actions drew me once again into the work of hunting Nazis, Resistance to tyranny and terror, and other antifascist action.
This is the fellow who used to represent my district- Spokane County 4th Legislative District in Washington State- till the Republicans threw him out for distributing a hit list of police and federal officers home addresses to death squads, to be killed in their sleep with their families during the secession to a White ethnostate. Yes, I write of the Patriot Movement leader involved in three armed rebellions including the Malheur standoff, possibly connected to several terrorist organizations including The Base, Atomwafffen Division, the Christchurch and Las Vegas shooters, abortion clinic protests and possibly the assassinations of doctors, and possibly assassinations of antifascists in Europe; all mere suspicions as strangely he has been neither tried nor convicted of any of this. Just a very bad man, with very bad co conspirators, formerly with the backing of the entire Republican Party.
I became a Precinct Captain of the Democratic Party as his direct opposition in the 4th LD, claiming the space of counterforce which all use of social force creates according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
It’s not the first time I’ve done what I could to help the Democratic Party, which I joined at the invitation of my Forensics students including Chrissy Georgiades at Sonoma Valley High School in the 1980’s, having previously been a member of my mother’s lifelong political party, the Peace and Freedom Party.
I’ve been a useful counterweight; founder of Lilac City Antifa and a flying squad for national and global antifascist action which first fought in Portland, as well as an Antifascist International Directorate to share resources and coordinate the work among networks of alliance, a global network of Living Autonomous Zones in the wake of Seattle’s CHAZ, and the independent military forces of American volunteers who named ourselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigades after the original force of the Spanish Civil War, sworn to no nation but to one another like the Jesuits and the French Foreign Legion who were among my models for intelligence and direct action forces, which I founded in Mariupol as the ALB of Ukraine and later refounded in Warsaw with those who escaped with me as an element of a force of international volunteers to take the fight to Russia on her own ground whose signal achievement was the division of our opposing force the mercenary and criminal Wagner Group from the Russian military and Putin regime and the assassination of its leader Prigozhin, then did something similar with the ALB of Palestine, forces which have independently and unpredictably cloned themselves in interesting ways globally in the last few years, among many other actions of Solidarity and liberation struggle.
All of this I did in the last seven years; one man, with a vision but on my own dime and with no resources beyond my own, and therefore beholden to no one nor under any kind of control. When events unfold which may be decisive or influential to the fate of humankind, open a space of play for change in ways wherein I may be helpful, or are otherwise of interest, I travel to disrupt my own expectations and biases and make my own independent evaluations, analyses, and interpretations of the situation on the ground of struggle, and only then choose how best to place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world and the legacies of our history.
And I report all of this here, everything that I can without compromising anyone else or any ongoing operations, publicly and without cost to anyone, in my publication Torch of Liberty which I founded in October of 2018.
In my sixties I fought Last Stands at The Battle of Portland versus Homeland Security in 2020, Panjshir in Afghanistan versus the Taliban in 2021, throughout Palestine versus Israel since the Third Intifada of 2021 began at al Aqsa and since Black Saturday 2023 against Israeli’s Palestinian Genocide and imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors, Mariupol in Ukraine versus Russia in 2022, in the Red Sea Campaign of 2024 from the Free Port of Hodeida to counter blockade the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, in December of 2024 I opened the gates of Damascus for the army of liberation to avenge Mariupol and to take Syria, Putin’s fortress state in the Middle East, away from him, during 2025 in Los Angeles and elsewhere in America versus the ICE white supremacist terror force and its criminal campaign of ethnic cleansing, and this month I fight in the Ansar Allah blitzkrieg to unify Yemen and liberate the Middle East from the American Empire which sponsors Israel as a fortress state to enforce hegemony over the Arab-American Alliance, whose regional military bases we have destroyed or captured or which have been abandoned as indefensible by the Trump regime and whose strategic resource of oil we now control.
And if I can do this, anyone can place their 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, and help change the course of history and the possibilities of becoming human.
Let us write, speak, teach, and organize democracy and liberation struggle. Regardless of who you are, there is always something you can do.
If the world is imperfect, we must ask ourselves, What can be done to bring change? May we all become a fulcrum, and help to change the balance of power in the world.
As I wrote in my post of May 16 2020, Matt Shea Purged From Office; Jubilation and dancing in the streets, champagne and running amok; this I write in celebration as Lilac City Antifa, as a voice of progressive democracy, and as a Precinct Captain of the Democratic Party, but also as an American citizen, for all loyal Americans may rejoice in this; Representative Matt Shea of the Fourth Legislative District of Washington State, who used his position in our government to organize and direct armed rebellion and treason against the United States and conspired to secede and found a White Redoubt in our fair and pleasant corner of the world, and to a lead a war of white supremacist terror and a crusade against Muslims and others in violation of our fundamental right of freedom of religion, and including plans for the assassination of police and federal officers, has been shunned and cast out as the monster he is by his own party.
Mad Matt has been purged from office; I hope this signals a turning of the tides and a realignment within the Republican Party against the harboring of treasonous and racist criminals within its ranks. Among my greatest wishes has been that the Republicans awaken to the fact that they too are Americans, and heirs to our traditions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, values that true conservatives would support and defend with us against the foreign and intrusive disruptive forces of fascist racism and tyranny. We may disagree on many things, but not on those truths we hold to be self-evident; not and call ourselves Americans.
I welcome a future Republican Party which has returned to its origins as the party of Lincoln as partners in just governance. To adapt and meet the existential threats we face, we need a conserving force which buffers our identity, values, and traditions from the shock of change, as well as a revolutionary force of transformational agility which looks beyond the boundaries of our horizon.
It is a long journey from here down the yellow brick road to our long range goal of the restoration of democracy in America and throughout the world, and of our local and immediate objectives of electing Democrats to replace Republicans in 2020, but this is a fine beginning, and I shall rejoice and savour it.
Long have we awaited an end to his reign of terror here in Eastern Washington, but for those unfamiliar with his misdeeds here below is a summary of the principal crimes and threats to public safety of Mad Matt.
Looking back on my words written six years ago, I am struck by how naïve I was to hope there could ever be a reconciliation with the Party of Treason which has abased itself to a Russian agent and Rapist In Chief. For in 2026 there remains to us only War to the Knife against a captured state of the Fourth Reich and the mad idiot of unspeakable perversions who is its figurehead, Traitor Trump.
Here follows a bill of particulars regarding the crimes of the man I rejoined the fray to oppose.
As written by Austin Jenkins in an article of December 2019 for NW News Network; “15 easily missed details from deep inside the Rep. Matt Shea report,
WA state Rep. Matt Shea has been ejected from the House Republican Caucus in response to a report that found he is a leader in the Patriot Movement and helped plan the 2016 armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge.
The recently released 108-page investigation detailing Washington state Rep. Matt Shea’s connections to militia groups and extremist activities has prompted his own caucus to exile him and the House Republican leader to call for Shea’s resignation.
In response, Shea took to Facebook to denounce the investigation as a “sham” and declare: “I will not back down, I will not give in, I will not resign.” Shea has also said that all of his communications have been lawful.
The top-line conclusions of the investigation are that Shea is a prominent leader in the Patriot Movement, played a role in planning three armed conflicts in the American West, including the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, and that his actions have put law enforcement officers in danger of political violence.
Buried in the report are a number of details and revelations that give readers an inside look at how Shea reportedly operates behind the scenes. It’s a world of code names, encrypted communications and military-style directives.
Here are 15 easily-missed excerpts:
Role in armed standoffs
“Between April 12-14, 2014, Representative Shea met with other elected officials from Washington, Idaho, Nevada and Arizona at Bunkerville, Nevada, who gathered in support of the Bundy family’s resistance to a federal court order and developed a strategy for leadership over future Patriot Movement armed resistance against the federal government by creating the Coalition of Western States (COWS).”
“Representative Shea in his leadership role as Chairman of the Coalition of Western States (COWS) along with [a] Washington militia leader and other members of COWS beginning around early November 2015 through January 2, 2016, engaged in conversations with Ammon Bundy and other militia members in the planning and preparation of the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, Oregon.”
Military-style plans and intelligence
“Representative Shea on or about January 3, 2016, created a detailed military styled operation plan Entitled ‘Operation Cold Reality’ that included roles and responsibilities of COWS members and militia leadership in support of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County Oregon.”
“Representative Shea on January 4, 2016 through the use of email and using codename ‘Verumbellator,’ covertly disseminated information to … State Representatives from Washington, Idaho, and Nevada, and to Patriot Movement militia leaders and others, that detailed and warned of specific law enforcement operations and actions in response to the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County Oregon.”
Sensitive law enforcement information
“Representative Shea, via his private email account in the name of ‘Verumbellator’ sent a document … entitled, ‘Apparatus of Repression’ … The document attached to Representative Shea’s email detailed extensive law enforcement confidential information laying out the command and control structure of Washington state law enforcement agencies. The document was over 250 pages long and contained rosters of local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) agents, SWAT team member lists complete with names and badge numbers and the Joint Harbor Operations Command (JI-IOC) building schematics. The document also included the names and home information of FBI, DHS, and Washington State Patrol agents, photos of SWAT teams, street surveillance cameras, aircraft and communications equipment used by law enforcement in Washington. In Representative Shea’s email he said he dug deep on the web to find the document. The document, as stated by Representative Shea, was to be used ‘to validate and check out agents from law enforcement agencies who may attempt to contact us…’”
Role in Patriot Movement
“This investigation determined Representative Shea is an active and influential leader of the Patriot Movement in the US. He supports the movement and its causes and at times is an active participant in organizing and carrying out demonstrations against state and federal government activities. He has on occasion organized and directed armed confrontations with law enforcement officers.”
“Representative Shea is a self-professed member of the Patriot Movement and although Representative Shea is not believed to consider himself a member of a militia, he is closely associated with several militia groups, their activities, and prominent militia members. He is also closely associated with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) and Marble Community Fellowship; two organizations closely aligned with the Patriot Movement.”
Marble Country connection
“[Marble Community Fellowship] is a church founded by pastors and married couple Barry and Anne Byrd, who Representative Shea has publicly introduced as his spiritual advisors …Representative Shea is very closely connected to MCF and to Barry and Anne Byrd. The Byrds have been included in private meetings where attendees were invited by code names, and where Representative Shea unveiled the Biblical Basis for War that offered his view of God’s authorization for war. [At] the same meeting Representative Shea distributed the Restoration document which was his blueprint for rebuilding after the fall of the US Government.”
Power, fear, radicalization, intimidation
“Obtaining political power is a strategic objective of the Patriot Movement but it is also used tactically by Representative Shea … Encouraging individuals within the Patriot Movement to run for political office is a frequently discussed topic as reported by individuals formerly active in the Patriot Movement.”
“Fear is an often used tactic by Representative Shea to develop and grow his political support. He frequently warns people to stockpile weapons and ammunition and to prepare to defend your property. He makes frequent reference to Syrian immigrants, Antifa communists, and at times tells inaccurate stories that drive fear. Representative Shea spoke of Syrian refugee children raping another child in a restroom at knifepoint, a story that was later found to be completely inaccurate and did not involve rape, a weapon, or Syrian refugees according to news articles quoting Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs.”
“Representative Shea and the Patriot Movement rely on the radicalization of individuals to the point they are willing to take up arms against the United States to carry out their objectives … Each armed conflict serves as a radicalization node, enraging individuals with sympathetic views of the goals of the Patriot Movement. This serves to draw more people into the conflict and into the Patriot Movement, thus adding to Representative Shea’s influence and power.”
“Inherent in the act of dispatching armed militants into a conflict with government authorities is the presence of intimidation and the threat of use of force. Intimidation and the ever-present threat of the use of force are powerful tactics used by Representative Shea in the achievement of his political goals.”
Encrypted communications
“Representative Shea communicates securely with others using his code name ‘Verumbellator’ over secured communications systems such as Wickr, Signal and Protonmail. In October 2017, Representative Shea abandoned the use of email due to unspecified ‘security threats’ in favor of the Redoubt Emergency Network (REN Group) that communicates over the Signal App … Representative Shea and his associates have also been known to use what they call ‘Red Phones’ when engaged in a conflict. Red phones are understood to be pre-paid telephones that are untraceable.”
Paranoia
“Representative Shea told [witness 22] on many occasions through casual conversation that the ‘government’ tracks the phones of ‘people like us’ and feared that if two or more of ‘us–Patriots’ are gathered they (the Government) would turn on the mics on the phones and listen via stingray devices through warrantless wire taps.”
Conclusion
“Based on evidence obtained in this investigation, it is more probable than not that Representative Shea is likely to plan, direct and engage in additional future conflicts that could carry with them significant risk of bloodshed and loss of life. It is the professional opinion of the Investigators, that on a more probable than not basis, Representative Shea presents a present and growing threat of risk to others through political violence.”
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2019, Christian fundamentalists hope to use abortion issue to incite civil war and create white fascist ethnostate; Gideon, anyone?
That’s the dream of Christian fundamentalists and white supremacists like Matt Shea, who is the leading political figure of the secessionists in Washington State; a white ethnostate in the fortress-like mountains of its northeastern region inspired in parts by the Confederacy, Fourth Reich ideology, and the Charismatic-Pentecostal interpretation of Biblical law. It’s like a looney mashup of Margaret Atwood’s Gideon and S.M. Stirling’s Domination of the Draka.
It’s an alternate-history fantasy, but its not a joke; this is the same fundamentalist-white supremacist alliance that elected Donald Trump. They are using abortion as a wedge issue, their churches as centers of recruitment and organization, have the support of plutocrats and the cover of agents who have infiltrated our government, and outreach and influence operations throughout our nation and social media.
We need not parallel their structure, but we must counter their influence. Or, as Stirling predicts in his novels, we will witness the fall of western civilization, of secular democracy based on the values and ideals of the Enlightenment; truth, justice, liberty, equality, and the Rights of Man.
We must win a better future.
As I wrote in my post of January 24 2020, Victory in the War Against Fascism for the Soul of America and the Freedom of the World; We at Lilac City Antifa and Torch of Freedom celebrate victories in the War Against Fascism for the Soul of America and the Freedom of the World, in the unmasking and bringing to justice of Nazi terrorists.
Rinaldo Nazzaro, leader of Nazi terror group The Base which set up a training camp near the remote mining town of Republic, Washington this year has been exposed as a probable Russian spy.
Republic, like Spokane and much of our Pacific Northwest, is nothing like the imaginary white ethnostate called the Redoubt by white supremacists like State Representative Matt Shea or Nazis like Rinaldo Nazzaro. Republic is a wild west town whose main street still boasts a wooden boardwalk, nestled in a valley on the far side of the highest pass in the lower United States, Sherman Pass, a terrifying drive in winter snows, and a route pioneered like Hannibal through the Alps by the local legendary hero who later became famous in the Civil War when he burned out the diseased heart of the Confederacy on the triumphant March Through Georgia and accepted the surrender of the rebel slavers. We cherish and remember his example still; let there be no quarter for those who would enslave us.
Yet there is more, for Republic and the Pacific Northwest remain the home of descendants of some of the original Industrial Workers of the World unionists, anarchists, and Democratic Socialists, an older generation who proudly recall the fight against fascism in World War Two, and a younger generation who look to the future and a diverse and inclusive world, yet have not forgotten who they are as Americans nor the means by which our free society of equals was won.
We are a hard people with hard lives wrested from the wilderness, who meet the daily challenges of survival by helping our families and neighbors as a united front, regardless of our differences.
This is the true Pacific Northwest, and we are having none of any fascist nonsense or shenanigans.
So I wrote six years ago, during the Interregum between Trump regimes and the failed Restoration of America under the great and flawed Joe Biden, when actual Nazi revivalists, white supremacist terrorists, and other fascists were marginal outliers in our society and not in control of the federal government and the national state.
This has now changed horrifically, and Trump has issued a proclamation declaring Antifa a terrorist organization in the wake of the assassination of his apologist Charlie Kirk not by one of us but by a member of a rival alt-right faction, the Groypers.
If we are organized, when by design according to anarchist principles there is no leadership or command structure, no training cadre, no hierarchy of any kind and no imposed ideology, no central communications hub and no funding, in what way can Antifa be an organization?
And in what way is opposing fascist terror a form of terror rather than free speech and the performance of citizenship in a free society of equals?
We are a social and political movement and a form of action, in some ways a community of allies and a vector of ideologies and histories. But no one gives orders, there is no membership, and anyone can claim to be antifascist and mean by this whatever they wish.
And what we do is quite simple; we resist tyranny and state terror and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as authorized national identities and systems of oppression.
If you find ways to do these things, you too are Antifa.
As our primary enemy the Trump regime has defamed us as terrorists on the basis of claims to patriotism, I offer refutation with this; If the American flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. This I say in recognition of two of the world’s most effective antifascist organizations, which like much of the West’s intelligence and special operations community historically developed specifically to liberate the world from Nazi tyranny and terror and remain crucial to that mission, the Central Intelligence Agency which originates in the Office of Strategic Services and the United States Special Forces or Green Berets which originates in the Jedburgh teams and the First Special Service Force called the Black Devils, and as an admirer of the Black Devils unit whose legendary exploits are fictionalized in the films The Devil’s Brigade and Inglorious Basterds. Nothing can be more American than antifascist action; in some ways it defines America and what it means to be American, both won with blood in the most terrible war the world has ever known.
When they come for one of us, as they always have and will, let them be met with all of us.
To my brothers. sisters, and others, I say Semper Fi; a motto of the United States Marines, but one which embodies the principle of solidarity and may be said of all Americans as a universal ideal and true national identity.
To fascist tyrants and those who would enslave us, I say Sic Semper Tyrannis, and Bella Ciao.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Mirror, Mirror Star Trek Season 2, episode 4
The Devil’s Brigade official trailer
Inglorious Basterds official trailer
War to the Knife: History of the 1st Special Service Force, the Devil’s Brigade
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
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
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
April 20 2025 Anniversary of My Speech to the Volunteers At Warsaw, and of the Reorganization of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine For Liberation Struggle in Russia in the Wake of Our Escape From Mariupol
May 29 2025 Anniversary of the Final Day of the Third Intifada of 2021: On The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force; Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
We celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month in America each year, when schoolchildren will be taught fetishized and deracinated versions of what it means to be Hispanic Americans as a kind of Orientalism as described by Edward Said; exotic foods from Taco Bell and representations from modern Carmen Mirandas, while the real Hispanic Americans whose labor creates our wealth in service to elite hegemonies of power and privilege as a slave caste or who languish in the concentration camps at our border or in foreign gulags as demonized outsiders and political pawns remain silenced and erased from view, a voiceless and terrible thunder of agony which will one day seize and shake us to the heart of our humanity and the foundation of our nation.
In this moment of liberation struggle versus the ICE white supremacist terror force and its campaign of ethnic cleansing, let us swear ourselves to each other in defense of our common humanity and solidarity of action. This, this, this.
America’s many ethnic Heritage Months offer us opportunity for reflection, self-criticism, and the interrogation of history and our normalities. Here let us seek the truths which Authority has hidden from us in the enforcement of its legitimacy.
Let us celebrate this and all such holidays which memorialize precariats and marginalized populations of politically designed disparity, unequal power, and exclusionary otherness including constructions of ethnicity by listening to their voices rather than valorizing authorized icons of disempowered figures and images.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Children, your culture is what you actually do; you, yourself, and not anyone else. No one but you gets a vote on who you are, or may become. It is for you to tell us who you are, not the other way round.
Among the most important truths to understand about culture, especially those you claim and which claim you in turn as opposed to those legacies of history from which we must emerge to claim our freedom and create ourselves as chosen identities and most importantly versus systems of oppression and narratives of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, is that we change our culture by what we ourselves do. Constantly, for culture like identity is a process of adaptation and change, ephemeral and protean, at worst illusory and at best both a realization of our truths, those we create and those written in our flesh, and an instrument of seizure of power, and always a form of power which cannot be taken from us for it is a praxis or action of our values, meanings, and being.
What do I mean by this? Who we are is a theatrical performance, and it is possible to improvise new identities in liberation struggle with our histories.
Identity is constructed as a system of stories, and a canon of literature is nothing less than an authorized set of identities. This is why the reimagination and transformation of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, must be constant and ongoing. The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
As Wednesday says to authority in the telenovela; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, cameras, surfaces which abstract us into images owned by others, which capture us in narratives we ourselves do not create and reflect us infinitely in theft of our uniqueness and our souls.
This is the true horror of colonialism, and of the line in the sand we have drawn at our border, now made a Wall of white supremacist state terror and institutional cruelty, to weaponize disparity and create a vast pool of exploitable labor on which the wealth, power, and privilege of America’s hegemonic white elites is built.
To this I say; tear down the Walls, just as we did the Berlin Wall, all the Walls, everywhere, our own most especially, where ever men hunger to be equal and free, until divisions of race, faith, nationality, language, or any other taxonomies of identity yet undreamed cease to have meaning except as curiousities or as identities we claim without claims of superiority and exclusionary otherness, until we are all simply human beings and guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Such is the vision of becoming human I have struggled for since I first realized its possibility among the myriads of futures from which we must choose.
There is a poem my father taught me to memorize and recite as a young boy, which I still hear in my thoughts whenever I wonder about our future possibilities of becoming human, and the choices we make about how to be human together, The Man With a Hoe by Edward Markham, Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting;
“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world
After the silence of the centuries?”
Man With a Hoe, Jean-Francois Millet
I wish all of us a joyful Hispanic Heritage Month; and remember to run amok and be ungovernable. Let us bring the Chaos, and a Reckoning.
As I wrote in my post of July 24 2022, In a Free Society of Equals, Who Confers Citizenship? Abolish Borders and Enact Citizenship By Declaration; Along our border with Mexico, concentration camps for nonwhite refugees instead of sanctuary, and a brutal army of slavecatchers and overseers of prison bond labor instead of humanitarian aid and safe conduct.
We will not begin to become human until we build bridges, not walls.
Let us enact diversity and inclusion rather than divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us abolish borders and enact citizenship by declaration.
If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, you are one of us; who are we to say no? This is the only test for citizenship we need.
Whenever I think of this issue of citizenship and immigration, I remember the famous scene in the film Freaks, in which the Loving Cup is offered to the prospective bride with the ritual chant of inclusion and membership; “One of Us! One of Us! You are now one of us!” Here is the ceremony we need for welcoming new Americans to our free society of equals; a ritual Feast of Belonging. The film is also a superb allegory of why democracy fails, and the limits of diversity and inclusion in fear and hierarchies of belonging and otherness.
Some of us, like myself, are truly other, and define the limits of the human, which like all limits I transgress as sacred acts of liberation. This is why I am interested in the idea of monsters, freaks, and outcasts which codify humanity, and advocate the embrace of our monstrosity as a prescription for freeing ourselves of racism and other forms of hierarchies of belonging and otherness which are crucial and determinative in the construction of identity, and are legacies of history and systems of oppression from which we must win free. I am a freak offering the Loving Cup to those who would enslave us, drive us out, hunt us to extinction. But when refused, let our vengeance be terrible and swift, without limits, for All Resistance Is War to the Knife.
I read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in part as a critique of colonialism, slavery, and the British Empire, and I identify with the Monster, especially Dean Koontz’s version of him as Deucalion, son of Icarus, in his Frankenstein series, which tells the story as a war against humankind by Victor as the creator of a race of supermen, like the Nazis thought of themselves. Here Deucalion, hideously deformed and scarred by his battles like myself though mine are not visible, and immensely powerful and brilliant, plays the role of Spartacus against his tyrant creator who would stop at nothing to enforce his idea of virtue. But Victor is also a figure of Prometheus who dares to steal the fire of the gods and seize power against their unjust authority, in this sense a liberator but one who becomes a tyrant in his turn as did so many in our history; Washington, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle due to the imposed conditions of struggle, especially anticolonial ones, and also to the internal contradictions of Idealism which in action is subversive of its own values once power has been seized.
This is why Israel, last bastion of a people nearly become extinct, is now a nightmare of state tyranny and terror, having reproduced the Auschwitz which they survived and are perpetrating the genocide of the Palestinians; one people divided by history.
And its why America, the Land of the Free whose Statue of Liberty proclaims to the world; “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”, now hunts, abducts, imprisons, and tortures without cause or trial nonwhite others with a white supremacist terror force called ICE.
All such things we must Resist, like Deucalion and other versions of Frankenstein’s Monster, or Lt Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds. By Any Means Necessary, to quote Malcolm X and Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands.
My point here is that we are all of us both Victor and his Monster, locked in titanic struggle to become human together, and this history has consequences for how we choose to be human together and for our possibilities of becoming human.
America has drawn a line in the sand to weaponize economic disparity in service to imperial dominion through labor exploitation of peoples with no legal status, for profit requires slavery as an invisible caste with whom one may do anything at all with impunity as if they do not exist. Here in our border with Mexico, its walls and cages, and in the omnipresent bodies of those who pick and serve our food, clean our living spaces, care for our children and elders, like the black clad stage handlers of a kabuki theatre of capitalism, or the Black Gang who stoke the engines of our system with the fuel of their lives as in Eugene O’Neil’s play The Hairy Ape, we find an immediate example of our own complicity in the dehumanization and commodification of those whose labor creates our wealth and services our elite privilege.
For we have made of our world a global prison and slave labor system, an imperial dominion of borders and carceral states of force and control, and of our fellow human beings the parts of a vast machine of wealth and power through theft of public resources.
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
In this struggle all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
Such is the hope of humankind.
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2021, The Carceral State and its Borders, Police, and Prisons are Institutional White Supremacist Terror: Case of the Haitian Refugees:
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
So reads the inscription on our Statue of Liberty, the dream of America as a beacon of hope to the world written by a young Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, who like her namesake has become immortal as a figure of America herself, of the better angels of our nature and the ideals toward which we reach, regardless of our failures to seize and live our truths.
In the revolutionary struggle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world, these words inscribed on our hearts illuminate the darkest of times and like the gift of Pandora inspire us to fight on, beyond hope of victory or even survival, for the chance of Liberty.
To resist tyranny, divisions of exclusionary otherness, and hierarchies of elite membership, and to refuse subjugation by those who would enslave us.
But the promise of sanctuary in a free society of equals wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth does not apply to all equally; not if you are nonwhite.
In the case of the Haitian refugees beaten by horse-riding police with whips and abandoned to die in squalid camps at our border, we have a vivid and horrific example of an inconvenient truth; America is not yet free. The carceral state and its borders, police, and prisons are institutional white supremacist terror, and in the crisis at our border we see an extreme case of a general condition.
The time has come to abolish the institutions of centralized power and tyranny as force and control, and to dismantle systemic and structural racism. What we need now is a version of England’s Shanley v Harvey judgement of 1763; anyone whose foot touches American soil is free, and may remain here under our protection.
Let us enact citizenship by declaration; claiming membership in our society would make it so in law. To say “I am an American” is to be an American; envision that this declaration may be made before any notary or embassy anywhere on earth, and from that moment America is a guarantor of your rights, with the responsibility of safe passage to our shores if those rights cannot be guaranteed should our new citizens remain in place, or liberation from tyranny where ever they may be, anywhere on earth, if escape is not the best solution or seizure of power from the regimes of those who would enslave us is possible.
Yes, this makes the whole world a borderless state and a United Humankind.
But there is an enormous difference between becoming one of us aa a citizen and co owner of our government, and claiming right of sanctuary among us. Citizenship is about the franchise and rights which derive from our laws and the powers we have seized, but also about specific responsibilities. Sanctuary is about universal human rights which derive from no government but from our human condition, and which no government may justly deny.
Politics is the art of balancing and negotiating these interdependent and parallel sets of rights, the legal rights of citizens and the inherent rights of human beings, that no one’s freedoms may deny those of any other.
Estonia has an interesting solution to the discontiguous nature of a dual set of rights; offer virtual citizenship or e-residency and a borderless state. The idea of nationality itself becomes transformed when a nation is embodied in the rights of its citizens, rather than defined by its boundaries.
Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers becomes a song not of the horrors of universalized forever wars, but of liberation from the social use of force by abandoning the hills on which we fly our flags, including the flags of our skins.
As I wrote in my post of March 16 2020, Walls of Hate, Tyranny, and Empire: America’s Global Borders: As we are inundated with the global awakening to fear of the coronavirus pandemic, it becomes clear that this is a natural triggering stressor which parallels a manufactured one, that of borders and refugee crises, in its behaviors and effects in our social and political environment as leverage for nationalist and fascist tyrannies of force and control in the subversion of democracy and the transformation of our world into a vast prison.
Overwhelming and generalized fear is a necessary precondition of authoritarian regimes, and of violence and the use of social force generally, which together with submission to authority may be regarded as a First Cause of the disease of power in the sense that Thomas Aquinas argued causality and being; ”If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.”
Authority and fear also alienate us from ourselves, dehumanize and commodify us as does capitalism as its outer form; for this is about the theft of our identity and power by those who would enslave us.
The first consequence of the emergence of authority and the disempowerment of its subjects is the modern pathology of disconnectedness; and this is the link which binds authority and tyranny together, and its weak point. Here is where resistance and revolution must act to shatter the knot of interdependent and mutually reinforcing systems which rob us of our humanity and our freedom.
We must build bridges not walls, togetherness not isolation, unity not division, and forge a borderless world and a free society of equals.
An Allegory of the Migrant Dilemma and of Racism and Capitalism as Interdependent Systems of Oppression: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo Del Toro
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, Zaragosa Vargas
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, Miriam Pawel
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, John Storm Roberts
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, Diego Rivera
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, Carlos Fuentes intro
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, Dolores Tierney, Deborah Shaw, & Ann Davies, Editors
Hispanic-American Literature
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, The Sum of Our Days, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, The Sum of Our Days, Conversations With Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabele Allende
Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion, Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Latin Moon in Manhattan, Our Lives Are the Rivers: A Novel,
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Silvio Sirias
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena Viramontes
Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Water Museum, The House of Broken Angels, Tijuana Book of the Dead, Luis Alberto Urrea
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Oscar Hijuelos
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Harold Bloom
House of the Impossible Beauties, Joseph Cassara
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Spanish
22 de septiembre de 2026 En celebración del Mes de la Herencia Hispana: Liberación, Memoria, Historia y Ser Humano; una Teoría Narrativa de la Identidad.
Celebramos el Mes de la Herencia Hispana en Estados Unidos a partir de este día cada año, cuando a los escolares se les enseñará versiones fetichizadas y desarraigadas de lo que significa ser hispanoamericano, como una especie de orientalismo, según la descripción de Edward Said; comidas exóticas de Taco Bell y representaciones de las modernas Carmen Mirandas. Mientras tanto, los verdaderos hispanoamericanos, cuyo trabajo crea nuestra riqueza al servicio de las hegemonías de poder y privilegio de las élites como casta esclava, o que languidecen en los campos de concentración de nuestra frontera como forasteros demonizados y peones políticos, permanecen silenciados y borrados de la vista, un trueno de agonía mudo y terrible que un día nos conmoverá hasta el corazón de nuestra humanidad y los cimientos de nuestra nación. Celebremos esta y todas las festividades que conmemoran a las personas precarias y marginadas, caracterizadas por la disparidad políticamente diseñada, la desigualdad de poder y la otredad excluyente, incluyendo las construcciones de etnicidad, escuchando sus voces en lugar de valorizar iconos autorizados de figuras e imágenes desempoderadas.
Crear una idea sobre un tipo de pueblo es un acto de violencia.
Niños, su cultura es lo que realmente hacen; ustedes, ustedes mismos, y nadie más. Nadie más que ustedes tiene derecho a votar sobre quiénes son o en quiénes pueden llegar a ser. Les corresponde a ustedes decirnos quiénes son, no al revés.
Una de las verdades más importantes que debemos comprender sobre la cultura, especialmente aquellas que reivindican y que a su vez los reivindican, en oposición a los legados de la historia de los que debemos emerger para reclamar nuestra libertad y crearnos como identidades elegidas y, lo que es más importante, contra los sistemas de opresión y las narrativas de falsificación, mercantilización y deshumanización, es que cambiamos nuestra cultura con lo que nosotros mismos hacemos. Constantemente, para la cultura, la identidad es un proceso de adaptación y cambio, efímero y cambiante, en el peor de los casos ilusorio y, en el mejor, una realización de nuestras verdades, las que creamos y las que llevamos escritas, y un instrumento para apoderarnos del poder, y siempre una forma de poder que no nos puede ser arrebatada, pues es una praxis o acción de nuestros valores, significados y ser.
¿Qué quiero decir con esto? Quiénes somos es una representación teatral, y es posible improvisar nuevas identidades en la lucha por la liberación con nuestras historias.
La identidad se construye como un sistema de relatos, y un canon literario es nada menos que un conjunto autorizado de identidades. Por eso, la reimaginación y transformación de las historias que nos contamos sobre nosotros mismos, a nosotros mismos y a los demás, debe ser constante y continua. La primera pregunta que debemos hacernos sobre nuestras historias es esta: ¿de quién es esta historia?
Como dice Wednesday a la autoridad en la telenovela: «Si no contamos nuestras historias, ellas lo harán». Estamos perdidos en un desierto de espejos, cámaras y superficies que nos abstraen en imágenes ajenas, que nos capturan en narrativas que no creamos y nos reflejan infinitamente, robándonos nuestra singularidad y nuestras almas.
Este es el verdadero horror del colonialismo y de la línea que hemos trazado en nuestra frontera, ahora convertida en un muro de terror estatal supremacista blanco y crueldad institucional, para instrumentalizar la disparidad y crear una vasta reserva de mano de obra explotable sobre la que se construye la riqueza, el poder y los privilegios de las élites blancas hegemónicas de Estados Unidos.
A esto digo: derriben los muros, como hicimos con el Muro de Berlín, todos los muros, en todas partes, especialmente el nuestro, dondequiera que los hombres anhelen ser iguales y libres, hasta que las divisiones de raza, fe, nacionalidad, idioma o cualquier otra taxonomía de identidad aún no soñada dejen de tener significado, excepto como curiosidades o como identidades que reivindicamos sin pretensiones de superioridad ni otredad excluyente, hasta que todos seamos simplemente seres humanos y garantes de la humanidad de los demás. Tal es la visión de convertirme en humano por la que he luchado desde que comprendí por primera vez su posibilidad entre la multitud de futuros entre los que debemos elegir.
Hay un poema que mi padre me enseñó a memorizar y recitar de niño, que aún resuena en mis pensamientos cada vez que me pregunto sobre nuestras futuras posibilidades de convertirnos en humanos y las decisiones que tomamos sobre cómo ser humanos juntos: El hombre con la azada, de Edward Markham, escrito tras ver la famosa pintura de Millet. Doblado por el peso de los siglos, se apoya
en su azada y contempla el suelo,
el vacío de las eras en su rostro,
y sobre su espalda el peso del mundo.
¿Quién lo hizo morir al éxtasis y la desesperación,
algo que no se aflige y que nunca espera,
impasible y aturdido, hermano del buey?
¿Quién aflojó y bajó esta mandíbula brutal?
¿De quién fue la mano que inclinó esta frente hacia atrás?
¿De quién fue el aliento que apagó la luz de este cerebro?
¿Es esto lo que el Señor Dios creó y dio
para dominar el mar y la tierra;
para trazar las estrellas y quemar
¿Acaso los cielos buscan poder?
¿Para sentir la pasión de la Eternidad?
¿Es este el Sueño que soñó quien moldeó los soles
y marcó sus caminos en las antiguas profundidades?
A lo largo del Infierno hasta su último abismo
No hay forma más terrible que esta,
Más cargada de censura por la ciega codicia del mundo,
Más llena de señales y portentos para el alma,
Más cargada de peligro para el universo.
¡Qué abismos entre él y los serafines!
Esclavo de la rueda del trabajo, ¿qué son para él
Platón y el vaivén de las Pléyades?
¿Qué son las largas extensiones de las cimas del canto,
la grieta del amanecer, el enrojecimiento de la rosa?
A través de esta terrible forma miran las épocas sufrientes;
La tragedia del tiempo está en esa dolorosa curva; A través de esta terrible forma, la humanidad traicionada, saqueada, profanada y desheredada,
clama protesta a los Jueces del Mundo,
una protesta que también es profecía.
Oh, amos, señores y gobernantes de todas las tierras,
¿es esta la obra que entregan a Dios,
esta cosa monstruosa distorsionada y apagada?
¿Cómo podrán enderezar esta forma?
Tocarla de nuevo con la inmortalidad;
Devolverle la mirada hacia arriba y la luz;
Reconstruir en ella la música y el sueño;
Corregir las infamias inmemoriales,
los pérfidos males, las aflicciones incurables?
Oh, amos, señores y gobernantes de todas las tierras,
¿Cómo se las arreglará el Futuro con este Hombre?
¿Cómo responderá a su brutal pregunta en esa hora
Cuando torbellinos de rebelión sacudan el mundo? ¿Cómo será con los reinos y con los reyes,
con aquellos que lo moldearon hasta convertirlo en lo que es,
cuando este mudo Terror se levante para juzgar al mundo
tras el silencio de los siglos?
Les deseo a todos un feliz Mes de la Herencia Hispana; y recuerden descontrolarse y ser ingobernables. Provoquemos el Caos y un Ajuste de Cuentas.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 24 de julio de 2022: «En una sociedad libre de iguales, ¿quién otorga la ciudadanía? Abolir las fronteras y promulgar la ciudadanía por declaración». A lo largo de nuestra frontera con México, campos de concentración para refugiados no blancos en lugar de santuario, y un ejército brutal de cazadores de esclavos y supervisores de trabajos forzados en prisión en lugar de ayuda humanitaria y salvoconductos.
No comenzaremos a ser humanos hasta que construyamos puentes, no muros.
Promulguemos la diversidad y la inclusión en lugar de divisiones de otredad excluyente, jerarquías de pertenencia y hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegio.
Abolimos las fronteras y promulgamos la ciudadanía por declaración.
Si estás tan loco como para querer ser uno de nosotros, eres uno de nosotros; ¿quiénes somos nosotros para decir que no? Esta es la única prueba de ciudadanía que necesitamos. Siempre que pienso en el tema de la ciudadanía y la inmigración, recuerdo la famosa escena de la película Freaks, en la que se ofrece la Copa del Amor a la futura novia con el cántico ritual de inclusión y pertenencia: “¡Uno de nosotros! ¡Uno de nosotros! ¡Ahora eres uno de nosotros!”. Esta es la ceremonia que necesitamos para dar la bienvenida a los nuevos estadounidenses a nuestra sociedad libre de iguales; un festín ritual de pertenencia. La película es también una magnífica alegoría de por qué fracasa la democracia y de los límites de la diversidad y la inclusión en el miedo y las jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad.
Algunos de nosotros, como yo, somos verdaderamente otros y definimos los límites de lo humano, que, como todos los límites, transgredo como actos sagrados de liberación. Por eso me interesa la idea de monstruos, fenómenos y marginados que codifican la humanidad y abogan por aceptar nuestra monstruosidad como una receta para liberarnos del racismo y otras formas de jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad, cruciales y determinantes en la construcción de la identidad, legados de la historia y sistemas de opresión de los que debemos liberarnos. Soy un fenómeno que ofrece la Copa del Amor a quienes nos esclavizan, nos expulsan y nos persiguen hasta la extinción.
Leo Frankenstein de Mary Shelley en parte como una crítica al colonialismo, la esclavitud y el Imperio Británico, y me identifico con el Monstruo, especialmente con la versión que Dean Koontz hace de él como Deucalión en su serie Frankenstein, que narra la historia como una guerra contra la humanidad protagonizada por Víctor como el creador de una raza de superhombres, como se consideraban los nazis. Aquí, Deucalión, horriblemente deformado y marcado por sus batallas, como yo, aunque las mías no sean visibles, e inmensamente poderoso y brillante, desempeña el papel de Espartaco contra su tirano creador, quien no se detendría ante nada para imponer su idea de virtud. Pero Víctor es también una figura de Prometeo que se atreve a robar el fuego de los dioses y tomar el poder contra su injusta autoridad; en este sentido, un liberador, pero que a su vez se convierte en tirano, como tantos otros en nuestra historia: Washington, Napoleón, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe. Una fase predecible de la lucha revolucionaria debido a las condiciones impuestas, especialmente las anticoloniales, y también a las contradicciones internas del idealismo, que en acción subvierte sus propios valores una vez tomado el poder.
Por eso, Israel, último bastión de un pueblo casi extinto, es ahora una pesadilla de tiranía y terror estatal, habiendo reproducido el Auschwitz del que sobrevivieron y perpetrando el genocidio de los palestinos; un pueblo dividido por la historia. Y es por eso que Estados Unidos, la Tierra de la Libertad, cuya Estatua de la Libertad proclama al mundo: «Dadme a vuestros cansados, a vuestros pobres, a vuestras masas apiñadas que anhelan respirar en libertad, a los miserables desechos de vuestras playas rebosantes. Enviadme a estos, los sin hogar, azotados por la tempestad, ¡elevo mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada!», ahora caza, secuestra, encarcela y tortura sin causa ni juicio a personas no blancas con una fuerza terrorista supremacista blanca llamada ICE.
Debemos resistir a todas estas cosas, como Deucalión o el teniente Aldo Raine en «Malditos Bastardos. Por cualquier medio necesario», citando a Malcolm X y Sartre en su obra de 1948 «Manos Sucias».
Mi punto aquí es que todos somos, a la vez, Víctor y su Monstruo, enfrascados en una lucha titánica por convertirnos en humanos juntos, y esta historia tiene consecuencias en cómo elegimos ser humanos juntos y en nuestras posibilidades de convertirnos en humanos. Estados Unidos ha trazado una línea divisoria para instrumentalizar la disparidad económica al servicio del dominio imperial mediante la explotación laboral de pueblos sin estatus legal, pues el lucro exige la esclavitud como una casta invisible con la que se puede hacer cualquier cosa con impunidad, como si no existiera. Aquí, en nuestra frontera con México, sus muros y jaulas, y en los cuerpos omnipresentes de quienes recogen y sirven nuestra comida, limpian nuestros espacios vitales, cuidan de nuestros niños y ancianos, como los escenógrafos vestidos de negro de un teatro kabuki del capitalismo, o la pandilla negra que alimenta el motor.
Al alimentar nuestro sistema con el combustible de sus vidas, como en la obra de Eugene O’Neil, El Mono Peludo, encontramos un ejemplo inmediato de nuestra propia complicidad en la deshumanización y mercantilización de quienes, con su trabajo, crean nuestra riqueza y sirven a nuestros privilegios de élite.
Porque hemos convertido nuestro mundo en una prisión global y un sistema de trabajo esclavo, un dominio imperial de fronteras y estados carcelarios de fuerza y control, y a nuestros semejantes en piezas de una vasta maquinaria de riqueza y poder mediante el robo de recursos públicos.
Todos somos el héroe de Nikolai Gogol en el Diario de un Loco, atrapados en las ruedas de una gran máquina a la que sirve, como Charlie Chaplin en su película Tiempos Modernos. Pero sabemos que estamos atrapados y esclavizados, y sabemos cómo y por qué; conocemos los secretos de nuestra condición que nuestros amos callarían, y al negarnos a callar podemos liberarnos a nosotros mismos y a nuestros semejantes. A esto Michel Foucault lo llamó decir la verdad; una visión poética de la reimaginación y una vocación sagrada a buscar la verdad que encierra un poder transformador. Así que aquí les ofrezco a todos palabras de esperanza para los momentos de desesperación, el horror de la falta de sentido, el dolor de la pérdida y la culpa de la supervivencia.
Su voz ha desafiado nuestra nada y resuena en los abismos de un mundo hostil y deshumanizante; cobra fuerza y poder transformador al encontrar mil ecos y comenzar a despertar la negativa a someterse a la autoridad y a sanar las patologías de nuestra falsificación y desconexión. La voz de un solo ser humano que porta una herida de humanidad que lo abre al dolor ajeno y que pone su vida en la balanza con aquellos a quienes Frantz Fanon llamó Los Condenados de la Tierra, los impotentes y los desposeídos, los silenciados y los borrados, quienes, resistiendo a la tiranía y el terror, la fuerza y el control, se vuelven invictos y libres; esa voz de liberación es imparable como las mareas, un agente de reimaginación y transformación que se apodera de las puertas de nuestras prisiones y libera las ilimitadas posibilidades de convertirse en humanos.
No desesperen y sean alegres, porque quienes somos Zonas Autónomas Vivas ayudamos a otros a romper las cadenas de su esclavitud simplemente por su condición de ser y de actuar; porque violamos normas, transgredimos los límites de lo Prohibido, exponemos las mentiras e ilusiones de la autoridad y dejamos a las fuerzas de la represión impotentes para imponer la obediencia.
Esta es la principal lucha revolucionaria que precede y subyace a todo lo demás; La apropiación de nosotros mismos de quienes nos esclavizan.
En esto, todos los que se resisten a la subyugación de la autoridad se asemejan a Zonas Autónomas Vivas, portadoras de semillas de cambio; podemos decir con la figura de Loki: “Llevo la carga de un propósito glorioso”.
Tal es la esperanza de la humanidad.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 21 de septiembre de 2021, El Estado Carcelario y sus Fronteras, Policía y Prisiones son Terror Institucional de la Supremacía Blanca: Caso de los Refugiados Haitianos:
“No como el gigante de bronce de la fama griega,
con extremidades conquistadoras a horcajadas de tierra en tierra;
aquí, a nuestras puertas bañadas por el mar y al atardecer, se alzará
una poderosa mujer con una antorcha, cuya llama
es el relámpago aprisionado, y su nombre
Madre de los Exiliados. Desde su mano-faro
brilla con una bienvenida mundial; sus ojos apacibles dominan
el puerto con puentes aéreos que enmarcan las ciudades gemelas.
“¡Conserven, tierras antiguas, su pompa legendaria!” —grita ella
con labios silenciosos—. Dadme a vuestros cansados, a vuestros pobres,
a vuestras masas apiñadas que anhelan respirar en libertad,
a los miserables desechos de vuestras riberas rebosantes.
Enviadme a estos, los sin hogar, azotados por la tempestad,
¡Levanto mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada! Así reza la inscripción en nuestra Estatua de la Libertad: el sueño de Estados Unidos como un faro de esperanza para el mundo, escrita por una joven judía, Emma Lazarus, quien, al igual que su homónima, se ha vuelto inmortal como figura de la propia América, de los mejores ángeles de nuestra naturaleza y de los ideales que perseguimos, a pesar de nuestros fracasos en aferrarnos y vivir nuestras verdades.
En la lucha revolucionaria por el alma de Estados Unidos y la libertad del mundo, estas palabras grabadas en nuestros corazones iluminan los tiempos más oscuros y, como el regalo de Pandora, nos inspiran a seguir luchando, más allá de la esperanza de victoria o incluso de supervivencia, por la oportunidad de la Libertad.
Para resistir la tiranía, las divisiones de la otredad excluyente y las jerarquías de la élite, y para rechazar la subyugación de quienes pretenden esclavizarnos.
Pero la promesa de refugio en una sociedad libre de iguales donde nadie es mejor que otro por razón de nacimiento no se aplica a todos por igual; no si no eres blanco.
En el caso de los refugiados haitianos golpeados a caballo Policías con látigos y abandonados a su suerte en campamentos precarios en nuestra frontera, tenemos un ejemplo vívido y horroroso de una verdad incómoda: Estados Unidos aún no es libre. El estado carcelario y sus fronteras, policía y prisiones son el terror institucional de la supremacía blanca, y en la crisis en nuestra frontera vemos un caso extremo de una condición general.
Ha venido a abolir las instituciones del poder centralizado y la tiranía como fuerza y control, y a desmantelar el racismo sistémico y estructural. Lo que necesitamos ahora es una versión de la sentencia inglesa de 1763 en el caso Shanley contra Harvey; cualquiera que pise suelo estadounidense es libre y puede permanecer aquí bajo nuestra protección.
Promulguemos la ciudadanía por declaración; reclamar la pertenencia a nuestra sociedad la convertiría en tal por ley. Decir “Soy estadounidense” es ser estadounidense; imaginen que esta declaración puede hacerse ante cualquier notario o embajada en cualquier lugar del mundo, y desde ese momento Estados Unidos es garante de sus derechos, con la responsabilidad de un tránsito seguro a nuestras costas si esos derechos no pueden garantizarse si nuestros nuevos ciudadanos permanecen en el país, o de la liberación de la tiranía dondequiera que se encuentren, en cualquier lugar del mundo, si escapar no es la mejor solución o si es posible tomar el poder de los regímenes de quienes nos esclavizan.
Sí, esto convierte al mundo entero en un estado sin fronteras y en una Humanidad Unida. Pero existe una enorme diferencia entre convertirse en uno de nosotros y copropietario igualitario de nuestro gobierno, y reclamar el derecho de santuario entre nosotros. La ciudadanía se refiere al derecho al voto y los derechos que se derivan de nuestras leyes y los poderes que hemos asumido, pero también a responsabilidades específicas. El santuario se refiere a los derechos humanos universales que no provienen de ningún gobierno, sino de nuestra condición humana, y que ningún gobierno puede negar con justicia.
La política es el arte de equilibrar y negociar estos conjuntos de derechos interdependientes y paralelos: los derechos legales de los ciudadanos y los derechos inherentes de los seres humanos, de modo que las libertades de nadie puedan negar las de ningún otro.
Estonia ofrece una solución interesante a la naturaleza discontinua de un conjunto dual de derechos: ofrecer ciudadanía virtual o residencia electrónica y un Estado sin fronteras. La idea misma de nacionalidad se transforma cuando una nación se encarna en los derechos de sus ciudadanos, en lugar de definirse por sus fronteras. Juegos sin Fronteras de Peter Gabriel se convierte en un canto no a los horrores de las guerras eternas universalizadas, sino a la liberación del uso social de la fuerza al abandonar las colinas donde ondeamos nuestras banderas, incluidas las banderas de nuestra piel.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 16 de marzo de 2020, Muros de Odio, Tiranía e Imperio: Las Fronteras Globales de Estados Unidos: Ante la creciente conciencia global del miedo a la pandemia del coronavirus, se hace evidente que este es un factor desencadenante natural de estrés, paralelo a uno artificial, el de las fronteras y las crisis de refugiados, en sus comportamientos y efectos en nuestro entorno social y político, como palanca para las tiranías nacionalistas y fascistas de fuerza y control en la subversión de la democracia y la transformación de nuestro mundo en una vasta prisión. El miedo abrumador y generalizado es una condición necesaria de los regímenes autoritarios, así como de la violencia y el uso de la fuerza social en general. Este miedo, junto con la sumisión a la autoridad, puede considerarse una causa fundamental de la enfermedad del poder, en el sentido en que Tomás de Aquino argumentó la causalidad y el ser: «Si no hay una causa fundamental, entonces el universo es como una gran cadena con muchos eslabones; cada eslabón se sostiene por el eslabón superior, pero la cadena entera no se sostiene por nada».
La autoridad y el miedo también nos alienan de nosotros mismos, nos deshumanizan y nos mercantilizan, como lo hace el capitalismo en su forma externa; pues se trata del robo de nuestra identidad y poder por parte de quienes pretenden esclavizarnos.
La primera consecuencia del surgimiento de la autoridad y el desempoderamiento de sus sujetos es la patología moderna de la desconexión; y este es el vínculo que une a la autoridad y la tiranía, y su punto débil. Aquí es donde la resistencia y la revolución deben actuar para romper el nudo de sistemas interdependientes que se refuerzan mutuamente y que nos roban nuestra humanidad y nuestra libertad. Debemos construir puentes y no muros, unión y no aislamiento, unidad y no división, y forjar un mundo sin fronteras y una sociedad libre de iguales.
Something glorious and strange has happened; a united front of media defies the White House Blacklist in solidarity and a strike which leaves Trump talking to nothing and no one.
This includes NBC, ABC, and CBS, acting in solidarity with banned CNN, MS Now and Politico.
All of this plays out as the Trump regime collapses and its apologists, minions, and collaborators begin to desperately distance themselves from the economic ruin, sabotage of our institutions, theft of meaningful citizenship, the ICE white supremacist campaign of ethnic cleansing, and the partnership with Israel in the abandonment of the principle of universal human rights which are the legacies of Trump’s regime of idiot madness and kleptocratic grift.
The renunciation of the Fourth Reich is a thing to be celebrated; but we must also bring a Reckoning for its many crimes. Friends, we must not allow fascists to escape the consequences of their actions like leopards changing their spots.
In the words of the magnificent Lt Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds; “I can’t abide it. Can you abide it?”
As goes the article which seems to have triggered the strike, written by Margaret Sullivan in The Guardian entitled The Washington press corps needs to boycott White House events; “On Monday, the three news organizations that had been kicked out of the White House because of Donald Trump’s latest fit of pique sued the president and three top advisers.
An accompanying statement by CNN, MS Now and Politico accurately calls last week’s sudden lockout “a direct assault on the first amendment”.
The legal action is the right move, of course, and one that may prevail since the ban seems to be a clear case of what press-rights lawyers call “viewpoint discrimination”. In other words, Trump didn’t like their stories so he removed their access.
The president has been in a bad mood lately, for obvious reasons. Retaliating against the press is his favorite way to let off steam.
But something else, beyond legal action, is necessary, too.
“Time for the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to report on the White House from off campus,” wrote Richard J Tofel, an attorney and the longtime president of the investigative news organization ProPublica, who writes a press-related newsletter, Second Rough Draft.
In other words, the biggest and most influential “print” news organizations – along with the major broadcast TV networks – should take collective action by boycotting that briefing room and similar White House events until their journalistic colleagues get their credentials back.
The major TV networks took a commendable step in that direction on Monday by deciding to suspend “pool coverage” of presidential events, since CNN was assigned to the duty of recording events and sharing them with the broader “pool” of news organizations.
“There will be no replacement pool put in place,” stated Bryan Boughton, the Fox News Washington bureau chief and chair of the TV pool in a memo to the White House press corps.
It’s especially good to see because the White House press corps often talks a good game about solidarity and press rights, but they’ve mostly kept doing what they’ve always done – treating Trump like any other president.
He can ban the Associated Press from the briefing room for refusing to use the term “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico”. He can respond to a reporter’s question with the disrespectful command “Quiet, piggy.” He can (through his defense secretary) try to revoke journalistic access to the Pentagon and fire top staffers at Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper. His weaponized justice department can subpoena New York Times reporters or show up at a Washington Post reporter’s home and seize her devices.
He can even trash as the “worst” his loyal rightwing media outlet, Fox News, for its recent polling that showed Americans’ deep dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy. He’s an equal opportunity media-basher.
But, no matter, Trump still gets that annual invitation to the White House Correspondents’ Association’s fancy DC dinner, where he can insult the press and make personal attacks on reporters whom he finds displeasing or those he simply wants to single out for abuse.
He still gets treated with deference.
And the reporters who are not in particular disfavor continue to go to White House briefings and press gaggles.
In other words, he mostly gets away with it.
This most recent ban is one of the most serious actions yet, as the scholar of authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, declared, calling it “a moment of reckoning for America”.
It’s not only, she said, “part of the autocratic playbook, but the timing is no coincidence. Trump is well into the autocratic backfire process, thus entire media outlets he sees as threats must be banished.”
To put it bluntly, Trump is a bully. And bullies will keep bullying until they get a punch in the nose.
As much as he professes to hate the mainstream media, Trump depends on it. He wants the constant attention. He loves being in the spotlight, where his every utterance – no matter how unhinged or false – is blasted out to the public.
It will get through to him if that kind of attention is withdrawn, as it was on Monday with the pool suspension.
Back when the AP was banned last year, a former Washington bureau chief at the news service, Ron Fournier, had some broader advice for the press corps.
“No self-respecting journalist should attend a White House briefing while the White House bans the AP for not accepting state-mandated language,” he wrote on social media, using the hashtag #BoycottTheBriefing.
Yes, media organizations may issue strongly worded statements, and may join in lawsuits, but solidarity is too often a theoretical thing, not a practical action with real-life consequences.
They offer a rationale, of course. It’s of utmost importance, journalists and their bosses will tell you, to cover the president. Not doing so would be a dereliction of duty and would stoop to the president’s level. It would be, God forbid, unprofessional.
But here’s the thing: reporters do not need to do their journalistic duty from inside the White House, or in an impromptu gaggle with Trump.
“We don’t need our journalistic watchdogs to have ‘access’ to Trump,” as former CBS News justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane put it. (He is now the chief Washington correspondent at MeidasTouch, the progressive media company.) “Everyone in the press room should walk out in protest … and source up.”
In other words, don’t abandon the job. Report aggressively from “off campus”.
It is a matter of principle at this point.
Especially at a time when American democracy is teetering on the brink.”
As I wrote last year in my post of September 21 2026, The Silencing of Witness and Mockery, and State Repression of Dissent: the Case of the Jesters Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel; We wander lost in the Wilderness of Mirrors, lies and illusions, propaganda and repression of dissent, the silencing of witness and mockery, and sadly this is nothing new or unique.
What remains to be said?
Professor Levine, Administrator of the Face Book group All Along The Watchtower, has issued an instruction on the most recent of such events, which has provoked a torrent of backlash as all uses of social force creates its own Resistance. Possibly to the point where we have reached consensus within our totally siloed communities of political ideology, having become polarized beyond listening to each other much less public debate to seek the truth, rendering the scraps of our intellectual life as mere instruments of confirmation bias and drowning us all in the white noise of outrage and the trauma of empathy fatigue and despair.
The terms of the Directive: “Please no more posts on Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension. It is important, but the thread is filled with them. Other important issues are happening and need our attention. Thanks.”
To this I reply; OK. You know I was writing a scathing diatribe on this, but you’re right its not news in Trump’s America. So few of our normalities remain yet to be violated, one runs out of new horrors to unmask.
Maybe you’re right, and the time for us to speak in words and not actions is passed, on this and far too many other issues.
State control of the media is a watershed issue, and a line from which there is no retreat if we are to save our democracy.
I ride at moonrise, friends. And if our rights guaranteed by the Constitution mean anything to you, rights of free speech and of the press which I summarize as the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, you too will find ways to Resist, to refuse to submit and remain Unconquered, to disbelieve and disobey. As the line from Tombstone goes, I say to all those who would dehumanize and enslave us, to fascists and to tyrants throughout history and the world; “I’m coming, and Hell’s coming with me.”
Let none stand alone, for the black tide of fascist tyranny and terror engulfs the world and threatens us all with dehumanization. We must join together in solidarity of action as a United Humankind and guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights, wherever men hunger to be free.
In the words of Elie Wiesel, “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe”.
But with America a captured state of the Fourth Reich, fascism has a force multiplier and sponsor state from which the Nazi revival and reconquest of the world may be launched, already begun in Ukraine and Palestine as the twin major fronts of the Third World War. So here we must begin, and draw a line against the dark.
As Picard’s line in Star Trek: First Contact goes; “We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far and no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done!”
The world should have learned long ago that any compromise with evil is a form of danegeld we cannot pay, and when a tyrant says “This is my last territorial demand”, the time has come to bring a Reckoning and purge our destroyers from among us.
First we must bring a public Reckoning with the criminality, monstrosity, and immoral degenerate cruelty of the subject whom our Jesters have been fired by their plutocrat toadies of fascist tyranny for mocking, Charlie Kirk. As written in his Substack newsletter by John Pavlovitz, in an article entitled The Shameful Christian Idolatry and Fraudulent Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk;
“• Kirk had claimed that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “huge mistake” that has now become an “anti-white weapon”.
• During a September 2024 episode of the debate show Surrounded, Kirk stated that even if his 10-year-old daughter became pregnant due to rape, she would be forced to carry the baby to term.
• On a January 3rd, 2024, episode of his show, Kirk continued his incessant verbal assaults on women of color, saying “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
• During an April 5, 2023, appearance at the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church, Kirk said, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.”
• In March of 2024, Kirk said on his show: The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
• Kirk decried what he described as the “myth” of Martin Luther King Jr , calling him “awful” and “not a good person”, another time declaring him “a serial adulterer, an alleged rapist, a reparations proponent, and a race Marxist.”
• A fierce opponent of DEI initiatives designed to give underrepresented and marginalized communities equal opportunities, he “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” (The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024)
• On an April 30th, 2025 episode of his show, Kirk reiterated his unapologetic Islamophobia, saying “large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.”
• In a 2024 episode of his show, Kirk quoted a Leviticus passage calling for gay people to be stoned to death, referring to it as “God’s perfect law,” and called for “a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.”
• And though Jesus’ life and ministry overflowed with compassion for the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, Kirk recently said, “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.”
I’m left to wonder and to ask professed Christians posthumously elevating Charlie Kirk as some hero of their faith:
Is this what you think followers of Jesus do?
Is this what Christianity is to you?
How can you call any of this Christlike?”
With the true character and purpose of Charlie Kirk established as a propagandist of hate and theocratic terror, let us now interrogate and problematize the function of comedy as the unmasking of tyrants, the witness of history, free speech which is the keystone of democracy and hate speech as an instrument of its subversion, and the sacred calling to pursue the truth.
In this case, our mad King Lear has taken no counsel from his Jesters, leaving us all inmates of an asylum ruled by its most depraved lunatics.
As Robert Reich has written; “Friends, The one thing Trump can’t take is a joke, especially one at his expense.
Yesterday — one day after ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely,” after pressure from the chairman of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — Trump said federal regulators should revoke broadcast licenses over late-night hosts who speak negatively about him.
“They’re giving me all this bad press, and they’re getting a license,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
It was bad enough in the early 1950s when the U.S. government criminalized certain speech during Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts. Those witch hunts were directed at alleged members of the Communist Party who supposedly posed a threat to America (although the vast majority of them were loyal Americans).
Late-night comedians pose no conceivable threat to America. They make people laugh.
But they do pose a potential threat to Trump.
CBS’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” was announced just days after Colbert slammed CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for giving Trump $16 million to settle Trump’s defamation suit — which Colbert called a “big, fat bribe” to get the FCC to allow Paramount to merge with and be acquired by Skydance Media.
Colbert was correct, of course.
Trump’s response to Colbert’s cancellation? “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
Kimmel was next, and it’s probably not coincidental that ABC has also been a target of Trump’s defamation ire, finally settling with him for the same amount, $16 million.
Trump’s response to Jimmy Kimmel’s cancellation this week? “Great news for America.” Trump then added, “[T]hat leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC.”
What does Trump have against late-night comedians?
For as long as anyone can remember, they’ve been a source of jokes about those in power. In the wake of Kimmel’s firing, David Letterman, the longtime late-night host, said he’d routinely beat up on president after president over the years, and “not once were we squeezed by anyone from any governmental agency. Everyone sort of understood [it was] in the name of humor.”
But Trump hates to be the object of humor. Some deep part of his reptilian brain understands that humor can be a more powerful antidote to tyranny than any other form of criticism.
Laughter doesn’t just entertain, it subverts. Humor undermines tyrannical power that relies on projecting an image of inevitability and invincibility, by making a tyrant appear weak and vulnerable. Check one against Trump.
Laughter also undermines fear, which is used by tyrants to maintain control. When the public laughs at a leader, his oppressive control weakens. Check two against Trump.
Finally, humor can remind people they’re not alone. When a joke is widely shared, it reveals that opposition is widespread, which can encourage and validate resistance. Check three against Trump.
At some level, Trump understands this.
It’s also true that Trump’s fragile ego can’t stand to be ridiculed.
Anyone who watched the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner got a glimpse of how much Trump hates being mocked. President Obama and Seth Meyers spent nearly five minutes roasting Trump over his promotion of the “birther” conspiracy theory. The audience roared. But Trump appeared to seethe. Some of his biographers have speculated that this event was a key factor in his decision to run for president in 2016.
Finally, Trump seems constitutionally unable to recognize humor.
Unlike John F. Kennedy, whose wit encouraged us to laugh with him, or Ronald Reagan, whose funny asides endeared him to many who disagreed with his politics, Trump is humorless.
He doesn’t laugh. He rarely smiles. He occasionally tells a humorous story at the expense of someone or some group he dislikes but he is incapable of self-deprecating humor.
We don’t laugh with Trump. We only laugh at him.
In 2018, during his speech at the United Nations, his claim that “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country” drew loud guffaws from world leaders. (Taken aback, Trump responded, “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay.”)
For all these reasons, Trump’s war on late-night comedians may be his undoing.
It’s one thing to declare war on crime or undocumented workers or even liberals. But everyone loves to laugh.
As Letterman said, “the institution of the President of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show, you know you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful [that they’ll get a laugh]. That’s just not how this works.”
Therefore let us practice the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
When they come for one of us, as they always have and will, let them be met with all of us. And when they come for the jesters who speak truths inconvenient to power and authority, let us all become jesters and give our naked emperors no space of legitimacy or hold upon us.
As written by Oliver Holmes in The Guardian, in an article entitled For comedians around the world, the laughs often end as democracy fades; “The exiled Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef has experienced firsthand how intolerant governments can silence political satire. And he had a short message this week for those living in an age of Donald Trump’s free speech clampdown: “My Fellow American Citizens,” he wrote on X. “Welcome to my world.”
In his attacks on the most prominent of American satirists, the US president has joined a cadre of illiberal and sensitive leaders around the world who will not tolerate a joke.
The latest target of what critics say is a campaign to silence dissenting voices was Jimmy Kimmel, who had his late-night ABC talkshow suspended after government pressure. The removal, weeks after the rival network CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s satirical show, follows other Trump-led crackdowns on media and academia.
Political foes of the US president say the diminishing space for free speech shows Trump’s America is moving towards authoritarianism. Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking to MSNBC, said the country was on a path towards becoming more like oppressive regimes in Russia and Saudi Arabia. “This is just another step forward,” he said.
From Egypt’s military ruler, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, to India’s populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, the laughs often end for comedians as democracy dwindles.
One of the most famous global comedians to have his life turned upside down by his political satire is Youssef, who first found fame with a TV show panning the Egyptian regime.
Known as the “Egyptian Jon Stewart” in reference to the US talkshow host whom he was inspired by (and looks like), Youssef is a former heart surgeon who became a household name.
But his satire made him the target of two opposing governments. He was first arrested in April 2013, accused of insulting Islam and Egypt’s then president. Months later, when Sisi took power by force, Youssef had to cancel his show and flee the country.
Youssef has said his struggle was as much against Egypt’s cloying, conservative culture as its repressive leaders. “We didn’t have a space for satire in Egypt. We carved out our own space. We had to fight for it,” he said in a 2015 interview.
“And because there’s no platform, no space or infrastructure for that kind of satire to be accepted, we were basically pushed out … We are up against generations of people who don’t have this kind of mindset. That’s why it was an uphill battle for us.”
Comedians elsewhere have often found themselves caught up in nationalist fervour.
In India, which has a history of a lively and relatively free public discourse, critics of Modi argue space to criticise the policies of his rightwing nationalist government is shrinking.
Comedians and comedy venues have increasingly been caught in the crosshairs since the rise of his Hindu Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which has ruled for more than a decade.
A Muslim comedian was detained by police for weeks in 2021 for allegedly vulgar jokes insulting Hindu gods – despite never having performed at the show. The comedian Vir Das faced a backlash later the same year and police reports filed by BJP officials after a monologue that dealt with the country’s contradictions on women’s rights and religion.
Police in Mumbai registered a criminal case against a comedian in 2017 over a tweet of a photo of Modi modified by Snapchat’s popular dog filter, giving him a canine nose and ears.
Similar cases have come out in Russia, including a standup of Azerbaijani origin and a citizen of Belarus, Idrak Mirzalizade, who was detained for 10 days and later banned from the country for a joke about open racism in Russia.
Comedy, it seems, can also be treated by some as a transnational crime.
The Turkish government asked for the prosecution of a German comedian in 2016 for performing a satirical poem about its president. In the late-night programme screened by the German state broadcaster ZDF, Jan Böhmermann sat in front of a Turkish flag beneath a small, framed portrait of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reading out a poem that accused the president of repressing minorities and “kicking Kurds”.
Erdoğan’s lawyer Michael Hubertus von Sprenger wanted to enforce a complete ban on the poem, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor at the time, was widely criticised for appearing to give in to Ankara’s demands.
Böhmermann said at the time he felt Merkel had “filleted me [and] served me up for tea” to Erdoğan, and that she risked damaging freedom of speech in Germany. Charges brought against him were later dropped and he was given police protection.”
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
How To Bring A Reckoning To Fascists
Inglourious Basterds
Picard, Star Trek First Contact
“The line must be drawn here, and I will make them pay for what they’ve done.”
Tombstone “I’m coming, and Hell’s coming with me.”
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
Lizzy and the Triggermen perform “When That Man Is Dead and Gone”, written by Irving Berlin in 1941 about Hitler.
Networks halt TV pool coverage of Trump after CNN White House ban – live
NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox News, the four other networks that make up the White House TV pool, decided they would cease coverage in solidarity with banned CNN
Americans are ‘deer in the headlights’ in face of Trump assault on free speech, Maria Ressa tells Jon Stewart: Nobel prize winner says US institutions have collapsed much quicker than expected under the Trump administration
Late-night show hosts decry suspension of Kimmel’s show: ‘Blatant assault on freedom of speech’: Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and David Letterman criticize ABC’s parent company, Disney and FCC chief Brendan Carr
December 11 2023 What is Hate Speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who Decides What Is Permitted, and How Shall We Enforce Limits On Each Other’s Freedoms? Case of the Repression of Dissent By Universities Beholden to Special Interest Money
February 26 2021 A Victory for Free Speech and Journalism as a Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth: America Lays a Charge of Murder Against Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in the Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi
April 28 2023 Tucker Carlson, Voice of the Fourth Reich and Nazi Ideology in the Era of Traitor Trump, Is Disavowed by Fox and Now Free to Run For the Presidency
September 15 2025 A Crack In the MAGA Wall of Hate: Ideological Fracture Between Turning Point Christian Identity Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terrorists and Groyper White Supremacist Terrorists Produces the Assassination of Charlie Kirk, and a Letter to New Resistance Fighters
Let us celebrate and bear forward into the future the glorious hope of a free society of equals which has been renewed for us all in the Occupy movement which began this week in 2011 as Occupy Wall Street.
Why do we need leaders, rulers, masters? If we begin with the premises that no one is better than any other by reason of birth, and that the subjugation of some of us by others is always unjust, there is no justification for elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, nor for hierarchies of membership and exclusionary otherness, nor identitarian divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil which weaponize fear and hate in service to power, nor for the centralization of authority and power in the carceral state and its use of force and control by those who would enslave us.
Are humans good or bad by nature?
I believe that humans are primarily social constructions wherein our uniqueness is an unfolding of historical processes and the struggle to become human versus systems of oppression, that our souls are ephemera among a sea of universal being in ceaseless processes of change, and that the negative emotions such as grief are a biosocial tax on individuals whose purpose is to drive us together to meet threats collectively and distribute the costs of survival, that we are mutually interdependent and therefore by our nature each of us is our brothers keeper.
I do not believe in the theory of the innate depravity of man which is the basis of all law, derived from the doctrine of original sin, that without the restraining force of law we become degraded to a subhuman state driven by barbarian atavisms of instinct and the most ruthless becomes king. Nor is this a desirable or just end; for authority maximizes disparity and inevitably collapses, as our civilization did in World War One and is now falling and being recreated.
There is no good or evil in the universe, not as universal principles by which real things exist, for these are human words, and require human acts to make them real.
When I hear the word good, I wonder; Good for who?
Masters are superfluous to the needs of the slaves who do the work; let us be done with them, and with their carceral states of police, prisons, borders, and laws; with the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, the authorization of identities, the limits of normality, and the boundaries of the Forbidden. Let us renounce the use of social force and the praxis of law and order, for law serves power and order appropriates both power and freedom.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. As Guillermo del Toro wrote in Carnival Row; “Who is chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
There is no just authority; it is nothing but a con game. Patriarchy, racism, and capitalism are a harmony of elite power which serves no interests but its own, and its lies and illusions are songs of enslavement, falsification, commodification, and dehumanization. As Dorothy spoke truth to the Wizard, “You’re just an old humbug.” Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain; he is lying, for he is the enemy, and everything the enemy says is a lie.
In the words of Max Stirner; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.” As we reach toward the future possibilities of becoming human and a free society of equals, let us begin as we intend to end and achieve our vision of liberty and equality by practicing it in all that we do.
As written by Andrew Anthony in The Guardian in an article entitled We are the 99%; “Ten years ago that unifying slogan travelled around the world. Some attribute its origin to the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who first popularised the distinction between the 1% of people with great wealth and power and the rest of us. Others say that it was the late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber who coined the phrase. But everyone agrees that it went global when it was voiced by demonstrators who gathered in lower Manhattan’s financial district on 17 September 2011.
What took place that day, and the two months to follow, would become known as Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement against economic inequality and injustice that spread to 28 other US cities, to European capitals and financial centres, including London, Paris and Berlin, as well as parts of South America and the far east. In total it’s said that there were more than 750 Occupy events around the world, featuring demonstrators ranging from a few tens in some places to many thousands in others.
Inspired by the Arab spring protests that had toppled several dictators in the Middle East, OWS was also a delayed reaction to the global financial crisis of 2008 that had ushered in an era of austerity.
“The one duty we owe to history,” said Oscar Wilde, anarchist and Irish rebel, “is to rewrite it.” In the limitless leisure of retrospect, any particular moment in time and space can become imbued with pivotal significance or be consigned to the dustbin of historical dead ends. A decade on, opinions about OWS remain starkly polarised among both observers and participants.”
For myself, the Occupy Movement is “a transformative event in contemporary US history, a popular uprising against the power of corporate America that helped shift the Democratic party leftwards, enable Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and the election of self-proclaimed socialist politicians such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. By this reckoning, it was also the original leaderless social media-organised movement on which #MeToo and Black Lives Matter would be modelled.”
Progenitor of nonhierarchical social movements whose object is the reimagination and transformation of whole systems, Occupy Wall Street was a watershed moment in human history which reframed public discourse as a Forum of Athens and centered that discourse in the context of a free society of equals.
Leaderless revolution also deauthorizes narratives of human being, meaning, and value and evades the central problem of revolution itself; the centralization of power under a charismatic authority figure and the reproduction of power as social force and control. The substitution of tyrants changes nothing in the nature of power itself; and this is what we must change if we are to become free.
Occupy Wall Street brought both ideological and organizational change to people’s liberation movements; became the M-15 movement in Spain and the anti-austerity movements in Greece, then throughout Europe and the world, and found new forms in the three successive movements which challenged elite power in its triadic forms as patriarchy, racist fascism, and capitalism in the #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and Extinction Rebellion- Fridays for Future green protests. It also revitalized global democracy as nonviolent anarchy in the Autonomous Zones movement and the call to Occupy City Hall.
As I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance become Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being and meaning, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
Such liberations are truly endless and without limit, unbounded in time and space, for in refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free as self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, each of us bearers of the Torch of Liberty and its Promethean Fire.
Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Living Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who 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 “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, which France modeled on the oath of the Jesuits; not to a figure of authority like a pope or a king, not to a flag or any symbol or institution of government, but to each another and to an idea of solidarity in struggle. Churchill referenced it in his address to the team that brought down the Nazi submarine blockade and allowed America to enter the war, as depicted in the film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare which tells the true history of the founding of the Special Air Service and all subsequent Allied special forces. Genet 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 over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful, quick and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human. She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and with relative personal safety become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has moved on.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me.
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those of the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
Such is the hope of humankind.
Occupy Wall Street: the story behind seven months of protest, film
“In September last year, anti-corporate activists descended on a small park in lower Manhattan and Occupy Wall Street was born. As protesters ready for a spring resurgence, film-maker Kat Keene Hogue looks back at more than six months of Occupy, a movement that spread from Zuccotti Park to over 100 cities around the world”
Our leaders have betrayed us to the Nothing; the cruel and merciless racist genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terror of a theocratic and amoral regime designed for fiendish dual purposes; the imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors and the Final Solution of the Palestinians.
Israel is driven to annihilate Palestine because they are each other’s mirror image and shadow, which they seek to purge in blood sacrifice.
This and this alone does Israel now represent, for the capture of the state by a settler regime to whom only their own fellow Jews are truly human and the subversion of democracy, our universal human rights, and the death of the dream of Israel as a refuge from fascism and hate crime is now total and nearly final. The dream of a new Sepharad dies, and in its place rises a carceral state of force and control called by Netanyahu “a Middle Eastern Sparta” based on Jewish Identity politics, the weaponization of faith in service to power, the centralization of power to tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
With the Gaza War and its myriads of atrocities and crimes against humanity, directly modeled on Putin’s destruction of Mariupol and which both follow the doctrine of Total War as crafted by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica, Israel has become a mirror of the death camps her people once survived, a nation of walls and internal borders, quasi-slave labor enforced by a system of barricaded slums modeled on the Bantustans of Apartheid South Africa, the Nazi camps, and America’s Indian reservations in strange recursion, and have a permanent war economy which exports globally instruments of the repression of dissent and universal surveillance.
Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis. Here only fear, power, and force are real and have meaning, and we are all threatened by dehumanization and subjugation to a wicked and malign authority which has abandoned human being, meaning, and value for power enforced by terror, abjection, despair, and learned helplessness.
No matter where you begin with hierarchies and taxonomies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results; the ideology of nonviolent Resistance which Gandhi and Martin Luther King used in victorious seizures of power, and the Russian and all subsequent Revolutions of class struggle and socialist liberation?
In this horrific event of mass terror a great truth is revealed; the liberty and human rights of one people is identical to that of all people, especially those of an Occupied or colonized people and of the imperialist-colonialist people who claim ownership of them, for the imperials are also enslaved by their own empire.
Beware of those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent; especially when coupled with unforgiveable acts committed in your name.
Israel has committed many such unforgiveable acts of dehumanization against the people of Palestine, because they worship the Infinite differently and are less white in the flags of their skins. Yet Israel was founded as a democracy, and the apologists of state terror both in Israel and in America are glad to behave as if this were still true and rally vast wealth and power to the Israeli state and war machine in the name of the Jewish people whom they no longer defend, but use the language of defense, security, and just cause to authorize and legitimate brutal repression and crimes against humanity.
This has all unfolded over seventy years, but two years ago this week something new has happened which changes everything; they have killed Americans, volunteer medics and famine relief workers, among their victims of mass random civilian terror.
And they have done so gladly, with exultation and the unique madness of superiority by virtue of killing; the most primal and barbaric kind of power.
We American are uniquely positioned to influence Israel and end this war of genocide and ethnic cleansing, for we are the primary sponsors of Israeli tyranny and terror. They are our colony and proxy state in America’s monopolization of oil as a strategic asset which confers us our global hegemony and dominion, and this is instrumental to the business of empire.
As I wrote on this day in 2024 of this Rashomon Gate event; As of this week our taxes not only buy the deaths of children in Palestine, but also the deaths of our fellow Americans.
Netanyahu believes he can commit any crime against humanity without losing American money, arms, and political cover, because we are caught on the horns of a dilemma in our elections; we must unite in solidarity to deny Trump the capture of the state lest we lose our democracy utterly and forever, but the Democratic Party thus far refuses to reign in our wayward vassal for fear of losing votes and money. Netanyahu and Trump almost certainly conspired together in the tragedy of Black Saturday to do exactly this, hand Trump the election together with manufacturing a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest and genocide of Palestine and the globalization of the conflict in which a Zionist Empire may arise.
There is but one rule in American politics; nobody messes with the grift.
What measures have we taken to bring peace and justice to the twin nations of Israel and Palestine? Genocide Joe refused to vote to charge Netanyahu with genocide, then armed him with the weapons to commit it; in all fairness, this is nothing new, and continues seventy years of American policy. We missed our best chance at defusing this war when we refused to enact Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction against Israel; again nothing new, as this was what we were protesting for when Governor Reagan ordered the police to fire on the students on Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, I a nine year old child holding my mothers hand when she offered a bouquet of flowers to a policeman who replied by cocking and aiming a shotgun at her. We were saved by a police grenade thrown into the crowd, as all devolved into death and chaos; fifty five years later our universities are still using police terror to repress dissent regarding our investment and arming of Israel versus Palestine.
America has no policy of regime change in Israel, has not brought Netanyahu and his regime to trial, has not used BDS to silence the bombs, and now allows the murder of American citizens with impunity.
Kamala laughs; but this time she is laughing at us. We need her to break the power of the fascists who plan to overthrow democracy, and she knows this and that at this point we cannot disavow her or fail to vote for her; but we can keep both democracy and our universal human rights if she and the Democratic Party change their policy of arming and funding Israel without accountability for how those weapons are used. We must bring this to the front of the election as its defining issue; Kamala must lead the change, for the principle of human rights is of equal importance with the preservation of democracy.
Biden failed this test, and abandoned the idea of human rights by refusing to change policy, use BDS, arrest Netanyahu, or stop sending weapons of mass destruction for purposes of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and we purged him from the election because of it, on the pretext of being an imbecile rather than a conspirator in genocide as he was. Yet the Democratic Party wants to ignore the elephant in the room, and makes no mention of the most crucial issue on the ballot other than democracy and abortion, our complicity in crimes against humanity; this is a mistake.
Trump of course is far worse, for he is an active partner and ally of Netanyahu, possibly a co-conspirator as well, who hopes to divide and conquer America by making us complicit in the unforgivable crimes of Israel. This we must resist and meet with solidarity and a United Humankind, but we must also recognize and acknowledge the complicity of the Democratic as well the Republican Parties in the crimes against humanity of the state of Israel.
Our lives count as nothing against the power offered by Zionist paymasters; we have not even declared AIPAC a terrorist organization.
Now is the moment to free ourselves from capture of the state by forces inimical to our humanity and our liberty. If we cannot do so now, rallying to the bloodied shirt of our fellow Americans, we never will.
Among the legacies of the past which we drag around behind us like an invisible reptilian tail, there are those which must be kept and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As written in the Editorial of The Guardian, entitled The Guardian view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable; “In the second world war, guerrilla forces scattered large quantities of booby-trapped objects likely to be attractive to civilians. The idea was to cause widescale and indiscriminate death. The Japanese manufactured a tobacco pipe with a charge detonated by a spring-loaded striker. The Italians produced a headset that blew up when it was plugged in. More than half a century later, a global treaty came into force which “prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”. Has anyone told Israel and its jubilant supporters that, as Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group points out, it is a signatory to the protocol?
On Tuesday, pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 12 people – including two children and four hospital workers – and wounding thousands more. This situation is directly analogous to the historical practices that current global arms treaties explicitly prohibit. US media say Israel was behind the attack, and the country has the motive and the means to target its Iran-backed enemies. Israel’s leaders have a long history of carrying out sophisticated remote operations, ranging from cyber-attacks, suicide drone attacks and remote-controlled weapons to assassinate Iranian scientists. On Wednesday it was reported that Israel blew up thousands of two-way personal radios used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon, killing nine and wounding hundreds.
This week’s attacks were not, as Israel’s defenders claimed, “surgical” or a “precisely targeted anti-terrorist operation”. Israel and Hezbollah are sworn enemies. The current round of fighting has seen tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the Israel-Lebanon border because of the Shia militant group’s rocket and artillery attacks.
However, the pager bombs were clearly intended to target individual civilians – diplomats and politicians – who were not directly participating in hostilities. The plan appeared to produce what lawyers might call “excessive incidental civilian harm”. Both these arguments have been levelled at Russia to claim Moscow was committing war crimes in Ukraine. It’s hard to say why the same reasoning is not applied to Israel – apart from that it is a western ally.
Such disproportionate attacks, which seem illegal, are not only unprecedented but may also become normalised. If that is the case, the door is opened for other states to lethally test the laws of war. The US should step in and restrain its friend, but Joe Biden shows no sign of intervening to stop the bloodshed. The road to peace runs through Gaza, but Mr Biden’s ceasefire plan – and the release of hostages – has not found favour with either Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Hamas.
The worry is that Israel’s actions lead to a disastrous all-out conflict that would pull the US into a regional fight. The world stands on the edge of chaos because Mr Netanyahu’s continuing hold on power and consequent insulation from corruption charges depend largely on his nation being at war. None of this is possible without US complicity and assistance. Perhaps it is only after its presidential election that the US will be able to say that the price of saving Mr Netanyahu’s skin should not be paid in the streets of Lebanon or by Palestinians in the occupied territories. Until then, the rules-based international order will continue to be undermined by the very countries that created the system.”
As written by William Christou in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Sophisticated evil’: Beirut medics and civilians horrified by pager attacks
People describe panic when explosions started and ‘apocalyptic’ scenes inside hospitals overwhelmed by injured patients; “Two beeps and a pause was the only warning Yusuf got. He turned around to face the noise, thinking it was one of his medical instruments, but instead was met with an explosion, throwing shrapnel into his leg. His patient fared much worse.
“The patient lost consciousness; he started bleeding. His face, neck and lips were burned. He had knife-like cuts, as if he was hit by a rocket,” Yusuf, a doctor from Beirut speaking under a pseudonym, said while waiting for an injured friend outside a Beirut hospital on Tuesday night. He rolled up his trouser leg to show a small wound, the remnants of his patient’s exploded pager.
Tuesday’s attacks, which targeted pagers used by members of Hezbollah and have been attributed to Israel, left at least 2,800 injured and 12 dead, including two children and a healthcare worker. The scale was “far greater” than that of the Beirut port blast some four years earlier, the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history, which left more than 7,000 injured, Lebanon’s health minister, Firas Abiad, said. Two-thirds of those wounded in the Tuesday’s attacks needed hospitalisation, a greater proportion even than those hurt in the port explosion, the minister explained.
On Wednesday, walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members for communication began to explode across Lebanon in a similar fashion to the previous day’s attacks. A video showed a blast suddenly striking a Hezbollah member during a funeral in Beirut for a fighter killed on Tuesday, knocking him down and sending the crowd running. At least 14 people have been killed by the walkie-talkie detonations and hundreds injured.
The wide-ranging attacks extended all the way to Syria, where at least four Hezbollah members were injured by pager explosions in al-Qalamoun, Damascus and Seida Zeinab, according to Fadel Abdulghani, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
News of Tuesday’s attack trickled in at first, starting with information regarding a security incident in Beirut, then the southern city of Tyre, and the Bekaa valley. Soon it was all over the news, with pictures of people with mangled limbs and bloodied faces emerging from all over the country. The sound of ambulance sirens started and would continue non-stop, deep into the night.
Abiad issued a call for all health workers to go to their stations, and Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces asked citizens to stay off the streets so that ambulances could reach hospitals.
“I didn’t understand what was happening; the first thing I thought was that it was a terrorist attack,” said Ali, a 22-year-old trader from the Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp, interviewed while waiting outside a Beirut hospital for an injured friend on Tuesday night. “People started throwing their phones on the ground out of fear; they thought they would explode.”
Ali was in a popular market in Burj al-Barajneh when the explosions started. Though he did not hear them, their aftermath became quickly apparent.
“I saw a man trying to hold his face together; it had completely split. His eyes had popped out of his skull and blood was pouring out,” Ali said.
Hours after Tuesday’s explosions, the wounded were still being transported to hospitals. At Rizk hospital in Beirut, dozens of families waiting outside the emergency room, eager for any news of their family and friends inside. People crowded the doors of arriving ambulances, peering into windows to see if any loved ones were inside.
A woman collapsed to the ground, wailing after first responders had no information on the whereabouts of her family member. Ya Ali!” she cried, a religious exhortation, as men tried to soothe her.
“You see that one? That one came all the way from Abbasiyeh,” Ali said, pointing to an arriving ambulance that had travelled more than two hours to find a hospital with available beds.
Doctors described “apocalyptic” scenes inside emergency rooms, where young men, women and children alike poured in nonstop.
“I was in my house when I heard what happened, so I came back [to the hospital]. People were crying, shouting ‘I can’t see!’” an anaesthesiologist who worked at the Beirut Hôtel-Dieu de France hospital said on Wednesday morning under the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorised to speak to the press.
The doctor said that the injuries were unlike anything they had seen before, mainly wounded eyes and hands, a result of patients looking at their pagers before they exploded.
“Never do you have eye emergencies at this frequency. It’s transforming 2,000 people into disabled [people] at the same time,” another doctor at the same hospital said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday that the attack could be a violation of international humanitarian law, through its use of pagers as booby traps, and that it had put civilians at risk.
“The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate … and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction,” Lama Fakih, the Middle East and north Africa director at HRW, said.
As families waited outside the hospital, individual volunteers emerged to distribute water bottles and manakeesh, a Lebanese flatbread. A line of people formed outside the hospital as people came to donate blood.
“I’m horrified by the level of sophisticated evil. It’s completely crazy,” said Maliha Raydan, a 50-year-old mother of two, while distributing supplies outside Rizk hospital. “We were wondering what we could do, so we thought it would be a good thing to do.”
The apparently limitless suspected reach of Israeli intelligence had instilled anxiety in Raydan and others, some of whom refused to speak to the press for fear it would make them a future target for Israel.
“By doing this today, they can get to anyone. They can get to us in our bedrooms. They breach all laws of war and humanity. And no one is stopping them,” Raydan said.
For others, fear was pushed aside by a deep anger – mainly at the indiscriminate nature of the attack.
“I am a medical worker, but the grudge I have now … I will insist on teaching it to my great-great-grandson. I was neutral, but now I’m going to take a side,” Yusuf said, stressing, however, that his resistance would be non-violent.”
The Guardian view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable
The case of Ed Sheeran, a musician who will now be forever identified with his silencing of dissent and complicity in evil as he caves to the demands of the billionaire cabal which controls the stadium venues for live performance and the Zionist lobby in pulling Macklemore from his show over the championing of our universal human rights and the plight of the Palestinians under the hammer of Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, institutional torture, rape, and murder by the IDF, and imperial conquest and dominion to build a riviera of casinos for elites on the bones of a people for the profit of Netanyahu and Trump, underscores a principle we must remember always; Silence Is Complicity.
And this principle has an important corollary; All Art Is Political.
This is a ground of struggle intertwined with the historical genesis of modern fascism as we must fight it now, born with Hitler’s line when he abandoned painting as interrogated in the great film Max; “Politics is the new art.”
In the struggle between tyranny and liberty there is no neutral ground; in the words of Jesus as given in the King James Bible, Matthew 12:30; “He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”
As written by Zoe Williams in The Guardian, in an article entitled Dear Ed Sheeran, fence-sitting is so last century: musicians can no longer opt out of politics; “Ed Sheeran, seeking to stay out of politics, has become, in this moment, the most political artist in the world. And in trying to leave himself room to manoeuvre, he has backed himself into a corner. Since the rapper Macklemore was dropped as a support act on Sheeran’s Loop tour on Monday, every other opening act has pulled out. Finneas O’Connell kept it brief on Tuesday: “Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed. I stand with Palestine and its people.” Aaron Rowe was already out, saying: “I cannot stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence … rightful voices.”
Beoga, Sheeran’s actual backing band, then pulled out, along with the Danish band Lukas Graham, who probably made the mildest statement, managing to not even mention any countries: “We should be able to speak about war, about civilians being killed, about children who deserve to grow up. Wherever they live. Whatever flag flies over them.”
Sheeran said the decision to drop Macklemore was entirely down to venue owners and promoters, adding that there was a reason he didn’t talk about politics on stage: “My audience includes young people, often children, of all backgrounds.” Both statements sound weak, but more importantly, it is not true that Sheeran doesn’t take political stances. He has taken part in a fundraising gig for Ukrainians, telling them, “I love you, I stand with you”; in 2017 he outed himself as a “Corbynista fanboy” (TM the Sun), and has been a vocal supporter of LGBTQI+ rights, on stage and off, throughout his career. More specifically, it seems unlikely he didn’t know the views of his support acts when he chose them: Macklemore had a song about Hind Rajab, the five-year-old killed by the IDF in 2024, on his set list; Beoga are founding members of Irish Artists for Palestine.
To try to psychoanalyse Sheeran, and say definitively whether he was trying to borrow the spirit of these artists while distancing himself from their beliefs, or in fact shares their views, would be premature; ultimately, he’s bound to declare himself. So far he has simply said he was “appalled by the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and that the “suffering and pain caused on both sides is a human tragedy”. Just because he didn’t choose to speak publicly, he said, “doesn’t mean I don’t care”.
This omertà won’t hold. But what we can say for certain now is that the idea of keeping politics out of entertainment, music, or art, is last century’s fantasy. Censorship is swift – but often not as overt as in this case. It is simply a fact that if artists don’t studiously avoid voicing certain opinions, they will get caught up in politics. It’s unclear whether it’s possible to create art – at least art that will be seen by a mass public – in those conditions.
At the vanguard of the move to jettison Macklemore from the tour was the Israeli-American Council, whose chief executive, Elan Carr, told the Today programme on Wednesday that the rapper had “put forth a blood libel against the state of Israel and, by connection, the Jewish people”. He was pressed by Justin Webb on what Macklemore actually said: “The words free Palestine don’t necessarily mean … that anything awful should happen to Jewish people or indeed to the state of Israel.” “Free Palestine absolutely is a call for the extermination of the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” Carr replied.
So what kind of Palestine is it acceptable to want? The other difficult strand of Carr’s argument was that a concert audience was “captive … people have paid to be there”. If you’ve paid money to be somewhere, the logic runs, you shouldn’t be subjected to politics of any kind. Yet billionaires have no qualms about having a political agenda. Macklemore, both onstage and in his own statement, has rebuffed the argument that voicing support for Palestinians and criticising Israel and its actions in Gaza and the West Bank is antisemitic. (In 2014, he apologised for a costume he wore on stage, which critics said was antisemitic, saying: “I respect all cultures and all people.”)
The concern of many of the artists was that they were facing not just censorship, but censorship by billionaires: specifically Robert Kraft, who demanded Macklemore’s removal with the threat of axing the whole show from his Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts. Kraft has so far not commented on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s charge that he put pressure on other stadiums to follow suit. In his own statement, he insisted his decision to ban Macklemore from Gillette was “not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate on their behalf”, but that such advocacy, “should not … obscure the responsibility of Hamas”.
What next, Ocasio-Cortez asked an interviewer, rhetorically: “It could be speaking out about AI … you can now just get a handful of stadium owners to ensure that an entire person’s career can be jeopardised.”
Ultimately, now, the only acceptable thing to say is nothing: there is no statement mild enough about Israel and Palestine that can be made on a stage to a general audience. Even to wish for a world in which children aren’t killed is too political, and even the Sheeran fix – that there’s a lot of pain on both sides – which might or might not have been devised to soothe billionaire interests, does not meet their preference. They would simply prefer that everyone pretend the situation doesn’t exist, that they’ve never heard of it, that nothing has happened, and if anything ever had, they wouldn’t be able to find it on a map. The slippery slope argument, that an enforced public silence could spread to protests against datacentres next, is plausible but unnecessary: we don’t need this censorship to get worse before we take it seriously.”
As written by Laura Snapes in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ed Sheeran wants to stay out of politics. By quitting his tour, his support acts have exposed the hollowness of neutrality; “n a statement about Macklemore being dropped from his US stadium tour for making pro-Palestinian comments, Ed Sheeran defended his own publicly apolitical stance: “If we only ever focus on shouting the loudest, nothing will ever change. There are different approaches to being an advocate for change.”
Every other musician involved with the tour – support acts Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother), Danish band Lukas Graham and Irish songwriter Aaron Rowe, plus Sheeran’s Irish backing band, Beoga – has made their approach to advocating for change clear, pulling out of the remaining dates to protest against the censorship of Macklemore and to express support for the Palestinian people.
In a statement released yesterday, Sheeran stressed that it wasn’t his decision to remove Macklemore, who called for a free Palestine on stage at the MetLife stadium in New Jersey last week. “I am not complicit,” Sheeran wrote. Macklemore (who in 2014 had to apologise after being accused of perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes with an onstage costume) wrote that his removal from the tour was organised by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who owns Gillette Stadium outside Boston, where Sheeran’s Loop tour is due to play in late September.
Kraft confirmed he barred Macklemore from opening for Sheeran at the Gillette Stadium, but did not respond to claims he organised the boycott by the other venues. (In a statement he said his decision was “not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate on their behalf” but that such advocacy “should not obscure the responsibility of Hamas”.)
Sheeran explained that he doesn’t use his platform for politics in order to be “a place of safety and sanctuary, to maintain diplomacy and keep conversations open”. Though this isn’t accurate: he performed at the Concert for Ukraine in 2022, signed an open letter to Theresa May about Brexit, endorsed Jeremy Corbyn and supported the equality act in the US.
Either way, the consequences of his apolitical stance have proven beyond doubt that there is no such thing as a neutral position, especially when you’re operating in a political culture that rarely obstructs corporate overreach. Kraft is friends with Trump and is a major donor to Israel: Netanyahu said at a 2019 awards ceremony honouring Kraft that “Israel does not have a more loyal friend”.
The decisive actions of every other musician on the tour have made a mockery of Sheeran claiming to be powerless in this situation. In his statement, Sheeran wrote that he would never “let down the fans who had made plans” by cancelling shows, “nor would I abandon the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living”. What might initially appear as a sign of solidarity – not inconveniencing fans, not leaving other artists and crew out of pocket – has been upended by a group of artists who understand that losing financial and professional opportunities and creating inconvenience is precisely what it takes to show backbone and stand against genocide and billionaires crushing free speech.
Macklemore’s speech in New Jersey introduced his 2024 song Hind’s Hall, which castigates censorship of protest against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, particularly the student encampment at Columbia University in New York, and is named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces. “What you willin’ to risk?” he asked in the song. “What you willin’ to give?” Many musicians and actors who have spoken out against Israel’s actions in Gaza have talked about losing work as a result: Susan Sarandon said last week at the Venice film festival that she has had acting gigs taken away; Irish pop star CMAT said a lucrative beauty contract was withdrawn; Swedish star Zara Larsson said she was dropped from brand deals and awards shows.
That hasn’t stopped them and other figures from continuing to speak out, putting moral imperative above personal gain, and recognising that any such “loss” bears no relation to what is happening to human life and habitat in Gaza, where Israel’s military offensive is estimated to have led to a death toll of 70,000. Dublin songwriter Aaron Rowe, by far the smallest support act on Sheeran’s tour and thus the one with the most to lose, thanked him for the life-changing opportunity. “But as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation,” his statement continued. “I need to be true to myself and my ancestors who resisted colonisation, and fought for a freedom that I enjoy today in Ireland.”
Sheeran and countless others take the line that pop culture should be somewhere fans can go to escape politics. “I do understand that for a lot of people, they just want to leave politics aside for a bit and be able to enjoy the music,” culture secretary Lisa Nandy said of the Sheeran situation on LBC this morning. But the fact that most right-wing politicians also take that view indicates the fact that they see pop cultural figures, with their largely left-leaning views and huge reach among young people, as a genuine threat best silenced.
As Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said yesterday, this isn’t just about the musicians on Sheeran’s tour, but “how just a handful of stadium owners can prevent [discussion of] an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza”. Prominent figures who go along with that view and deny the power of their voice allow these billion-dollar corporations to rob us of our rights step by step until one day there is nothing left. “We need to be very clear about how dangerous a precedent this is,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
At worst, Sheeran – who has always been open about his commercially minded approach to pop – looks like a corporate shill; at best, wilfully naive. Sheeran loves to dabble in the music of other cultures to present a toothless pan-global vision of togetherness lifted from the latter-day Coldplay playbook. But you can’t play with the aesthetics of global music without also being willing to engage in the lived reality of those cultures.
“Those who have been to one of my shows will know that they are about unity, joy, escapism, love and a place for everyone to feel welcome,” Sheeran wrote in his statement. Just as long as they shut up and sing: Sheeran’s inaction and humiliation at the hands of his principled supporting musicians have irrevocably compromised a position that’s no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was.”
All of this conceals the implicit question; What is the purpose of art, and what is its place in society and the self-construal of our identity?
As written by Jason Okundaye in The Guardian, in an article entitled Ed Sheeran thought fans didn’t want artists to be politically engaged. He’s finding out how wrong he was; “t must have come as a surprise to Ed Sheeran when all of his support acts withdrew from the remainder of the US leg of his tour. The American rapper Macklemore had triggered the walkout when he gave an impassioned speech calling for a “free Palestine” on stage and was dropped for doing so. The decision by the remaining acts to drop out in solidarity exposed a deep divide in the modern music industry. Some artists still insist on keeping politics out of music, while others expect music to speak to our perilous times.
After he was dropped, Macklemore wrote that Sheeran’s “typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before”, to which Sheeran responded: “I am not complicit” and “those who come to my shows do not expect a political forum”.
I think that the concept of expectation is worth probing. The idea that artists should make their political sentiments known is often dismissed as a parasocial delusion, one particularly rampant among young people on social media who “call out” musicians for their silence (indeed, young people are far more likely to be in favour of musicians using their concerts to make political statements). Artists aren’t politicians, the criticism goes, and to consider them as such distracts from, even compromises, the purpose of art as a forum for personal expression and of escapism. In other words, why not just enjoy the music instead of expecting activism from musicians, too?
The problem with that idea is that it treats a separation of art and politics as natural rather than something determined by historical convention. It wasn’t so long ago that expectations were quite different. There used to be a neater division between countercultural musicians who were relegated to the periphery and mainstream artists who would be disciplined if they spoke up.
The MTV era of music in the 2000s prioritised blockbuster, spectacle and glamour, while avoiding political, social and economic controversies. Artists were generally expected to keep politics out of their music. When Madonna challenged that idea in 2003 with her single American Life, which opposed US foreign policy and jingoism at the onset of the Iraq war, the backlash was heavy: she was forced to dump its “un-American” music video, and faced heavy radio blacklisting. It took years for the Chicks, then known as The Dixie Chicks, to recover commercially from the backlash they faced to their criticism of the Iraq War and George W Bush around the same period.
Today, the expectations that audiences have of artists are different from two decades ago. Partly, this is because the economics and the technology behind the music industry has changed. In the age of streaming, it is harder to silence artists who have made politically problematic statements – radio station blacklisting is far less fatal than it was before people discovered music through their phones and algorithms.
Interestingly, this greater political autonomy also means that the biggest artists take less of a commercial hit in their worst moments. After Kanye West’s antisemitic rants (which the rapper apologised for), his album Vultures still reached No 1 on the Billboard charts in 2024. On his most recent tour, he performed at AT&T stadium in Arlington, Texas, one of the venues that banned Macklemore from performing.
In any case, this greater autonomy pushes young fans to ask: why not take the risk? Why not speak? Particularly in the case of Palestine, it has often been smaller and less influential artists who have done so. Think of how the scale of Sheeran’s commercial reach, by contrast, dwarfs that of the artists around him who have risked more by speaking out.
Artists, both alternative and mainstream, have also set this expectation for each other. The stances a musician has taken on pressing issues are no longer just cudgels used against them. Rather, silence on these matters has become a source of shame.
Billie Eilish rebuked her fellow celebrities for not taking a stance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the US and its killing of civilians. The Irish singer-songwriter CMAT, who I saw at Glastonbury last year leading a “free Palestine” chant on the Pyramid Stage, had this to say while receiving the award for best album at the Ivor Novello Awards this year: “I have a very specific idea of what songwriting is supposed to be for, and I think it is to reflect the times through your own personal view so that everybody can have something to connect to and something to learn from years later. And now I would compel my fellow artists in the room, it is not the time to sit on the fence.”
The political shift in music also reflects a tonal shift. Artists have become more emotionally intimate with their audiences. I was struck by an analysis published earlier this year by the music data company Musixmatch for the Economist, which assessed lyrics from the Billboard charts to conclude that pop music has become “gloomier”. The most popular songs increasingly invoke sadness, angst and heartbreak.
A study in the Times also found that the musical mood has become more downbeat. This is in itself not surprising – listeners increasingly want authenticity from musicians and depend on it for a sense of connection. Think of the music of Eilish and CMAT, both of whom are popular with young audiences and praised for filterless emotion. They invoke that gloom, vulnerability and emotion – in other words, they communicate pain as a central tenor of their sound.
As CMAT said of her music, which muses on isolation, capitalism and disillusionment: “Everyone has the same wants and desires, and if you’re really honest as an artist with your pain, it will always connect.” For many young people, part of the pain they have felt in the past few years has been in witnessing the events in Gaza, as well as the rising global tide of far-right populism, the climate crisis and instability. So for a generation that is increasingly accustomed to having their despair made audible through gloomier music, why would they not increasingly expect artists to draw connections between their personal pain and what is causing it?
Artists, then, cannot assume that the old bargain still holds. Sheeran’s insistence on an apolitical arena of music is increasingly anachronistic – a position that has exposed the faultlines of modern music. Many listeners increasingly seek emotional clarity as well as moral clarity. Whether popular music has risen to that moment will be judged by history. But for now, as the expectation changes, it is down to artists to decide if they change with it.”
As I wrote in my post of As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; “Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.”
