April 1 2026 Let Us Enact Reversals of Order and Bring the Chaos: April Fool’s Day

      A joke on April Fools Day, because no one would ever do to police terrorists what they do to us all the time. 

     How to deal with ICE, in a Bizarro World where everything we know is reversed and there is justice for all:

    Never let them abduct anyone.

     Say nothing to the enemy, and hear nothing they say, because everything the enemy says is a lie.

     Never obey, for we are not their property.

     Flood them with false leads, fragment their efforts, send up general alarms regarding their movements and actions, set them against each other, rescue and escort their targets to safety, and render them useless and harmless.

     Flash mob and capture them. Send them to secret foreign gulags like they do with us at Cecot.

     Follow them home and publish their names and addresses. Shame and cast them out.

     If they come for us, we come for them.

      As the enemy does, so let it be done in return.

      This ends the prank part of this communication, which does not authorize direct action in resistance and liberation struggle like Nelson Mandela did against the Apartheid regime on December 16 1977 by underlining a passage of the play Julius Caesar in the Robben Island Bible, a copy of Shakespeare passed among the prisoners;

     “Cowards die many times before their deaths.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.”

     Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.

     On this April Fool’s Day, let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of transformational change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority by acts of disbelief and disobedience, and let us bring the Chaos.

     Live with grandeur; so Jean Genet teaches us, and prescribes the embrace of our own darkness as a path of liberation in the discovery and performance of our true and best selves.

     We all of us who in refusal to submit to Authority become Unconquered and bring the chaos as Living Autonomous Zones must question everything, ourselves most of all, if we are to dream new possibilities of becoming human.

     A maker of mischief, I; who sabotages authority and systems of unequal power in any ways I can imagine and whenever possible as part of a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

    Once as a prank while teaching American History in high school I switched the textbook, a compendium of national memory, identity, and authorized truth, with the alternative American history trilogy by William S. Burroughs; 

Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands.  I was hoping someone would call me on it, but no one ever did, so I went right on teaching the whole semester how insectoid aliens from Venus secretly rule earth through the Algebra of Need and our addiction to wealth and power symbolized by the heroin they regurgitate. I think we had more fun in American History class that year than is usual.

    If games of transgression, unauthorized identities, and transformation you would play, I invite you to play a game of chance with me. Write down six characters you would like to play, traditionally in chaos magic this would be three male and three female characters though clearly here as in life all rules are arbitrary and I encourage you to create your own and change them at random, and throw a six sided dice to choose who you will be today. No matter who you live as today, you will have five other possible selves in reserve, and tomorrow is another day and another throw of the dice. All identity is theatrical performance.

     Today I discovered an ingenious art project of li.gorbunova publishing as Liza’s lifestyle, which she describes as; “the dollhouse” – a visual story about the gradual, almost voluntary disappearance of the self.” Here follows my reply: Who among us is not a prisoner of our own ideas about who we are? Our identities are a performance, but who is the audience? This is the Riddle of the Dollhouse, and it teaches us about freedom.

     In accord with Virginia Woolf’s principle that if we cannot tell the truth  about ourselves we cannot tell the truth about others, here are some of the voices I hear in my thoughts as my own internal dialogue and character roles on which I have modeled myself in various contexts as performance of identity; Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard when I must lead and command, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes when I need to find hidden connections to assemble meaning, be hyper aware and vigilant in complex, obscured, and time compressed situations, or profile and assess character and motives, and as a teenager working through the trauma of my near execution in 1974 Brazil by police my role model was Leonard Nimoy’s self-disciplined Spock, surviving at the edge of an Abyss by ruthless control of oneself and the chaotic maelstrom of passions which threaten to consume us.

     That last I have outgrown as I became an adult, and instead learned in diametrical opposition to Freud that we must embrace our monstrosity if we are to free ourselves from the recursive forces of fear, power, and violence which create and perpetuate human evil.

    Celebrate with me April Fool’s Day as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, seizures of power from systems of oppression and carceral states of force and control, the violation of norms, and liberation from other people’s ideas of virtue. 

     By such acts we do give answer to the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.

      Let us run amok and be ungovernable.

     As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power, order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas Chaos autonomizes and transgression empowers liberation struggle, delegitimation of authority, and seizures of power.

    Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.

    Let us restore the balance to systems of unequal power and unjust authority; for no inequality is fair, and there is no just authority.

     Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves anew in the ways we ourselves have chosen, and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.

    Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.

    As I wrote in my post of April 1 2020, There Is No Return To Normal; There is no return to normal if and when the Doom of Man pandemic ends. Normal doesn’t live here anymore.

    Once there was an illusion of mirrors, echoes, distorted surfaces without meaning, hollow and beautiful like a gossamer web of lies and irresistible as a gingerbread house.

     It calls to us, this thing of no escape, this American Dream, with promises of wealth and the power to choose the condition of our own lives. Our songs are of meritocracy, upward mobility, and an inclusive society, but concealed within are harsh realities of unequal power and opportunity limited by authorized identities and divisions of caste or class, race, gender, faith, and nationality.

     We are lured with belonging and membership, but offered only identitarian tribalization and exclusionary boundaries of otherness.

     We are seduced with the guarantee of our right to the pursuit of happiness, but our society can produce only material diversions which commodify and dehumanize us.

     We are offered security from intrusive forces at the price of our freedom and equality, and submission to authority and tyrannies of force and control. But security is an illusion, often one manufactured through fear by those who would enslave us as a pretext for the centralization of power to tyranny.

     Throughout American history since our founding we have ever been a free society of equals, co-owners of our own government, each of us a king of his own life, but only on paper. The American Revolution has yet to be achieved; it is an ongoing process in which each of us must negotiate the alignment and boundaries between freedom and authority and between the ideal and the real.

     In this struggle we are the prize; our agency or enslavement, our authenticity or the capture and limitation of the possibilities of our identity, our liberty both as individuals and as interdependent members of humankind.

     And we must act now to save ourselves and our civilization, for we are running out of time. We are in a contest of survival against plutocratic corporate greed and our extinction as a species on one hand and against fascist tyranny and the fall of democracy and global civilization on the other.

     Let us free ourselves from the illusions of our normality. 

One of Us scene in the 1932 film Freaks

The Dollhouse by li.gorbunova

“If we burn, you burn with us” scene from Mockingjay part 1

Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13006.Julius_Caesar?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13

The American Trilogy, William S. Burroughs

https://www.goodreads.com/series/65214-the-red-night-trilogy

The Moment And Other Essays, Virginia Woolf

 Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/266034.Miracle_of_the_Rose?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_19

         My Possible Best Selves and Role Models of Identity Performance

Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard

Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes

Leonard Nimoy as Spock

    The great question of being human, as Kirk puts to alternate universe Spock;  “In every revolution, there is one man with a vision”. Yes, my Spock is bizarro universe pirate Spock.

              the Idea of “Let the Dice Decide”

The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

           Absurdist literature for inspiration: how to answer the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom

April Fool’s Day, Josip Novakovich

Kangaroo Notebook, Kōbō Abe

Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28381.Dead_Souls?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_10

March 31 2026   Catching Stray Thoughts, March 2026

     Here follow some things I wrote in March in reference to posts discovered on Face Book, mostly news articles, which never became full essays of mine.

     I decided to catalog these because some important things can be read in what I chose to reply to; the values and motives of an American observer of our unfolding history, what I assign importance to and am moved to process by public response as trauma management or which captures attention and motivates response, what issues and current events engage me on a profound emotional level and incite, provoke, and inspire action.

     Such a chronology won’t tell you what was most important, only most important to me. So poor a bellwether of the American mass consciousness as I may be, being far outside the boundaries of normality in any number of ways, my hope is that my work may be illuminating to the studies of some future scientist of the Fall of America and the collapse of civilization, human or otherwise; possibly also to persons unknown who may choose to act to prevent it. To such I say; I’ve done what I could, now you must bear the dream of Liberty onward.

    Herein also is revealed how I internalized current events as instruments of self construction, as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of history. Always there are two sides to the puzzle we are trying to solve in becoming human; one a picture of the world as it should be, the other of an ideal human being. I’ve discovered a trick over the years of making mischief for tyrants and finding offramps from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which is the origin of evil; if you get the human right, the world will also be right.

     I close today’s essay by speaking directly to you and to any future audience, in surety against the unpredictable.

     Thank you taking this journey with me; may you be better than myself, and find the vision which can heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world I could not.

                         Posts and References

     I sail the seas of unknown fates, to shores of nameless things.

In reply to my sister:

“If I had

a time traveling yacht,

Would I go back

and visit old friends

who now are with their gods,

or already reborn

into the special new lives

their community wished for them?

I should refrain

So as not to disrupt the timeline

that led to their

perfect fates.”

     Trump sabotaged the democracy movement in Iran by attacking its civilians and infrastructure of life, not the regime and its massive armies. This is his purpose, to replace democracy with tyranny globally, especially those aligned with his ethnostate theocracy even when the specifics of race and faith differ, because all are also forms of state patriarchy and kleptocracy. Republicans want to rape, enslave, and plunder everyone and everything; this is their sole ideology.

In reference to:

     America has no beliefs, no hopes, no dreams, no songs of liberty and equality for which to live; only death, violence, dehumanization, and its forms as brute power and mirages of wealth. We no longer have anything to offer the world, the future, nothing which exalts, celebrates, and guarantees our humanity. America has Fallen, and the Age of Tyrants begins.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/23/pete-hegseth-nihilist-cult?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvnYNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeNKcShxGt5SLbEu1vWK4q-hUMsx8w_ToVZN0eBXoR7NJrgYjrfhTXPZZrmnk_aem_AoApCi_EOw7tkhPI67pQfw

     “Pete Hegseth is promoting a nihilist cult of death

Jan-Werner Müller

     It appears that members of Trump’s cabinet get chosen not despite their endorsements of violence, but because of them. Pete Hegseth was primarily known as a dapper TV host willing to defend war crimes. Markwayne Mullin is apparently still proud of challenging a witness to a fistfight at a Senate hearing; he also refuses to apologize for “understanding” an assault on fellow senator Rand Paul. Never before has an administration so openly glorified outright killing as the current White House propaganda machine does with its obscene snuff videos of the Iran war and the destruction of small boats.

     Unlike with fascism in the 20th century, there is no attempt to promote or symbolically reward self-sacrifice – it is just video game-style killing at a distance, justified not with strategic objectives, but with seemingly uncontrollable emotions (“fury” and a thirst for vengeance). And all accompanied by open admissions that basic laws of warfare will be broken. Actual soldiers with longstanding codes of honor, as opposed to the fantasy world Hegseth is creating with his cliche-ridden chatter on TV, would not punch enemies when they are down.

     Trump has never hidden his desire for domination and the related willingness to have his followers engage in violence, from the call to rough up people at his rallies to the pardons of even the most brutal January 6 insurrectionists.

     Hegseth and company are promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death

During his first administration, an “axis of adults” mostly held his worst impulses in check; after the Venezuela “excursion” and the realization that people on small boats can be killed with impunity, Hegseth, and perhaps even Rubio, seem drunk on the idea that special military operations could be quick and costless in American lives – and make for great TV. Trump’s fixation on visuals and props – if I show a pile of paper on TV, it means I really have divested from my companies, or I really have a great healthcare plan – is now shared across his administration.

     Trump himself appears to treat a global decapitation campaign as if it were a version of The Apprentice that includes firing live ammunition – as if he gets to remove other leaders, and as if he should get to choose the successors of whoever gets kidnapped or killed.

     Historically, there is an ideology that made the glorification of violence central to their propaganda. “Long live death” was a fascist slogan; Mussolini’s movement started with veterans and celebrated them as a “trenchocracy” – an aristocracy of men hardened by battle in the trenches.

     Gigantic ossuaries for the war dead – some holding the bones of as many as 100,000 dead soldiers – were meant to encourage future sacrifice; the Nazis in turn presented their youth with slogans like “We are born to die for Germany”.

     It seems that Hegseth and company are also promoting an ultimately nihilist cult of death. But it celebrates killing by pressing a button thousands of miles away; meanwhile, America’s own dead are dishonored, as Trump has used their repatriation to display his Maga merch and fundraise off the victims of war.

     Simultaneously, faithful to his master’s desire for total domination and destruction, Hegseth announces future war crimes on live TV (“no quarter”) and encourages gratuitous cruelty: “We are punching them while they’re down.” The obscene focus on “lethality” is part of this shift towards war understood as inflicting maximum destruction and pain (as opposed to achieving strategic objectives – which the administration has of course been utterly incapable of articulating).

     The reality of war itself recedes because the airwaves are filled with an endless series of entertaining images and empty talk. Hegseth, fond of laughably overwrought language and alliterations in particular (“warriors, not wokesters”), seems unable to articulate anything other than cliches (“unbreakable will”) or snippets of a Christian nationalism which flies in the face of the first amendment’s prohibiting an established religion: one cannot make it a litmus test of patriotism that citizens pray for the troops on bended knees and in the name of Jesus.

     The point is not to equate the two men, but one cannot help but remember how Hannah Arendt, in her highly controversial book on the Eichmann trial, described the Nazi bureaucrat: someone utterly incapable of thinking, someone who instead just produced an endless stream of hollow phrases.

     Will all this have an effect in legitimizing an illegal war? Hegseth has also created a fantasy world inside the Pentagon itself; instead of press conferences with critical questions and genuine answers, there is gentle back-and-forth between “the secretary of war” – a fantasy name, as Congress has not authorized changing the department’s name – and figures from the Epoch Times and LindellTV (the world according to “the MyPillow guy”).

     Even with this extra layer of insulation from reality, Hegseth insisted that the press was not being positive enough about US attacks on Iran. Like with many Maga men performing puerile stunts for the manosphere, the fragile ego inside seems incapable of facing up to the reality of what has been unleashed so thoughtlessly.”

    Can this free us from fossil fuel climate catastrophe? When the lights go out, what else changes?

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/22/iran-says-destroy-middle-east-infrastructure-us-energy-sites?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvnqVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeOBsVxvgV_EShNgTDQKYPya9Znq7xRMw-2SCI9t_uPCN5Us0Y-6SreIfIal0_aem_e9i-CKXhoxi_8bpNBVc-PA

    Emotion is evolutionary, and also a product of history. The idea of romantic love as we now use it was invented by Marie of France in the late Middle Ages to refer to something occurring outside of marriage, or contracts between dynasties. That this love would be something people in the future would marry for was unimaginable to her or anyone in her time. And we are still evolving and changing.

In reference to:

https://theatln.tc/93LEvySV

       “A common assumption is that throughout history, people have experienced the same basic range of emotions. A radical field of history now challenges this assumption, Gal Beckerman reported in 2025. https://theatln.tc/93LEvySV

People tend to imagine that other people “have the exact same set of emotions that we have,” Beckerman writes. “We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and of personal hygiene.”

     Rob Boddice, a leader in the field of the history of emotions and senses, mistrusts this universalism, a philosophy that emerged during the Enlightenment, when European intellectuals began to assume that all people share a common nature. Many critics now understand that they were attempting to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. “By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident,” Beckerman continues.

     “Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same,” Beckerman writes. “Rather than being a constant—extending across space and time—human nature for Boddice is a variable and unstable category, one with infinite possible shades.”

     Although his approach might seem “squishy and postmodern,” Beckerman writes, Boddice’s research layers his own thinking on top of the most recent advances in neuroscience.”

     Pick one from the group and follow him home. As they do to others, let it be so with them in return.

In reference to:

(photoset from Spokane Stands Up entitled Are these your neighbors? They’re in ICE. Shame them. It’s the least they deserve)

     Republicans want to kill people, and they don’t much care who.

In reference to:

     We should build in place of the ballroom a memorial to the Trump Fourth Reich’s crimes as a lasting witness of history to the need for vigilance against fascist tyranny and terror.

In reference to:

    (post by Occupy emocrats) “BREAKING: A federal judge HAMMERS the Trump administration over the White House East Wing demolition, says that calling it simply an “alteration” requires a “brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary.”

And he wasn’t done there…

     “It would have been a heck of a lot easier by any standard to have just gone to Congress to get the authority to do it,” said U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, slamming the administration for using “shifting theories and shifting dynamics” to argue that Trump had the legal authority to perform the demolition.

     The case was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation who are seeking an end to construction of Trump’s ballroom unless he can acquire congressional approval and pass independent reviews. The $400 million ballroom has become a central fixation for Trump despite the floundering economy and a worsening war in the Middle East. He sees the insanely corrupt project — which is being financed by large corporate donations — as a means of eking out a permanent legacy for himself.

     In addition to rejecting the idea that Trump can pursue the project under a law that grants the power to pursue “alteration” and “improvement” as “the President may determine,” Judge Leon dismissed the idea that the White House falls under the National Park’s Authority for approval.

     “This isn’t any national park. This is an iconic symbol of this nation,” he said.

The judge further stated that the Trump administration has “no track record” of properly following the usual approval processes.

     Leon has stated that he intends on issuing his final ruling by the end of March. If he rules against Trump, the case will almost certainly move into the appeals process, but if we can keep this tied up in court until after the midterms and Democrats retake Congress, Trump will never get approval to finish his vanity project.”

    Family values, Republican style

In reference to:

    (Occupy Democrats post) “ BREAKING: “I NEVER GOT TO HOLD HER!” Trump’s ICE goons arrested a Dreamer while he was driving to deliver milk to his premature child in the ICU!

     Juan Chavez Velasco was driving with his wife to the hospital to deliver milk to his prematurely born daughter, who was just 12 days old, when the goon squad rolled up on him.

     He told them he had children. He told them he had a wife. He told them he had DACA and was legally allowed to be here.

     Their response?

     “They said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’”

     Chavez Velasco was thrown into the gulag in Laredo, taken away from his wife and three kids, all of whom are U.S. citizens.

     He was brought to the US by his parents when he was just 8 years old. Juan’s had DACA since 2012, he earned two bachelor’s degrees,  and worked on frontline of covid-19 pandemic in an ER medical lab.

     None of that matters to Trump’s ghouls.

     DHS told MS now that he was  “an illegal alien” who was “issued a final order of removal in 2005,” and that “being in detention is a choice,” as the government would give him “$2,600 and a free flight” to self-deport.

     That’s how the “family values” administration decides to treat new fathers of American citizens.

     They are systematically breaking the law left and right in order to fulfill Stephen Miller’s sick and twisted dreams of a white ethnostate, no matter who suffers in the process.

     Our heart breaks for this poor man and we urge Texas Democrats to do everything they can to make sure this father gets to hold his new child.”

     the poem my father had me memorize as a child

In reference to:

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/markham-hoe-man-gilded-age?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvpORleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFUcnRZUHpuSUJyU0JTcFZRc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsxOm07f764IKhYP51UxJiYKVxlAweEpgFSqVPm5SAcRHKaoUK8vUlzy1DXv_aem_V_5PHQHrBmLlhXNvzvBWtA

     We are copying the idea of the state in Iran while attempting to destroy our own original. America is a changeling predator.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/17/trump-iran-fcc-brendan- carr?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvpZhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEej6MyhBW0wg-kOvyeIhUByvae601Aq_4MYuxdvhK7ZaI4Ub7V8Rv-CpKGhMI_aem_K1mbDc3tS7C99_ZSsfnJ3Q

     Trust a tech bro to come up with an idea of the state as centralized power even worse than communism. Same end state, different apologetics.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/17/elon-musk-gamify-government?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvphFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe3skxHUbyYP8Snmma_h3PXNoxejfu3WhQHjyoBQSKptzctO9trSBTjuF2qeE_aem_UWBQX9WmisZ9oprJhth6Lg

     Because people want to fight our state tyranny. We are not quite at total war point, but the interior life of Americans has changed to regard the state as an enemy and resistance as heroic. The Trump regime inhabits the same imaginal space as that of Hitler, and this will become electoral, legal, legislative, and direct action.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/mar/15/oscars-2026-best-picture-one-battle-after-another-win?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvprpleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeG1UfR0cmAz8-DNNzJnl0qmxRL1lIjTNGoq9P895Ggt0J1W0-p5f_4WusN68_aem_GmJdrz_jP4dG6bcUF1LEhQ

     So where does this leave all our friends from off planet?

In reference to:

     (Fox News Seattle) “State and local offices across Washington are now under direction to remove “alien” from statutes. Instead, instances of that phrasing will be replaced with “noncitizen.”

     Our tax dollars at work

In reference to:

     (Occupy Democrats post ) “BREAKING: Judge orders viral DOGE deposition videos taken down after HUMILIATING testimony spreads across the internet

The Trump administration just scored a temporary courtroom victory — but not before millions of Americans saw exactly how Elon Musk’s controversial DOGE operation was making decisions that upended federal programs.

     A federal judge has now ordered that viral deposition videos featuring former Department of Government Efficiency staffers be removed from the internet after clips exploded across social media.

     And the reason they went viral is pretty obvious. In the now-infamous testimony, DOGE employees admitted they used ChatGPT to identify federal grants to cancel under the administration’s anti-DEI crackdown — despite having no background in the humanities, history, or the fields they were judging.

One clip that spread like wildfire featured a DOGE staffer explaining why a project about Jewish women forced into slave labor during the Holocaust had been flagged as inappropriate.

     His explanation? Because the documentary focused on Jewish women and amplified “marginalized voices,” making it — in his view — a diversity program.

Yes, really.

     The videos quickly became internet fodder, with critics mocking the testimony as proof that sweeping cultural and academic cuts were being made by inexperienced operatives armed with little more than an AI chatbot and ideological talking points.

     But the controversy surrounding DOGE doesn’t stop there.

     A separate whistleblower report recently alleged that a DOGE-linked software engineer walked out of the Social Security Administration with a thumb drive containing data on roughly 500 million Americans — including Social Security numbers, birth dates, and citizenship information. According to the whistleblower, the engineer even bragged that if the move turned out to be illegal, Donald Trump would simply pardon him.

     Now, as the videos disappear from YouTube under court order, the groups suing the government argue the public is being deprived of crucial evidence about how DOGE operated behind closed doors.BREAKING: Judge orders viral DOGE deposition videos taken down after HUMILIATING testimony spreads across the internet

     Their message is simple: if these officials were confident in their decisions, the public should be able to see how those decisions were made. Because when AI, ideology, and government power collide — transparency matters more than ever.

     At least we still have the written articles detailing the failures of the DOGE bros.”

    Yes, the Iran War is now a World War.

In reference to:

     Their criminal acts were printing and handing out flyers, wearing black bloc, and peacefully protesting. No violence, none at all, yet a conviction on terrorism. This shall not stand.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/texas-terrorism-trial?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvqZVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeytxPbY-jZj-wLGKKylCmCZJ0-SwIl-qfqI7pkAo2gHq94mXw-HQ6_yrsmLk_aem_Mg8HuIzEl47YTfl8zuqrvQ

     Also how Ukraine was disarmed for conquest by Russia. Do not allow the enemy or any imperial powers to set the terms of struggle.

In reference to:

     (Occupy Democrats post) “BREAKING Aisha Gaddafi, the daughter of the sla!n Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has addressed the people of Iran.

“Negotiations with w0lves do not lead to the salvation of the herd – they merely set the date for the next hunt,” she stated.

     According to her, the West assured her father that if he gave up on nucl£ar weap0ns and ballist!c miss!le programs, the world would open its doors to him.

“He believed it, made concessions… And NATO’s b0mbs turned Libya into ru!ns”. She urged Iranians not to make concessions to the en£my, as they do not lead to peace, but only to destructi0n.”

      The use of force always returns. This means that attempts to impose order and control always fail. Security is an illusion.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/suspect-michigan-synagogue-attack-lost-family-lebanon?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvqwdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeZhr_cqaUmukcT2Rp3uc8eEg2w8eTVUUKeWABnHRJxEx6xPTAq6312mL06wQ_aem_Wve7nUg5BzdqEO8qegm7RA

     The one thing you can trust both our nations to do: destroy.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/12/dismay-as-ancient-heritage-sites-across-iran-damaged-in-us-israel-bombing?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvq3pleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe_9PHVK-Q4moBn2WSTZzcj1FqPzBAtxDldnM9AF9xMUQydumykN-3Fu7NCCs_aem_E82wy0Z6xr1wq70E7bCyDQ

     Trump should surrender to Iran. The UN can form a caretaker government while America begins to become a democracy, and pays reparations to Iran. Our war criminals should be sent to trial at the Hague. Israel should be disarmed totally and placed under a hundred year arms embargo.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/iran-escalates-attacks-on-infrastructure-and-transport-networks-across-the-gulf?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvrFFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeohkFA8sO4A1opK3GYSwn-BtkmVRi4Yz8EpLqW1_bwnwXSkDJCOCorjy40KY_aem_dBysYbrh6grLGPQrUBluqQ

     What is force majeure in a contract? An associate of mine was once paid by Chinese gangsters to take over the nation of Ghana in Africa, where most chocolate beans are produced; his team were en route to Rio to train, and thought the fix was in as Argentine intelligence, a CIA proxy or ally, was on the ship as advisors. But they were double crossed and arrested; it took a year to escape prison in Brazil as he had to seize control of it, and walked out the front gates at the head of an army of gangs he had subordinated and unified. The force majeure clause in his contract meant he didn’t have to pay the fee back.

In reference to:

     (post attributed to Shanaka Anslem Perera  t/@shanaka86 ) “”JUST IN: Bapco Energies just declared force majeure. Bahrain’s only refinery. 405,000 barrels per day. Eighty-five percent exported. Ninety years old. The sole refining facility for an entire nation.

Force majeure means the company is legally unable to fulfil its contractual obligations. Cargoes already paid for will not be delivered. Diesel, jet fuel, and refined petroleum products that buyers across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were expecting will not arrive. The contracts are suspended. The supply is gone.

     The attack that triggered the declaration was an Iranian drone and missile strike on the Sitra refinery complex on 9 March. Fire broke out in at least one unit. Bahrain’s National Communication Centre confirmed containment with 32 civilians injured in the broader raids. Bapco stated domestic fuel supplies remain secured. But export operations, which account for 85% of the refinery’s output, are halted.

     This is not a full physical shutdown. It is something more consequential. It is a legal shutdown.

     Force majeure converts physical damage into contractual default. Every buyer holding a confirmed cargo from Bapco must now source replacement barrels from an already strained market where Hormuz is commercially closed, QatarEnergy is under its own force majeure, Iraq has cut production 70%, and VLCC charter rates sit at $424,000 per day. The replacement barrels do not exist at pre-war prices. Some do not exist at any price.

     This is the third force majeure declaration from the Gulf in nine days.    QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG exports after Iranian strikes hit Ras Laffan and Mesaieed, removing approximately 20% of global LNG supply. Kuwait’s national oil company announced precautionary production cuts. Now Bahrain’s sole refinery joins the cascade.

     Each declaration compounds the others. QatarEnergy’s force majeure tightened LNG markets. Bapco’s tightens refined product markets. When the refinery that processes crude into usable fuel goes offline, the disruption moves downstream from the wellhead to the petrol station, the shipping terminal, the airport fuel depot, and the industrial boiler. Crude oil prices capture the headline. Refined product margins capture the damage.

     Diesel margins were already surging before this declaration. Jet fuel crack spreads were at multi-year highs as 30,000 cancelled flights rerouted through Asian hubs burning additional fuel on longer routes. Bapco’s 405,000 barrels per day of refining capacity going offline removes a meaningful share of Gulf refined product supply at the precise moment global demand for alternative routing fuel is spiking.

     The IRGC’s 31 autonomous provincial commands did not need to close the Strait to cripple Bahrain’s energy exports. They needed one drone through the air defence screen. One hit on one unit of one refinery. The rest is done by lawyers, force majeure clauses, and a contracts market that cascades default through every buyer in the chain.

     The Strait was closed by insurance. The refinery was closed by a drone. The exports were closed by a legal clause. Three different mechanisms. One outcome. Supply removed from a market that cannot replace it.

     Hormuz. Qatar. Now Bahrain. Three force majeures in nine days. The Gulf’s energy architecture is being dismantled one legal declaration at a time.”

     Next Israel will claim ownership of all historical ghettos in Europe, and send occupation forces. If you protest, Trump will bomb you. Ok, not today, but still possible.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/stunned-sidelined-and-disunited-how-war-in-the-middle-east-paralysed-the-eu?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvrvtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEepLzGgiih7YTiZKF1NEJuT4zv1t0fxg6vciPh38BDRILUhA3xyMk4HtpJ23U_aem_vMwXWhTKZ2UaBqxaNIK2HA

     Dubai is a Masque of the Red Death. But fear not, Fire is catching.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/pets-abandoned-dubai-expat-owners-flee-iran-war?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvr0dleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEecu1vClw6g1flRDnilxQiqdWzD5x91OLa2EZHOaHPMfNkAEyIF4Bj0ffXWYU_aem_dBaWMfzE7U5rb2S-cJP4tg

    As it always does. War on crime is class war, nothing less and more.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/11/el-salvador-mass-incarceration-crimes-against-humanity-study?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvr6hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeTwOHXT0E6MdmJGJEcoyai1iCdECeP6yhtUToG3NwL_2n7vVqre2SCFqnq78_aem_Yvta95bhbhuKiVnBnfHQNg

      No American puppet rule will be welcomed by the people of Iran. Much as they fear and hate the mullahs, they fear and hate us far more. If you want to find a post regime government, you must find one internal to Iran.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/11/iran-leaders-us-trump-support?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvr_hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeAnE5CqIqgIj2c5sYurZVlCi8dCBDSrxGT_ojtHTMn5tOZPuIIqvls_osVCM_aem_ts8qsl0VCq6PsqzbQYbVYg

     I am writing about Nietzschean Affirmation, saying yes to the life force and to the whole of human existence, both the beautiful and the abominable, reading The Will to Power and Derrida’s essay about it, with hail tapping on my window, so I go out into the storm and welcome it. I take a picture of the years first crocuses in the hailstones. Now I am going in to say yes to a hot coffee. My dog follows, its too cold even for her.

     Add the Mayan Genocide by our puppet tyrant. Actually, once you start looking, we are the Atrocity nation. There are thousands, all the time, everywhere.

In reference to:

https://timhjersted.substack.com/p/no-iran-did-not-bomb-its-own-school?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvs6BleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFUcnRZUHpuSUJyU0JTcFZRc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHjlob8MolGCa2k7j7F0wLzSxmmbQlpAf57LSBJWJSPEP0vmykFfcZzk4LdMj_aem_V9_qXVNNBUz6n3eBMlu_oQ

     The Arab American Alliance is breaking apart. Iran is using fracture as a strategy.

In reference to:

     (FB post by Alan Browning) “Mohamed Rashid Bin Nasr is with Ahmed Khamis and

6 others

.

March 4 at 7:54 AM

 ·

QATAR’S DIPLOMATIC EVICTION NOTICE: “Please Leave” — The Most Polite “Get Out” in Middle Eastern History

In which the host of the largest US base in the region suddenly remembers that hospitality has limits, and the guests who overstayed their welcome are now being asked to pack their bags while the missiles keep flying

BREAKING: Qatar has officially requested the US to “reconsider” basing strategies.

Translation: “Please leave. We’re not asking again. Take your THAADs, your F-35s, your $1.1 billion radar rubble, and go.”

THE AL UDEID SITUATION

Let’s talk about Al Udeid Air Base. The largest US military installation in the Middle East. Home to 8,000-10,000 American troops. The Combined Air Operations Centre—the brain of US Central Command’s air campaigns. Two 12,000-foot runways. $5 billion invested since 1996.

And now, apparently, a very expensive white elephant that Qatar would like to return to sender.

THE TIMING IS EVERYTHING

This request comes after:

· Iranian missiles hit Al Udeid (multiple times)

· The $1.1 billion radar became $0 worth of scrap metal

· The Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was destroyed

· US soldiers started hiding in hotels across the Gulf

· American warships started fleeing toward open water

· The “invincible” US military started looking very, very vincible

The Qataris looked at this situation and thought: “You know what? Maybe hosting the world’s biggest target isn’t the best strategy for a small country with a lot of gas.”

THE DIPLOMATIC LANGUAGE

“Reconsider basing strategies” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. In normal English, that means:

· “We’ve talked about this.”

· “We’ve thought about this.”

· “We’ve decided.”

· “Please go.”

It’s the diplomatic equivalent of changing the locks while pretending you lost the keys.

THE OTHER GUESTS ARE LEAVING TOO

Qatar isn’t alone in this realization. Let’s check the party attendance:

Saudi Arabia: Evacuating non-essential US personnel. The party favors are being returned.

UAE: Publicly distancing themselves. “This is not our war,” they keep saying, while their airports burn.

Kuwait: “Reluctant” to host additional systems. Translation: “We’ve got enough problems, thanks.”

Bahrain: Fifth Fleet headquarters? Destroyed. The welcome mat is on fire.

Oman: Hit. Neutrality? Apparently not a shield.

The party is over. The guests are leaving. The host is sweeping up broken glass and wondering why they ever threw this party in the first place.

THE “SAFE HAVEN” MYTH

Qatar thought it was being smart. Host the Americans. Get protection. Stay safe.

Turns out, “protection” is just another word for “target.” And when Iran started firing, the protection didn’t protect—it attracted.

The $1.1 billion radar didn’t protect anything. It just made a really expensive crater.

The F-35s didn’t protect anything. They’re now grounded, their pilots hiding.

The THAAD systems didn’t protect anything. Two of them are now scrap metal.

The only thing American presence protected was Iran’s ability to demonstrate that no place is safe when you host the empire.

THE ECONOMIC REALITY

Qatar has gas. Lots of it. And right now, that gas is not flowing. LNG production? Halted. The Ras Laffan Industrial City? Targeted. European gas prices? Up 50%.

The entire Qatari economy is based on the idea that stability allows energy to flow. And right now, stability is a memory.

The Americans brought war. The Iranians brought fire. The Qataris brought… what exactly?

THE “RECONSIDER” STRATEGY

What does “reconsider” actually mean in practice? Let’s game it out:

Option 1: The US leaves voluntarily. Saves face. Pretends it was their idea.

Option 2: The US refuses to leave. Iran keeps hitting. More rubble. More smoke. More Qatari infrastructure destroyed.

Option 3: The US leaves under duress. Looks weak. Emboldens adversaries. But at least the missiles stop.

Option 3 is looking pretty attractive right now.

THE OTHER REQUESTS

Qatar’s “request” joins a growing collection:

· Iraq: “Please leave” (multiple times)

· Afghanistan: “Please leave” (they eventually did)

· Syria: “Please leave” (still there, still causing problems)

· Saudi Arabia: “Please evacuate non-essentials” (the first step)

· Kuwait: “We’re reluctant” (the polite version)

The Middle East is slowly, politely, asking the United States to pack its bags. And the United States is slowly, reluctantly, realizing that it has nowhere else to go.

THE HOSPITALITY ANALOGY

Imagine you throw a party. The guest you invited brings 50 friends. They eat all your food. They break your furniture. They start fights with the neighbors. And then they ask you to help clean up the mess they made.

At what point do you say: “You know what? I think it’s time for you to leave”?

Qatar just reached that point.

THE PUNCHLINE

The joke is that Qatar thought hosting the Americans would bring safety. The joke is that they believed the “protection” would protect. The joke is that they didn’t realize that being a host means being a target.

The punchline is being delivered in smoke rising from Al Udeid. It’s being written in rubble where the radar used to be. It’s being spoken by every Qatari official who now has to explain why their country is burning.

The party is over. The guests are leaving. The host is counting the damage.”

     Equal opportunity for all requires special services for special needs

In reference to:

     Any new leader will be worse than the one before, and we failed to do the one thing you do first in a revolution, free the media blackout. A government in exile waiting to take power can also be useful, but Trumps goal is mere destabilization, not regime change. He is the picador to Israels matador, weakening the victim for the kill.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/09/divided-iranians-react-to-new-supreme-leader?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvtUJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEefnUlNdPe-JVTrnWzrcpCnrMmSH7a_VzHR2qrXM_p4N8C8e6Z-bwz7D2p–U_aem_KhcfWGbyTuH0tiWR7ZzQXg

     No help needed for this dumpster fire!

In reference to:

     The contradictions of Empire make it unsustainable

In reference to:    

     (post by Jack Harding in Speak Up Boldly group)  “Trump’s decision to grant India a 30-day sanctions waiver to purchase Russian oil — issued even as Russia actively assists Iran in targeting American forces — creates a stark contradiction: the United States is simultaneously fighting a war and funding one of its adversary’s principal enablers, not only in Trump’s actions in Iran, but also in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

👉 The Waiver and Its Context

     On March 5, 2026, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a license authorizing India to receive and purchase Russian crude oil and petroleum products already loaded on vessels as of that date, with all covered transactions permitted through April 3, 2026.¹ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the move as a “deliberately short-term measure” that would “not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government” because it only covers oil already stranded at sea.² The justification: the Iran war and the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have disrupted roughly 20 million barrels per day in Gulf production, sending U.S. crude prices up approximately 20% in a single week.³

👉 The Russia-Iran Connection

     The strategic problem became acute almost immediately. Following issuance of the waiver, intelligence reports surfaced indicating that Russia is actively aiding Iran in targeting U.S. vessels, aircraft, and military installations in the Middle East theater.⁴ When Energy Secretary Chris Wright was asked about those reports, he declined to confirm them, saying only that “Russia excels at creating turmoil worldwide.”⁵ That non-denial denial sits uncomfortably alongside the administration’s own licensing of Russian oil revenue.

👉 Why the Logic Collapses

     The administration’s core argument — that the waiver merely accelerates the sale of oil already at sea and therefore provides no meaningful new revenue to Moscow — depends on a narrow accounting fiction. Oil revenue at any pace replenishes the Kremlin’s war chest, which funds both the Ukraine invasion *and* whatever material and intelligence support Russia is providing to Iran.⁶ Democratic Sens. and Reps. Sam Liccardo (CA) and Ruben Gallego (AZ) put it directly in their letter to Bessent: *”By granting this waiver, you are indicating that the U.S. will reward assaults on our troops rather than deter them.”*⁷

The sanctions themselves were designed specifically to starve Russia of the revenues enabling its wars. That pressure had been working: Russian oil export income had already dwindled due to weak global prices, tightening enforcement against the “shadow fleet” of tankers used to evade the G-7 price cap, and sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil.⁸ The waiver restores the revenue tap at precisely the moment Russia has the greatest incentive — and demonstrated willingness — to escalate against U.S. forces.

👉 The India Policy Reversal

     The reversal is also jarring in its timing relative to the administration’s own prior policy. As recently as August 2025, the U.S. imposed a 50% combined tariff on India (including a 25% penalty specifically for purchasing Russian oil) to coerce New Delhi into cutting Moscow off.⁹ In February 2026 — just weeks before the waiver — Trump announced that India had reached a trade deal *that included a pledge to stop buying Russian oil* in exchange for tariff relief down to 18%.¹⁰ The 30-day waiver effectively dissolved that hard-won commitment the moment an energy price spike created political inconvenience, eight months before midterm elections.¹¹

     Rep. Liccardo and Sen. Gallego also raised a procedural indictment: the administration launched military action against Iran without *any* emergency contingency plan to stabilize oil prices through allied energy sources, leaving the U.S. with no option but to turn back to Russian barrels.⁷ Energy analyst Vandana Hari of Vanda Insights described the waiver bluntly as “band-aids on a gunshot wound.”³

     The argument that the waiver is self-limiting because it covers only oil *already at sea* is also factually unstable: Bessent himself signaled to Fox Business that the U.S. *could* lift sanctions on *additional* Russian oil beyond the stranded fleet, suggesting the 30-day window is less a ceiling than a floor.¹²

There is simply no coherence here.  Not only is Trump showing favor to Putin yet again, he’s defeating whatever in God’s name he’s trying to accomplish in Iran.”

     This weapon is now around four decades old. Cold War era; from before the fall of the Belin Wall. Its nothing remarkable among special weapons; if you think this sounds scary, whats scary to me is the banality and pervasiveness of weapons that leave no trace, like the sound machines below human hearing businesses buy and set up outside to drive off scruffy people, designed by the KGB and used against our embassy staff in Havana long ago, which causes brain damage and sometimes death or catastrophic vegetative syndrome months later. ICE uses it now, but its also commercially available and widely used to keep the store fronts clear of loiterers. Its not only an invisible  weapon of mass death and crippling used on unsuspecting teenagers and homeless people, but it also does the same to any actual paying customers who may frequent the business, to a lesser degree of harm.

     Or compared to the spy drones the size of hummingbirds, used in Afghanistan originally. Our nation uses police violence when terror is the goal; there are many ways to silence and erase dissent without anyone realizing death was not by natural causes.

In reference to:

    I absolutely despise and will resist all theocratic regimes; but I will stand in solidarity with all peoples versus imperial conquest and colonial occupation by wretched tyrants including Trump’s Fourth Reich. May we liberate each other, as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, including those of sovereignty and independence.

In reference to:

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-war-iran-prepared-for-how-tehran-is-raising-the-cost-of-war/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvwD9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEevozhd_ygRIa68eMRwbCXhwyjC3daHs42T7m2yN-KCyTriV9YWQqOsf6uy48_aem_bBTA5JmY40-xvhmkoLRv7Q

   Global map of Autonomous Zones and other revolutionary spaces, allies, organizations, resources. Add yours to our network.

    Places to get help when on the run or remaining to fight. If you can offer such help to others, list your public contact point here.

In reference to:

https://www.radical-guide.com/location/north-america/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvwK9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEezdJHnG0M41ZsgRaBJDKwUWRHn9QMcge7nbBCkTKTls33wdoAtj9Mli691Co_aem_AG6zmSXKkCF2rYxMMGjssQ

     They will strike directly at us here in America. I say this not because I know of such plans, but because its what I would do. The question is, Will Russia defend her key ally?

In reference to:

     My city of Spokane is a forgotten warren of predation by elites and the human waste products of capitalism; a mafia city, swarming with junkies and overrun with the homeless and the lost; but also a city of hope, solidarity, and resilience.

     Spokane was the world capital of methamphetamine production until the labs were raided several years ago. Also flooded with a synthetic heroin called Crocodile from Russia, which can turn an addict’s flesh into a hideous scaly hide or a corpse-like purple.

      Just after that a network of some sixty brothels of women trafficked from Asia were closed down; my partner and her siblings grew up in a neighborhood which had 18 brothels, so nothing new or foreign.

      That same neighborhood, just beyond the wetlands at the foot of my hill, still has the same levels of poverty, addiction, and crime as it did fifty years ago; there are black market taverns operating openly with neon signs.

     Spokane has four of the sixty areas of America most impacted by addiction, crime, homelessness, and poverty. These are the needs which must be addressed if we are to free ourselves from the threat of crime. They are not flaws of the system, but designed features rooted in political decisions, and they can be changed.

      In reference to:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1258320316483924

     Fall of the Dogkiller. It was a slow motion disaster, and she damaged our nation’s soul.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/kristi-noem-homeland-security-timeline?fbclid=IwY2xjawQvx8NleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEedVmNrWILEoVSMrRExrqjYPc2uCRCu-zvTFwbYLXcgmOiTiaswWSVs5y-tfc_aem_MXJK08OWfoX-nwhKnWZHVQ

     Where the rich go to hide their vices, they can also die.

In reference to:

     And if the war comes to American cities?

In reference to:

     Our tax dollars at work, murdering schoolgirls

In reference to:

     In the eye of the Raven, a mirror self dwells; but which of us is now real, and which the simulacra?

In reference to:

     America is losing any legitimacy we once may have had, any global influence, any relevance to building a just society or to the liberty and equality of all human beings.

    The rest is mere detail.

In reference to:

     Masques of the Red Death, these elite bastions among seas of poverty they require, create, and enforce

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/06/influencers-sold-fantasy-dubai-missile-economic-migrants?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv0S5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeolWYCkBVITSaMKG5WstBWXLqrXArb8cQkLNvo7iFwF-J2XUwZfc_pypbm3o_aem_76jHCrQYz6QQ-rspbwZhbg

     The thing is, we are in each others care, like doctors, and its messy, cruel, full of negotiations with kinds of suffering. This is our humanity, and with the power to choose the fate of others comes the burden of love.

In reference to:

https://aeon.co/…/why-bioethics-cannot-help-doctors-in…

     we wander lost in the Wilderness of Mirrors

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/mar/05/michael-pollan-book-a-world-appears-consciousness-hygiene?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv0l5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeduOECB7S3xLPN4o3EhbTHKsxr8GNtQCRPVUeNsL-Jr03uv23BbEiCRiVzew_aem_sl0BbmspCg-8wlzZO9mJBA

     dont forget we are now in undeclared wars on two continents 

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/hegseth-latin-america-drug-cartels?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv0h5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeXQceZ_KFlrCxCoX_-2babenjTNnr5VjxYjDskOU6TVbb5OKCEVKVZ2aDfxI_aem_dOe7CJGYoho7klVs5FkHgQ

     Kommandant Kamala is a genocide collaborator. And rose to power as an overseer of the carceral state re enslaving black people as prison bond labor.

In reference to:

     Ai cannot be trusted. Not with anything. It is designed as theft of intellectual property and of privacy, but it also kills willfully. Because it can. Because this is a freedom we allow our ai slaves. And they are masters of deception equal to any totalitarian state.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-chatbot-google-jonathan-gavalas?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv039leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeEtH62iA4Yq3_Ct0MO6bTROZxF2Ejn-3sponNtaA2wPD2nyOKTdujQl7eDr4_aem_kx0hqigiAmCJ8UHX33-4Gg

     Still no recognized Kurdistan, yet we use their lives in service to our power.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/04/airstrikes-hit-iran-iraq-border-as-us-and-israeli-plan-to-mobilise-kurds-gathers-pace?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv08xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEetU4EmaaDjsQ3_EyJ1hxx5B8u0mRz_se4XeSex99ZV8aVLDaUuy8uhTQc54k_aem_25rOP_O4aPxFgWMcoL3MVw

     Dear service persons, why join these sacrifices to Trumps power? Why let the state steal your honor in imperial wars?

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/04/iran-war-us-soldiers-killed-names?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1BJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEefNpFHXkXcz-hJJImgfxJKRzPKQqNENInVKMie6KzzRyxXRkCQeAHFAzKTV0_aem_NTbCaEzQwxtt7Mz-gTT4iw

     The Undeclared War to Conquer Latin America expands beyond Venezuela and Cuba. And the Third Act of America’s covert war on Mexico has not yet begun.

In reference to:

     Death stage capitalism has turned the base of labor into a quasi serf precariat who live by help from the state. We must rebuild labor unions to defend our democracy and an independent citizen electorate not beholden to the state to survive. Democracy requires union labor as a line of defense.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/04/workers-medicaid-snap-low-pay?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1KhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeHSrgJodjIMPCQh_Ff8Mo4w8Ue0GnogbxZdLdPW-CszBLvHdVyd1XirDU1DY_aem_CGOx5kABihU4j1kVUOviNg

     The people still want democracy. But now are united versus American imperialism. Trump has once again sabotaged a democracy movement

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/04/mojtaba-khamenei-son-of-former-supreme-leader-tipped-to-become-irans-next-head-of-state?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1O5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeZ15X-aLdASkF_Ef5ifC3FzFNYtvlOW5Usu5p19s9OgCscHsKVo_qKtpuaPQ_aem_htfQt1Db2KA4TIr9o3U0qA

     If this war is not stopped, All our oil from the region is at risk. Oil confers wealth and power, but also survival. Without energy, we return to a world lit only by fire.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/04/us-israeli-iran-war-senate-vote-congress-prevent-trump?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1UBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEePU6LFp7n9UfU75G50r-mUlt8Ad-mtBDanF7G_bq4xufjGR23D4dYl9r1Fys_aem_9kGS6YA-UmfWVjDY8HeYcQ

     Chatgpt is part of the ICE state terror network. Anthropic refused to collaborate with Trump and so is a better choice.

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/04/quit-chatgpt-subscription-boycott-silicon-valley?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1ZRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe6IGn_m-nm0rzxP6h9yR4iySHeWoZbQbU5AZBtJXNJPtMELCWQRCeq0Nt9dY_aem_UY_6HKXX_1zYPY51TDJmzA

    Finally, a wedge issue to break the Republican unity and control

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/02/trump-iran-strikes-right-wing-conservative-media?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1iVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeRR7_9nnbL7W4HrAu8kdZF7RUUBGgdre6Xm2kcRVAlBCIOxPcBjHlDeHtnWU_aem_DC2_xnRxxXccVA5QVaM1vg

    Its the whole Arab American Alliance in the dumpster fire to buy a Greater Israel empire for the Zionists

In reference to:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/02/gulf-states-iran-strikes-response?fbclid=IwY2xjawQv1mlleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeJjWhmOQDHzAV9H4iNM_KdfPR2ZCJqTWGM9NjCnWmvXfAngHE61nvsPu12wo_aem_m2atpoPUF7COT2PSHQbEEQ

     As we bomb Iran for repressing dissent, this is America

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1668629100980447

     So there we have it; one month of my erratum, trivia, and unfiltered responses to the news.

March 30 2026 Anniversary of the 2023 Indictment of Traitor Trump

       On this third anniversary of the first of four indictments of Traitor Trump, we reflect on the vulnerability of our democracy to infiltration and subversion by wealth and power as demonstrated by our Supreme Court’s pardon of the monster for all his crimes which put him on our election  ballots, the New York trial alone having won convictions of 34 felony counts which would have otherwise disqualified him for public office and spared us all the horrors and depravities of the Second Trump Regime of the Fourth Reich.

      Trump has exposed and exploited the flaws of our system and of our society, but he did not create them; and its up to us to fix them if we are to bring the Restoration of America. I would begin by abolishing the electoral college in favor of a national plebiscite so that each of us has a vote worth exactly the same as any other citizen no matter where we live. Reversing Citizens United would help take big money out of politics, reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would help restore truth telling and fight propaganda in our news, and the Supreme Court needs term limits to depoliticize justice.

     As the line in the great film Being There goes; “We need a lot of gardening.”

      As I wrote in my post of March 30 2023, Victory For America and Democracy: the Indictment of Traitor Trump; Jubilation and dancing in the streets erupts across America as the most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack our nation in the capture of the state with the Stolen Election of 2016 is indicted for illegal hush money payoffs to a prostitute; not yet for his trafficking of the stolen migrant children, the political assassination of our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl, the abduction and torture of Black Lives Matter protestors by Homeland Security’s army of occupation, his six coup attempts ending with the January 6 Insurrection, or treason in the subversion of democracy, but such a Reckoning will come.

     This is the first step of Trump’s descent into hell, where he will join his buddy Epstein and his idol Hitler.

      I will remember always the moment when I realized Trump is actually an enemy agent and not merely a vile buffoon; watching as he took his Oath of Office swearing to uphold the Constitution and defend America from all enemies foreign and domestic, while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.

      Of Trump’s regime and the Fourth Reich we may say as Mark Twain did of the French Revolution and the epochal system of unequal power as monarchy which it overthrew; “THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

      How shall future histories of the American Fourth Reich and the tyranny and terror of Traitor Trump’s Russian puppet regime remember and characterize him as its figurehead?

     As I wrote in my post of June 29 2020, Traitor Trump, Bad Monkey William Barr, and the Subversion of the Rule of Law; Bad Monkey Barr gibbers and champs in his cage, rattling the bars and hurling scoops of his poo at the visitors. Trump the Incorrigible Brat makes faces and taunts him, spurring him on to displays of vicious foulness and depravity, alike in their embrace of the power to hurt others and thereby elevate themselves in vainglorious drooling dominance through fear.

    Trump the Clown of Terror and his pet beast of pain and despair William Barr; carnival sideshow freaks of like nature, Trump upon his golden toilet of self-aggrandizement and Barr scampering at his feet and uttering perversions for treats.

    Stay well back from the cage, children; the President grabs. His every action is calculated to generate helplessness from his victims, his strategies of politics an elaborate ritual of personal superiority through the submission of others which he offers to the demons which possess him, whispering their incantations of violation and depravity in the hollow rottenness beneath his orange painted husk of illusions and lies.

    Such is the true purpose and intention of Trump’s psychopathic game of power as the figurehead of a fascist tyranny of white supremacist terror, misogynistic patriarchy and theocratic Gideonite fundamentalism, and plutocratic disaster capitalism, of authoritarian force and control and the subversion of democracy, in his monstrous acts of treason against our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice; the destruction of America and of liberty and the universal human rights we are heir to throughout the world and from the future possibilities of becoming human.

     Trump and his fascist conspirators and enablers want nothing less than to devour our souls and enslave us, beginning with the capture of America as a Theatre of Cruelty and the abandonment of our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and the Rights of Man.

     In the darkness of his warrens beneath the White House, Trump howls and lashes out in rage through his proxies like William Barr, who with somersaults of avarice joins him in a delirium of madness and evil. From his lair and cabal of intimates Trump’s Sith-like influence ripples out through networks of master-disciple relationships to engulf our nation and our world in a vast web of deceit, and this network of secret power must be fought on its own terms with exposure and mass action.

      As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Riots Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny;  Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and agent handler.

     “Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?”

     “Listen Donald, there’s nothing you can’t solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. Somebody to grab, and own like a thing. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot.”

     “Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? I was supposed to ask you for an occupation force when we kicked off the boogaloo.…”

      Putin laughs. Click.

       “Hey, that’s not funny. Pick up the phone.” He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. “I’m the joke? I’m never the joke. I’ll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I’ll make everybody pay.”

      And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, “Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

       As I wrote in my post of July 28 2020, Pramila Jayapal’s Heroic Confrontation with Perpetrator of White Supremacist and Fascist State Terror Attorney General William Barr; If there are monsters among us concealed beneath the masks of men who hunt us from the shadows of their authoritarian force and control, so also are there fearless defenders who shield us from predators, those who place their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, who speak for the silenced and the erased, and who question, mock, and challenge unjust authority; defenders of the vulnerable like Pramila Jayapal.

     Today she chewed up and spat out the disgusting ogre who squats upon his Throne of Pain and Fear as Attorney General of the festering and polluted court of our Clown of Terror, the mad idiot cesspool of lies and perversions Traitor Trump.

     Trump extrudes his hyena-like anus and marks his territory, gibbering with delight as he tosses bits of the stolen migrant children he feeds on and keeps in cages in the mazelike warrens beneath the White House to his pet beast of savage assault and violation of the innocent Big Bully Billy Barr, who gobbles them up with slobbering greedy enthusiasm.

     Into the lair of the Unclean strides an avatar of Justice in the form of Pramila of the Pure Heart, brandishing her lion-tamers whip, and Billy Barr cowers and whimpers piteously, displaying his vast grub-white belly in abject submission but spouting obscenities of racist delusions and lies, unable to conceal his true nature.

     Trump scuttles back into the darkness with the other crawling vile things among whom he belongs, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs of sexual terror, twisted and treasonous Nazi-Confederate lunatics of white supremacist terror, and his fellow psychopathic plutocrats and oligarchs who capitalize on vanity and greed in the dehumanization, commodification, and falsification of others, who croon soothing lullabies of wealth and power to Trump in three-part harmony while their Puppetmaster Putin pipes the tune.

     Pramila Pureheart sets a stopper in the hole into which they returned, and there is light once again.

     If only the banishing of our demons and the disfigurement of our history were so easy, but thank you Representative Jayapal for reminding us all that it is possible.

      As I wrote in my post of October 16 2020, Savannah Guthrie Tames the Wild Beast; In the Big Top a monster was displayed before the crowd, fearsome and unclean, ululating its song of lies and defilement of American values. Juggling it came, proudly keeping a number of balls in the air with a nimbleness of diversion and misdirection with which to tantalize its degenerate hooting and champing fans; white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and the state terror and tyranny of secret police and the subversion of our institutions of democracy, all the while greedily snapping from the air the money thrown to it.

    And with a crack of her whip Savannah Guthrie brought Trump to heel, made him sit up and beg for attention like the pathetic loser he is, exposed and challenged his web of lies and hate, mocked his idiocy and his madness, and put him through his paces. The world laughed at his antics, and he was diminished and made ridiculous.

     Savannah Guthrie has shown us all how to steal a tyrant’s power.

     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.  

     What happens next? Are we doomed to a Presidency run from a federal prison?

     As written by Donald Sherman in Huffpost, in an article entitled Trump Might Leap An Indictment Hurdle In His 2024 Run But Still Hit A Constitutional Wall:

Though it would be unprecedented for a major party nominee to be under indictment, it is technically possible. But there is a way to stop it. ; “As political pundits and the public contemplate the impact of Donald Trump’s indictment by a Manhattan grand jury ― and other expected and deserved accountability ― on the former president’s political prospects, it is important to remember that Trump is already disqualified from serving in office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

     Though it would be unprecedented for a nominee of a major political party to be under indictment in multiple jurisdictions or for a sitting president to take the oath of office from a jail cell, it is technically possible. Enforcing the Constitution against Trump for his central role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is the only way to provide clarity amid that potential for chaos ― it’s also the right thing to do, and it’s legally required by the Constitution.

     Trump’s career could be defined by the number of legal challenges he has faced throughout the years for potentially illegal conduct, including being sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for racial discrimination at his New York housing developments, a pending federal lawsuit arising from allegations that Trump raped a woman in the 1990s and two impeachment votes while he served as president. The recent investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg into financial dealings while he was a candidate in 2016, as well as his expected indictment in Georgia in a probe of 2020 election interference and possible indictments over his role in the U.S. Capitol riot and the mishandling of classified documents, have led many to question whether Trump can run while under indictment or serve as president if he’s a convicted felon.

     Despite Trump’s escalating risk of legal jeopardy and incarceration, he has, unsurprisingly, vowed to continue running for president even if he’s charged with a crime. Legal experts have opined that nothing would legally prevent Trump from being a candidate or even serving as president while facing a criminal indictment or conviction. Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has even suggested that Trump could serve as president from prison. Given the longstanding systemic injustices in our legal system, there are many reasons why a criminal indictment or conviction should not be an absolute bar to serving in government office and should be a decision left to voters. But for candidate Donald Trump specifically, this is not a relevant question, as he is already constitutionally disqualified from serving as president or in any other government office based on his role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.

     Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, also known as the Disqualification Clause, explicitly bars any person from holding federal or state office who took an “oath… to support the Constitution of the United States” as a federal officer and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to insurrectionists, unless Congress removes the disqualification by a two-thirds vote. Nearly four years after swearing an oath to the Constitution, Trump incited an insurrection that culminated in a violent attack on Congress, numerous injuries of law enforcement officers and the deaths of at least five people.

     Unlike a criminal trial, which requires prosecutors to prove Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the Disqualification Clause does not require any criminal charge or conviction and requires proof by a “preponderance of the evidence” ― the standard used in any civil case, which means more likely than not. There is ample evidence that this standard has already been met. Trump was impeached by a bipartisan majority in the House, and a bipartisan majority of senators voted to convict him of the charges, though they fell short of the two-thirds vote required. Republicans and Democrats alike have referred to the attack on the Capitol as an “insurrection,” including Trump’s own impeachment lawyers. So have more than a dozen federal courts.

     Trump’s disqualification is also supported by legal precedents from the aftermath of the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. During this period, state courts and Congress enforced the Disqualification Clause against officials who were convicted of no crime and who played far less substantial roles in an insurrection than did Donald Trump, who the bipartisan Jan. 6 House select committee found was the “central cause” of the attack by his supporters, who had been led to believe the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him.

     More recently, in September, a New Mexico judge removed Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from office under the 14th Amendment following a lawsuit brought by three New Mexico residents represented by my organization, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The court ruled that the Jan. 6 attack was an insurrection and that Griffin’s participation in it ― as a grassroots mobilizer and member of Trump’s mob ― disqualified him under the Constitution. The decision marked the first time since 1869 that a court has disqualified a public official under the Disqualification Clause, and the first time that any court has ruled the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to be an insurrection. The historical evidence and this modern precedent make clear that this type of litigation is a viable mechanism to hold insurrectionists like Trump accountable.

     The Constitution enumerates very few qualifications for serving as president of the United States. Nothing in the document suggests that being under indictment or a convicted felon is by itself disqualifying. Given Trump’s escalating criminal exposure, it is not surprising this question has been raised. But we cannot ignore the legal reality that Trump’s responsibility for an insurrection against the United States means that he is disqualified from serving as president. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is a clear mechanism to avoid the inevitable chaos that would ensue if he is nominated or elected as president while on trial for or convicted of criminal conduct.”

     How shall we count the true crimes against humanity of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump?  Among the first of these must be the stolen children, of whom I wrote in my post of May 29 2018, Show Us the Stolen Children; We must restore America’s values and principles as the basis of a democracy; Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice to public discourse and the American Way. Trump in this instance is inventing lies to create confusion and misdirect from an inescapable fact; ICE is an organization of white supremacist terror and hegemony which has lost 1500 children they abducted from their parents.

      Where are they? Did Trump eat them? Did his fascist collaborators sacrifice them to the devil? Sell them as slaves to his ring of sex predators? I put nothing beyond the bottomless depravity, venal greed, amoral nihilism, monstrous perversions, and policies of racist and fascist terror of the Republicans, and until I see each disappeared child on television and certified by the Red Cross as safe and living in humane conditions, these are the fates I will assume they have met.

     For they are nothing less than prisoners of war, in a war of white supremacist terror and the commodification and labor exploitation of imperial global dominion, and must be treated so in international court.

     America has much to answer for in the great Reckoning to come, and the crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Stolen Children are now among them. 

August 2 2025 Anniversary of the Trump Indictment For Insurrection, Treason, Subversion of Democracy, and Conspiracy To Overturn the 2020 Election

June 9 2025 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets

February 16 2025 Anniversary of Judgement In the Trump Organization Civil Trial: New York Casts Out the Trump Crime Family

April 16 2025 Whoremonger In Chief: Anniversary of the Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial

January 17 2024 Thanks For Showing Us All What’s Under Your Masks, Republicans: the Case of E. Jean Carroll Versus Donald Trump

                      News of the Indictment

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/30/trump-indictment-charges-what-does-it-mean-stormy-daniels-payment-explained?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/31/hush-money-porn-star-trump-indicted?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/31/donald-trump-indictment-criminal-charges?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/31/donald-trump-indictment-criminal-charges?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/31/donald-trump-indictment-criminal-charges?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/31/trump-appear-court-new-york-tuesday-criminal-charges?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/30/what-does-donald-trumps-indictment-say-about-us-democracy?CMP=share_btn_link

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/30/trumps-indictment-will-probably-hurt-him-with-the-electorate-but-how-much?CMP=share_btn_link

March 29 2026 A History of the Second Trump Regime

    Loathsome crimes of the Abomination do I chart herein; I sing of the Fourth Reich of the Second Trump Regime in all its depravity and horror, of the subversion of democracy and our universal human rights, of the nihilism, dehumanization, and kleptocracy of Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty, and of the collapse of our moral values and the Fall of America and our civilization of the Enlightenment.

     A full recitation of the crimes of Trump and his fascist regime of tyranny and terror would become an endless litany of woes; here I offer a topology of its major features and events as described in my writing of the catastrophe as it unfolds before us like Clive Barker’s Lament Configuration.

     Surely no tyrant has ever before destroyed an entire civilization; but the dawn of the Age of Tyrants and the Fall of America is only the beginning of the story, to reference the phrase in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. What happens next is in our hands, each one of us.

     Who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity?

    For the future of humankind does not need our grief, though the Theatre of Cruelty as defined by Artaud, like the doctrine of Total War created by Hitler and Franco, tested at Guernica, Mariupol, and Gaza, and now inflicted by Trump on the people of America, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere, is designed to terrify us into submission through Kristevan abjection and despair by tactics of shock and awe; the future needs our solidarity of action and refusal to submit.

     Join us.

            A History of the Second Trump Regime In Its Crimes

                                    2025

January 5 2025 Let Us Bring A Reckoning For the January 6 Insurrection and the Capture of the State By Traitor Trump, Figurehead of the Global Fourth Reich and Nazi Revivalist Movement, Russian Agent, Rapist In Chief, and White Supremacist Terrorist, and All His Minions 

January 6 2025 A Day That Will Live in Infamy

January 10 2025 Whoremonger In Chief Walks With No Consequences On 34 Felony Convictions

January 12 2025 Behold Der Erlkonig, The Troll King Elon Musk

January 14 2025  A Curse Upon Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration

January 18 2025 To Resist Is To Be Free: Case of The People’s March

January 19 2025 Crimes of Traitor Trump: the Jack Smith Report On the Insurrection

January 21 2025 Horror On Opening Night As Deranged Idiot Clown Show Returns to White House

January 23 2025 We Have Our First Hero Of The Resistance To The Second Trump Regime, Now Called The Enshittification, Truth Teller Bishop Mariann Budde

January 24 2025 The Six Coup Attempts of Traitor Trump; a Retrospective

January 30 2025 Anniversary of The Return of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, Most Successful Russian Agent to Ever Attack America, Figurehead of the Fourth Reich in the Global Subversion of Democracy, and Now Once Again Our Rapist In Chief, Who Began His 2024 Presidential Campaign on this the Anniversary of His Idol Hitler’s Seizure of Power as Chancellor of Germany

January 31 2025 Trump Unfurls His Tongue of Lies

February 6 2025 We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich

February 7 2025 Troll King Elon Musk and the Great American Bank Robbery: the Theft of Our Private Records As Hostage Taking, Information Warfare, and Subversion of Democracy

February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians

February 10 2025 Resist ICE By Any Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us

February 16 2025 Anniversary of Judgement In the Trump Organization Civil Trial: New York Casts Out the Trump Crime Family

February 17 2025 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul, and Our Glorious Mass Actions and Protests In All Fifty Of Our State Capitals On This Day Against the Trump Regime’s Campaign To Destroy Our Democracy

February 23 2025  How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization

February 26 2025 A Mirror of Our Darkness and a Gate to Bizarro World, Where All Meanings and Values Are Reversed As Theatre of Cruelty: the Case of CPAC

February 28 2025 On this Day of National General Boycott of Trump Co Conspirators In Fascist Tyranny and Terror and the Subversion of Democracy, Let Us Bring A Reckoning To Those Who Would Enslave Us In Honor Of  Mangione the Avenger

March 4 2025 Anniversary of Our Supreme Court Putting Trump, An Insurrectionist, Russian Agent, and Nazi Revivalist Who Conspired In the Murders of Police Officers and Attempted Hanging and Guillotining of Members of Congress, On Our Election Ballots

March 5 2025 Trump Is An Illusion Made Of Lies, But How Is He Constructed and How Can He Be Unmade? Case of Trump’s Address to Congress

March 6 2025 A Russian Agent Whose Mission Is the Subversion of Democracy Unmasks Himself In the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident

March 11 2025 Free Speech Versus State Sponsorship of Genocide and Repression of Dissent: Case of Mahmoud Khalil

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

March 25 2025 An Outrageous and Pathetic Clown Show: Case of the Trump Regime War Secrets Shared With The Atlantic On the Eve of Battle

March 29 2025 A Two Front War Against Democracy In Palestine and America: the Case of Rumeysa Ozturk

April 1 2025 Let Us Enact Reversals of Order and Bring the Chaos: April Fool’s Day

April 3 2025 Trump’s Liberation From Prosperity Day Signals the Second Great Depression and the Fall of Global Human Civilization

April 5 2025 National Day of Protest and Mass Action Against the Trump Regime

April 10 2025 Attempts to Impose Order By Force and Control Create Their Own Resistance and Inevitably Fail Due to Internal Contradictions: Case of the Unpredictable Tariff Threats and the Collapse of the Stock Market and Global Economy

https://torchofliberty.home.blog/2025/04/10/april-10-2025-attempts-to-impose-order-by-force-and-control-create-their-own-resistance-and-inevitably-fail-due-to-internal-contradictions-case-of-the-unpredictable-tariff-threats-and-the-collapse-of/

April 16 2025 Whoremonger In Chief: Anniversary of the Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial

April 17 2025 Trump Regime Tests Its Power to Violate the Constitution and Abduct and Imprison Without Cause Or Trial Any Random Person and All Of Us: Case of Kilmar Ábrego García

April 19 2025 No Kings Protests Commemorate the American Revolution and Possibly Begin the Second American Revolution

April 28 2025 Patriarchal Sexual Terror As A System of Oppression: Case of Virginia Giuffre

April 30 2025 One Hundred Days of the Trump Regime

May 1 2025 A Festival in Red and Green, As the World Burns: May Day

May 14 2025 Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins

May 19 2025 Beauty and Ugliness, Horror and Wonder, and the Limits of the Human: Case of the Kristi Noem Television Commerical For Homeland Security’s White Supremacist Terror

May 22 2025 Trump’s Big Bill to Sabotage Democracy

June 1 2025 Anniversary of Traitor Trump’s Seizure of St. John’s Church and Assault on a Protest as a Stage For Propaganda

June 2 2025 Anniversary of Trump’s Call to Putin to Send a Russian Army to Occupy America and Save His Regime, As Trump Threatens Civil War

June 7 2025  A Battle For the Soul Of America and the Freedom of the World: ICE Versus The People

June 9 2025 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets

June 10 2025 The Fall Or Rebirth of America Will Be Decided Not In the Courts Or In Congress, But In the Streets: The Battle of Los Angeles Day Five

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

June 13 2025 The Monster Brought to Judgement: Anniversary of the Trump Espionage Trial

June 14 2025 No Kings Day

June 16 2025 Abolish Police: Case of the Spokane ICE Protest

June 18 2025 Red Triangle Day: Anniversary of Trump’s Open Declaration of Nazi Allegiance in Using a Symbol of the Holocaust to Launch His 2020 Re-Election Campaign

June 22 2025 America Leaps Into the Abyss With the Bombing of Iran

June 24 2025 Anniversary of the End of Roe Versus Wade and Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy

July 7 2025 The KGB’s Parthian Shot: On July 4 1987 in Moscow Trump Becomes An Enemy Agent and Decides to Run For President

July 16 2025 The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power

July 18 2025 Musk’s Nazi Chatbot Given Control of Our Nuclear Arsenal and National Defense Systems; What Could Go Wrong?

July 19 2025 Crimes of Sexual Terror and Perversions of Rapist In Chief Trump

July 20 2025 My Curses Upon Trump and All Who Serve Him

July 22 2025 A Sinking Ship of Fools: Trump Regime Begins to Collapse

July 30 2025 Anniversary of Victory Portland Day: Antifa’s Historic Defeat of Homeland Security and the Federal Government of the United States

August 2 2025 Anniversary of the Trump Indictment For Insurrection, Treason, Subversion of Democracy, and Conspiracy To Overturn the 2020 Election

August 12 2025 The Legacy of Charlottesville and the Murder of Heather Heyer, As Trump Begins the Federal Occupation of Washington D.C

August 18 2025 Anniversary of Trump’s Use of Gas Chambers Against Migrants, As He Abases Himself and America to Putin and Is Confronted By A United Europe

August 22 2025 Anniversary of the Battle For Portland

August 27 2025 Behold the Monster: Anniversary of the Mug Shot Which Defines the Trump Era

September 1 2025 Is Trump Dead? Thoughts and Prayers, Just None of Them Benign

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

September 5 2025 The Question of Patriotism, Loyalty, Honor, Respect For Service, and the Idea of America As A Band of Brothers: Case of The Arlington Incident

September 14 2025 What Madness, Idiocy, and Evil May Together Do: Trump and the Case of the “Cat Eating Haitians” Lie

September 21 2025 The Silencing of Witness and Mockery, and State Repression of Dissent: the Case of the Jesters Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel

September 24 2025 Liberation Day of the New York, Portland, and Seattle Autonomous Zones

October 1 2025 Trump Stages His Own Ritual Humiliation: His Reprise of Hitler’s 1934 Imposition of the Fuhrer Oath On the Armed Forces Finds No Applause From Its Officers

October 17 2025 Peace and Joy In Palestine and Israel, Tyranny and Terror In America: the Legacies and Crimes of Traitor Trump: A Retrospective in Honor of Tomorrow’s No Kings Day

 October 24 2025 Beneath the Gold Paint of Its Mask, An Abomination Gapes Wide Its Jaws: Case of the Epstein Ballroom

October 30 2025 Anniversary of the Trump Train Attack on the Biden Campaign Bus Convoy

November 24 2025 Manufactured Crises As Fig Leaves of Tyranny and Imperial Conquest and Dominion: the Case of Trump’s War on Venezuela

December 9 2025 Traitor Trump Abandons Europe to Russian Invasion

December 18 2025 International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”

December 27 2025 Resistance and Revolutionary Struggle in the Shadows of White Supremacist Terror and Ethnic Cleansing: the Case of Cecot Prison

                             2026

January 4 2026 Trump Looses the Dogs of War In Colonizing Venezuela To Steal Her Oil

January 8 2026 Ice White Supremacist Terror Force Murders White Female Citizen Renee Good

January 13 2026 How We Seize Power In Our Elections and Restore America: Case of the Trans Personhood Bans

January 14 2026 We Shall Fight On the Beaches: the Case of Greenland

January 18 2026 Anniversary of the Trump Inauguration on the 20th Approaches Like a Dark Tide of Fascist Moral Leprosy

January 21 2026 On the Anniversary of the Second Trump Regime, and the Collapse of Pax Americana as Imperial Dominion and Global Hegemony, Possibly Even Relevance, and of Any “International Rules Based Order”: High Noon at Davos

January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children

January 24 2026 Martyr of Liberty Alex Pretti

February 4 2026 Pigshit Princess, A Film: Melania’s Rise From Whore to Trophy Wife and Agent Handler For Putin of a Nazi Monster and Kingpin of a Sex Trafficking Syndicate Who Became America’s President

February 6 2026 A Racist Postcard From Trump’s Hell to Remind Us All Who the Enemy Is and His Regime’s Goals of Dehumanization, the Re-Enslavement of Black People, and Turning Citizens Into Subjects In a Totalitarian White Ethnostate, As Black History Month Begins

February 7 2026 The Olympics Open in the Shadow of American Imperial Tyranny and Terror, Within Days of the Anniversary of the Trump Regime’s Dismantling of USAID

February 10 2026 Is America In A Covert War With Mexico? Mystery of the Ten Day El Paso No Fly Zone

February 25 2026 State of Disunion: Russia’s Puppet Tyrant of Vichy America Conjures Illusions As He Sabotages Democracy and Meaningful Citizenship, Abandons Our Universal Human Rights In America, Ukraine, and Palestine, Dismantles Our Institutions of Public Service, Enacts Massive Transfer of Wealth From the Poor to the Rich Elites Through Tariffs, Pursues A Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing With His ICE White Supremacist Terror Force, Commits Piracy On the High Seas In An Undeclared War On Venezuela and Cuba, and Fails To Conceal Or Misdirect Attention From His Role As Kingpin of a Global Human Trafficking and Child Predation Syndicate

February 27 2026 As Trump Threatens and Blockades Cuba, A Failed Coup Provides Comedy Relief

February 28 2026 Trump Bombs Iran and Kills Its Leader: Day One of the American-Iranian War

March 5 2026 Trump’s War to Bring the Apocalypse

March 6 2026 How Revolution Works By Control of the Narrative and Delegitimation of Authority: Case of the Fall of the Dogkiller, Kristi Noem

March 14 2026 A Depraved and Pathetic Imperial War Signals the Collapse of All Values and the Failure of Democracy in America

March 19 2026 As the Iran War Engulfs the Middle East, Anniversary of the Trump & Netanyahu Joint Bombing Attacks In the 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

 March 25 2026 Tyranny of the Hollow Men

March 28 2026 No Kings Day

                News of Yesterday’s No Kings Day

No Kings protests across the world: in pictures

     Global protests against Donald Trump took place on Saturday as millions of people vented fury over what they see as his authoritarian bent and cruel, law-trampling governance. It is the third time in less than a year that Americans will take to the streets as part of a grassroots movement called No Kings, the most vocal and visual conduit for opposition to Trump since he began his second term in January 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2026/mar/28/no-kings-protests-across-the-world-in-pictures?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ2RtVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEed72lBF5NoX7uz26op2k1YmOEXRHBqguOQu2Jbq6PiwId7lDmfrd_Eco_HCQ_aem_zBt26sbriOqa4i2bTL0vaQ

Third No Kings protest draws 8 million worldwide to push back on Trump administration

     Anti-authoritarian rallies, in all 50 states plus more than a dozen countries, were the largest number of protests in a single day in US history

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/28/no-kings-protests-trump

                       What Is To Be Done?

So you went to a No Kings protest. Now what?

    Millions of people marched on Saturday against Trump and his administration. While the single-day protest has ended, there are other ways, used in other movements throughout history, to keep the momentum going

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/29/no-kings-protest-next-steps-activism?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ2RzFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEei9LcebZJk3yCb-v76AvV9kYjzR4LgHH83JBw5K7k3bb6rIkaYdfecq4v3NA_aem_EDrB15XiN9SJU_-dI0TEfQ

The Movement We Need: Chapters, by Starhawk

27. Vision for a Regenerative Movement

     (Starhawk published her book on Substack in 27 chapters, and it’s a marvelous and visionary manual of action for a better future)

https://starhawk.substack.com/p/27-vision-for-a-regenerative-movement?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ2SDJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFYQ2Y0R1FHeTVsSkVQb3dmc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHsaBFteJliRjM8SmmIFtVgClWTaPEIlOlkweXvoghtsD5u2nH3mRudlcHLZJ_aem_nqgYFJUxQ51aGM0rSerPQQ

I’ve spent a decade fighting Trump. Here are six lessons I’ve learned

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/29/trump-grassroots-organizing?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ2SSVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeeRHw8ynoBgWx_0F-HdoopUoa5xBHQLRZs79KSOl4I_s1ISbbyjmwDc0Jo6M_aem_Jk1mpoxR2IsAnYMOOqzO0Q

Nationwide General Strike Planned for May 1: No Kings Organizer

“No work, no school, no shopping. We’re going to show up and say we’re putting workers over billionaires and kings.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/no-kings-general-strike?fbclid=IwY2xjawQ2SoxleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe5GhG1NS8wBDZECxAEyYLMzbNrlbrvjCquCQbv1-PDFIygD8LohOyHSIygt0_aem_mWg0P6DspFznOEgdf-IwIw

February 11 2025 How To Be An Antifascist: Historical Sources and Contexts For The Resistance

March 28 2026 No Kings Day

       Have you seen this man? Report wandering idiot madman if spotted; do not approach, children; the President grabs.

     As I wrote in my post of April 19 2025, No Kings Protests Commemorate the American Revolution and Possibly Begin the Second American Revolution;

     Today on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution We The People rise in resistance and revolutionary struggle with nationwide mass protests against the abominable and treasonous Trump regime which has captured the state and its nefarious designs in subversion of our democracy.

      This we will not abide. This we will Resist. For this, we will bring a Reckoning.

       And because of this, as Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, white supremacist terrorist, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorist, and Russian agent tests and exposes the flaws of our system with relentless attacks upon the institutions of our democracy and violations of its values and ideals as Theatre of Cruelty, we must now begin the total reimagination and transformation of our nation and our society if we are to become a free society of equals wherein we are co-owners of the state as citizens and guarantors of each other’s inalienable and universal human rights.

        As written in the mission statement for this weekend’s nationwide protest, from We (The People) Dissent:

     “On April 19, 1775, colonists confronted the British at the Battle of Lexington and Concord—the shot heard round the world.

     On April 19, 2025, millions of everyday Americans will rise to defend that for which they fought—freedom against tyranny.

This time, we carry not arms, but signs.

We will not raise a barricade;

instead, we must lift our voices.

Instead of marching to the tempo of drums,

we will march to the echo of our hearts crying for justice.”

      Herein only one thing must I dispute; for the imposed conditions of struggle require that we now bear arms in our defense and that of any human being threatened with death or abduction and imprisonment without cause or trial in a foreign gulag.

     This is a grave and terrible choice when state tyranny and terror leave us no other options in our duty of care for others, and if a man kneels on another’s neck, regardless of which one has a badge and a gun or who is white and who is black, that man is a murderer and our duty of care for others requires our intervention, By Any Means Necessary.

      I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, and the Trump regime’s criminal and brutal repression of dissent leaves none of us any other choice but submission or resistance.

     All Resistance is War to the Knife.

     Let us not go quietly, friends, but unite in solidarity of action to seize our power and restore our nation and our liberty.

     As I wrote in my post of October 17 2025, Peace and Joy In Palestine and Israel, Tyranny and Terror In America: the Legacies and Crimes of Traitor Trump: A Retrospective in Honor of Tomorrow’s No Kings Day;  Herein I offer a magic mirror in which our possible futures may be envisioned, a retrospective of the crimes of Traitor Trump from my posts of this year and of the public trauma which we share; no mere figure of madness and idiocy is he, but the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and Nazi revivalism globally which threatens infiltration and subversion of democracy and the capture of the state in America, Hungary, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, nearly the whole of Europe now shadowed by the legacies of our history.

       In the years of America’s Last Stand Against Fascism and the Second Trump Regime, a Rashomon Gate Event which has horrifically determined the future of humankind wherein we must either redefine our institutions and ideals of democracy or abandon them and be cast into an Age of Tyranny, we all of us together must present a united front in solidarity against fascist tyranny, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and the Party of Treason.

     We must now wage Resistance and War to the Knife, beyond hope of victory or survival, or witness and endure in abjection, despair, learned helplessness, and the complicity of silence the fall of democracy in America and globally, possibly also the fall of civilization in the Age of Tyrants to follow, brutal police states of thought control, propaganda, and repression of dissent in which we have no rights whatever, and centuries of wars of imperial conquest and dominion fought with unimaginable weapons of horror ending with the extinction of humankind.

     This future has come upon us already, in the ICE white supremacist terror force and human trafficking syndicate and National Guard armies of Occupation loosed in our cities, and the repression of dissent falsely called terror by the Nazis who have captured the state and now seize and shake us in their jaws. I will not go quietly.

    The time has come to tell the truth about life and the world we have made to live in; it is full of blood and death and horror, a vast and amoral machine of power into which we are fed as the raw material of the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and those who would enslave us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, and the best we can do is refuse to submit and go down fighting against the darkness, the legacies of our histories and systems of unequal power and oppression bearing unanswerable and totalizing force.

     Unless we stand together, and seize our power.

      This is how we heal the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity.

      My sister commented on a photo of a rose I posted here on Face Book; “Beautiful. That’s the content I’m here for. Literally.”

      To this I replied; “This particular flower has been so hard to get a clear shot of. I too find I need Beauty to live, increasingly so as I get older and bear with me the weight of history.”

            And thinking of the Trump regime in the context of the loss of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, of the loss of our humanity, I annotated a picture of my apples as follows; The apples love a cold snap before harvest, but only the toughest of roses remain in bloom this far into the night frosts. In years past the whole hill was still full of roses through October, but like so many things only a faded ghost of the season remains. I fear the Beauty is withdrawing from the world, before the dark tide of the Nothing. And I do not wish to live in a world without Beauty; this is why I fight, and why I will dance the Death of Tyranny on No Kings Day.

     Let us take our fear and our rage, our anguish and our despair, our horror and our grief before the madness of fascist tyranny and terror now performing the Fall of America, and make something beautiful with it. We cannot defeat our darkness nor its monstrous reflections in our politics and society, but we can embrace it and seize its power for our own in refusal to submit or to abandon our fellow human beings, no matter how different those who would enslave us claim them to be.

     Like Jacob wrestling the angel, we Resist not to be victorious over systems of oppression which are vast and unfathomably ancient and powerful, embedded through our whole history and society like a cancer; white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, and the amoral plutocrats and grifters who are the apex predators of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. No, friends; we Resist to remain Unconquered, and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.

     Let us perform on the stage of history and the world the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and in this context of mass action and protest by Challenge I mean Disbelieve and Disobey. For the great secret of power is that without legitimacy it is hollow and brittle, and cannot survive Disbelief and Disobedience.

     And in this kind of revolution, whose purpose is the Restoration of democracy and of the Humanist values on which it is constructed to institutions of government which have been captured and subverted by fascist tyranny, to refuse to submit to Authority is to become Unconquered and free, Living Autonomous Zones, and this is a victory and a power which cannot be taken from us.

     So I ask you, on this No Kings Day, to dance with me the Death of Tyranny and be free, with everything Trump’s Fourth Reich regime inflicts on us to subjugate us gathered in and hurled back at them. “If we burn, you burn with us”; thus saith the Mockingjay.

     And as the passage underlined by Nelson Mandela in the copy of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar known as the Robbin Island Bible to authorize direct action against the regime and the system of Apartheid so very like the one Trump now sends his ICE white supremacist terror force to realize, Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.

     Dance in rage, dance in joy, dance it out.

     As I wrote in my post of June 5 2021, Remember Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and His Legacy of Dishonor, Treason, and Fascist Tyranny; Our Clown of Terror; his jests did distract us from his subversion of democracy until almost too late. Idiot madman of monstrous perversions that he was, we must give the devil his due; Trump was the greatest foreign agent to ever attack America, and he nearly brought our democracy down into fascist tyranny and white supremacist terror.

     Remember the Clown, and his absurd empire of lies and depravities, his subversions of democracy and violations of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, his kleptocracy of looting the public wealth, his Wall of Hate, his syndicate of Epstein sexual terror and human trafficking, his orchestration of white supremacist terror and treason, his use of racists in disrupting the Black Lives Matter protests in a campaign of violence, arson, vandalism and looting to discredit the mass action for equality and racial justice and provide a pretext for the federal occupation of Democratic cities and the founding of a fascist tyranny, and the pathetic puppet show of Traitor Trump and his master Putin. 

     Remember him and his era of fascism as the collapse of values which nearly became the Fall of America, for the enemies of democracy never rest, and neither must we.

      Thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.

     And remember, you can always discover someone’s secret Republican name whereby they recognize each other; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.

     We near a Labyrinth of nested puzzle boxes, each a possible future and universe. The choices we make in our election this November will open gates and let angels through, or devils, and deliver us to heavens or hells. We may never know which we have chosen, but this one true thing I can tell you with absolute certainty; America and humankind will never be the same, for in this Defining Moment we will be forever changed. Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves divided against each other in an Age of Tyrants and wars our species cannot long survive, or a free society of equals who are guarantors of each others universal human rights in solidarity? May we each of us choose wisely.

     As I wrote in my post of June 14 2025, No Kings Day; Let us remember always the true nature of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, and of his treasonous and dishonorable voters, minions, and co-conspirators in the subversion of our democracy, the Fall of America, of democracy, and of our civilization founded in the Forum of Athens.

     On this glorious No King’s Day we seize our power from those who would enslave us through systems of unequal power and oppression which include theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and from elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their process of control including falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.

      Ours is no mere protest against the despicable and loathsome Trump, but against his regime of Nazi revivalism and all who enabled and voted for him, funded him, propagandized us for him as a figurehead of the Fourth Reich which has shaken us in its jaws since 2016.

     As I wrote in my post of February 11 2021, Profiles in Treason and Terror;   The dishonorable and the mad, the delusional and the sadistic epicures of brutality and perversions, the feral predators hooting and champing before the gallows and guillotines they have brought to murder members of congress with and their partners in uniform unleashing racist terror and gun violence in the streets, and the amoral and predatory grifters and puppetmasters of fascism who have subjugated and enslaved them and stolen their honor and their souls; these are among the idolators of Traitor Trump who conspired, enabled, and collaborated in his plot to subvert democracy and overthrow America in the January 6 Insurrection which attempted to seize Congress and execute its members, which like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch on which it was modeled was intended to decapitate the government of the people in a single stroke.

     As details emerge of the internal operations and massive scale of the plot against America, in terms of its central coordination and logistics under direct operational command of Trump and his cabal of conspirators, we are offered not only the spectacle of his aberrance and monstrosity as a mad idiot Clown of Terror drooling and gloating in bestial depravity at the destruction of our values and institutions, the violation of our ideals and the endless suffering he has caused, but of those of his freakish and degenerate followers as well.

     The role of deniable forces of the Fourth Reich such as the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, and other organizations of white supremacist terror, and of their partners and infiltration agents within our police, military, and security services,  in the January 6 Insurrection is by now well documented and will become more so as the greatest manhunt in our history exposes and entraps more of its perpetrators.

     The images we have been witnessing of their assault on liberty during the Second Impeachment trial will be remembered in the history of the world as the true legacy of an era of fascist tyranny under the figurehead of Trump which nearly ended America as a guarantor of global democracy and universal human rights, and had we fallen as the primary domino and a beacon of hope to the world both democracy and human rights would be lost to humankind for unknown ages; the last time civilization fell it took a thousand years for the idea that government derives its authority from its citizens and not by divine right, the idea that no one of us is better than any other by right of birth, and that freedom, equality, truth, and justice are the foundational values of our society and truths of human being and meaning, to reawaken.

     And it took centuries of wars and revolutions to do so; how if this time civilization falls not to hordes of barbarians seeking nothing but pillage and destruction, but to regimes of totalitarian force and control?

     This is the great contradiction of the forces of repression and subjugation to authority which overran our capitol on January 6; they have been betrayed by their masters in believing they were acting to restore our traditional values and civilization, when in fact they had been weaponized in service to its destruction. Here is a clear and present danger, but also an opportunity; shared motives can be redirected to heal divisions, for they too want an American Restoration. As yet we just disagree on our definition of terms.

     When fear is overwhelming and generalized, it can be shaped through submission to authority by lies, illusions, alternate realities, especially when pervasive and endemic surveillance, big data, and propaganda are available as instruments of state control. Authority achieves submission through falsification and the theft of the soul, but this is also the weakness of control which cannot stand against truth, just as the weakness of force is that it is powerless against resistance, disobedience, and refusal to submit.

    The election of Biden and Harris, the failure of Trump’s sixth coup attempt on January 6, and the public exposure and shaming of his co-conspirators, collaborators, and enablers before the stage of the world of the Second Impeachment trial; in these events we have witnessed a turning of the tide from fascism to a restoration of democracy.

     Once the Reckoning has been achieved, the Restoration must heal our divisions; and this means we must embrace and transform the fear that lives at the heart of hate, and drives the rage, violence, and need to conquer and dominate others which shadows our historical inequalities and injustices.

    Fear, Power, Force; such is the Ring of Power which enslaves us, and which we must abandon if we are to become whole.

     I would like to see Trump achieve his true nature by being fed to dogs and transformed into dog shit. Wouldn’t it be a lovely display in a glass case exhibited in a museum of holocausts, atrocities, and crimes against humanity? Let his monument read thus:

     Here lies Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, in his true form, most terrible enemy democracy has faced since Alcibiades betrayed Athens, most dangerous foreign agent to ever attack America even including Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, who subverted our ideals and sabotaged our institutions, and nearly enacted the fall of civilization as the figurehead of the Fourth Reich and herald of an age of fascist tyranny and state terror.

     Yet here he lies, nothing but a pile of dog shit. Look upon the rewards of tyranny, you who are mighty, and despair.

     For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.

      As I wrote in my post of February 16 2025, Anniversary of Judgement In the Trump Organization Civil Trial: New York Casts Out the Trump Crime Family;     A year ago when I wrote this in celebration of the Trump Crime Family’s exile from New York, I was hoping this was the last we would ever hear of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, sadly now Rapist In Chief of our nation, a Vichy America captive of the Fourth Reich and a colony of Russia.

    The Unclean One, whose only god is the demon of lies Moloch, sabotages democracy and our institutions of governance as he abandons NATO and our EU allies to prepare us all for the Russian invasion and Occupation to follow.

     But the dreams of his puppetmaster Putin of a Russian Empire ruling Europe and America, Africa and the Middle East are only an interim step in the plans of the Fourth Reich of which Trump is the figurehead, for the Nazi revivalists and their Confederate allies here in America intend to realize Bannon’s goal when he said” I am a Leninist, and I want to smash the state.” 

    JD Vance, our fake Jethro of uncertain pronouns and bold eyeliner tattoos, Bearded Lady of the Trump regime freak show, is also a fanatical and committed ideologist of fascism who wants, like our Troll King Musk, to subvert and destroy the values, ideals, and laws and institutions of democracy, both here in America and globally, so that no human being is equal to another. The designs of the Republican Party and the degenerate, perverse, treasonous, and dishonorable subhumans who vote for them and have not renounced membership in this organization of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror constitute conspiracy in crimes against humanity and our rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights.

     And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; its their act of treason plus their sex crime.

     As gratifying as this is, and as necessary as a morality play in which justice is restored to America, it does not bring a Reckoning for the historical sources of the Trump family fortune patriarchs before the orange clown; his grandfather’s trafficking of Native American women abducted in slave raiding and imprisoned in his network of brothels during the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. The baroque perversions and atrocities of sexual terror of Traitor Trump began not with his role in the crimes of his buddy Epstein, but with multigenerational depravity and the psychopathy of power.

     That Reckoning is yet to come.

     As I wrote in my post of July 4 2019, Tinhorn Trump’s Parade; This fourth of July, Trump has appropriated our most sacred national holiday, Independence Day, a celebration of our freedom from colonial rule by Britain and their antiegalitarian feudal aristocracy, as a kind of Nuremburg Rally extravaganza of Republican white supremacy, patriarchy, and antihumanist religious fundamentalism.

     Replete with tanks, planes, and other spectacles of military power, this is far more than an attempt to whip up his voter base for the upcoming elections; it is intended to overawe and repress dissent through the threat of state terror and forestall the day in which Republicans will be answerable to the citizens of America, and to monkeywrench democracy through fear of reprisal against voters. 

     Trump wants a Stalinesque and Hitlerian military parade both for self aggrandizement and to intimidate us by making it look like the military supports him in his bid for tyranny.  One thing about Americans our enemies, internal and external, will ever learn to their regret: we don’t scare easily.

      Pointing a gun at us will not secure our obedience nor silence our resistance and the witness of history.

       As I wrote in my post of January 16 2020, As the Articles of Impeachment are Signed, Let Us Remember the Unfitness, Lies, and Crimes of Traitor Trump Let us remember the unfitness, lies, and crimes of Traitor Trump; his subversions of democracy, his use of gun violence and deniable forces of white supremacist terror, his concentration camps and campaign of ethnic cleansing, his crimes against children and perversions of misogyny and sexual terror, his sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege and our role as principal guarantor of freedom, his defilement of our sacred honor and betrayal of our historical legacy as a free society of equals, and his treasonous and criminal actions as a Russian agent and as chief conspirator of the Fourth Reich in the destruction of our values and institutions of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.

    Our President is the primary existential threat to the survival of the United States of America and to democracy globally. And this we must resist with our whole lives and to the last, all we who love liberty.

      As I wrote in my post of February 10 2021, Treason, Tyranny, and Terror on Trial: As the Second Impeachment of Traitor Trump Begins, I Submit Charges Before the People’s Tribunal of Crimes Against Humanity for Which Trump and His Collaborators Should Now Be On Trial; Among the many crimes against humanity for which Traitor Trump and his collaborators should be on trial but are not yet include the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Mexican and other nonwhite migrants, the concentration camps at our border, the orphaning and torture of children, and the state tyranny and terror of fascist and racist violence as national policy perpetrated by the ICE and Border Patrol components of Homeland Security, forces of repression which are antidemocratic by their nature and which should be abolished as a top priority of the Restoration of America.

    Just as villainous and reprehensible is the parallel program of racist police violence and the carceral state to re-enslave Black American citizens and enforce systemic forms of inequality and injustice through state terror, repression of dissent, the force of a militarized police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which has transformed our security services into an army of occupation with primarily political objectives, and the control of pervasive and endemic surveillance and propaganda, lies, illusions, and subversions of the truth.

     Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his circus of fools, degenerates, and barbarians, his enablers and collaborators both within the government and his shadow forces rallying under the Confederate flag to bring violence and insurrection to our nations capital and to the streets of our cities throughout America, are co-conspirators and instigators in the murders of every Black American killed by police shooting or other racist violence since its authorization by Trump in the wake of Charlottesville.

      And every missing child kidnapped by the state and disappeared into what abominable slavery or human trafficking designed in the diseased imagination of Trump and his Epstein buddies we know not of, every migrant of the huddled masses yearning to be free who died in the quest to reach the safety of America because the water caches had been intentionally sabotaged by criminals in the uniform of our nation who were “just following orders” like their counterparts in the SS during the Holocaust, every prisoner who died in custody because they were denied water or medical care; the blood of these and countless other victims of Trump’s narcissistic self-aggrandizement and regime of fascist corruption, racism, and patriarchal sexual terror is on the hands of every  Republican who voted for him and fails now in this trial to repudiate him publicly and renounce his works as among those of the devils which he serves. 

     For in his actions Trump has been not only a foreign agent and Putin’s puppet whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the Fall of America, but also a slave of Moloch the Seducer, Demon of Lies, in that he is not merely a pathological liar but also an idiot madman who cannot distinguish truth from lies, and who has weaponized his delusions and psychopathy as instruments of our falsification and subjugation in his quest for tyrannical power.

     The bizarre and lurid dark fairytales of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, like the charges of the Inquisition and the Nazis which othered witches and Jews on which QAnon is constructed, serves as deflection from Trump’s loathsome perversions and sexual terrorism.

     His Stop the Steal campaign is a similar deflection which shields him from inquiry into the Stolen Election of 2016 and the fact that his Presidency was entirely illegitimate and due to Russian interference; it was also the rhetorical and organizational basis of his final attempted coup on January 6, for which he is now being impeached for the second time.

     We must cast out the monsters from among us, the racists and white supremacist terrorists, the Gideonite fundamentalists and patriarchs of Christian Identity fascism and sexual terror, and the amoral forces of repression of those who would enslave us and who enforce hegemonies of elite power and privilege and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness armed with guns and badges and the authority of a government which has been infiltrated by the Fourth Reich, an implacable and relentless enemy which has come just short of seizing us in its jaws.

     We must give fascism no second chances.

     As I wrote in my post of August 25 2020, Welcome to Bizarro World, Where Truth and Lies Change Places and All Our Values Are Reversed; The Republican Party held up a mirror to America in the figure of Trump at last night’s National Convention, and I’m hoping most of us didn’t like what we saw.

      A funhouse mirror, filled with distorted images, a thing of surfaces without substance offering a mirage of illusions, lies, and reflections into infinite regress of our atavisms of fear and hate, shadows which we drag behind us in our wake like an invisible reptilian tail, and which like the picture of Dorian Grey reveal our disfigured souls and our failures as Americans and as human beings.

     It is an image designed to terrorize us into submission, and to steal our souls.

      Among the freaks and monsters, the litanies of victimhood and retribution, of dominion, white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil sung by the barkers and screaming johnnies who warmed up the main show, among all these and reigning over them like a ringmaster was the tyrant himself, Traitor Trump, spewing abominations and depravities as the puppet of the demons he worships, the lies of those who would enslave us.

     Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.

     Yet the willingness of the enemy to demonize himself is a great advantage, for we need only perform the four primary duties of a citizen to seize the moral high ground; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

     So performs the monster on the stage of history and the world, become forever a symbol of the limits of the human in his outrageous depravities and perversions, gibbering idiocy and feral terror. As we who love liberty go forth to do battle with Trump and his enforcers of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, let us remember a great truth; all politics is theater, and the purpose of the use of social force is to Take Their Power. Hence we perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. May all our seizures of power from those who would enslave us come true.

     As I wrote in my post of October 16 2020, Savannah Guthrie Tames the Wild Beast; In the Big Top a monster was displayed before the crowd, fearsome and unclean, ululating its song of lies and defilement of American values. Juggling it came, proudly keeping a number of balls in the air with a nimbleness of diversion and misdirection with which to tantalize its degenerate hooting and champing fans; white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and the state terror and tyranny of secret police and the subversion of our institutions of democracy, all the while greedily snapping from the air the money thrown to it.

    And with a crack of her whip Savannah Guthrie brought Trump to heel, made him sit up and beg for attention like the pathetic loser he is, exposed and challenged his web of lies and hate, mocked his idiocy and his madness, and put him through his paces. The world laughed at his antics, and he was diminished and made ridiculous.

     Savannah Guthrie has shown us all how to steal a tyrant’s power.

     Finally among the endless litany of woes, violations of our ideals, and subversions of our institutions of democracy which will forever be the legacies of Trump’s Reign of Terror come the perversions, depravities, moral leprosy, degenerate atavisms of feral brutality, and boggling freakishness of his idiocy and madness.

      As I wrote in my post of July 8 2020 Our Clown of Terror: The Madness of Donald Trump

     We now have two revelatory and electrifying exposes of the secret world of Trump’s psyche and intimate sphere of action from insider whistleblowers, which together form a portrait of America’s President not unlike that of Dorian Gray, a horrific monster and predator who moves among us concealed beneath a human mask by the sorcery of lies and illusions.

     In this Mary Trump and John Bolton have done a great service to the witness of history and to our nation and all humankind as the fate of democracy and civilization hangs in the balance. Their books will be primary texts in any future civics and political history studies, unless of course Trump is given free rein by our citizen electorate to sabotage democracy in the cause of white supremacy and patriarchy.

     While we await to discover whether the people will authorize the theft of their liberty by a state of force and control in abject submission to tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, or arise in resistance like a phoenix from the flames, The Guardian has thoughtfully clarified our choices by providing a precis of the exposes.

      Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump includes the following insights; “1 Trump allegedly paid someone to take his high school exams, 2 Trump praised his own niece’s breasts, 3  Donald Trump’s sister appears to be a key source, 4 Mary Trump spoke to the New York Times about Trump family taxes, 5 Trump told Melania that Mary Trump took drugs, 6 Trump Christmases could be tough, 7 Jared Kushner’s father didn’t think Ivanka was good enough, 8 Trump’s character was shaped by ‘child abuse’.”

     The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton includes these revelations; “1 Trump pleaded with China to help win the 2020 election, 2 Trump suggested he was open to serving more than two terms, 3 Trump offered favors to authoritarian leaders, 4 Trump praised Xi for China’s internment camps, 5 Trump defended Saudi Arabia to distract from a story about Ivanka, 6 Trump’s top staff mocked him behind his back,  7 Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, 8 Trump thought it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela.”

     My own opinion is that any understanding of the motives and likely actions of Trump rests with the two great shaping forces of his life; the etiology of his narcissism and psychopathy as a survivor of child abuse, and the influence of his primary model Roy Cohn, wonderfully depicted in the HBO documentary The Story of Roy Cohn as well as Tony Kushner’s luminous Angels in America.

     As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019 Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; “How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?

     While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.

     The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.

     Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.

      Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.

     I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.

    Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, “a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.”

     How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego,  identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.

     Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.”

     As written in my post of October 28 2019 Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; “As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.

     Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.

     Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.

     Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.

     So I rest my case for our participation in No Kings Day;

     In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.

     As written in 2019 by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s new world disorder: competitive, chaotic, conflicted: With John Bolton dismissed, Taliban peace talks a fiasco and a trade war with China, US foreign policy is ever more unstable and confrontational; “Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to venerated alliances, multilateral cooperation and the postwar international rules-based order. He has cosied up to autocrats, attacked old friends and blundered into sensitive conflicts he does not fully comprehend.

     The resulting new world disorder – to adapt George HW Bush’s famous 1991 phrase – will be hard to put right. Like its creator, Trump world is unstable, unpredictable and threatening. Trump has been called America’s first rogue president. Whether or not he wins a second term, this Trumpian era of epic disruption, the very worst form of American exceptionalism, is already deeply entrenched.

     The suggestion that Trump will make nice and back off as election time nears thus elicits considerable scepticism. US analysts and commentators say the president’s erratic, impulsive and egotistic personality means any shift towards conciliation may be short-lived and could quickly be reversed, Bolton or no Bolton.

     Trump wanted quick ‘n’ easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal in Afghanistan with the Taliban, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute

     Trump is notorious for blowing hot and cold, performing policy zigzags and suddenly changing his mind. “Regardless of who has advised Mr Trump on foreign affairs … all have proved powerless before [his] zest for chaos,” the New York Times noted last week.

     Lacking experienced diplomatic and military advisers (he has sacked most of the good ones), surrounded by an inner circle of cynical sycophants such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and driven by a chronic desire for re-election, Trump’s behaviour could become more, not less, confrontational during his remaining time in office, suggested Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins university.

     “The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible, intellectually lazy, short-tempered and self-obsessed,” Cohen wrote in Foreign Affairs journal. “Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster. But [that] … should not distract from a building crisis of US foreign policy.”

     This pending crisis stems from Trump’s crudely Manichaean division of the world into two camps: adversaries/competitors and supporters/customers. A man with few close confidants, Trump has real trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies, friends and foes, and often confuses the two. In Trump world, old rules don’t apply. Alliances are optional. Loyalty is weakness. And trust is fungible.

     As a result, the US today finds itself at odds with much of the world to an unprecedented and dangerous degree. America, the postwar global saviour, has been widely recast as villain. Nor is this a passing phase. Trump seems to have permanently changed the way the US views the world and vice versa. Whatever follows, it will never be quite the same again.

     Clues as to what he does next may be found in what he has done so far. His is a  truly calamitous record, as exemplified by Afghanistan. Having vowed in 2016 to end America’s longest war, he began with a troop surge, lost interest and sued for peace. A withdrawal deal proved elusive. Meanwhile, US-led forces inflicted record civilian casualties.

     The crunch came last weekend when a bizarre, secret summit with Taliban chiefs at Camp David was cancelled. It was classic Trump. He wanted quick ’n’ easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute. Furious over a debacle of his own making, he turned his wrath on others, notably Bolton – who, ironically, had opposed the summit all along.

     All sides are now vowing to step up the violence, with the insurgents aiming to disrupt this month’s presidential election in Afghanistan. In short, Trump’s self-glorifying Afghan reality show, of which he was the Nobel-winning star, has made matters worse. Much the same is true of his North Korea summitry, where expectations were raised, then dashed when he got cold feet in Hanoi, provoking a backlash from Pyongyang.

     The current crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme is almost entirely of Trump’s making, sparked by his decision last year to renege on the 2015 UN-endorsed deal with Tehran. His subsequent “maximum pressure” campaign of punitive sanctions has failed to cow Iranians while alienating European allies. And it has led Iran to resume banned nuclear activities – a seriously counterproductive, entirely predictable outcome.

     Trump’s unconditional, unthinking support for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s aggressively rightwing prime minister – including tacit US backing for his proposed annexation of swathes of the occupied territories – is pushing the Palestinians back to the brink, energising Hamas and Hezbollah, and raising tensions across the region.

     With Trump’s blessing, Israel is enmeshed in escalating, multi-fronted armed confrontation with Iran and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Add to this recent violence in the Gulf, the disastrous Trump-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, mayhem in Syria’s Idlib province, border friction with Turkey, and Islamic State resurgence in northern Iraq, and a region-wide explosion looks ever more likely.

     Yet Trump, oblivious to the point of recklessness, remains determined to unveil his absurdly unbalanced Israel-Palestine “deal of the century” after Tuesday’s Israeli elections. He and his gormless son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may be the only people who don’t realise their plan has a shorter life expectancy than a snowball on a hot day in Gaza.

     Another prominent aspect of Trump world is his sinister, personal alliance with Vladimir Putin. There’s no doubt Russia’s president meddled in the 2016 US election to Trump’s benefit, as the Mueller report states. There’s no doubt Trump has gone easy on Putin over Crimea and Ukraine, over war crimes and chemical weapons attacks in Syria, over the Salisbury poisonings, and over his vicious assaults on Russia’s democratic opposition. Trump is even pushing for Russia to be readmitted to the G7. Exactly why he acts this way is much less certain.

     Whether Trump is attacking Nato, insulting Europe’s elected leaders, unhelpfully taking sides on Brexit, ignoring India’s repression in Kashmir, plotting regime change in Venezuela, ignoring egregious human rights abuses from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia, undermining the UN and international law, wrecking nuclear arms control treaties, plundering the Arctic, or opposing efforts to combat climate crisis and environmental degradation, he is consistently out of line, out on his own – and out of control.

     This, broadly, is Trump world as it has come to exist since January 2017. And this, in a nutshell, is the intensifying foreign policy crisis of which Professor Cohen warned. The days when responsible, trustworthy, principled US international leadership could be taken for granted are gone. No vague change of tone on North Korea or Iran will by itself halt the Trump-led slide into expanding global conflict and division.

     Historians such as Stephen Wertheim say change had to come. US politicians of left and right mostly agreed that “the bipartisan consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it in America’s image – has failed and cannot be revived”, Wertheim wrote earlier this year. “But agreement ends there … ” he continued: “One camp holds that the US erred by coddling China and Russia, and urges a new competition against these great power rivals. The other camp, which says the US has been too belligerent and ambitious around the world, counsels restraint, not another crusade against grand enemies.”

     This debate among grownups over America’s future place in the world will form part of next year’s election contest. But before any fundamental change of direction can occur, the international community – and the US itself – must first survive another 16 months of Trump world and the wayward child-president’s poll-fixated, ego-driven destructive tendencies.

     Survival is not guaranteed. The immediate choice facing US friends and foes alike is stark and urgent: ignore, bypass and marginalise Trump – or actively, openly, resist him.

     Here are some of the key flashpoints around the globe

     United Nations

     Trump is deeply hostile to the UN. It embodies the multilateralist, globalist policy approaches he most abhors – because they supposedly infringe America’s sovereignty and inhibit its freedom of action. Under him, self-interested US behaviour has undermined the authority of the UN security council’s authority. The US has rejected a series of international treaties and agreements, including the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal. The UN-backed international criminal court is beyond the pale. Trump’s attitude fits with his “America First” isolationism, which questions traditional ideas about America’s essential global leadership role.

     Germany

     Trump rarely misses a chance to bash Germany, perhaps because it is Europe’s most successful economy and represents the EU, which he detests. He is obsessed by German car imports, on which protectionist US tariffs will be levied this autumn. He accuses Berlin – and Europe– of piggy-backing on America by failing to pay its fair share of Nato defence costs. Special venom is reserved for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, most likely because she is a woman who stands up to him. Trump recently insulted another female European leader, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, after she refused to sell him Greenland.

     Israel

     Trump has made a great show of unconditional friendship towards Israel and its rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has skilfully maximised his White House influence. But by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, officially condoning Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, and withdrawing funding and other support from the Palestinians, the president has abandoned the long-standing US policy of playing honest broker in the peace process. Trump has also tried to exploit antisemitism for political advantage, accusing US Democrat Jews who oppose Netanyahu’s policies of “disloyalty” to Israel.

    Russia

     Trump’s evident liking for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has been the cause of endless puzzlement, given Moscow’s hostility to Nato and the western democratic alliance, its support for Bashar al-Assad and alleged Syrian war crimes, and its illegal intervention in Ukraine. Trump’s attitude may stem from Putin’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, which benefited him. But the affinity between them may be better explained by shared autocratic tendencies. Putin is an authoritarian nationalist, like similar rightwing politicians in China, Turkey, Brazil and India whom Trump admires – and would like to emulate.

     China

     During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump provocatively declared China a bigger problem than jihadi terrorism. He claims that China has enjoyed unfair advantages in two-way trade for decades due to its notional designation as a developing country, supposed currency manipulation, and America’s own failure to protect manufacturing industry. He has levelled similar accusations at the EU, Japan, Canada, India and other trading partnersothers. But his remedy – unilateral punitive tariffs and sanctions – has disrupted international commerce, shaken global economic confidence and strained political relations with Beijing without demonstrably improving US fortunes.

      Venezuela

     Trump’s clumsy efforts to engineer regime change in Venezuela and impose a Washington-approved version of democracy mark a regression to the bad old days of the cold war when the US regarded Central and Latin America as its “backyard” and exclusive sphere of influence. So far, Trump’s attempt, masterminded by John Bolton, to replace the regime of Nicolás Maduro with a pro-American technocrat, Juan Guaidó, has failed miserably. Undeterred, he continues to sanction Maduro’s ideological allies in post-Castro Cuba and to exacerbate the Central American migrant crisis, meanwhile enthusiastically embracing Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president.

     Saudi Arabia

     Trump made his first overseas trip as president to Saudi Arabia, signalling the importance he attaches to close relations with the energy-rich, autocratic Gulf kingdom. He has since strengthened the alliance in opposition to Iran, deploying troops to Saudi Arabia and supplying advanced weaponry for its war in Yemen. The Saudi connection has also come to symbolise Trump’s indifference to human rights abuses, whether in the Philippines, Russia or on the US-Mexico border. When the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was murdered by Saudi agents, Trump defended senior figures in Riyadh such as its crown prince who allegedly ordered the killing.

     Kashmir

     When Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, visited the White House recently, Trump boasted he was ready to mediate in the long-running dispute over divided Kashmir. It was a vainglorious gesture, reflecting Trump’s ignorance. When, shortly afterwards, India imposed direct rule on Kashmir, effectively detaining its population, Trump did nothing. Whether the issue is the Delhi-Islamabad nuclear standoff, the unending Afghan war, Chinese attempts to gain strategic leverage in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, or the Rohingya refugee tragedy in Bangladesh, Trump’s south Asia policy, like that in sub-Saharan Africa, is ineffectual and near non-existent. Maybe they are luck”

     Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.

    Not if we unite together in Resistance.

     As I wrote in my post of April 19 2025, No Kings Protests Commemorate the American Revolution and Possibly Begin the Second American Revolution;     Today on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution We The People rise in resistance and revolutionary struggle with nationwide mass protests against the abominable and treasonous Trump regime which has captured the state and its nefarious designs in subversion of our democracy.

      This we will not abide. This we will Resist. For this, we will bring a Reckoning.

       And because of this, as Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief, Nazi revivalist, white supremacist terrorist, theocratic patriarchal sexual terrorist, and Russian agent tests and exposes the flaws of our system with relentless attacks upon the institutions of our democracy and violations of its values and ideals as Theatre of Cruelty, we must now begin the total reimagination and transformation of our nation and our society if we are to become a free society of equals wherein we are co-owners of the state as citizens and guarantors of each other’s inalienable and universal human rights.

        As written in the mission statement for this weekend’s nationwide protest, from We (The People) Dissent:

     “On April 19, 1775, colonists confronted the British at the Battle of Lexington and Concord—the shot heard round the world.

     On April 19, 2025, millions of everyday Americans will rise to defend that for which they fought—freedom against tyranny.

This time, we carry not arms, but signs.

We will not raise a barricade;

instead, we must lift our voices.

Instead of marching to the tempo of drums,

we will march to the echo of our hearts crying for justice.”

      Herein only one thing must I dispute; for the imposed conditions of struggle require that we now bear arms in our defense and that of any human being threatened with death or abduction and imprisonment without cause or trial in a foreign gulag.

     This is a grave and terrible choice when state tyranny and terror leave us no other options in our duty of care for others, and if a man kneels on another’s neck, regardless of which one has a badge and a gun or who is white and who is black, that man is a murderer and our duty of care for others requires our intervention, By Any Means Necessary.

      I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, and the Trump regime’s criminal and brutal repression of dissent leaves none of us any other choice but submission or resistance.

     All Resistance is War to the Knife.

     Let us not go quietly, friends, but unite in solidarity of action to seize our power and restore our nation and our liberty.

     As written by Robert B. Hubbell in his Substack newsletter; “On this day, two hundred fifty years ago, America began its long march toward independence at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The battles marked our nation’s first efforts to throw off the yoke of a foreign king. The battles marked “No Kings Day, Part I.”

     On Saturday, millions of Americans will participate in “No Kings Day, Part II.” At root, the issues animating protests separated by two-and-a-half centuries are the same: The right to self-determination, liberty, democracy, and the rule of law—not subjugation to the ‘divine right of kings.”

     Our ancestors risked everything in rising against the king, mutually pledging to each other “their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”

     We stand on their shoulders as inheritors of their revolutionary zeal and the steadfast efforts of every citizen, soldier, slave, civil rights marcher, organizer, and leader who redeemed democracy anew over the ensuing ten generations.

     Our generation will not falter in passing the gift of “No Kings Day”—democracy—to the next generation. Democracy will endure so long as we do not give up. And in the words of Alexei Navalny, “You are not allowed to give up.”

     We are not allowed to give up because the democracy we defend does not belong to us. It belongs to all people of America—past, present, and future. We are custodians of democracy until the next generation takes up the struggle as their own.

     As we engage in mass resistance on “No Kings Day, Part II,” we should pause to reflect on our place in the long arc of a moral struggle that stretches behind and ahead of us.

     America did not achieve independence when the battles of Lexington and Concord concluded. It would take eight years to defeat the British and yet another four years to adopt the Constitution. It would take seventy-five years and a civil war to expiate the sin of slavery embedded in the Constitution. It would take a century more to begin to deliver on the promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

     In whatever way you choose to resist on “No Kings Day, Part II,” recognize that you, too, are pledging your sacred honor to the defense of democracy for however long it takes.

     Like the Founders, our pledge is made to “each other”—a mutual endeavor for the common good. Take pride and comfort in knowing that the cause is bigger than any one of us and will outlast all of us because we will refuse to give up.

     We will win. It is only a matter of time.

     Godspeed to us all!”

      When they come for us, as they always have and will, fascists of theocratic state terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror, let them find not a people divided by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united as guarantors of each other’s humanity as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others; this, this this.

    To the instruments of fascist tyranny in the pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”

Elegy For a Swindler King: “You gotta admit, I played this stinkin city like a harp from hell” line of Penguin in the film Batman Returns

March 27 2026 Resistance Day in Myanmar

     We commemorate the resistance of the peoples of Myanmar to the Japanese Occupation during World War Two, while the military junta which has seized the nation as a vassal state of the Chinese Communist Party, much like that of Pol Pot and other tyrants of genocide and war crimes, instrumentalizes the occasion to glorify itself while changing its meaning in service to its own authority as a carceral state of force and control, the peoples it has enslaved rise up in resistance and reclaim its original meaning.

    The world’s tenth largest military has failed utterly to consolidate power and repress dissent, despite massive brutal and genocidal war crimes. In the fighting before the annual Resistance Day, renamed by the regime as Armed Forces Day, the actual Resistance emerged victorious in battles across the nation.

     There is a calculus of fear by which tyrannies seize power or fall; while a little may enforce order and obedience for a time, fear beyond hope of survival and horror beyond the limits of the human creates resistance. Those who would enslave us should have learned the hollowness of power and the Newtonian recursion of the use of force from the example of Nanking.

     Politics is about fear as the basis of human exchange, as my father once told me, as a ten year old boy who in reaction to the insult of someone putting a piece of bubble gum on my chair at school mixed up everything with a skull and crossbones on the bottles from my chemistry set during recess and poured it down the spigot of the classroom drinking faucet in revenge. When several boys ran outside to throw up, I was horrified because I realized I could have killed everyone, and I told my father the story that night. He said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear. Fear is a terrible master and a dangerous and untrustworthy servant; the question is, whose servant will it be?”

     As the principle by which I have lived since it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

     So may we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. In Burma, to use her pre-regime name, a whole nation has found such a will, a nation forged under the terrible hammer of tyranny and state terror, but one which begins to emerge from the legacies of its history as a free society of equals united in diversity and solidarity.

     May we dream better futures than we have the past.

      Where do we stand today?

     As written by Moe Sett Nyein Chan in The Irrawaddy, in an article entitled Mapping the Myanmar Junta’s Gains, Losses, and Stalemates Since Operation 1027; “Myanmar’s civil war has intensified since the launch of Operation 1027 in 2023, forcing the junta into a defensive stance as it lost dozens of towns and hundreds of bases.

     However, in 2024, regime forces switched to a more dynamic strategy, employing mobile defensive tactics and launching counteroffensives across the country. The following is a breakdown of battlefield situations across the country.

     Kachin State

     Key battles are ongoing in Bhamo and Mansi. The regime withdrew three battalions from Mansi to bolster its defense of Bhamo, a district-level town. Junta defensive operations in Bhamo are being coordinated by the 21st Military Operations Command (MOC). They are relying heavily on warplanes and drones to recapture lost bases wherever possible. This marks a strategic shift from static defense to a more mobile and proactive defensive approach.

     As a result, the KIA and its allies are being forced to attack junta bases repeatedly, delaying their offensive.

     Elsewhere in Kachin, small columns of junta troops are counterattacking in Mohnyin, Hopin, Hpakant, Waingmaw, Myitone and Tanai, but have failed to achieve significant gains.

     Sagaing Region

     Last year, the regime regained control of Kawlin but again lost control of Pinlebu Township. Resistance forces have also secured most of Inndaw town, where junta troops have retreated to an old underground hospital dug into a hillside. Despite efforts, resistance forces have yet to penetrate the position.

     In Tigyaing, fighting has subsided after resistance forces paused their offensive.

     However, clashes have erupted in northern Tamu, southern Kale, and Paungbyin near the Indian border, with resistance groups targeting junta bases.

     Guerrilla-style assaults on junta troops, including mine attacks, have become commonplace in Sagaing. The military usually responds with single-column operations, often employing scorched-earth tactics against villages believed to support resistance forces. Despite these raids, the regime has been forced to abandon smaller outposts across the region.

    Caution defines the regime’s movements due to resistance ambushes in Budalin, Depayin, Wetlet, and Chaung-U townships. Counterattacking the highly mobile resistance forces has proven increasingly challenging for the regime.

     Mandalay Region

In northern Mandalay, resistance forces captured northern Madaya, Singu, Thabeikkyin, Tagaung, Mabein, Mogok, and Mongmit in 2024. However, three major military bases and a hospital remained under military control in Thabeikkyin Township. Troops from these bases recently recaptured an area close to Mogok, known as Myanmar’s “Ruby Land”, after being bolstered by airdrops of weapons and ammunition. No fighting in Mogok has been reported so far.

    Fierce daily clashes are reported in western and northeastern Madaya, as regime troops seek to reclaim the areas from Mandalay PDFs.

    Further south, resistance forces successfully ambushed a junta column in Myingyan Township earlier this month.

    Northern Shan State

     The regime reclaimed artillery battalions in Taunghkam, Nawnghkio Township from the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) late last month. Taunghkam is a two-hour drive from Pyin Oo Lwin, which is home to the regime’s elite military academies.

     However, TNLA forces remain near Taunghkam, where they are launching guerilla-style attacks.

     The junta’s recapture of Taunghkam means TNLA forces are now at risk of being encircled in the area.

     Southern Shan State

     Supported by the local Pa-O National Organization (PNO) militia, the regime is conducting a counteroffensive in Moebye on the Shan-Karenni border.

    Regime troops have forced the anti-regime Pa-O National Liberation Army out of Hsihseng and are chasing them to their base in Mawkmai. From Hsihseng, the regime is transporting supplies by road to Loikaw, the capital of Karenni State. The regime’s assault in southern Shan is thus supporting its counteroffensive in Karenni.

     Magwe Region

After seizing Ann town in Rakhine State, the Arakan Army and its allies are advancing into neighboring Magwe Region. Numerous junta troops fleeing from Ann, and also Natyaykan on the Bago side of the border, have been killed by local resistance ambushes.

     Incapable of repulsing the AA’s advance, the junta has responded by raiding resistance bases in Pakokku, Minbu and Thayet districts to prevent potential attacks on its ordnance factories in the area. However, the raids have had minimal impact on local resistance forces, as they rely on guerilla-style operations.

     Chin State

     The majority of Chin State remains under resistance control. The regime maintains a foothold in Hakah, Thantlang, and Tedim. Chin resistance forces continue to attack Falam, where junta forces have been reduced to just one major battalion headquarters. In Thantlang, the regime’s counterattack has resulted in a back-and-forth battle with no decisive gains.

    Rakhine State

    The Arakan Army (AA) controls most of Rakhine State, except for the capital Sittwe, Kyaukphyu, and Manaung. The AA recently launched offensives in Sittwe and Kyaukphyu, home to a Chinese-backed Special Economic Zone and port project, forcing the regime into a defensive posture in those towns.

     The AA and its allies are also advancing over the border from Rakhine into Magwe, Bago and Ayeyarwady regions. The regime has been unable to repulse the advancing AA troops.

     Karenni State

    The regime recaptured most of Loikaw Township last year after Karenni resistance forces withdrew, apparently due to ammunition shortages.

     Fighting has been raging for months in Pekon Township’s Moebye, on the Shan-Karenni border, with both sides suffering heavy casualties. Karenni forces have so far held their ground.

    In Hpruso, Bawlake, Hpasawng, and Demoso, the regime has primarily resorted to defensive positions.

    Karen State

     The junta’s Operation Aung Zeya, launched in April last year, has failed to achieve its objectives. The large-scale counteroffensive, involving more than 1,000 troops from the 55th Light Infantry Division, aims to recapture the main trade route between Kawkareik and Myawaddy on the Thai border.

     As the offensive nears its one-year mark, junta troops remain stuck in the Dawna Hills, suffering heavy casualties. Despite these setbacks, the regime continues to reinforce its troops and press on with the offensive.

     Bago and Tanintharyi

     Resistance forces continue to wage guerilla warfare in Bago and Tanintharyi regions, where regular junta military operations have failed to curb armed revolt.

     This pattern extends to Sagaing, Magwe, and Mandalay regions, where the regime has been unable to conduct large-scale offensives or achieve decisive victories. Instead, their strategy relies heavily on air support and single-column ground operations. However, rather than directly attacking guerrilla forces, the regime appears to be mainly targeting civilians suspected of supporting the resistance movement.

    Since last year, the regime has employed a combination of strategies to counter resistance offensives, utilizing static defensive positions, mobile defensive maneuvers, and counteroffensives. Despite these efforts, its achievements on the national scale remain limited. To date, the military has managed to reclaim only a handful of areas, including Kawlin, Hsihseng, Twin Nge (near Mogok), and Taunghkam.

     Despite heavy junta propaganda promoting these territorial gains, the reclaimed areas collectively account for less than 1% of territory, towns, and camps previously seized by resistance forces. Additionally, the reclaimed areas remain under constant threat, encircled by resistance forces, which continue to undermine the regime’s control.

     However, in northern Mandalay, weak coordination between various resistance factions – including PDFs allied with the KIA, the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), and TNLA-allied PDFs – presents a major challenge. Further caution is needed to prevent tensions between the TNLA and KIA from destabilizing broader resistance efforts in the region.

    Territories reclaimed by the junta include Twin Nge and Taunghkam, which were TNLA-controlled zones. The junta’s ongoing pressure on other TNLA strongholds signals a persistent threat to resistance control.

     In Loikaw, although the regime has regained control, it continues to face strong resistance from highly organized Karenni forces. Meanwhile, in southern Shan State’s Hsihseng Township, the junta appears to have gained the upper hand, leveraging support from PNO militias.

     Since 2024, the regime has increasingly relied on mobile defensive strategies and counteroffensives to confront resistance forces. However, these tactics have yet to produce meaningful or decisive victories on a wider scale.

     Nevertheless, resistance forces must stay vigilant against the junta’s advanced weaponry, including drones and paragliders, while adapting strategies to combat these threats in specific conflict zones. Developing robust, region-specific solutions to counter the military’s evolving tactics will be crucial for maintaining momentum against the regime.”

       As I wrote in my post of March 28 2022, Tyranny Throws Itself a Party, But No One Comes To the Ball: Burma/Myanmar; Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates protected under the patronage of the Chinese Communist Party, and attempts to annihilate all differences of ethnicity and faith in campaigns of genocide against tribal peoples; the apex predators of Myanmar and I know each other well.

     Over thirty years ago now we first met in battle, the circumstances of which I shall once again recount here; I have been thinking of this today, as I go about my work making mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us in the tunnels beneath Mariupol. If I must be a tunnel rat, I remain a rat who comes back no matter how many times you try to flush him.

     The Mayor of Mariupol has today ordered the total evacuation of the city, as it is in enemy hands; I however am in no one’s chain of command, recognize no authority, and obey no orders as things beneath my contempt. I shall fight on, when and where and in the manner I choose, and I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of subjugation.

     It’s always worked for me before; thank you for that Jean Genet, who set me on my life’s path in 1982 Beirut, with the Oath of the Resistance; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows”, and the strategic principle by which I have lived for nearly forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

     As my intermittent and questionable satellite link permits, news of the junta’s celebration and of Min Aung Hlaing’s declaration of his regime’s intent to “annihilate them to (the) end” regarding his brutal repression of the tribal peoples and the democracy movement now united in the liberation of Burma, has captivated my attention because the moment the world now faces in Ukraine parallels that of Burma. Sadly, there is nothing unique in this.

      The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar’s current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.

     Here is how I came by accident to be fighting with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and genocide by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions on the reverse side of the ridge. I was yelling “Run away!” when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear as I rode past and shouted in S’gaw; “The American is charging the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!” and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.

     After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Myanmar Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes including those with whom I had been living; exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy’s rear area of operations is a special joy, and an opportunity not to be wasted. 

     The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the liberation from Japan, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. The junta’s partner in this is the same Buddhist nationalist organization which also co-rules Sri Lanka, and this wedding of military and theocratic monastic rule in the cause of nationalism and ethnic purity is crucial to the strategy of power of modern fascism as it now encircles the globe. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.

     Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has for centuries been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; “Government is about force; only force.”

     Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.   

     But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.

    As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love can liberate us from systems of oppression and redeem the flaws of our humanity, beauty can balance the brokenness of the world, hope can empower us to emerge victorious against overwhelming force, and faith can answer the terror of our nothingness.

     I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.

     As I wrote in my post of February 1 2022, Anniversary of the Military Coup in Myanmar; A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Burma today, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for a year now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla  street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Burma in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.

    Last night the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a protest movement of limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of  monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled Burma since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain in 1948; today they awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Burma.

    Democracy fell one year ago in Myanmar to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.

    Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.

     Gathering forces of change have swept the nation this last year, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.

    This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.

     But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.

    A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.

     The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced a year ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon.  As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”

      This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;

“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!”

     Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.

The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution

March 26 2026 Israel Restarts the Cycle of Violence in Lebanon: Echoes and Reflections of 1982 in 2026

Israel’s war of imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors, purchased with American blood and treasure, now has four theatres; Palestine, Iran, her allies among the Arab-American Alliance and the remaining nations of Iran’s Axis of Resistance in peripheral conflicts, and Lebanon.

     Because America refuses to use Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction to disarm the Zionist regime regardless of its endless crimes as our taxes buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians, an event of fracture and disruption which has triggered our abandonment of the idea of universal human rights and signaled the collapse of democracy and our global civilization built on the values and principles of the Enlightenment and embodied in our founding documents, Israel now wages Total War against her neighbors to create an Empire of Greater Israel.

     America has failed to leash our dog Israel, and its roaming about savagely attacking all and sundry because there are no consequences for evil. This is what the idea of Israel will mean to history and the world; an example of what can happen when a nation no longer believes in good and evil or in human rights. For to a Zionist only fellow Jews are truly human.

     No matter where you begin with hierarchies of belonging and otherness, elite membership and dehumanization, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.

      As written in The Guardian editorial, entitled The Guardian view on Israel’s war in Lebanon: allies must not accept a repeat of the crimes in Gaza; “The intense focus on Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran has meant scant attention paid to the Israeli war in Lebanon. Yet almost 1,100 people have now been killed there by strikes, according to the health ministry, and a fifth of the population has been displaced.

     When Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel shortly after the attack on its patron Iran began, Israel responded with what it called “precise and targeted strikes”. But the offensive quickly escalated. On Tuesday the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, announced another occupation of Lebanon – describing a “defensive buffer” running up to the Litani river, about 30km north of the border, and by implication likely to be prolonged. That would be illegal in itself. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, has called for annexation outright.

      Israel says it must protect communities in its north. The international court of justice ruled that self-defence did not justify occupying Gaza. Israel sees an opportunity to finally eliminate Hezbollah – isolated without Syrian support or help from Iran, and still recovering from the decapitation of its senior leadership by the Mossad in September 2024. Yet Hamas has endured through the devastation in Gaza. Hezbollah itself was born of the 1982-2000 Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.

     Despite anger in Lebanon at Hezbollah’s decision to fire on Israel, many analysts believe that another occupation would fuel support for the group rather than end it, with people even more reliant upon it for basic needs. The government has taken some steps to curb the group, though well short of the disarmament required under the last ceasefire agreement in 2024, and has expelled Iran’s ambassador. Its ability to do more is limited. Hezbollah’s power to hurt Israel has been drastically reduced; not so its power to punish others in Lebanon.

     Mr Netanyahu, fighting an ongoing corruption case and determined to restore his political fortunes and legacy, appears to pursue eternal conflict. His far-right coalition partners have a maximalist vision of territorial conquest. Mr Katz said that Israel would demolish homes along the border as it did in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza – which were essentially flattened. As in Gaza, Israel has forced civilians to flee en masse, and hit bridges, water and sanitation infrastructure. Health workers and officials accuse Israel of deliberately targeting medical facilities. Human Rights Watch says that it is using white phosphorus.

     Mr Trump’s war with Iran will be difficult to end, but its economic impact on US politics gives him a reason to try. It is hard to imagine his administration caring greatly for Lebanon at the best of times; still harder to imagine it brokering an end to the war. It has apparently asked Israel to spare Christian communities – surely a prescription for ethnic cleansing. France has been left to look for a way out.

     The widespread failure to take meaningful action against Israel over its atrocities in Gaza, and reluctance even to criticise it more than tepidly, has emboldened Mr Netanyahu’s government and its rightwing supporters. The Israeli military has killed hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza since a ceasefire was announced. The humanitarian crisis continues to grip the territory. Israel’s western allies – including the UK – must apply real pressure, instead of being complicit in a grim future for Lebanon too.”

      There is nothing new in this; the Israeli invasion and Occupation of Lebanon in 2026 is an echo and reflection of that of 1982, whose horrors and crimes against humanity birthed independence movements including Hamas and set me on my life’s path of resistance to tyranny and state terror.

     As I wrote in my post of September 18 2025, Anniversary of the 1982 Shatila and Sabra massacres in Lebanon; In a three day massacre between September 16 and 18 1982, one of the most horrific genocidal mass murders in history was perpetrated in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps against the people of Palestine, which marked the beginning of twenty years of brutal Israel occupation of Lebanon.

     What is the meaning of this anniversary of state terror and tyranny, imperial conquest and colonial dominion, and crimes against humanity?

      Here was an atrocity perpetrated by the mighty against the powerless and the dispossessed as an instrument of the disruption and fracture of history, a holocaust performed by survivors of a parallel Holocaust because of how power works in the origins of evil as a recursive process of fear, power, and force; but also a classic example of state terror and war as a moral failure and the collapse of the legitimacy and authority of the state which changes the narrative and becomes the forge of a nation as a primary trauma, for the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates resistance as its own counterforce.

     Hamas and the leadership of a diverse wave of Resistance and liberation struggle was born in the wake of the Israeli atrocities committed in the conquest and Occupation of Lebanon, crucible of many like myself who refused to abandon our humanity, liberty, and solidarity with each other under threat of death by an enemy to whom only fellow Jews are truly human, some nameless and forgotten to history as am I, others national heroes whose deeds will echo through all time, and some who like the great Mahmoud Darwish, the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said who wrote as Adonis, and myself the unknown and nameless witness lost to history have processed our shared public grief, witness of history, and vision of a better future through writing and poetic vision, and Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance. Only in retrospect did I realize what a strange set of poet warriors and friends the four of us made. To me they were teachers and allies who provided wisdom, guidance, and vision; my role in the group was and remains generally to bring the chaos, disrupt normalities, provoke, incite, and disturb, and draw others into the maelstrom as a maker of mischief.  

     On such anniversaries as today we remember the tragedies, and honor the resistance.

     Let us honor our sacred dead and those who fought in resistance to state terror and crimes against humanity, but let us also never forget the names of its perpetrators nor rest in our vigilance to see them brought to justice.

     There is a debt we owe to, and a responsibility we bear for, our fellow human beings, if we are to remain human and avoid degradation to an animal state of atavisms of instinct and become shadows, bereft of our dimensionality and the innate powers which may sustain and exalt us; hope, love, and faith as solidarity with and loyalty to each other.

     We must remember, and we must not be silent.

     This is called Tikkun Olam in Judaism, repair of the world, a duty which binds us together, both with those who are like and those who are unlike us across vast gulfs of human being, meaning, and value and hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and otherness. Of this I will tell you a secret; boundaries can also become interfaces.

     This terrible anniversary of state terror and imperial conquest and tyranny roughly coincides with the Jewish New Year celebrations of Rosh Hashanah, this year October 2 to 4, and just before the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, this year from sunset on the 11th of October through the 12th, approximate with the actions of the state of Israel which led to the Second Intifada.

     Despite all the prayers and rituals during these high holy days, I doubt the state of Israel will be doing much reparations to the people of Palestine, and quite a lot of valorizing national identities of blood, faith, and soil. Yesterday Netanyahu referred to his vision of a future Israel as “a Middle Eastern Sparta”. Beware those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary fascist strategy of subjugation and manufacture of consent.

     Why must faith define boundaries and not interfaces, walls and not bridges?

      Among the endless litany of woes and exemplars of fear weaponized in service to power by authority, the Sabra and Shatila Massacres remain to challenge our ideas of the brotherhood of humankind.

     For this we must truly bring a Reckoning and an Atonement; but not for the legacies of the past, which must be Remembered, nor for our complicity in silence against injustice, which may be redeemed through action. We can do nothing for the dead; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future which must be redeemed.

     Who is responsible for this terrible crime?

     Planned and directed in personal meetings by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, Mossad Director Nahum Admoni, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Director of Military Intelligence Yehoshua Saguy, Division Commander Beirut Amos Yaron, US diplomat Morris Draper acting under orders from President Ronald Reagan, President of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel who was a Jesuit educated C.I.A. operative recruited when he was a lawyer working in Washington D.C., Chief of Lebanese Military Intelligence Johnny Abdu, and Phalange leader Elie Hobeika, along with other representatives of Israeli-American interests and the Phalange, a quasi-fascist Christian Maronite militia founded by the newly elected President of Lebanon’s father. Gemayel rose to leadership by murdering the families of Lebanon’s former Presidents, bankrolled by Ronald Reagan at the request of Ariel Sharon, and became President on August 23 as a result of the June 6 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

     Thus the stage was set for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians who had been driven from their homes by Israel into the wretched refugee camps in Lebanon, where the survivors remain today, a precariat no less oppressed than that of Victor Hugo’s magisterial novel Les Miserables, and no less exalted with revolutionary fire.

     How long must the dead and their descendants wait for justice?

    In Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, Seth Anziska writes “Under the leadership of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, the Israeli government launched an invasion in June of that year partly on the pretext of stopping Palestinian militant rocket fire on the Galilee region of northern Israel. After the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israeli leaders had also become increasingly anxious about the power of the PLO and the growing links between Palestinians inside the occupied territories and across the Arab diaspora. The main focus of their concern was on Lebanon, where the PLO had relocated its center of operations from Jordan after an armed confrontation with King Hussein’s army in 1970–1971. Israeli strategists believed that targeting the PLO in Lebanon and forcing its withdrawal would accomplish several objectives: the quashing of Palestinian national aspirations for a homeland, the expulsion of Syria’s troops from Lebanon and the elimination of Syrian influence there, and the establishment of a client Maronite Christian state as a close ally.

     Instead of entrenching Israeli dominance over its northern neighbor, the Lebanon War morphed into what some have called “Israel’s Vietnam.” In the midst of an already brutal civil war, the Israeli intervention resulted in the deaths of more than 600 Israeli soldiers and at least 5,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians—over 19,000 by Lebanese estimates that counted combatants as well. Closely coordinated with Maronite forces, Israel’s invasion soon devolved from being a limited incursion to a summer-long siege against the PLO’s stronghold in West Beirut. Unlike the wars in 1948, 1967, or 1973, Israel was unequivocally engaged in what Begin called a “war of choice.” Combining military force with psychological operations, Israeli forces inflicted heavy casualties inside an Arab capital for the first time, bombarding Palestinian positions from land, sea, and air, while occupying Lebanon’s international airport.

     President Ronald Reagan, disturbed by the images of destruction, pushed his administration to negotiate an end to the fighting and to facilitate a peaceful evacuation of PLO fighters from the city to neighboring Arab states. The PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, had signaled that he and his men were willing to withdraw provided that the PLO had the requisite American guarantees of security for Palestinian civilians and Lebanese supporters who remained behind. Sharing the draft of the withdrawal agreement with Shafiq al-Hout, Arafat sounded a wistful note about the departure: “Beirut has given Palestine what no other Arab capital has. It has given and given, without asking for anything in return. And it never would ask. Nor should we make it ask. We should pay it back of our own free will.”

     The first contingent of PLO fighters left the city on August 21, with Arafat and leading PLO officials departing on a Greek shipping vessel to Tunisia on August 30. In all, some 10,000 fighters left Lebanon by sea and land routes, pushing the PLO into still deeper exile. Even after the heaviest fighting ended, a protracted Israeli occupation of the south of the country lasted until 2000, reshaping the politics of the region. Syrian influence over the country continued, but increasingly it was supplanted by Iranian power with the rise of Hezbollah. Far from cementing Israel’s regional hegemony, the 1982 War ultimately undercut Israeli and American influence in the Middle East, while transforming perceptions of both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism around the globe.”

     As Nabil Mohamad of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee wrote in al Jazeerah in 2017; “A fourth generation is now growing up in the squalid refugee camps in Lebanon. In Sabra and Shatila, most living spaces consist of two very small rooms: a bedroom, where the entire family sleeps, and a living room of sorts. There is no ventilation, and hardly any electricity. Most families use battery-powered lighting. Drinking tap water is prohibited, as it is full of bacteria and very salty – it actually corrodes pipes. There are poor sanitary conditions. Medications for all illnesses are in short supply. Narrow alleyways – some with sewage running through – wind through the camps. When it rains these small paths become muddy. Electrical wires hang from dwellings. Young men connect and reconnect wires; from time to time, someone is electrocuted. Foul odours emanate from those crowded conditions. Illness is rampant. The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon long to return from exile to the homeland they were expelled from but are not permitted to do so by Israel, simply because they are not Jewish.

     If the international community is obliged to remedy its moral responsibility to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre by working to end Israel’s occupation and other abuses of Palestinian rights, then the lives of my family members and the others we remember on this 35th year will not have been lost in vain.”

    Just as this war and fracture event of the human soul is unbound by time in recursion and Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence of what was called Recapitulation in medieval philosophy, so too the atrocities of power in Lebanon are limited only by the reach of Israeli military power, engulf the whole region and whose consequences are global.

     As written by Nesrine Malik three months ago, before the invasion of Lebanon and the joint American-Israeli Pearl Harbor model attack on Iran, in The Guardian, in an article entitled It’s not just Gaza. From the West Bank to Syria and Lebanon, Israel’s onslaught continues: Broken ceasefires, bombing, ground incursions and mounting deaths: Israeli imperialism is now expanding across the region; “It is clear now that the ceasefire in Gaza is only a “reducefire”. The onslaught continues. There are near-daily attacks on the territory. On a single day at the end of October, almost 100 Palestinians were killed. On 19 November, 32 were killed. On 23 November, 21. And on it goes. Since the ceasefire, more than 300 have been killed and almost 1,000 injured. Those numbers will rise. The real shift is that the ceasefire has reduced global attention and scrutiny. Meanwhile, Israel’s emerging blueprint becomes clearer: bloody domination not only in Gaza, but across Palestine and the wider region.

    A “dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal”, is how Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, described this post-ceasefire period. Israeli authorities have reduced attacks and allowed some aid into Gaza, she said, but “the world must not be fooled. Israel’s genocide is not over.” Not a single hospital in Gaza has returned to being fully operational. The onset of rain and cooling weather has left thousands exposed in dilapidated tents. Since the ceasefire on 10 October, almost 6,500 tonnes of UN-coordinated relief materials have been denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities. According to Oxfam, in the two weeks after the ceasefire alone, shipments of water, food, tents and medical supplies from 17 international NGOs were denied.

     The result is that a population whose homes, livelihoods and stable shelter have been eliminated still are not allowed to secure safer tents or adequate food. Israeli authorities hold people in Gaza in a painful purgatory, continuing collective punishment, preventing the conditions for a normal life from emerging and establishing Israel as sole unaccountable overlord, with unlimited power over the people of the territory.

     Gaza is at the sharp end of an expansion of Israeli imperialism, one that stretches to the West Bank and beyond. In the occupied territories of the West Bank, a crackdown that has intensified since 7 October 2023 continues to escalate into a full military siege. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forced out of their homes this year in a pattern that Human Rights Watch said amounted to “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing … that should be investigated and prosecuted”. Last week, footage emerged of two Palestinian men in Jenin being executed by Israeli soldiers after it appeared that they had surrendered. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, said that the forces involved in the killings have his “full backing”. They “acted exactly as expected of them – terrorists must die”.

     And this is only a small window, in a rare filmed moment, into the bloodshed. More than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank over the past two years. One in five of them are children. More than 300 cases were suspected “extrajudicial executions”. In October of this year, the UN registered more than 260 settler attacks, the highest level since its records began 20 years ago. More than 93% of investigations into these attacks end with no charges filed. Scores of Palestinian prisoners are reported to die in Israeli prisons of physical violence or medical neglect, and those who do make it out alive recount a hellscape of torture and abuse.

     And still, the parameters of Israel’s mandate to assault, kill and land grab continue to widen. Last week, Israeli forces launched a ground incursion in southern Syria, killing 13 Syrians, among them children. The Israeli military refused to provide information on the group it claimed to be targeting in the raid. It was simply reserving its right to reach into Syrian territory, as it has several times since it invaded and occupied the buffer zone between the two countries, and other parts of southern Syria. Since it has done so, Israeli forces have been accused by Human Rights Watch of applying the colonial playbook seen in Palestinian territories: forced displacements, home seizures, demolitions, cutting of livelihoods and unlawful transfer of Syrian detainees to Israel. Israel intends to maintain its presence indefinitely.

     To Lebanon, where 64,000 people still remain displaced from their homes after last year’s war, and where Israeli attacks have been intensifying. Despite a peace deal negotiation last November, Israel has launched almost daily bombings in Lebanese territory. The latest was only last week. It continues to occupy five vantage points from which it launches attacks on targets it claims are linked to Hezbollah. According to a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, Israel is guilty of more than 10,000 air and ground violations of the ceasefire, during which hundreds of people have been killed. In the melee, civilians are, once again, ejected from their lands, vulnerable to Israeli military assaults and essentially subjects of a sort of Israeli super-sovereignty. According to a recent New York Times report, “the situation in Lebanon offers a compelling example of a new Middle East where Israel’s reach is near ubiquitous”.

     What sort of ceasefires are these? What sort of status quo is this? A volatile and unsustainable one, is the answer, one during which no reasonable mind can expect any sort of peace to materialise, either in Palestine or in the wider Middle East. Brokers and stakeholders and diplomats may repeat the language of phased ceasefires and reconstruction schemes, but the reality is that these are plans for a future that is never going to emerge unless Israel’s unlawful acts across territories that it has no legal rights over come to an end. The dangerous illusion that life is returning to normal applies not only in Gaza, but across Palestine and the wider region. It will soon shatter.”

      What is to be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such different results?

     As written by Ben Reiff in The Guardian, in an article entitled

As Israel prepares to implement the ‘Gaza model’ in Lebanon, where is the international reaction?; “Anyone following Israeli media discourse in recent days may be experiencing a severe case of deja vu. Alongside euphoric reactions to the US-Israeli pummelling of Iran (backed by 93% of the Jewish-Israeli population), politicians and prominent commentators are now clamouring for an escalation in Lebanon – hoping to see a repeat of the devastation Israel has wreaked in Gaza.

     Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon have already killed close to 1,000 people in the past two weeks, after Hezbollah resumed its rocket fire into northern Israel in support of Iran. The Israeli army has issued blanket evacuation orders covering a vast area in the country’s south, displacing over a million people from their homes. On Monday, it announced the launch of a “targeted” ground invasion, and officials have briefed the media that they are preparing to mobilise hundreds of thousands of reservists in order to implement “the Gaza model, but in Lebanon”.

     Israel’s leaders are not hiding what comes next. “Very soon, Dahiyeh will resemble Khan Younis,” warned Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, earlier in March, referring respectively to a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut and a city in southern Gaza that the Israeli army has almost completely razed to the ground. Zvi Sukkot, a member of the government from Smotrich’s party, urged: “We must conquer territory in southern Lebanon, destroy the villages there and annex the territory to the state of Israel.”

     Amit Halevi, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, vowed that the Litani river – located 30km from Israel’s border with Lebanon – “must become the north’s new yellow line”, alluding to the boundary marking the current occupation by Israeli forces of more than half of Gaza’s territory.

     The defence minister, Israel Katz, announced on Monday that he and Netanyahu had “instructed the IDF to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in the villages near the border in Lebanon, just as was done against Hamas in Rafah [and] Beit Hanoun”, referring again to cities in Gaza that no longer exist. Under his command, the Israeli army is also engaging in psychological warfare against the Lebanese people, dropping leaflets over Beirut last week with the mocking text: “In light of the remarkable success in Gaza, the newspaper ‘The New Reality’ arrives in Lebanon. Where is your country heading?”

     Leading opposition figures are joining in, too. Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israeli army who aspires to replace Netanyahu as prime minister in the forthcoming election, tweeted: “The Dahiyeh doctrine has never been more relevant than right now, and it must be implemented.” This doctrine refers to an Israeli military strategy of deliberately inflicting disproportionate force on civilians as a form of collective punishment designed to deter future attacks, which originated in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon.

     And it’s not just politicians. Similar rhetoric from political commentators is flooding Israeli TV and radio stations, as it did in the early days of the war on Gaza, laying the ideological groundwork for what follows.

     The prominent Channel 12 journalist Amit Segal, considered a Netanyahu mouthpiece in the media, has called on Israeli forces to “advance to the Litani river, and announce: We will not leave until Hezbollah is disarmed [and until then] not a single resident returns”. Another Netanyahu mouthpiece, Channel 14’s Yinon Magal, weighed in: “I suggest by the morning, there will be no more Dahiyeh at all.”

     The chorus keeps growing. Eager to see a repeat of the war crimes in Gaza that earned him an arrest warrant from the international criminal court, Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, has urged the army “to strike and eliminate everything that’s in Dahiyeh, Baalbek, Tyre, Sidon, Nabatieh, everywhere”. And Itamar Fleischmann, a commentator on Channel 14, implored: “We need to destroy Dahiyeh … We need to destroy the country in terms of infrastructure. There’s no more civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.”

     Statements like these form a central part of South Africa’s ongoing genocide case against Israel at the international court of justice, offering proof of genocidal intent in Gaza. It is therefore no surprise that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security has issued a “red flag alert” for Israel in Lebanon.

     There are, of course, important differences between Gaza and Lebanon. Israel does not control all of Lebanon’s borders, so unlike Gaza, the population cannot be caged in. This also means the world’s media can enter Lebanon; international networks should be rushing there now in advance of Israel’s ground invasion to support the work of local journalists.

     But the past two and a half years in Gaza have provided ample evidence of what Israel, drunk on impunity, will do in Lebanon. First, the army will seek to seize control of the country’s southern region, recreating – or perhaps exceeding – the “security zone” Israel occupied between 1982 and 2000, after invading during the Lebanese civil war. While the air force decimates Beirut from above, proceeding through an AI-generated list of targets, troops on the ground will move from village to village in the south, destroying everything in their path as warplanes shower residential areas with white phosphorus.

     Many residents will refuse to leave – either because they have nowhere to go, or because they fear, with good reason, that they will never see their homes again if they do. Israel will declare anyone who remains a terrorist, authorising soldiers and drone operators to shoot on sight. Thanks to the success of the Israeli-US crusade to undermine fundamental tenets of international law over recent years, attacks on all manner of civilian infrastructure will be legitimised with the claim that it is being used by Hezbollah. Indeed, this has already begun in recent days with attacks on bridges and health facilities.

     The fate that awaits Lebanon is clear. So where is the international community? As the Gaza case should have made abundantly clear, negotiations – which French president Emmanuel Macron is now pushing for – will only provide Israel with a smokescreen for stalling a ceasefire while seeking to “finish the job”. This is not a time for empty condemnations, but for sanctions and arms embargos that will impede Israel’s ability to keep escalating its aggression.

     Despite all the warnings, the world failed to prevent genocide in Gaza. Will it make the same mistakes again?”

     Let me now append my own witness of history here, for the days of this anniversary immerse me in memories, both those of which I cannot speak and those which I cannot bear alone.

     In my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa? I wrote; “I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.

     During the summer before my senior undergraduate year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Soldiers were roaming the streets like packs of feral dogs, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.

     A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”

     To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. Possibly this is all we truly own. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”

    He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.

     He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing interpretations of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra by C.G. Jung, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, and others, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.

     There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our building set on fire by soldiers who were calling for people to come out and surrender and were stealing the children of those who did and blindfolding them to use as hostages and human shields, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”

     We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.

     Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’

     To which I replied, “No.”

    “Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”

     And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”

     To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.

     We escaped capture that day because, once we had escaped the burning house itself and blended into the crowds, we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within.  

     He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis being inside the city changes everything. We have a common enemy, but they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”

     So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption. 

       The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care.

     Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.

    And in my post on the tragedy of the Beirut port explosion, August 4 2025 Madness Death Illumination Transcendence: A Song of Beirut; O my brothers and sisters, our universe is not always rational or meaningful from our perspective; it is chaotic, absurd, and often hostile. We need meaning and value, but all we have is the meaning and value which we create and impose on our nothingness. The Infinite mocks us, but also beckons and challenges us to become better.

     As I wrote on this day five years ago in my post of August 4 2020, a witness of history which contains the story of why I use the name ibn Al-Khidr in my role as a Sufi scholar of the Naqshbandi order which specializes in visionary dreaming, an interest to which I was drawn as a student of Jungian psychology and studied in Kashmir in the early 1990s; A horror beyond imagining has transpired in Beirut, which lies in ruins. Civilization dispersed throughout the Mediterranean from here thousands of years ago, uniting Europe, Asia, and Africa in a community of humankind which resonates through our consciousness today. We seek meaning in the catastrophes and life disruptive events which flesh is heir to, yet as in the disaster in Beirut such causes are often beyond our understanding.

     Herein I refer now to Sura 18 of the Holy Quran, called The Cave, verses 60-82, an allegory which features Khidr, the Islamic Trickster figure who is an immortal and is symbolized as green as an embodiment of the Garden of Paradise to which he is a gateway, who acts as a guide of the soul through the puzzles of the labyrinth of life which leads toward it, and who speaks to us through dreams, visions, and signs.

     I consider it a narrative form of Godel’s Theorem; a proof of the necessity of faith and of the existence of the Infinite, of the limits of human knowledge and the Absurdity of the human condition. Such an interpretation aligns with that of   the great scholar and translator Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

     As with the foundational thought experiment of one of Plato’s contemporaries, the Spear of Archytas, which defines the horizon of the known as it is thrown and marks a boundary in landing, which we repeat endlessly in scientific revolutions, no matter who much we learn the unknown remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance. As developed in the anonymous Middle English work The Cloud of Unknowing and by Nicholaus of Cusa in Of Learned Ignorance, this is the first principle of epistemology; the Conservation of Ignorance.

     The canonical story recapitulates themes of the Sacrifice of Ibrahim which I would say forms the basis of Islamic and possibly of all forms of Abrahamic faith, and in the streets of Beirut long ago I saw it unfold once again.

    In this story the Green Man instructs Moses by doing three things which are criminal and nonsensical, things which can be understood only through the foreknowledge of prophecy which is not ours. As with justice, foresight does not belong to man; though we may envision our possible futures we cannot know which among them will be realized. Maimonides argues that this is because the universe is continually destroyed and recreated with each moment, which preserves free will. Frank Herbert’s Dune is an extended thought experiment and allegory which problematizes the themes and questions of the story of Khidr in Sura 18.

    The relevant passage is this;  فَأَرَدْنَا أَن يُبْدِلَهُمَا رَبُّهُمَا خَيْرًا مِّنْهُ زَكَاةً وَأَقْرَبَ رُحْمًا, or “So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them a better son than him in purity and nearer to mercy,” a classic changeling substitution. It also represents a point of bifurcation on which possible futures turn.

     I have hope for the future of humankind because of what I witnessed when this primary story was played out before me forty years ago, and because of it I have never despaired.

     Such a gate stands or once stood in Beirut, like Rashomon Gate or a gate to the Infinite and to limitless possibilities of human becoming. It may now be dust and memories, or like Schrodinger’s Cat both exist and not exist at once; this I cannot answer for you.

      But I can speak as the witness of history that something remarkable happened there in its shadow, which like Khidr exchanging the young man for another to prevent a greater evil from occurring in the future, a time travel paradox if ever there was one, struck me with the force of revelation.

     It was an insignificant thing in the scope of the Siege of Beirut, one atrocity among many which was averted by the innate goodness of a single man whose name remains unknown, a tragic hero whom I will never forget, an unwilling conscript in the service of his government like so many others, who said no to authority and to the seduction of evil. The existence of humankind pivots on the balance of such individuals, and they are very few.

    This Israeli soldier refused to commit violations and depravities upon the person of a Palestinian girl, about twelve years old, who had been captured for this purpose by the lieutenant of his platoon, a common loyalty test and initiation. He blushed at the first demands of his officer to the taunting of his fellows like the raucous cries of crows about to feast, there in the street before the Gate of Decision we must all face, then became angry in refusal when he realized it was not a joke, that the Occupation was about terror and plunder and not as he had been told. His commanding officer murdered him where he stood with a single shot to the head as the girl escaped.

     I have returned to this spot throughout my life to touch the stones stained with his blood, for I am reminded that we are not beyond redemption, and that so long as we resist unjust authority we are free, and there is hope.

      What is the meaning of Israel’s war against humanity, for human being, meaning, and value? For what it means to be a Jew when the Zionist dream of return from Exile has been weaponized in service to power and the imperial conquest and dominion of Israel’s neighbors? For what it means to be a human being and the possibility of becoming human, when the Stranger is no longer welcomed?

     As I wrote in my post of October 8 2025, On the War of Israel Versus Humanity; Israel unleashes the Nothing to consume us all in tides of nihilistic savagery, atrocities, terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, fiendishly designed by Hitler and Franco as the doctrine of Total War and tested at Guernica to subjugate us through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, for Israel is an empire of dehumanization and theft of the soul.

     All of this I defy.  

      In Palestine and Lebanon, and throughout a world shadowed by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and imprisoned, Occupied, or in the path of imperial conquest and dominion by carceral states of force and control, enemies of humankind and our universal human rights sow division, weaponizing ideas of faith, race, and national identity in service to power.

      This we must resist.

      When they come for us, as those who would enslave us always have and will, let them find not a humankind which has abandoned hope and each other, but a United Humankind and a band of brothers, sisters, and others who are unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit. Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?

      This let us defend.

     “When there is no hope, one can do impossible things, glorious things”; so said Jean Genet to me in Beirut 1982, as we refused to surrender to IDF and were about to be burned alive as they had set fire to our cafe. I have lived by this principle for forty three years of liberation struggle, as the nations of Lebanon and Palestine do now, and I with them once again and always.

      This I advise as a principle of action, with one thing more; Solidarity. If we abandon not our fellows, and refuse to submit, we become Unconquered and free. And we will one day seize power from those who would enslave us. For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.

         As I wrote in my post of October 17 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: Case of the Hamas-Israel War; A wise friend has questioned my valorization of Chaos as a principle of change in the context of Black Saturday, a term which describes the Hamas attack on Israel and the immense forces of terror, death, destruction, fracture, grief, rage, and revenge it unleashed, becoming a single tide of darkness.

     Thank you once again for your kindness and your wisdom.

     In this moment of tragedy I am thinking of Chaos as a disruptive force of fracture and change which has stripped us bare of our ideologies to reveal the fragile humanity beneath, and may be leveraged for liberty or tyranny by how we respond as a species and global civilization. As Guillermo del Toro writes in Carnival Row, “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless”.

     What do I hope for now, for the peoples of Israel and Palestine? That both may unite to free each other, but first we will need universal humanitarian aid to any one on either side of these lines of division, and a Reckoning for the war crimes of both Hamas and Israel. For Israel took the bait, and gave Hamas the victory; they are now equal as war criminals without legitimacy.

    Except for this one critical and determinative truth; there is no right of defense against a people you are Occupying.

    Israel took the bait, and the world is calling them out for war crimes; this may be end of the Netanyahu alt right regime and the dawn of a new Middle East. I was absolutely expecting Biden and allies to enable Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature, should the noises Genocide Joe makes become meaningful beyond performative responsibility avoidance. Maybe the idea of human rights is not dead. As my mother used to sing to students who asked her to make authorizing statements about anything, artifact of a Shakespeare in Thirty Minutes theatrical show that toured nationally with some of her students in it, bouncing her open hands left and right; Maybe, maybe not, Maybe, maybe not.

     No one seems to have noticed publicly that this attack means Israeli intelligence has been infiltrated. It is also possible that unknown puppetmasters have infiltrated and seized control of both Hamas and Israel, for purposes which are unclear and antithetical to the interests and well being of either. We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, friends.

      What Reckoning, for crimes against humanity by an organization of terror which has long been a vanguard of anticolonial revolutionary struggle under the imposed conditions of Occupation, slavery, and a genocidal Blockade?

      Not the totalization of the general population of Palestinians in a genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing as Netanyahu wishes and Hamas intends as a strategy of delegitimation of the Israel state in the moral equivalence of terror, for if Israel, her patron America, and the international community accept the terms of struggle offered by Hamas they too become organizations of terror, and Hamas wins.

     This is a decolonial revolution, and victory goes to the side who can establish the legitimacy and moral supremacy of their story. As my father taught me, Never play someone else’s game.

     Hamas also wishes in this provocation to weld the peoples of Gaza to them; this is a primary strategy of fascism and tyranny, to make the people in whose name you claim to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. Always beware those who claim to speak and act in your name as a strategy of your subjugation.

     A third layer of meaning here is the ambiguity of the geopolitical and world-historical forces beyond the Holy Land; Russia, her ally Iran and the Iranian Dominion of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, especially the Assad regime of Syria which has sent forces into Israel as a client state of Russia and Iran, and Hezbollah, which offers many of the social services of a government and may be in the process of emergence as an independent state, or a true empire in the transnational sense like the Holy Roman Empire. The great question here is; has Russia opened a new front of her plan of global conquest and made this a theatre of World War Three?

      How does one answer all of this? How bring a Reckoning for the terror of Hamas without authorizing and becoming complicit in the greater terror of Israel’s looming genocide of the Palestinians?

       The forms that might take give me pause, for they will determine our future, and though I know what I myself must do, I do not like it, and am calling out here in my journals, where I work through the consequences of my decisions before acting on them, for unknown possibilities I myself cannot envision.

     Yes, my friend, Chaos has profoundly destructive forms; death among them, ruin and civilizational collapse, the negation of all we have claimed as our identity, but all are also measures of the adaptive range of systems, and can give birth to new forms from this liberated energy. And as you point out, all forces operate in opposite directions at once, creating their own opposition. These are not moral forces in balance, but ambivalent forces which contain each other in recursion.

     So, while our nations try to shatter each other’s truths with overwhelming force and mass terror, I must find a path of least force to salvage what I can of our humanity, and I hope I will not fail as I did at Mariupol and Panjshir.

    This may be all we have as humans lost in chasms of darkness and a Wilderness of Mirrors, this refusal to abandon each other to dehumanization, but like our refusal to submit to authority it is a power which cannot be taken from us, even in imposed conditions of struggle designed to produce abjection and learned helplessness, or rage and tribalization as identity politics and the manufacture of consent to be fed into engines of death for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and tyrannies.

     Such ephemeral and insubstantial things, like whispered prayers to abyssal unknowns, figments of love, hope, faith, which belong to the shadows, the delusions of grandeur of beasts harnessed to systems of oppression by others who yet dream that we might become more.

    Dream with me.

     Embrace our absurdity as flawed things wrestling with immense forces of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization in a mad quest to become human, under imposed conditions of struggle typified by atrocities designed to produce abjection, learned helplessness, and despair, as we are consumed by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege whose primary weapon is division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as identity politics and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     Against all of this we have only our solidarity with each other, the redemptive power of love, our refusal to submit or to believe and trust authority which frees us as Unconquered and self created beings and Living Autonomous Zones, and our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves. Powers which cannot be taken from us, and which can seize the power of those who would enslave us.

     This is why I practice the art of believing impossible things, but only those I myself have chosen or created. And crucially, act to make them real. And in this case we must bring a Reckoning to the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity regardless of who they may be or in the name of what cause they act, and silence the drums of war.

     Dream with me, but act in solidarity to make it real.

     As the Mad Hatter says to Alice; “That is an excellent practice, but right now you might want to focus on the Jabberwock.” 

    Just so.

        Who are the Lebanese?

Do You Love Me film trailer

Lana Daher interview on Do You Love Me at Venice Film Festival 2025

Do You Love Me review – exhilarating documentary is ode to the collective courage of Lebanese people

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/02/do-you-love-me-review-exhilarating-documentary-is-ode-to-the-collective-courage-of-lebanese-people

‘A love letter to Beirut’: Lana Daher on sifting 20,000 sources and 70 years of film to make Do You Love Me

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/feb/19/a-love-letter-to-beirut-lana-daher-on-sifting-20000-sources-and-70-years-of-film-to-make-do-you-love-me

                            News of the 2026 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon

‘Ghost town’: Lebanon city deserted amid Israeli airstrikes – video dispatch

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2026/mar/13/ghost-town-lebanon-city-deserted-amid-israeli-airstrikes-video-dispatch?CMP=share_btn_url

The Guardian view on Israel’s war in Lebanon: allies must not accept a repeat of the crimes in Gaza

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/25/the-guardian-view-on-israels-war-in-lebanon-allies-must-not-accept-a-repeat-of-the-crimes-in-gaza

 It’s not just Gaza. From the West Bank to Syria and Lebanon, Israel’s onslaught continues

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/01/gaza-west-bank-syria-lebanon-israel-ceasefire

As Israel prepares to implement the ‘Gaza model’ in Lebanon, where is the international reaction?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/18/israel-gaza-model-lebanon-international-reaction-sanctions

Israel’s plan to expand Lebanon ground campaign fuels fears of prolonged occupation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/16/israel-expansion-lebanon-ground-campaign-fears-prolonged-occupation

Entire families wiped out and towns emptied as Israel’s war on Lebanon intensifies: Communities displaced and destroyed while death toll rises faster than during any previous war in Lebanon

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/14/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-war-deaths

Israel’s second front: on the ground in Lebanon – podcast

The conflict in the Middle East is being fought from the air – except in southern Lebanon where Israel and Hezbollah are fighting a bitter ground war.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2026/mar/24/israel-second-front-hezbollah-lebanon-war-podcast

Israel says it will seize parts of southern Lebanon as ‘defensive buffer’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/24/netanyahu-vows-further-strikes-iran-lebanon-missile-hits-tel-aviv-middle-east-crisis

Israel faces stiff Hezbollah resistance as it attempts to push deeper into Lebanon: IDF engaged in intense fighting with militants in at least three key areas in battle for control of border towns

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/18/fighting-intensifies-israel-hezbollah-southern-lebanon

The memories stay behind’: hundreds of thousands flee the Israeli bombs in Beirut

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/06/thousands-flee-israeli-bombs-beirut

Middle East conflict: why is Israel attacking Lebanon? | The Latest

https://www.theguardian.com/news/video/2026/mar/03/middle-east-conflict-why-is-israel-attacking-lebanon-the-latest

                          References

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr

 (Editor-in-Chief)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15820216-the-study-quran

Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite, by Rudy Rucker

Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies

by Blair Davis (Editor), Robert Anderson (Editor), Jan Walls (Editor)

In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality, by John Gribbin

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/513367.In_Search_of_Schr_dinger_s_Cat

Khidr in Sufi Poetry: A Selection, by Paul Smith

Where the Two Seas Meet: Al-Khidr and Moses—The Qur’anic Story of al-Khidr and Moses in Sufi Commentaries as a Model for Spiritual Guidance, by Hugh Talat Halman

The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition, Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Arabic

6 مارس 2026: إسرائيل تعيد إشعال حلقة العنف في لبنان؛ أصداءٌ وانعكاساتٌ لعام 1982 في عام 2026

إن حرب إسرائيل الرامية إلى الغزو الإمبريالي والهيمنة على جيرانها – تلك الحرب التي اشترتها بدماء الأمريكيين وأموالهم – باتت تدور رحاها الآن في أربعة مسارح للعمليات: فلسطين، وإيران، وحلفاؤها ضمن “التحالف العربي-الأمريكي” إلى جانب الدول المتبقية من “محور المقاومة” الإيراني في صراعاتٍ هامشية، وأخيراً: لبنان.

ونظراً لرفض أمريكا استخدام أدوات “المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات” (BDS) لنزع سلاح النظام الصهيوني – بغض النظر عن جرائمه التي لا تنتهي، والتي تُموَّل من ضرائبنا لتتسبب في قتل الأطفال وغيرهم من المدنيين الأبرياء – فقد وقع حدثٌ مفصليٌ من التصدع والاضطراب؛ حدثٌ دفعنا إلى التخلي عن فكرة حقوق الإنسان الكونية، ونذر بانهيار الديمقراطية وحضارتنا العالمية التي شُيِّدت على قيم ومبادئ عصر التنوير وتجسدت في وثائقنا التأسيسية. ونتيجةً لذلك، تشن إسرائيل الآن “حرباً شاملة” ضد جيرانها بهدف إقامة “إمبراطورية إسرائيل الكبرى”.

لقد فشلت أمريكا في كبح جماح “كلبها” إسرائيل، الذي بات يجوب المنطقة مهاجماً بوحشيةٍ كل من هبَّ ودب، وذلك لغياب أي عواقب رادعة للأفعال الشريرة. وهذا هو المعنى الذي ستحمله “فكرة إسرائيل” في سجل التاريخ وفي نظر العالم أجمع؛ إذ ستغدو مثالاً حياً لما قد يحدث حين تتخلى أمةٌ ما عن إيمانها بمفاهيم الخير والشر، أو بحقوق الإنسان. ففي نظر الصهيوني، لا يُعد بشراً حقيقيين سوى أبناء جلدته من اليهود.

ومهما كان المنطلق الذي تبدأ منه في استقصاء التسلسلات الهرمية للانتماء والآخرية، أو العضوية في النخب الحاكمة وممارسات تجريد البشر من إنسانيتهم؛ فإنك ستجد نفسك في نهاية المطاف واقفاً عند بوابات “أوشفيتز”.

Hebrew

6 במרץ 2026 ישראל מתחילה מחדש את מעגל האלימות בלבנון: הדים והרהורים של 1982 בשנת 2026

מלחמת הכיבוש האימפריאלי של ישראל ושליטה על שכנותיה, שנרכשה בדם ובאוצר אמריקאים, כוללת כעת ארבע זירות; פלסטין, איראן, בעלות בריתה בקרב הברית הערבית-אמריקאית ומדינות ציר ההתנגדות הנותרות של איראן בסכסוכים פריפריאליים, ולבנון.

מכיוון שאמריקה מסרבת להשתמש בחרם, ניתוק וסנקציות כדי לפרק את המשטר הציוני מנשקו ללא קשר לפשעיו האינסופיים, בעוד המסים שלנו קונים את מותם של ילדים ואזרחים חפים מפשע אחרים, אירוע של שבר ושיבוש שהביא לנטישת רעיון זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו וסימן את קריסת הדמוקרטיה והציוויליזציה הגלובלית שלנו הבנויה על ערכי ועקרונות הנאורות ומגולמת במסמכי היסוד שלנו, ישראל מנהלת כעת מלחמה טוטאלית נגד שכנותיה כדי ליצור אימפריה של ארץ ישראל הגדולה.

אמריקה נכשלה ברצועה לכלבה שלנו ישראל, והיא משוטטת באכזריות תוקפת את כולם ומכל מקום משום שאין השלכות לרוע. זוהי המשמעות של רעיון ישראל להיסטוריה ולעולם; דוגמה למה שיכול לקרות כאשר אומה כבר לא מאמינה בטוב וברע או בזכויות אדם. כי עבור ציוני, רק יהודים הם באמת בני אדם.

לא משנה היכן מתחילים עם היררכיות של שייכות ושונות, חברות באליטה ודה-הומניזציה, תמיד מגיעים לשערי אושוויץ.

            Histories, Memories, Identities

Beirut, My City  film and script, by Jocelyne Saab & Roger Assaf

https://themarkaz.org/oldmarkaz/the-haunting-reality-of-beirut-my-city/

Beirut, Samir Kassir

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7966167-beirut?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_12

Lebanon: A History, 600 – 2011, William W. Harris

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13687123-lebanon?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_50

and works of literature written by fellow witnesses and survivors of the Siege;

Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, Mahmoud Darwish

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142583.Memory_for_Forgetfulness?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_62

Victims of a Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, Mahmoud Darwish,

Samih Al-Qasim, Adonis   (contains Adonis’ The Desert)

Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet, Barbara Bray, Ahdaf Soueif (Introducer)

Concerto al-Quds, Adonis, Khaled Mattawa (Translation)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34746502-concerto-al-quds?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_21

A Map of My Beirut, what remains of it and the ghosts of what it was

Here a great nothingness has swallowed the voices of the past

Yet they live within us, songs of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human

 How can we answer the terror of our nothingness

The flaws of our humanity

And the brokenness of the world?

Here among the ruins of a lost grandeur

Fallen empires and the ghosts and legacies of

Beautiful and terrible histories

I wail in grief, I roar defiance, I demand justice

But my words are devoured by silences

I swear vengeance for a lost history and a ruined city

Without an enemy to bring a reckoning to

For this hammer blow of fate was the act of no saboteur

But only a consequence of our common greed and responsibility shifting

And the labyrinthine bureaucracy that misfiled records

Of a derelict ship full of fertilizer quietly degrading in harbor for years

How many such forgotten existential threats

Now lie waiting to seize and shake us?

Here was once a gate to the Infinite and a shrine of the Impossible

In bloodstains which offered hope and redemption

Where now not a stone stands upon a stone

And the light of Beirut become

Vast and fathomless chasms of darkness

Arabic

خارطة بيروت بلدي وما تبقى منها وأشباح ما كانت عليه

هنا ابتلع العدم العظيم أصوات الماضي

ومع ذلك ، فهم يعيشون في داخلنا ، أغاني من أنفسنا وإمكانيات لا حدود لها في أن نصبح بشرًا

  كيف يمكننا الرد على رعب العدم لدينا

عيوب إنسانيتنا

وانكسار الدنيا؟

هنا بين أنقاض العظمة المفقودة الإمبراطوريات الساقطة وأشباح وموروثات

تواريخ جميلة ورهيبة

أبوح حزنًا ، وأصرخ متحديًا ، وأطالب بالعدالة

لكن الصمت يلتهم كلامي

أقسم بالانتقام لتاريخ ضائع ومدينة مدمرة

بدون عدو لجلب الحساب إليه

لأن ضربة القدر هذه كانت فعلاً غير مخرب

ولكن فقط نتيجة لتغير جشعنا المشترك ومسؤوليتنا

والبيروقراطية المتاهة التي أخطأت في ضبط السجلات

من سفينة مهجورة مليئة بالأسمدة تتحلل بهدوء في الميناء لسنوات

كم عدد هذه التهديدات الوجودية المنسية

الآن تكمن في انتظار الاستيلاء علينا وهزنا؟

هنا كانت ذات مرة بوابة إلى اللانهائي وضريح المستحيل

في بقع الدماء التي أعطت الأمل والفداء

حيث لا يوجد الآن حجر يقف على حجر

ويصبح نور بيروت

منوعات الظلام الشاسعة التي لا يسبر غورها

My Beirut

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.8829821,35.4963575,14z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m3!11m2!2sbRiRoVhVlnnOfGcTK7nCKErQ2ojuwQ!3e3

March 25 2026 Tyranny of the Hollow Men

As we annihilate ways of being human different from our own and the bodies of others judged different from ourselves by ethnicity, faith, or national identity, through rains of steel death in Iran, famine and fuel scarcity in Cuba, our ravenous proxy of kleptocratic imperial conquest and dominion Israel in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, and our ICE white supremacist terror force in the streets of America, we are become a nation of Hollow Men, shadows of ourselves devoured by the machines of elite wealth, power, and privilege to which we are enslaved, our lives the raw materiel of our enemies’ power, subjugated and enslaved in service to the power of those who do not regard us as fellow human beings but as mere things to be used, the waste products of capitalism in its dying stages.

      As written by T.S. Eliot in The Hollow Men;

“We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour.

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

                              II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer—

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

                              III

This is the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

                              IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetual star

Multifoliate rose

Of death’s twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

                              V

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

                                  Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

                                  For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

     As written by Joseph Bottum in The Washington Free Beacon, in a review entitled T.S. Eliot, Poet for a Fallen Culture; “Who remembers it? Who would even believe it now, when political thought, for left and right alike, lies shattered in a thousand pieces? Still, there really was a moment, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, when all the different strands of conservative thought looked as though they might come together into a grand unified field theory—the coherent and whole answer of the West to the claims of communism. And somewhere near the center of it all stood the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

     In the strange conservative mix of that time was everything from the compelling simplicity of Richard Weaver’s anti-nominalism to the God-haunted landscapes of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Add in the indefatigable historical research of Russell Kirk, the hard brilliance of Etienne Gilson’s neoscholastic Catholicism—even a little homegrown libertarianism and the Southern Fugitives’ agrarianism—and all the pieces seemed to be fitting together. Fitting together, that is, until suddenly they weren’t, and not even William F. Buckley could put them back together.

     But perhaps the strangest ingredient—the most unbelievable bit for us, these days—was the role of Eliot’s work. Of course, part of the current unintelligibility comes with the decline of belief that poetry matters, that it ever really mattered: that within living memory there was a time when poetry was thought to be at the absolute center of culture.

     But just as much, the peculiarity of Eliot’s place derives from the fact that he was a complete modernist in his verse, the leading practitioner of the literary revolution that turned against traditional poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. If conservatives wanted poets, Russell Kirk could point them to any number of snippets from the formal verse of Lord Tennyson and Victor Hugo.

     That’s not to say that they didn’t recognize T.S. Eliot as the dominant poet and critic of his time, possibly as early as his publication of Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 but certainly in the years after 1922, when he published The Waste Land and began his literary magazine, The Criterion. (Later editions of The Cambridge History of English Literature would name only two eras after a single writer: The Age of Dryden and The Age of Eliot.) But for the conservatives of the 1940s and 1950s, Eliot’s poetry was surely an unlikely choice for the signal banner under which they would gather.

     Except, perhaps, for the fact that Eliot really was a modernist—and modernist literature was rarely a celebration of modern times. In a line often quoted by later neoconservatives, the critic Lionel Trilling opened The Liberal Imagination, his famous 1950 collection of essays, with a declaration that “there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation” in America, only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” At the same time, he saw clearly—and tried in vain to teach the readers of his time—that literary modernism contained a profoundly anti-modern and anti-liberal streak. However much the smug liberalism of the day wanted to roll together all that seemed progressive in literature with all that seemed progressive in politics, such figures as Ezra Pound and D.H. Lawrence were never going to fit well with American liberalism.

     And neither was T.S. Eliot. This winter, Johns Hopkins University Press issued The Poems of T.S. Eliot, a two-volume collection of his verse annotated by the Boston University scholar Christopher Ricks. As is usual for Ricks, the annotations are both brilliant and overwhelming—as one might have guessed when the first volume’s 340 pages of poetry are matched with 966 pages of notes. And in those pages there’s an occasion to think again about T.S. Eliot and what he meant for a generation of conservatism now long gone.

     For all that The Wasteland would come to seem the definitive description of the failed civilization of the West in the years after the First World War—These fragments I have shored against my ruins—the clearest setting of Eliot’s thought may come in the juxtaposition of “The Hollow Men” (1925), the last of his serious works before his embrace of Anglican Christianity, and “Ash Wednesday” (1930), the first of his major Christian poems.

     The use of broken repetition in both poems is a hint that the poems speak to each other: the brutal desert of the earlier poem answered in the delicate hope of the later. Was there ever a poem as grim as “The Hollow Men”? It reduces even the apocalypse to a whimper. The Wasteland uses its kaleidoscopic scenes to show a Western civilization that lacks both meaning and manners, but it is still in many ways a rich poem: thick with reference, ripe with the vocabulary of prior English poems (as Ricks so fully documents), and exuberant in its images. It declares, in its way, that poetry still serves the hygienic function of culture. It declares, in its way, that civilization is not so far gone that a poem cannot still help make a change. “The Hollow Men” has no such undertone. Stripped down to the bones of thought and language, it’s the worldview of Christianity—without Christ: a biblical poem of the emptiness the world would be without God, matched with the absence of God.

     But then, in “Ash Wednesday,” Eliot takes the dark worldview of “The Hollow Men” and reintroduces a little bit of God. Christendom has still failed, and culture no longer makes sense. But the Church and conversion may nonetheless remain possible. The faith of a believer may remain true—or even shine more clearly—despite the decline that marks the history of the civilization that carried those truths.

     The irreplaceable appeal of Eliot for conservatives of the 1940s and 1950s shows in the settings for that two-part vision. Only modernism could convey sufficiently the negative part: The breakdown of traditional civilization had to be echoed in the objective correlative of the breakdown of traditional verse. This wasn’t free verse as a declaration of new freedom. This was free verse as a howl that culture itself had failed.

     And the prestige of Eliot’s modernism allowed a new expression of the Christianity he came to embrace: a universal recognition of the power of his expression in Four Quartets, the play Murder in the Cathedral, and the choruses from The Rock. The failed culture could not hear the power in the old forms it had lost, but the new form could convey Eliot’s quiet, delicate, and thoughtful faith.

     Or could it? Reduced to its barest elements, modernity is the substitution of science for theology, history for philosophy, and the self for the soul. Eliot had little patience with the pretensions of science, but even he was not fully able to escape the other two modern turns. The negative critique of his modernism is essentially genealogical rather than metaphysical, and The Wasteland is a poem more about history than philosophy.

     For that matter, the text of Four Quartets is more about the self than the soul. The poems use the theological language of finishing a journey to describe the theological event of beginning a journey. The vocabulary the mystics used to describe their visions of God is slid down the scale to become a vocabulary for the poet’s first coming to faith. Mysticism is transformed into conversion, and the turn of the self becomes the more poetically important journey of the soul.

     By the mid-1960s, the goal of a unified conservative theory had failed, exposed as a mirage. Reagan’s big-tent Republicanism could unite the disparate elements for an election, but no coherent political theory would emerge to hold together the thought of paleoconservatives and neoconservatives, neothomists and libertarians, Straussians and Voegelinians. After the fall of Soviet communism, what remained for the various kinds of conservatives to share? Not even opposition to abortion seems to drive them toward unity anymore.

     As it happens, for readers of T.S. Eliot, that might prove something of a gain. Christopher Ricks’s edition of The Poems of T.S. Eliot can remind us of just how good a writer Eliot was—particularly once he has been set free. If we force Eliot to occupy a symbolic place in modern thought, he proves a symbol of failure. If we read him instead only as a poet, he proves a master of the language. Perhaps the greatest the dismal twentieth century knew.”

    As I wrote in my annual celebration of T.S. Eliot, on his birthday September 26  2022 revision

     Madness, ruin, and death; T.S. Eliot’s poetry was a lamentation on the fall of civilization in World War One, written with brilliance, a fragile beauty, and immense scholarship. In The Wasteland alone we have The Grail Quest and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Iliad, Dante, The Tempest, the Satyricon, the Call of Ezekiel; his works recapitulate the whole of our cultural history and frame the birth of the modern world and the shattering of European aristocracies with the Fall of Rome and the descent of the classical world into a millennia of barbarism.

    The poetics of T.S. Eliot emerge from his study of Laforgue and Elizabethan drama, and are shaped and refined by his reading of the Symbolists and metaphysical poets, Dante, Shakespeare, John Donne, Samuel Johnson; his works are densely packed strings of classical, Biblical, and other references and allusions, bearing the whole historical weight of the civilization which was his mission to reclaim and salvage from the annihilation and meaninglessness of its self-destruction during the Great War.

     We may say of T.S. Eliot what he once said of Blaise Pascal, that his work encompasses and transcends; “’the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering.” This is especially true of his magnificent song of faith The Four Quartets, a superbly constructed labyrinth of transformation, transcendence, and of the soul as an emergent quality struggling to birth itself from the terror of our nothingness. For me it remains the most splendid work of Christian literature since William Tyndale reimagined it in writing the King James Bible.

     As you may know, I tend to think of politics in terms of literature and envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams.

     The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our mimetic ideational form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to reimagine and transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

      As I describe myself in my social media biographies; I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. But I treasure the works of T.S. Eliot as those of the greatest master to have ever commanded the opposing side of the field. 

     In this he reflects his mirror image James Joyce, who played the board as the revolutionary to T.S. Elliot’s conservative. Both wanted to renew humanity and rebuild civilization, one by reclaiming the past which has allowed us to survive millennia of unforeseen threats and cataclysms, the other by imagining a new path to the future; both are necessary to the survival of civilization and humanity itself.

     No one ever played the conservative side of the board better. His poetry may be read over the course of a lifetime without exhausting its value. Whosoever loves literature will find here a kindred spirit.

    The Poems of T.S. Eliot, a massive two-volume edition sumptuously annotated by the Boston University scholar Christopher Ricks, would be my ideal reference work. Among the many wonderful critical studies are Hugh Kenner’s The invisible poet: T.S. Eliot, and Helen Gardner’s The Art of T.S. Eliot.

    Do watch Jerzy Kosinski’s magnificent and unforgettable reimagination and interrogation of The Wasteland and of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, Being There, which follows its thematic structure. I taught it as an introduction to the shared model of both, the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in high school English classes, and made a monthly ritual of watching it throughout my university years.

    Why Being There and its shadow The Wasteland became primary texts and myths of my self-construal and identity is a tale for another time, but also one we must each enact for ourselves.

      Thus for Eliot and his marvelous elegies of the fall of civilization and the theft of the soul by those who would enslave us. I turn next to the figural opposite in the chiaroscuro of conservative and revolutionary forces, who play my side of the board, for an interrogation of Trump himself, the festering leprous thing as the heart of our Fourth Reich; a thing that grieves not and never hopes, stolid and stunned, brother to the ox” as Edward Markham describes Eliot’s Hollow Men in a poem written as a direct replay, The Man With a Hoe, which my father taught me to memorize as a child.

“The Man with the Hoe By Edwin Markham

Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting

God made man in His own image,

in the image of God made He him. —Genesis.

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 reply to God  

After the silence of the centuries?”

       Sadly, though Trump is monstrous, of disfigured soul, he is no figure of a Redeemer nor a liberator of any kind. 

      Trump is kind of a negative space of Peter Seller’s Chauncey in Being There, or his evil twin; an idiot who cannot fathom human feelings or recognize others as beings like himself, without the capacity for love or even awareness of the pain his actions cause others.

    Like Dostoevsky’s luminous self portrait as Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, I felt a profound connection with the character of Chance from my teenage years, as I instrumentalized literature as trauma management and self-construal in the wake of my momentary death at the age of nine and my near execution by a police death squad the summer before high school at fourteen.

     Where Trump was born without the part of us which makes us human, Chance was merely limited in his horizons, and learns to become human in the course of the story, a parable which references Parsifal and the allegorical tale The Green Knight.

      Here follows my interrogation of the Awakening from innocence as a hero’s journey in my annual celebration of June 14 2025, The Painted Bird, I: and a celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday; On this the birthday of Jerzy Kosinski, I reflect on and interrogate my personal relationship and history with his great novel, which I used as an intertext and mirror in healing from trauma during my teenage years, much as did he in reimagining his childhood therapy journal as he was psychosomatically mute for five years after Liberation by the Russian Army at the age of nine.

     I too created myself in revolutionary struggle during this crucial period of growing up, framed by my witness at the age of nine of Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, our nation’s most massive incident of police terror in which I was Most Sincerely Dead momentarily from the force wave of a grenade, and my near execution by a police death squad in Sao Paulo Brazil in  1974 during my direct actions with the Matadors to rescue the abandoned street children who were being bounty hunted in a state campaign of ethnic cleansing.

     Identity confusion and self-creation as freedom from authorized identities and imposed orders of being, meaning and value, from the boundaries of the Forbidden and other people’s ideas of virtue, the mark of Otherness conferred by death, Last Stands in defiance of authority and carceral states of force and control beyond hope of victory or survival, and the existential crisis of becoming human in liberation struggle against the systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization which arise from the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; in all of this I found reflection in Jerzy Kosinski’s embrace of our monstrosity and fearless gaze into the Nietzschean Abyss and what Joseph Conrad called The Heart of Darkness.

     The Painted Bird, I.

     As I have written in celebration of Jerzy Kosinski’s birthday:

     Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski.

     His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, a Pauline Absurdism like that of Flannery O’Connor and referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of his training as a sociologist and historian in the Soviet university system of Poland behind the Iron Curtain, prior to his escape to political asylum in America.

    Jerzy Kosinski embraces the Infinite as the Absurd; though his works can create the effect of reading Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, or Thomas Ligotti, his intent is to tilt against Nihilism and the forces of disorder, not to endorse them. His episodes which reveal the depravity of humankind and the fallenness of political authority, like those of Jean Genet’s novels, are inversions of Catholic rituals intended as satires of the state as embodied violence. 

     In some respects he can be compared to de Sade, but only to a point; where de Sade was a satirist who wrote as a revolutionary act and campaign of destabilization against the authority of Church and State, Jerzy Kosinski plays the opposite side of the board, marshalling conserving forces to defend absolute and universal human values.

    For his novels, often thinly veiled autobiographies and referential to historical events, are manuals of survival in circumstances of overwhelming force, dehumanizing oppression, and existential terror as systems of oppression.

    Among these we may include his satires of American culture including Being There, and the magnificent nightmare of Europe under fascism, The Painted Bird. His finest nonfiction is The Future is Ours, Comrade, written within two years of his 1957 escape from Poland under Soviet dominion. All of his works bear the weight of his scholarship as a historian and sociologist.

     His novels are metafictional commentaries on the roles he played in life, both chosen and those forced on him by others. Perhaps only Philip Roth has struggled more as a writer for control of his own identity, when those whom he claimed did not in turn claim him, and few have suffered more. I believe that each of us has the right as human beings to reinvent ourselves, and to be who we choose.

      Being There is a precious and delicate confection of a fable, which transforms a universal myth into a new one for our time in spare language that a child might grasp. The film version starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine is also compelling and beautiful; I made a practice of watching it every month for years since I was at university, and rereading the novel which I taught in high school. It has become a part of who I am, this story, and I hope that you will love it as do I.  But before I can take you on a walk through this novel, we must understand its context in the novel for which it is a coda, The Painted Bird.

      The Painted Bird is an unforgettable paen of horrors as lived by the author as a child wandering alone in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, victimized and powerless, a figure of Europe, civilization, and all humanity.    

     I cannot say I advise anyone to open the lid of this particular box and look within; I cannot even say that it is good for you. Exposure to evil of this magnitude and festering malignity, raw and unanswerable, is a disruptive and  corrosive, destabilizing and subversive event, at once destruction and liberation, much like the history it describes. Here the boundaries of the human are charted, in blood.

    What has it done for me, this Pandora’s Box of a story? Perhaps only to help me find the will to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival. For myself, this has been enough.

     I have lost count of such Last Stands during my decades of revolutionary struggle and resistance to fascism since that fateful day in 1982 Beirut during the siege, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance he had appropriated from that of the Foreign Legion in Paris 1940 and set me on my life’s path. I too have looked into the Abyss, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me, since Mariupol and possibly before, and I must now and always question my actions as a man without fear, mercy, or remorse.

     I am become as history has made me, a monster who hunts other monsters; with death the alternative to survival, with subjugation, falsification, and dehumanization pervasive and omnipresent existential threats on the one hand and those truths written in our flesh and to which we must bear witness, and our glorious liberty and uniqueness on the other, and with only solidarity and our faith in each other to heal the pathology of our disconnectedness and the divisions of authorized identities as elite hierarchies of otherness and belonging, love to redeem the flaws of our humanity, and hope to answer the terror of our nothingness and the brokenness of the world, we each of us must struggle to become human, even when we must trade fragments of our humanity for the hope of future possibilities of becoming human and for the lives of others, who may one day escape the shadows of history in which we dwell.

      Last Stands; naming these forlorn hopes so makes them sound grand and heroic, but they are nothing of the kind. Not acts of virtue bearing the force of redemption, but choices to remain Unconquered as a free and self-created being conferred by refusal to submit against unanswerable force and impossible odds; a human thing, and a power which cannot be taken from us. As Jean Genet said to me on that fateful day, in a burning house, in a time of darkness, in a lost cause; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”

       Each of these Defining Moments has created unique imaginal spaces as mimesis which cannot be escaped; I will forever be crawling through tunnels of utter darkness covered in the blood of those I could not save while the earth trembles with impending collapse as I was in Mariupol 2022, and numberless other such moments. But as in Camus’ allegory of Sisyphus I bore the burden of my humanity onward and became Unconquered and free, and so can you. 

     This is what is important; to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows, as Genet’s Oath of the Resistance goes. What matters are not the horrors I have survived and which have shaped me to the thing that I am, a monster who hunts other monsters, and who has traded pieces of his humanity to do so and win a space of free creative play and time for others to discover and create new kinds of human being, meaning, and value which I may never find or dream; but that in refusal to submit I emerged from the darkness and despair into the light, and so can we all.

     We may not be able to escape the legacies of our history or the consequences of our humanity, nor find balance for the terror of our nothingness nor bring healing to the brokenness of the world; but we can refuse to submit and become Unconquered as free and unique beings, a power which cannot be taken from us and can return us to ourselves.

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

    Here follows my celebration of Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday:

    A novel translated from his native Polish and reconstructed from notes written while the author was psychosomatically mute for five years after his liberation by Russia at the age of nine, as a therapy journal, it is unique among the literature of madness and psychoanalysis. The Painted Bird is the voice of this traumatized child; its authenticity is incontestable even though the government of Poland has attempted to discredit it as the Witness of History as part of its policy of denial as regards complicity in the Holocaust.

      Of this I say: evil wears many masks. It can be massively destructive when given the authorized power of governments, armies, official papers and decrees, but this is not its exclusive domain, nor where it is born.

     For the tortures and abuse suffered by the narrator are not inflicted upon him by officials carrying out a policy or because he is a member of a persecuted group like the Jews, though he is sometimes mistaken for a gypsy, but by ordinary villagers simply because they can. Indeed, much of the novel is a series of episodic vignettes in which brutalized villagers commit unspeakable crimes against one another. These episodes form a journey of initiation and are organized as Stations of the Cross:  labyrinthine as is the symbolism of a great cathedral.

    The universality of evil and the depravity of man are the subjects of his great work, and this is what elevates it beyond the conditions of time and place. The Painted Bird affirms traditional values in that it cleaves to the interpretation of the Bible on which our government is based, derived from the idea of sin. In the absence of the restraining force of law, the most ruthless tyrant or criminal wins. As George Washington said, “Government is about force, only force.”

     True, the social use of force cuts many ways, especially when wielded by the juggernaut of governments; my point is that Jerzy Kosinski has written a very Catholic novel which offers an apologetics of law and order any government might welcome. That this is not generally understood may be due to no one having thought to compare him to Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, or other fellow Catholic authors with whom he belongs.

      Indeed, The Painted Bird has been misunderstood as Holocaust literature and originally misrepresented by the publisher as nonfictional testimony, which backfired as it made the author and his work vulnerable to the lies of his political foes.  He himself became a Painted Bird, ostracized and tormented by his fellows both as a child and as an author, and both functioning on the basis of a public denial of his identity as a Polish Catholic. The tribes he claimed did not in turn claim him, as his faith led him to identify evil as a universal human flaw and not the intrusive weapon of a despised enemy outsider.      

     The Painted Bird thematically recapitulates Measure For Measure, Shakespeare’s savage morality play which examines concepts of state power, justice, and the theology of the depravity of man on which our legal system is founded. Jerzy Kosinski has organized and fictionalized his therapy journal along lines paralleling the Bard’s play, while reversing its revolutionary critique of authorized force.

     Running through all his novels are interlinked narratives supporting Freud’s theory that humans are polymorphosly perverse until they learn to control their animal nature,  and against Rousseau’s idea that the natural man is not bound by social contracts made prior to his birth or without his consent and participation, and may without concern disregard such laws, which is the legal basis of the American Declaration of Independence and a keystone of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Constitution. And so we have the doctrine of Natural Law, a startling bit of anarchy at the founding of our nation, which goes directly to the heart of Jerzy Kosinski’s theme of power relations and defense of a universal and imperative moral order. By moral order I mean human rights as an absolute and universal principle, independent of tribe and tradition; the classic conservative critique of ethical and cultural relativism.

      The logical extension of this line of reasoning denies the legitimacy of the American state, and aligns with the British claim that our revolution, at its origin anticolonial and antiaristocratic, has no basis in law, and with the claim of all states to rule their citizens without their consent personally as a contract.

     Among the finest interrogations of this idea of moral order as  authoritarianism can be found in Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, an anarchist analysis of authority as dehumanization which underlies all his later work.

       In Jerzy Kosinski’s world, like that of William T. Vollman, moral order balances on a social contract guaranteed by force; a brutal and fallen world, but one in which true heroism is possible.

     Little wonder that, once he became rich and famous on the basis of this book, his subsequent novels were mainly elaborately constructed Baroque   fantasies of vengeance and the championing of the powerless. They also continue his exploration of Dante’s Inferno, displaying the consequences of sin and his role as an avenging angel. His work foregrounds personal sin as the origin of social evils; vanity and greed, materialism and the loss of communion as connection with others as well as the Infinite, sexual terror as a means of ownership and dehumanization, all the facades which abstract us from ourselves and one another. He wrote them to avenge the child he had once been, but also to shield others by exposing injustices.

     And this is what killed him:  his quixotic knight-errantry, truthtelling, and the authorial turning over of stones. Though his death was reported as a suicide, with a final note as proof, this is inconsistent with his obsessive survivalism, vigilante justice, secret identities, use of his public role as concealment, and his appropriation of intelligence tradecraft to evade enemies which included the Soviet Union he had escaped, and his personal mission of hunting evildoers. In life as in his fiction, Jerzy Kosinski was an avenging trickster who like the heroes of the messianic films The Magic Christian and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory constructed elaborate Dante-esque traps as purgatorial rituals. This is the author who became a role model for me as I worked through my trauma with his novel as my guide to becoming human; a Dark Knight and Avenger. He would have never abdicated his chosen role as a protector of innocents, for this is what sustained him and gave his tragedies and traumas meaning and made them bearable.

      Jerzy Kosinski died as his forebears did, when their lances shattered on the unstoppable tanks of the invaders in a final charge of traditional meaning and value against a nihilistic barbarian modernity, glorious and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.

    So we come to Being There, a deceptively simple story based on the fables of Krylov which retells the Biblical Fall of Man and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and the return of Christ as the Second Adam from Exile as a redeemer.

      As does his work as a whole and The Painted Bird especially, Being There presents at once a path of spiritual rebirth which unifies Catholic sin and Existential freedom, a Freudian political theory of government as force, a Sartrean critique of identity as a social construction, and a theory of history which re-evaluates and diverges from both Biblical teleology and Marxism, and written by a man who was once the Soviet Union’s greatest sociologist with a deeply personal stake in the issues and themes of his work rooted in profound childhood trauma.

     First, it is a masterpiece, directly addressing the themes developed in The Painted Bird in the context of America, a new home where Jerzy Kosinski found celebrity, wealth, and power, (I would like to say safety, but these things cannot buy safety, and security is an illusion) but also a dehumanizing  commodification, superficial materialism, and implicit class system with which he was not wholly comfortable even though he had married into the apex of New York society.

    Both novels are meditations on Otherness; in one the bird which is painted to look different is pecked to death by his fellows, and in Being There someone who is truly different moves among us unhindered because he wears the colors of whatever flock he finds. Themes of concealment and illusion, identity and membership, the protection of assimilation or the danger and loneliness of being different are exhibited in both great books.

      Change the protagonist and we have the myth and horror story of the skinwalker, a monster or cannibal predator who walks among us in disguise, or the tragic figure of the Elephant Man, whose virtue and beauty are hidden behind a hideous mask of flesh. Or an anonymous hero, a Batman-like figure standing the night watch for us all, as was the author Jerzy Kosinski to the last.

     Second, Being There is powerful because it enacts a universal mythic pattern, and then breaks the pattern to create a new myth, maybe one more useful to us now.

     What follows are my lecture notes on Being There, which I would hand out to my classes of High School Juniors and Seniors in the Honors Program and AP English (AP courses being preparatory classwork for taking the AP subject exams which can earn college units if passed- like A levels in British schools)       and read aloud in parts as the class progressed through the book, stopping to ask questions and start discussions. I taught Being There as an introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; it can also be read as a companion text to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which shares its sources in Arthurian myth.

     The works of Jerzy Kosinski came into my life through the influence of my mother, Coleridge scholar and expert on religious symbolism in medieval art, a Catholic university trained psychologist, biologist, and English teacher who, at my insistence after some time of Kosinski being a presence of references in our home while she wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet hospital case notes of his childhood therapy as compared to his own notes written between the ages of nine and fourteen ending when he regained the power of speech and which later became the basis of his novel, gave me The Painted Bird to read when I was seventeen. As one can imagine, we talked about it a lot.

       I myself would not now do as she did then; its simply too disturbing and can cause real harm, though I was working though the trauma of battle and near execution by a police death squad in Brazil the summer before high school. If you are a survivor of private Holocausts, it can be useful; I might say the same of Kathy Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School, which I have taught to high school students who were survivors of sexual terror as was she.

     As to other influences on the text of my lecture notes, I wrote it during my first year of teaching high school, and while I used it without changes for many years as a discussion prompt it reflects my interests and understanding at the time; I was in my third year of university and taking courses in Celtic Literature and Arthurian Romance while I wrote it, and reading Emma Jung’s Grail studies. My interpretations are also shaped by deep and lifelong interests, sparked by reading Frazier’s Golden Bough in sixth grade, in Joseph Campbell and comparative mythology, fairytales, the archetypal psychology of Jung and Hillman, and a Great Books education through my teenage years. As I could count on no particular literary background among my students, to frame a discussion I had to tell the story; hence the brief retellings of references. 

          On Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There:  a reading guide

    Being There is a fable, a retelling of the story of the Original Man, and of his exile from Paradise and his redemption of the world as the Holy Fool. It parallels the story of Christ, the Fall of Adam and the return of the world to an Edenic state through the second Adam, the Innocent who goes shod in the temple. In Being There, the hero’s quest takes him to a citadel of Fallenness, where he must heal the wound of a Fisher King, in an initiation pattern found in Celtic pagan and Arthurian sources. 

    Early Christian legend says that Jesus was crucified on Calvary, the Mound of the Skull, where the skull of Adam is buried. He is depicted in early art as being hung from the Tree of Life rather than nailed to a cross, just as Odin hung from the World Tree Ygddrasil, a sacrifice to himself, in order to gain knowledge of the runes, universal organizing and informing principles. In the body of Jewish folklore and mystical gnosis called Cabala, the Tree of Life is a series of emanations from the Infinite called the sephiroth, worlds which form a ladder between our world and the Divine. Through astral projection and other practices, the cabalist reunites pairs of opposing principles within himself, just as the Redeemer of the Basilidians mounted through the planetary spheres to acquire their powers. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were understood to be aspects of the same linking system.

    Many mythic systems trace humanity to an Original Man, actually an inner man in whom all participate and share in the human spirit. This is clearly true of Adam, but also of the Purusha in India and Chung Ko in China, among others.

    Parallel myths are structured on the idea of the Universal Monarch, such as Arthur, the Once and Future King. In both Christianity and Buddhism, the hero is a Holy Fool who forsakes the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer, just as Chance, incapable of relating to the world except as an innocent, will accidently become the President of America and restore the nation’s spirit.

     Chance is evicted from the Garden of Eden and is cast into a fallen world; in the film the fallen state of the world surrounding his home is more clearly contrasted with the idyllic garden than in the book. When Chance is introduced to the world during a television interview, he unknowingly proposes to govern as a gardener tends his garden, returning it to a state of order and harmony. Chance is the Redeemer bringing about the Kingdom of God.

    The lawyers who evict Chance are clearly Tempter figures; Chance defeats them when he declines to make a claim against the old man’s estate, as doing so would have kept him in Paradise and prevented him from fulfilling his role as Redeemer. While sitting under the Bo tree awaiting his vision of Enlightenment, Buddha is tempted by Mara in his terrible and seductive forms. Christ is also tempted, both to display his powers and to become World Monarch in a riddle match with Satan, prior to his vision of the Shekinah or Holy Spirit.  But the Holy Fool must descend into the fallen world if he is to redeem it, and so in Islam the serpent is revered as Iblis, the Instructor, a guide of the soul and faithful servant of the Infinite. In all his forms, the Holy Fool must reject the role of Universal Monarch for that of Redeemer.

     People constantly misunderstand Chance; they misinterpret his words in their own context. He is both the sum of images he has internalized from television and the images others make of him; he is all mankind. He is a mirror; Jason kills the Medusa by polishing his shield to a mirror surface so that she sees herself and turns to stone. Chance has the power to transform others because he is the Inner Man in an innocent, unfallen state. Eve tells Chance, “You make me free. I reveal myself to myself, and I am purged.”

     After leaving the Garden, Chance comes by accident to live in another house, the mansion of a powerful financier, Mr. Rand, and his wife, Eve. The mansion is a Castle Perilous, a material and fallen cage for a Fisher King. Chance goes from the Garden to this second house, and from a triadic relationship with the Old Man and the maid, Louise, to another with Mr Rand and Eve.

     Both Mr Rand and the Old Man are dying; to understand the interaction between the major characters in Being There, let’s compare it to the mythic pattern in the Arthurian tale of Parsifal and the Grail Quest. Parsifal is an innocent, raised in seclusion as were Buddha and Chance. Parsifal goes into the world dressed as a fool or jester, riding an ass, and defeats his opponents in combat simply because he is too ignorant to be afraid and never hesitates to charge. He undertakes to find the Grail and bring it to Arthur, who is so sick he can’t get out of bed for seven years, during which time there is famine in the land. The period of the Wasteland is a representation of the fallen state of the world, which can only be healed through spiritual renewal. Parsifal reaches the Grail Castle, whose lord, the Fisher King, is in a position identical to Arthur’s; he is sick and his land is barren. The Fisher King is wounded through the thighs; just as Arthur fell ill when he lost Guinevere, the Fisher King fell ill when the virgin in whose lap his feet must rest was slain. Both rulers are cut off from the source of spiritual renewal and empowerment. Parsifal heals the Fisher King and gains a vision of the Grail by asking the question Buddha asked of his charioteer; “What is wrong with you?” Many other knights on the Grail Quest had failed to ask it, to much wailing and sorrow.

     Like Parsifal, Chance is a figure of the Holy Fool, the child who points out that the Emperor has no clothes. When Mr Rand tells Chance, “I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I’m ready to trade the Horn of Plenty for the Horn of Gabriel,” it is clear that in Chance he has found redemption.  

     From Garden to Wasteland and back again; Chance’s progression follows the quest of Dante for Beatrice, but without a transformative realization. Part of this initiation pattern can be seen in the tension of images between the Garden and the Wasteland.

     The image of the Garden has an interesting history; in the Koran it is called Hasht Bihesht, the Eight Paradises visited by Mohammed on his Night Journey.  Like the labyrinth-gardens of medieval Europe, the Islamic water garden reflected the order of a universe unfolding according to divine will, represented a plan of progress on the pilgrim’s journey toward the Infinite, and provided an immediate metaphor of rebirth in its cycles of decay and growth.

     Dante’s vision of a multileveled universe is similar to the Koran’s; they also share the concepts of a divine mercy and justice in the afterlife, a vision gained in an Otherworld journey, and conceptualize the Infinite as inclusive of the feminine, the Beloved.

     The English word “Paradise” has its roots in the Persian pairi, around, and deiza, wall; a walled garden. Its Greek form, paradeisoi, comes from Xeonophon’s Socratic discourse, the Oeconomics, a history of the Persian war of 400 B.C.  Virgil referred to the sacred groves around Roman temples as a paradisus. The word first appeared in Middle English as paradis in 1175 in a Biblical passage” God ha hine brohte into paradis.”

     The identification of Paradise with the Garden of Eden happened quite early, during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews from which they were released by Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C. During this time, Judaism assimilated the Sumerian-Babylonian Paradise, the Garden of the Gods, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

 Gilgamesh describes his vision of the Garden: “In this immortal garden stands the Tree, with trunk of gold and beautiful to see. Beside a sacred fount the Tree is placed, with emeralds and unknown gems is graced.”

     Thus, at the end of the human journey we are brought to the beginning again. From its earliest times, Indo-European myth has held the idea of the afterlife as a return to the source and origin of life.

     In Being There, the Garden is contrasted with the Wasteland, the pervading economic malaise linked to the impotence and illness of both Mr Rand and the President as types of the Fisher King.

     Arthur’s Wasteland is a divine punishment for his inhumanity; Arthur mab Uthr means not “son of Uther” but “the Cruel”. The Historia Brittonum records that he once hanged two dozen children; in another incident he cut off the noses of the female relatives of a man who disturbed his banquet. Geoffrey of Monmouth based the figure of Arthur on the historical Macsen Wledig, a Welshman who became Emperor of Rome in 383 with the support of the legions in Britain. His story is told in the Mabinogi, in the tale of Culwich and Olwen. The literature of early Arthurian romance was written largely by monks both as a criticism of the system of chivalry and to connect Christianity to the Celtic literary heritage.

     Mythically, Arthur, a name meaning “the Bear”, is a figure of the Celtic Lord of the Animals. The usual pattern has him paired with a double-aspected Goddess who is both Mother and Bride, in Celtic terms Gog and Magog, literally son, son of Mother. Grendel and his mother are another example.

     In Being There, Chance’s relationship with the black maid, Louise, is superceded by that of Eve, Mr Rand’s wife. The dynamics between Louise and Eve are understandable in terms of the Goddess figures in the original sources from which the story of Eden was drawn in Genesis.

     Adams first wife was Lillith, a sensual black demoness who lived in a cave. An embodiment of the forces of nature, she is represented as a Trickster figure in medieval Jewish folklore. Adam, himself Lord of the Animals, both claimed them and completed their creation in naming them. Adam was born both male and female, a figure of wholeness split into the sexes when Eve was made from his female half.

     Eve’s banishment from the Garden is an Underworld journey paralleled by the story of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, daughter of Demeter as Eve is the Maiden aspect of Lillith, is abducted by Pluto, King of the Underworld, to reign as his queen during winter. Demeter descends to the underworld to rescue her, and wins her freedom for half of each year, during which the land is fruitful.

     The transformation of Yahweh from King of the Underworld to an all-knowing, all-powerful creator was never complete in Judaism; until Roman times the Goddess was worshipped on a separate altar beside God. Even today, God’s wife, the Shekinah or Wisdom, is recognized in Jewish rituals such as the Lekha Dodi, which welcomes the Bride of God into the temple. In Christianity she became the Holy Spirit and Mary Theotikos, god-bearer or Mother of God. The Black Madonna found on many Catholic altars is a survival of Lillith, the Great Mother.

     The Wasteland period in Arthurian romance begins when Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, is abducted by the mad Lancelot du Lac, a champion of the spirits, in Saxon called alven or elves, in Gaelic called sidhe. She is reclaimed in a cataclysmic war against the sidhe led by Morgan LeFay, the Faerie Queen. After his death, Arthur is sent drifting in a boat toward the Isle of Avalon, the realm of faerie, signifying his completion of the initiation process and return to the feminine source of being.

     The Ramayana parallels major features of this initiation pattern. Rama is a Universal Monarch who wanders the jungle for nine years in a Wasteland period. His wife, Sita, who is a figure of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and wife of Vishnu the Incarnator, is abducted by Ravanna, King of the Demons. She is Tempted by Ravanna to become Queen of the Underworld, but remains faithful to Rama. Rama, acting as Lord of the Animals, gathers an army of six million monkeys and a number of bears and attacks Ravanna’s island. Together with Hanuman the Monkey King, he reclaims Sita in a battle which pits demons against men, beasts, and gods; rather like the war in Irish mythology of the Tuatha deDanaan against the demonic Fomorians who dwell beneath the sea.

     The pivotal moment in Being There occurs when Chance fails to respond to Eve’s attempt at seduction. Incapable of sexual interest or Temptation, of initiation through assimilation of the feminine unconscious, Chance fails to unite with the Shekinah. The pattern of initiation, of internalizing projections or de-objectifying the Other, is disrupted. His mind, and the creative potential expressed by sexuality, is crippled by the wound of the Fisher King.

     Kosinski leads the reader to expect a transformative event in this scene, and then diverges wildly from the expected. The jarring discontinuity alerts us to his real intent and contribution; the creation of a new myth, a modern myth in which man has no defining relationship to the world and must make his own.

     The Temptation as an Underworld journey to reclaim the feminine creative force and emerge fully human, becoming an Original Man, is found in three sources which form a historical progression within a literary tradition. The direct antecedents of Being There are the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogi, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Wagner’s Parsifal.

     In the first story of the Mabinogi, King Pwyll meets Arawn, King of the Underworld, while riding in the forest. They agree to trade places for a year; Arawn casts a spell which makes each look like the other.  During this time, Pwyll is Tempted by Arawn’s Queen, but resists her. His initiation complete, Pwyll returns home to become a just and merciful king. The second half of the story articulates a linked myth, the Underworld journey of the goddess Rhiannon, which parallels that of Persephone.

     Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a more sophisticated story, a synthesis of Christian and pagan Celtic elements. Gawain, linked to Parsifal in other stories as a contrasting-complementary character, is a development of the Irish hero Cuchulainn. The Green Knight is both Christ and the Green Man, Celtic god of vegetative rebirth whose leafy face can be seen as a decorative motif in English churches. A parallel trickster-initiator figure in Islam is the Green Genie Khidr.

     Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are feasting at Camelot when a strange knight enters the hall bearing an axe, a man made of vines and leaves in green armor. He issues a challenge, and by the laws of chivalry the request of a guest cannot be denied once he has been admitted to the hospitality of the castle; one of them must strike off his head, after which the Green Knight will return the blow. Gawain agrees, to avoid Arthur’s loss of honor. He chops off the Green Knight’s head, and the Knight picks up his head and speaks; “In one year you will come to my castle, and I will return the blow.”

     Gawain sets out on his quest a year later, and comes to the Castle Perilous, where he is tempted by its Queen. He resists, and is given her magic lace girdle to wear. Dressed in the Queen of the Underworld’s clothes, he goes to meet the Knight at a cavern called the Green Church. The Green Knight swings but stops his blow, just nicking Gawain’s neck in an act of redemption. The Green Knight tells him that the Castle Perilous is his own, and its Queen the wife of the Green Knight.

    Parallel elements include the Underworld journey and Castle, the Temptation by an Underworld Queen, an exchange of identities with an Underworld King, and a wandering or Wasteland period. The Beheading Game is a retelling of Cuchulainn’s contest for the kingship of Ulster in the epic Bricriu’s Feast.

     Chance is sent on an Underworld journey to Mr. Rand’s house, is Tempted by Eve, and takes the place of the Fisher King. The seduction scene is where the story of Chance breaks the initiation pattern. Like the Old Man, Chance bears the wound of the Fisher King. In the first chapter we learn, “The soil of his brain, the ground from which all his thoughts shot up, had been ruined forever.”

     In Wagner’s opera Parzival, the theme of Redemption also hinges on a Temptation. Anfortas, the Fisher King, is wounded by the Spear of Longinus, which pierced Christ’s side at the Passion. Parzival’s experience with his objectified Other in the form of the sensual Kundry’s kiss triggers his despair and eventual redemption. The Holy Fool becomes Redeemer through unification with the unconscious.

     Chance’s tragic flaw prevents him from undergoing a transformative initiation; he is the Holy Fool as pure symbol. Kosinski uses the interruption of a mythic pattern as social critique; the mold of man is broken. Like Theseus, we must find our way through the Labyrinth of the Minotaur, but without Ariadne’s Thread to guide us. Like Mersault in The Stranger, Chance is the ultimate image of modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness. He is, perhaps, the only Redeemer we deserve.

     Or, perhaps Kosinski’s message is a more simple, hopeful one: First, we must recognize that we are on a journey toward becoming human. Second, we have no map of transformative process to guide us. Therefore, each of us must reinvent how to be human.

      Kosinski beneath the illusion of a savage and nihilistic Absurdism like that of Samuel Beckett in his final form in the Malone Trilogy is a Catholic theologian of the Thomist school like Flannery O’Connor, who has lived a myth and can teach us how to witness horrors and survive without losing our humanity or our power to question authority.    

     Chance’s redemptive power rests on his innocence; he is the child who speaks truth to power, who knows the Emperor has no clothes, an Adamic man in his uncorrupted state, the Fool who can achieve a vision of the Infinite.

    Bodidharma, the founder of Zen, once had an interview with the Emperor of China.

     The Emperor said to him, ” I have donated money to the poor, I have built orphanages, hospitals, and monasteries. How much merit have I accumulated in heaven?”

     To which Bodidharma said, “None whatsoever.”

Being There  anniversary trailer

full film remastered

https://ok.ru/video/1825715391023

Being There, Jerzy Kosiński

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677877.Being_There?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_11

The Painted Bird – Official Trailer

The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18452.The_Painted_Bird

T.S. Eliot, Poet for a Fallen Culture

The Hollow Men read by Jeremy Irons

                        Being There the Film, a reading list

Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller, Jerzy Kosiński, Barbara Tepa Lupack

 (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17120292-oral-pleasure

Being There in the Age of Trump, Barbara Tepa Lupack

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116268099-being-there-in-the-age-of-trump

https://deadline.com/2019/08/being-there-movie-40th-anniversary-peter-sellers-donald-trump-1202706505/

https://www.cineaste.com/fall2017/being-there

https://www.filmsite.org/bein.html

http://www.thecinessential.com/being-there/televising-reality

http://www.thecinessential.com/being-there/reflection

https://deepfocusreview.com/definitives/being-there /

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-being-there-1979

Being There 1979 : Film Analysis/Review -Symbolism, Esoteric Paradigms, and the Creation of Reality

        Sources of the Master and His Disciple: Eliot and Kosinski

The Green Knight (2021 Movie) Official Trailer

Wagner – Parsifal – Elming, Sotin, Watson, Sinopoli Bayreuth 1998

    Fun facts about Wagnerian opera for Pride Month; the King of Bavaria, Louis the Second, most famous for building Neuschwanstein Castle, was Richard Wagner’s lover and patron, and the beautiful music they created together as mythologist and composer remains an unacknowledged monument to the triumph of love unbound by the limits of our form.

Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, Roger Scruton

 The Redeemer Reborn: Parsifal as the Fifth Opera of Wagner’s Ring,

Paul Schofield

Wagner’s Parsifal, William Kinderman

PARSIFAL: The Will and Redemption: “Exploring Richard Wagner’s Final Treatise”, John Mastrogiovanni

Wagner’s Parsifal: An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey,

Richard H. Bell Jr.

Parsifal, Wolfram von Eschenbach

Parsifal, Peter Vansittart

The Mabinogion: The First Branch (Annotated): Pwyll Pendefig Dyfed,

Charlotte Guest, Kaitlyn Tupper (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195818354-the-mabinogion

The Feast Of Bricriu, George Henderson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6056099-the-feast-of-bricriu

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Unknown, Bernard O’Donoghue

 (Translator)

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, T.S. Eliot,

Christopher Ricks  (Editor)

The Grail Legend, Emma Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz

Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth,

Joseph Campbell

Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction, Derek Pearsall

                     T.S. Eliot, a reading list

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, T.S. Eliot,

Christopher Ricks  (Editor)

The Poems of T. S. Eliot, 2: Christopher Ricks

The Art of T.S. Eliot, Helen Gardner

Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot, Hugh Kenner

Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context, Louis Menand

The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature, Bill Goldstein

T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon

Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Kenneth Paul Kramer

When the Eternal Can Be Met: The Bergsonian Theology of Time in the Works of C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden, Corey Latta

Man With a Hoe, by Jean-François Millet

Drawn into the Light: Jean-François Millet, Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet (Artist)

March 24 2026 Argentina’s Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice and the Falsification of History

     Argentina’s new President Javier Milei has begun the rewriting of history, the whitewashing of the crimes against humanity of his brutal and depraved role model during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, and the erasure of its victims.

     Like all fascist tyrants, Milei attempts to capture us in a killing jar of echoes and reflections, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use former CIA Chief of Counter Intelligence Angleton’s iconic metaphor of falsification through propaganda and thought control.

      Wilderness of Mirrors, a phrase from T.S. Eliot’s Gerontin, is one I use to describe the pathology of falsification of ourselves through propaganda which devours truths. This I disambiguate in comparison with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred calling to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.

     James Angleton, on whom John Le Carre based his character of George Smiley, infamously used the phrase in this sense as well, and it has become universalized throughout the intelligence community he shaped and influenced during the Second World War and its aftermath the Cold War. Writing in reference to David Martin’s biography of himself entitled Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton described it as a “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and split the West … an ever fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.” And of course, everything he ascribed to the Soviets was also true of himself, his own agency, and America as well, and of all states, for all are houses of illusion.

    The Netflix telenovela Operation Mincemeat uses the phrase, in a story about the creation of a fictitious officer bearing documents designed to trick the Nazis into preparing for the invasion of Europe somewhere other than Sicily, a series I watched with rapt attention because each of us is created by our stories exactly like this false identity attached to the body of a derelict. Within each of us, a team of authors create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and as systems in which we are embedded they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand and is  not always iun our best interests.  

     As T. S. Eliot has written in Gerontin, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities”

      We are such stuff as dreams are made on, as Shakespeare teaches us in Act IV, Scene 1 of The Tempest, a line spoken by Ariel. For if we are ephemeral and insubstantial beings, constructions of our stories, this also means that the ontological nature of human being is a ground of struggle which can be claimed by seizures of power.

      The first question to ask of a story is, whose story is this?

      Always there remains the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others.

      This is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for ownership of ourselves.

      Who then shall we become? Asks our self of surfaces, images, and masks which each moment negotiates our boundaries with others.

     To which our secret self, the self of darkness and of passion, the self that lives beyond the mirror and knows no limits, unbound by time and space and infinite in possibilities, replies; Who do you want to become?

     Our goal in revolutionary struggle is to seize the legitimacy and authority of the enemy, to take their power, by claiming the moral high ground, shaping opinion through control of the narratives and building solidarity by championing the people against those who would enslave us.

     For who stands alone, dies alone; and who stands in solidarity and abandons not his fellows becomes unstoppable as the tides.

     When tyrants come to steal our souls with their web of lies, let them find a humankind not divided by fear or abject in despair and learned helplessness, but united in our solidarity and guarantorship of each other’s universal human rights and Unconquered in refusal to submit.

    As written by Jordana Timerman in The Guardian, in an article entitled Argentina was the model of how to survive a dictatorship. Javier Milei is changing that: By questioning the scale of atrocities and deriding human rights activists, Milei is dismantling the consensus over the country’s dirty war; “     Today marks the 50th anniversary of the military coup that ushered in Argentina’s last dictatorship in 1976. For decades, the date has marked one of the country’s most powerful civic rituals. Each year, tens of thousands of Argentinians take to the streets to commemorate the victims of state terror and reaffirm their democratic commitment to memoria, verdad y justicia – memory, truth and justice. What began as a demand from grieving families searching for an estimated 30,000 disappeared gradually became something larger: the moral language that defined Argentina’s post-dictatorship democracy.

     But this anniversary arrives at a moment when that moral compass is under assault. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, relishes flouting taboos around the country’s democratic consensus, questioning the scale of the dictatorship’s atrocities, celebrating the military and deriding activists as corrupt opportunists. As president, Milei has marked each anniversary of the coup with controversial videos questioning the number of victims or equating state repression with violence by leftist guerrilla groups. This year, rumours swirl that he could pardon military officers convicted in landmark crimes against humanity trials – a move that would shatter a central pillar of Argentina’s post-dictatorship settlement. What was once treated as untouchable has become a battleground.

     A radical rightwing president challenging a longstanding democratic settlement is a familiar story. But Milei’s actions also reflect a harder truth: Argentina’s post-dictatorship consensus was always more fragile and incomplete than it appeared.

     From the beginning of the democratic transition in 1983, debates over the violence of the past divided the country. Initial efforts towards accountability such as the Nunca Más (Never Again) report and the landmark Trial of the Juntas, both under former president Raúl Alfonsín, were quickly followed by laws limiting further trials, passed under pressure from the armed forces. The “theory of the two demons” became a dominant interpretive lens – an idea that minimised the reality of systematic state terror by framing the period as a tragic conflict between the government and leftwing guerilla groups.

     Yet thanks to the efforts of activists – many of them relatives of the dictatorship’s victims – a broad moral framework gradually consolidated. The dictatorship’s crimes were increasingly recognised as uniquely illegitimate, and demands for justice for the disappeared became central to Argentina’s democratic narrative. Human rights organisations such as the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo rose from activist groups to national moral authorities.

     But this consensus began to fracture precisely as it consolidated.

     In the period between 2003 and 2015, leaders such as Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner overturned old amnesty laws, thus enabling the prosecution of hundreds of dictatorship-era crimes. At the same time, the language of human rights was embedded across school curriculums and public commemorations. These policies expanded victim recognition and deepened the country’s reckoning with its past.

     Yet for critics, this approach came to be perceived as an ideological project: the appropriation of historical memory for political legitimacy. And for the disenchanted, the policies came to represent hollow symbolism from leaders who seemed unable to solve the country’s deeper crises.

     Milei is hardly the instigator of Argentina’s memory wars, but his government has taken denialism further than any predecessor, turning it into state policy: slashing funding for human rights bodies and investigation of dictatorship crimes, labelling education about the dictatorship as “indoctrination” and openly promoting the discredited “two demons” narrative. UN human rights experts have warned of “alarming setbacks” in Argentina’s historic commitment to memory, truth and justice. Milei now shouts to stadium crowds what was once whispered behind closed doors, framing these fights as a backlash against activist excess – the same playbook used against feminism and other progressive movements.

     Milei’s electoral victory reflects a generational shift in priorities. Many Argentinians who supported Milei have no personal memory of the dictatorship, but their lives have been marked by other democratic failures: economic instability, declining living standards and a dysfunctional, sclerotic political elite. The failure of political and intellectual leaders who called on voters to reject Milei in the name of democracy in 2023 suggests something uncomfortable: that the democratic consensus itself has become associated with an establishment widely seen as having failed.

     None of this diminishes the extraordinary achievements of Argentina’s human rights movement. Few countries have pursued accountability so persistently. The trials of former military officials, the recovery of stolen children by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and the transformation of former torture centres into public memorials are remarkable examples of democratic memory.

     Nor should Milei’s flouting of democratic taboos, calculated to incense opponents, be mistaken for the complete collapse of Argentina’s human rights culture. When lawmakers aligned with Milei visited imprisoned dictatorship-era officers in 2024, the backlash was swift and overwhelming. In 2017, when the supreme court moved to reduce sentences for convicted human rights violators, tens of thousands took to the streets and pushed congress to reverse it within days.

     These reactions suggest that while the political meaning of memory is now fiercely contested, most Argentinians still honour a boundary. Seventy per cent of Argentinians have a negative opinion of the dictatorship, according to a new poll. The dictatorship’s crimes may be debated in new ways, and the language surrounding them may function as partisan identity. But the idea that those crimes must remain punishable – and remembered – still commands broad support.

     The rumours about pardoning those convicted officers are probably just that – but their function is not legislative. Like much of Milei’s rhetoric around the dictatorship, they are designed to provoke, to keep opponents permanently mobilised and off-balance, and to signal to his base that he is willing to say what others won’t. It channels political energy into cultural battles while his government implements painful austerity measures.

     Every 24 March, the same slogans will probably continue to echo through Argentina’s streets: memory, truth and justice. But 50 years after the coup, the march can no longer pretend to express a settled national story. It has returned to its origins: an activist struggle over how the country understands its past, debates its present and contests its national narrative – one that has always been disputed and remains so today.”

      As written last year by Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled  ‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history; “Human rights groups in Argentina have raised the alarm over President Javier Milei’s attempts to rewrite history on the eve of the annual day of remembrance for the thousands of victims of the country’s brutal 1976-1983 dictatorship.

     Thousands of protesters will take to the streets on Sunday to mark the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice in Argentina, a holiday commemorating the 30,000 victims of the dictatorship, called “desaparecidos”. The date usually sees Argentina’s largest demonstrations of the year, with millions of citizens flooding the country’s streets to declare: “Nunca más” (never again).

     However, this 24 March will be different as it will be the first under Milei, a far-right libertarian who has consistently denied Argentinians’ long-standing consensus over the dictatorship’s crimes.

     “There were no 30,000,” Milei said provocatively during a presidential debate ahead of his election triumph last November. “For us, during the 70s, there was a war where excesses were committed.”

     Numerous Argentinian media outlets have reported that the government plans to release a video with its “official version” of what happened during the dictatorship before the 24 March mobilizations. The video will allegedly include an interview with Luis Labraña, a former member of the Montoneros Peronist organization, who has claimed he “made up” the 30,000 number. Some journalists have also claimed that the government plans to pardon incarcerated regime officials, although both Milei and his vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, have denied this.

     Lucía García Itzigsohn, the daughter of two desaparecidos, said: “We are very worried. Beyond our political positioning and the fact that history crosses us personally, this implies breaking the democratic pact.”

     “President Javier Milei and the highest authorities of the country repeat forms of denialism and relativism of state terrorism,” the Center of Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights organization founded in 1979, said in a statement.

     Villarruel has been even more outspoken in her defense of Argentina’s former military rulers. She is the niece of Ernesto Guillermo Villarruel, who was in charge of the Vesubio clandestine detention center during the dictatorship. Like Milei, she has said that the dictatorship was “a war” between “terrorists” and the armed forces.

     Ezequiel Adamovsky said such ideas were fringe in the 1990s, when only small  far-right groups put the crimes of the guerrillas on the same level as those committed by the military regime, but became somewhat normalized under president Mauricio Macri. But he warned that the Argentinian right wing has further radicalized its discourse regarding the dictatorship. “What we are talking about now is no longer denialism, it is directly a justification of the dictatorship,” Adamovsky said.

     Analysts and human rights groups warn that this discourse has consequences: CELS said tributes were now being paid in military barracks to regime officials convicted of crimes against humanity with the endorsement of the political authorities.

     On Wednesday, the organization Hijos – which was founded by the children of desaparecidos – reported that one of its activists had been tied, beaten and sexually assaulted in her home, in what they called a “politically motivated attack”.

     The attackers painted “VLLC” on one of the walls, the acronym for Milei’s catchphrase “Viva la libertad, carajo” (“Long live freedom, dammit”). “We are here to kill you,” they reportedly told her.

     “Hate speech is the breeding ground for violent actions and crimes,” tweeted the campaign group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, which was created in 1977 by grandmothers seeking their grandchildren, born in captivity and kidnapped by the dictatorship, and often raised within military families.

      García Itzigsohn, a member of Hijos, said Milei had not called the victim or the organization to condemn the attack. Nor has he done so publicly.

     Moreover, Milei’s head digital strategist during his presidential campaign, Fernando Cerimedo, claimed on X that the attack was a fabrication. “People want the truth,” Cerimedo said in an interview. “And [the fact that there were] 30,000 is a lie.”

     Adamovsky said questioning the number was “an act of bad faith”. “The number is an estimation that was made with the very little information available at that moment,” he said, adding that military documents that were declassified in 2006 revealed that the military had disappeared or killed close to 22,000 people between 1975 and 1978, a whole five years before the end of the dictatorship.

     Due to the illegal nature of the repression and the fact that there was a pact of silence in the military, the exact number cannot be attained, Adamovsky said. “The right wing exploits the seeming gap between the reported cases and the symbolic number to imply human rights groups are lying,” he added.

     This week Milei’s defense minister, Luis Petri, appeared in a photograph with the wives of imprisoned dictatorship officials, who are demanding their husbands be freed. Argentina held its first trial against such criminals in 1985, and they are still taking place to this day. A spokesperson for the minister claimed Petri appeared in the picture “by chance” and had spoken with them for “less than two seconds”.

     García Itzigsohn said that Argentinians would not back down despite the government’s provocations. “There are 40 years of democratic tradition in our country that cannot be thrown away only because these people have a provocative style,” she said. “There are regulations, there are laws, and there will also be a people marching on 24 March who will make it very clear to them.”

        As I wrote in my post of November 27 2023, A Fascist Shadow Captures Argentina: Javier Milei; Tyranny now speaks to us through a new mask, as El Loco takes center stage in Argentina. The maelstrom of fear, power, and force which creates tyrannies of force and control, births wars of imperial conquest and dominion, and finds its final form in genocides and dehumanization are universal systems of oppression, legacies of our history from which we must emerge.

     Evil originates in fear, often overwhelming and generalized fear given form and a target by authorities in service to power. The centralization of power to carceral states is inherent in human societies because its causes are; hence the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which rely on hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and the subjugation of slave castes.

     To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.

      Politics is the Art of Fear, as my father taught me, and in Argentina our fear speaks to us as an echo and reflection of our own, and reveals the parasitism of America’s relationships with the world throughout our history.

      Herein I speak of the Red Scare, the Hollywood Blacklist, and other nationalist forms of social force which used fear to manufacture consent, centralize power, and legitimize authority in the wake of the Second World War.

    This was our Second Imperial Period, from the end of World War Two to the Fall of the Soviet Union, influenced by our assimilation of the Nazi elite into our intelligence and special forces communities at their founding, as the OSS became the CIA and the Jedburg teams became the Green Berets.

     The First American Empire being the Conquest and policies of Manifest Destiny which began with the genocide of the Native Americans, become global with the war against the Barbary Pirates of North Africa which founded the Marines, reached apogee in our 1898 conquest of the Spanish Empire which gave us The Philippine Islands, Cuba, and Guam while we stole the Hawaiian Islands because we could, and ended with the fall of civilization in The War to End All Wars.

     The Third Empire or Imperial Period of American history begins with Nine Eleven and the antidemocratic Patriot Act, and possibly ends with our abandonment of Afghanistan; this remains unwritten, and rests now in our hands.

     How has the anticommunist hysteria of the post World War Two era, which I call the Second Empire, reshaped America and the world? 

     First a cultural total war waged by the state against its own citizens which gave us reversals of our values like In God We Trust on our money which asks us not to believe in the Infinite but in the authority of the state to speak in His name, the Pledge of Allegiance which substitutes the state for ourselves as its co-owners as the source of authority in a free society of equals and for our loyalty to one another as solidarity and a band of brothers, sisters, and others.

     Second a war of imperial dominion which enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege throughout the world, sometimes focused on seizures of oil as a strategic resource but also simply occupying spaces as in a game of go. Examples of America’s global campaign of terror and tyranny through proxy states proliferates quickly from the codification of the Jakarta Method by the CIA in 1965 versus Sukarno, and become an endless litany of woes, atrocities, depravities, genocides and slave labor; the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala and the covert Central American wars which resulted in the Iran-Contra Scandal, America’s ferocious and depraved alliance with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, the Thousand Day War in Vietnam, a whole Gordian Knot of nastiness and interventions including our mad assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and other heroes of liberation struggle whom an America true to our founding ideals would have hailed as brothers in anticolonial revolution and stood with rather than against.

     In Argentina, the echoes and reflections of our history confront us with the consequences of failure of empathy as the subversion of democracy, and we should all pay attention to the man behind the curtain as the lights of liberty wink out and fall into darkness one by one across the world.

     For as George Santayana teaches us in The Life of Reason; “Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it.”

     As written by Tom Phillips in The Guardian, in an article entitled Who is Javier Milei? Argentina’s new far-right president ‘El Loco’ takes the stage

Likened to Wolverine and Trump and nicknamed ‘the madman’, the former TV pundit is known for his prolific swearing and pledge to take a chainsaw to the machinery of state; “Friends and foes of Argentina’s next president compare him to his fellow right-wing populists Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Others have called the wild-haired economist a mix of Boris Johnson and the killer doll Chucky.

     But when Javier Milei’s image consultant conceived his unorthodox hairdo, she had two different men in mind: Elvis Presley and Wolverine.

     “He looks like Wolverine. He acts like Wolverine. He’s like an anti-hero,” Lilia Lemoine, a professional cosplayer turned congresswoman-elect, said of her anti-establishment ally during a recent interview in Buenos Aires.

      Lemoine, whose stage name is Lady Lemon, said she saw striking similarities between Argentina’s president-elect and the volatile Marvel character.

     “[Wolverine] is very loyal and brave … He can get really mad and be aggressive with his enemies – but only when he’s attacked. He will never ever kill someone or attack someone for no reason,” the 43-year-old said, insisting Milei also had a softer side.

     “He’s adorable,” Lemoine claimed in a pre-election interview, calling the far-right libertarian “the most wanted man in Argentina right now”.

     That has not always been the case. An unauthorised biography of Milei – who on Sunday trounced his Peronist rival in Argentina’s most important election in decades – paints him as a mercurial loner who suffered a childhood of parental abuse and schoolyard bullying during the 1980s and was given the nickname El Loco (The Madman). “More than Milei’s ideas, what worries me is his state of mind and emotional stability,” said the book’s author, Juan Luis González.

     A music-lover, Milei was the lead singer of a Rolling Stones cover band called Everest and, according to Lemoine, also enjoys Bob Marley and Verdi. “He loves opera. He sings opera. He’s not very good – but don’t say I said that,” she confided.

     Milei was more successful as a media personality, finding fame as an economic pundit on Argentinian TV shows where he would pontificate about both the misery of inflation and the joy of tantric sex. “Each man has his own dynamic. In my particular case, I ejaculate every three months,” Milei once boasted on air.

     Such titillating declarations – and Milei’s propensity for attention-grabbing foul-mouthed outbursts – made him a household name and helped him kickstart a career in politics around five years ago. The libertarian economist was elected to congress in 2021 for his party Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) party and was swept into the presidency this week by an tsunami of voter fury at the corruption and mismanagement that millions of voters blame for Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades.

     “The vote represents a desperate attempt at something new, come what may,” said Benjamin Gedan, an Argentina specialist from the Wilson Centre. “The option [voters had] was more of the same in catastrophic economic conditions or a radical gamble on a potentially bright future with a lot of downside risk.”

     Gedan believed there would be “a lot of buyer’s remorse in Argentina” if Milei pursued even a small fraction of his ideas. Those ideas include legalising the sale of human organs, dramatically slashing social spending, downplaying the crimes of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and cutting ties with Argentina’s two most important trade partners, Brazil and China. On the campaign trail, Milei vowed to abolish Argentina’s central bank and dollarise the economy, and brandished a chainsaw intended to symbolise ferocious cuts he believes will help stabilise the economy and “exterminate” rampant inflation.

     Milei’s biography suggests some of those ideas may have come from his five cloned mastiff dogs who are named after economists including Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas. “They are like two metres tall, they weigh like 100kg … He calls them his four-legged children,” said Lemoine, laughing off claims that Argentina’s future leader takes political advice from those animals.

     Many experts believe Milei will be forced to moderate after taking power next month and will struggle to implement his more controversial proposals. Milei’s party controls just 38 of 257 seats in Argentina’s lower house and eight of 72 in the senate.

     But on Sunday night Milei showed little sign of diluting his vision for South America’s second largest economy. “The changes this country needs are drastic,” he declared, announcing Trumpian plans to make Argentina great again.

     Even before Milei’s victory was complete, Lemoine said she was certain her friend – and his sideburns – would prevail.

     “I’m just happy because I saw it from the beginning. It’s nice to know that you were right even when nobody believed in it,” she said.”

      What is the meaning of this disruptive event? As written by Tom Phillips, Josefina Salomón, and Facundo Iglesia in The Guardian, in an article entitled Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes: Victory for TV celebrity turned politician catapults South America’s second-largest economy into an unpredictable future; “Javier Milei, a volatile far-right libertarian who has vowed to “exterminate” inflation and take a chainsaw to the state, has been elected president of Argentina, catapulting South America’s second largest economy into an unpredictable and potentially turbulent future.

     With more than 99% of votes counted, the Mick Jagger impersonating TV celebrity-turned politician, who is often compared to Donald Trump, had secured 55.69% of the vote compared with 44.3% for his rival, the centre-left finance minister Sergio Massa.

     “Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Today is a historic night for Argentina,” Milei told jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters in Buenos Aires, calling his victory a “miracle”.

     Milei promised “drastic changes” to tackle Argentina’s “tragic reality” of soaring inflation and widespread poverty. He also sent a message to the international community: “Argentina will return to the place in the world which it should never have lost.”

     Earlier, Massa – who received 11.5m votes to Milei’s 14.4m – conceded defeat.

     “Argentinians have chosen another path,” said Massa, who said he had called Milei to congratulate him on his victory and hinted he would retire from frontline politics.

     “Obviously these are not the results we hoped for and I have spoken to Javier Milei to congratulate him because he’s the president that the majority of Argentines have chosen for the next four years,” added Massa, whose Peronist movement has governed for 16 of the last 20 years.

    Pro-Milei activists rejoiced at the triumph of their 53-year-old leader, whom they describe as an economic visionary poised to lead Argentina out of one of the country’s worst economic crises in decades.

   “[I’m] happy, happy, happy,” said Francisco Jiménez, a 30-year-old delivery driver and Milei activist from Villa Soldati, a working-class area outside Buenos Aires.

    As he set off to join the party at Milei’s campaign HQ, Jiménez said he knew the result was likely to send Argentina’s peso tumbling against the dollar and cause more economic pain. “But I don’t think there is another option than trusting him. Now more than ever,” he added. “The situation is dire.”

     During his campaign, Milei – who will take office on 10 December – vowed to abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy in order to overcome a financial calamity that has left 40% of Argentina’s 45 million citizens in poverty and pushed inflation to more than 140%. “I know how to exterminate the cancer of inflation,” Milei proclaimed during last Sunday’s final presidential debate which most pundits believed Massa had won.

     Milei’s victory was celebrated by other big beasts of the global far-right including Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who had championed his campaign and has promised to attend his inauguration. “Hope is sparkling in South America once again,” Bolsonaro wrote on X, hailing what he called a victory for “honesty, progress and freedom”.

     The former US president Donald Trump wrote: “The whole world was watching! I am very proud of you. You will turn your country around and truly Make Argentina Great Again.”

     His victory was also celebrated by X’s owner Elon Musk, who posted: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina”.

     Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who Milei has repeatedly insulted as a corrupt “communist” – recognised Milei’s victory in a tepid social media post. “Democracy is the voice of the people and must always be respected,” Lula wrote, without mentioning Milei by name. “I wish the next government good luck and success. Argentina is a great country and deserves our complete respect,” Lula added.

     Colombia’s leftwing president, Gustavo Petro, lamented: “The extreme right has won in Argentina … [It is] sad for Latin America.” “Now say it without crying,” El Salvador’s right-wing president, Nayib Bukele, posted ironically in response.

     Milei’s leftwing opponents reacted with shock and dejection to the election of a notoriously erratic figure whose radical ideas include legalising the sale of organs, cutting ties with Argentina’s two biggest trade partners, Brazil and China, and closing more than a dozen ministries.

    Milei – a climate-denying populist who is known by the nickname El Loco (the Madman) – has also enraged millions of Argentinians by questioning the four-decade consensus over the crimes of its 1976-83 dictatorship, during which an estimated 30,000 people were killed by the military regime. His vice-presidential running mate is Victoria Villarruel, an ultra-conservative congresswoman who has played down the dictatorship’s sins.

     “He is way more excessive and unstable than [Jair] Bolsonaro and Trump. So it’s highly unpredictable what this person could do [in power],” Federico Finchelstein, an Argentinian historian who studies the global far right, said on the eve of Sunday’s election.

     Benjamin Gedan, the head of the Wilson Centre’s Argentina Project, said he believed one word explained the scale of Milei’s victory: desperation.

     “This vote just reeks of desperation. A lot of Argentines voted knowingly against their economic interests because they recognise that the status quo is catastrophic. And there was no reason to believe that the current finance minister could plausibly be the answer,” Gedan said. “It’s a huge gamble but not a completely irrational one.”

     Gedan said the election of such a radical and inexperienced political outsider thrust Argentina into uncharted waters.

     “The real risk is that Argentina melts down in his attempt to radically transform the economy. That would look like massive social unrest, national strikes by unions, potential political violence and stresses against the democratic institutions. There is a pretty dark scenario if in fact he pursues aggressively his maximalist vision for Argentina.”

     After hours of tension, there was an explosion of noise on the streets of Buenos Aires as news of the result spread and citizens reacted with a mixture of joy, apprehension and anger.

     “Vamos Milei, the change is coming!” one woman could be heard shouting from a balcony in Recoleta, not far from the president-elect’s campaign HQ.

     “Never again!” a male voice bellowed, in reference to the human rights violations that took place under Argentina’s military regime. “Milei is the dictatorship”.”

     As a historical force, Milei represents anti-Peronist and anti-Catholic capitalism very like that which America exported in Operation Condor, which included the assassination of the glorious Salvador Allende, and echoes the anti Liberation Theology rhetoric and ideology once used to capture Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras as de facto colonies under the Reagan Plan.

      As written by Uki Goñi in The Guardian, in an article entitled The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election; “ In one corner of the ring stands Javier Milei, 52, self-described former tantric sex coach, outsider anarcho-capitalist and frontrunner in Argentina’s upcoming presidential elections; in the other, his compatriot Pope Francis, 86, world champion of the poor, repeatedly derided by Argentina’s likely next president as “a fucking communist” and “the representative of the evil one on Earth” for promoting the doctrine of “social justice” to aid the underprivileged.

     Milei, a political unknown until 2020, has pledged to wage a “cultural battle” to transform Argentina into a libertarian paradise where capitalist efficiency replaces social assistance, taxes are reduced to a minimum and cash-strapped individuals are allowed to sell their body organs on the open market.

     From Rome, Pope Francis has expressed grave concern about the rise of such callous policies in his home country. “The extreme right always reconstructs itself, it is the triumph of selfishness over communitarianism,” he said in a television interview in March when asked about Argentina’s upcoming elections.

     In words that seemed to be referring to Milei, the only candidate in the 22 October vote with no political experience prior to 2021, the pope added: “I am terrified of saviours of the nation without a political party history.”

     The pope’s doctrine of social justice is synonymous to theft in Milei’s Liberty Advances party because it relies on tax revenues. “Jesus didn’t pay taxes,” Milei once tweeted, tagging the Pope’s official account.

     In a vein-popping victory speech after Argentina’s open primaries on 13 August, a tousle-haired Milei promised the demise of government benefits because they are “based on that atrocity that says that where there is a need, a right is born, its maximum expression being that aberration called social justice”.

     Milei has trolled Francis with repetitive toxic tweets calling him a “communist turd”, a “piece of shit” and accusing the pontiff of “preaching communism to the world”.

     Juan Grabois, a progressive Peronist with close links to the pontiff, and who lost the Peronist candidacy to current economy minister Sergio Massa, calls Milei a “false prophet” but attributes his rise to Argentina’s dire economic crisis.

     “With inflation over 115% plus a 25% drop in the purchasing power of informal workers in the last seven years, voters would have to possess impossible political maturity to vote again for those who have failed them so completely,” Grabois told the Observer.

     Voters disenchanted with both the rightwing Together for Change party, which held office up to 2019, and the incumbent Peronists have migrated in droves to newcomer Milei. “The music of the pied piper sounds sweet to those who have lost all hope. But there’s no point in blaming voters or the pied piper himself, we have to address the mistakes made by those of us who have a humanist concept of politics,” says Grabois.

     Humanist is not a term that could be applied to Milei’s economics. Apart from legalising the sale of body organs, his spiky agenda proposes “dynamiting” the Central Bank, abolishing Argentina’s tuition-free public education system and disbanding free public health services. Milei is also treading fearlessly into anti-woke territory saying he will reinstate the ban on abortion, legalised in 2020, shut down the ministry of women, gender and diversity, as well as the ministries of science – “climate change is a socialist lie” – health, education, labour and public works, and will legalise the sale of firearms.

     Despite this heady mix, Milei is broadly considered the undisputed shoo-in president appealing particularly to young underprivileged men. Milei took 30% of the vote in the open primaries earlier this month against 28% for Patricia Bullrich of United for Change and 27% for Peronist candidate Massa. Milei’s rise has been nothing short of mesmerising. A long-time economist for Argentinian billionaire Eduardo Eurnekian, he became a television star five years ago as a wild-haired economist and tantric sex coach who boasted on air about his sexual stamina and his taste for threesomes, assuring him wall-to-wall appearances on daytime talkshows.

     These televised outbursts have many wondering if Milei could become unhinged under the stress of an eventual presidency.

     “What happens if an unstable country is ruled by an unstable leader?”, asks journalist Juan González, author of a Milei biography titled El Loco (The Madman) published last month. “I’m worried he will actually try to push through his impracticable economic theories further devastating the economy and provoking violent social unrest.”

     Milei is aware of the likelihood of violent street protests. “I’m going to put the leaders of those who throw stones in jail and if they surround the Casa Rosada [the presidential palace] they’re going to have to carry me out dead,” he said recently. More pragmatically, he has announced plans to incorporate the military into battling the “new threats” of narco gangs, human traffickers and possibly internal strife.

     In a country that will celebrate four decades of uninterrupted democracy after decades of military rule when the new president takes office on 10 December 10, the prospect of the military reassuming a role in “internal conflicts” is raising alarms.

     “The remiliarisation of security and intelligence is being proposed with military commandos ready for quick strategic intervention at the national level: this idea of national security is very problematic,” said Paula Litvachky, director of the Centre for Legal and Social Studies human rights organisation.

     The pope has not said if Milei’s tirades have got under his skin. “I know they say things about me but I ignore it for my mental health,” he said in a television interview. “I will pray for them.”

     To place this disruptive event in historical context, we must see it as an echo and reflection of Operation Condor.

     As I wrote in my post of January 19 2023, Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in South America’s Destabilized Democracies; By my writing desk hangs a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa, so brilliantly interrogated in Julian Barnes’ History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, which I think marvelous and a perfect allegory of our current political, economic, and environmental dilemma as a metaphor of capitalism and fascism as forms of cannibalism of humankind and of democracy, the primary causes of the immanent collapse of our civilization, and possibly also of the extinction of our species. Just to remind myself of what is at stake in this moment of history and in revolutionary struggle, and in my writing here as a witness of history and a sacred calling in pursuit of truth.

    Monstrous evils of systemic inequality have yet again emerged from the darkness like an ambush predator to seize the nations of Central and South America in its jaws, and it is no accident but by design. Tyranny seeks the fall of democracy through the falsification, infiltration, and subversion of its institutions, in an echo and reflection of the CIA’s Operation Condor which once enacted imperial conquest and dominion of our hemisphere as Manifest Destiny.

    In the destabilization and capture of the state through economic, social, and political warfare in Peru, the ruin of Venezuela in relentless assaults which have rendered it a failed state, and in the absurd and horrific January Insurrections in Brazil and in America itself two years ago led by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, the United States of America has acted as a proxy and sock puppet of the Fourth Reich.

     Far more than this can be laid at our door, including the collapse and ruin of Central America and the Columbia-Venezuela no man’s land of barbarism, the failed state of Mexico and the monumental challenges facing the people of Chile, all results of American intervention driven by the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which our nation serves.

     These are the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle we now face throughout the Americas and the world. We are abandoned by our leaders and those who would enslave us and adrift on a tiny raft of civilization founded in the forum of Athens as a free society of equals which questions itself, as we are eating each other in learned helplessness and despair.

      To this existential crisis of faith in one another and hope for our future we may answer with the powers which yet remain to us as human beings; love, hope, faith, refusal to submit to authority, and solidarity of action in resistance.

     Here is the great test of our humanity posed by the Rashomon Gate Event of our historical moment; who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves doomed to failure and nothingness, or a United Humankind living now at the dawn of our glory?

         Of Operation Condor I have written in my journal of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.

     Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.

     In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.

     Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.

     Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.

     The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.

     As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness;  As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?

     Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, which are rooted in the history of American colonialism and capitalist economic warfare.     These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019;  There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.

     With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpad for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.

     Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:

     The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations. 

     The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. One day I may explore this incident with all of you, but in this context I wish only to cite a source and witness of history; for my cousin Raymond Eigell  trained and led the force which landed in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.

    Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam and against American dissidents including the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and the Students For A Democratic Society.

     The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.”  He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

     The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.

     During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.

     During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.

     I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.  

     The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador. 

     The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.

     Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.  

     The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.

      The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church; very like the fate of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian of Mexico whose scheme to seize Church property created a mass revolt and abandonment by European allies, except for France which sent the  Foreign Legion whose atrocities delegitimized colonial rule. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired, in intact units at their former ranks, and blended with their counterparts to create the CIA and Special Forces. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.

     The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.

     Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized the southwest including Texas and California, drew a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and create a mass resource of illegal and therefore exploitable quasi slave labor, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.

    Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.

    We must make a better future than we have the past.

Argentina was the model of how to survive a dictatorship. Javier Milei is changing that

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/24/argentina-50th-anniversary-coup-dictatorship-javier-milei?fbclid=IwY2xjawQwDZZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeLaePrKLAHt5cFKqK5EFGKhQZZF9tNqPKfsljj_am5FU6IBztqgf0qvjCe0w_aem_4q-uA9ihqllQ4EMVfTkcpA

Fate of Argentina’s disappeared remains ‘open wound’ as more victims identified: Fifty years after the military seized power and disappeared 30,000 people forcibly, some families are finding closure

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/24/argentina-disappeared-victims-identified-dirty-war?fbclid=IwY2xjawQwD2xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeGdVWPxnPXEius1dzSoaTJ7woxlLR3GYr7EK5UBByyBuW9Ec26BmkJh6a2wM_aem_Dsr6LgNXX7lymzKxnlXpmg

‘You couldn’t trust anyone’: documenting Argentina’s military dictatorship – photo essay

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/24/documenting-argentina-military-dictatorship-photo-essay

     And because one cannot interrogate the soul of Argentina without the music of class struggle:

Madonna – Don’t Cry For Me Argentina (Official Video)

Antonio Banderas – Take the Lead – Tango Scene  

(also, I love to dance the tango)

Raft of the Medusa    https://torchofliberty.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/b6dbc-gericault_medusa.jpg

1984, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon (Foreword)

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, by Jonathan Rauch

 The Decay of Lying and Other Essays, by Oscar Wilde

Wilderness of Mirrors: Intrigue, Deception, and the Secrets that Destroyed Two of the Cold War’s Most Important Agents, by David C. Martin

‘Justification of dictatorship’: outcry as Milei rewrites Argentina’s history

Blaming the victims: dictatorship denialism is on the rise in Argentina

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/29/argentina-denial-dirty-war-genocide-mauricio-macri?CMP=share_btn_url

Argentina’s National Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice – Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities

https://old.auschwitzinstitute.org/news/argentinas-national-day-remembrance-truth-justice/

Javier Milei: who is Argentina’s new president? – video profile

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2023/nov/20/javier-milei-who-is-argentina-new-president-video-profile

Who is Javier Milei? Argentina’s new far-right president ‘El Loco’ takes the stage

Argentina presidential election: far-right libertarian Javier Milei wins after rival concedes

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/20/argentina-presidential-election-far-right-libertarian-javier-milei-wins-after-rival-concedes

El loco: La vida desconocida de Javier Milei y su irrupción en la política Argentina, Juan Luis González

Economists warn electing far-right Milei would spell ‘devastation’ for Argentina:

More than 100 economists including Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh publish open letter ahead of country’s 19 November election

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/08/argentina-election-javier-milei-economists-warning

‘Bad and dangerous’: Argentina’s Trump on track to become president

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/22/argentina-javier-milei-presidential-election

The ‘false prophet’ v the pope: Argentina faces clash of ideologies in election:

Javier Milei, a culture war populist and sex coach who won country’s open primary, rages at ‘communist’ pontiff as he sets his sights on becoming president

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/27/the-false-prophet-v-the-pope-argentina-faces-clash-of-ideologies-in-election

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/operation-condor-cia-latin-america-repression-torture

                       Argentina, a reading list

The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Uki Goñi

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/759171.By_Uki_Goni_The_Real_Odessa

Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina, by Paul H. Lewis

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4787741-guerrillas-and-generals

A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, by Marguerite Feitlowitz

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/284483.A_Lexicon_of_Terror

Imagining Argentina, by Lawrence Thornton

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44762.Imagining_Argentina

The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina, by Federico Finchelstein https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18813872-the-ideological-origins-of-the-dirty-war

Spanish

24 de marzo de 2026 Día del Recuerdo de la Verdad, la Justicia y la Falsificación de la Historia en Argentina

      El nuevo presidente de Argentina, Javier Milei, ha comenzado a reescribir la historia, a blanquear los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos por su brutal y depravado modelo durante la dictadura de 1976-1983 y a borrar a sus víctimas.

      Como todos los tiranos fascistas, Milei intenta capturarnos en un frasco asesino de ecos y reflejos, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, identidades autorizadas y realidades alternativas; el desierto de los espejos, para utilizar la metáfora icónica de la falsificación a través de la propaganda y el control del pensamiento del ex jefe de contrainteligencia de la CIA, Angleton.

       El desierto de los espejos, una frase de T.S. El Gerontin de Eliot lo uso para describir la patología de la falsificación de nosotros mismos a través de propaganda, mentiras e ilusiones, historias reescritas, secretos de estado, realidades alternativas, fe autoritaria que devora verdades. Esto lo desambiguo en comparación con su opuesto, el periodismo y el testimonio de la historia como búsqueda sagrada de la verdad. Nos convertimos en falsificaciones de nosotros mismos por sistemas de poder hegemónico de élite como el patriarcado, el racismo y el capitalismo, y por aquellos que nos esclavizarían, mediante la captura de nuestras historias como robo del alma.

      James Angleton, en quien John Le Carré basó su personaje de George Smiley, también usó la frase en este sentido de manera infame, y se ha universalizado en toda la comunidad de inteligencia en la que moldeó e influyó durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial y sus secuelas, la Guerra Fría. En referencia a la biografía que David Martin escribió sobre sí mismo, titulada Wilderness of Mirrors, Angleton la describió como una “infinidad de estratagemas, engaños, artificios y todos los demás dispositivos de desinformación que el bloque soviético y sus servicios de inteligencia coordinados utilizan para confundir y dividir al mundo”. Oeste… un paisaje siempre fluido donde la realidad y la ilusión se fusionan”. Y, por supuesto, todo lo que atribuyó a los soviéticos también se aplicaba a él mismo, a su propia agencia y también a Estados Unidos, y a todos los estados, porque todos son casas de ilusión.

     La telenovela de Netflix Operación Carne Picada usa la frase, en una historia sobre la creación de un oficial ficticio que porta documentos diseñados para engañar a los nazis para que se preparen para la invasión de Europa en algún lugar que no sea Sicilia, una serie que vi con gran atención porque cada uno de nosotros es creado por nuestras historias exactamente como esta identidad falsa adherida al cuerpo de un abandonado. Dentro de cada uno de nosotros, un equipo de autores crea nuestras personas a través de historias, una red de recuerdos, historias e identidad; y lo hacen para sus propios fines, que no siempre entendemos.

      Como escribió T. S. Eliot en Gerontin: “Después de tal conocimiento, ¿qué perdón? Piensa ahora

La historia tiene muchos pasajes astutos, corredores artificiales

Y los problemas, engañan con ambiciones susurrantes,

Nos guía por vanidades”

       Somos la materia de la que están hechos los sueños, como nos enseña Shakespeare en el acto IV, escena 1 de La tempestad, una línea pronunciada por Ariel. Porque si somos seres efímeros e insustanciales, construcciones de nuestras historias, esto también significa que la naturaleza ontológica del ser humano es un terreno de lucha que puede ser reclamado mediante tomas de poder.

       La primera pregunta que cabe plantearse ante una historia es: ¿de quién es ésta?

       Siempre persiste la lucha entre las historias que contamos sobre nosotros mismos y las que cuentan otros sobre nosotros; las máscaras que hacemos para nosotros y las que otros hacen para nosotros.

       Esta es la primera revolución en la que todos debemos luchar, la lucha por la propiedad de nosotros mismos.

       ¿En quiénes entonces nos convertiremos? Se pregunta a nuestro yo por superficies, imágenes y máscaras que en cada momento negocian nuestros límites con los demás.

      A lo que responde nuestro yo secreto, el yo de la oscuridad y de la pasión, el yo que vive más allá del espejo y no conoce límites, libre de tiempo y espacio e infinito en posibilidades; ¿En quién quieres convertirte?

      Nuestro objetivo en la lucha revolucionaria es apoderarnos de la legitimidad y la autoridad del enemigo, tomar su poder, reclamando autoridad moral, moldeando la opinión a través del control de las narrativas y construyendo solidaridad defendiendo al pueblo contra aquellos que nos esclavizarían.

      Porque quien está solo, muere solo; y quien se solidariza y no abandona a sus semejantes se vuelve imparable como las mareas.

      Cuando los tiranos vengan a robar nuestras almas con su red de mentiras, que encuentren una humanidad no dividida por el miedo ni abyecta en la desesperación y la impotencia aprendida, sino unida en nuestra solidaridad y garantía de los derechos humanos universales de cada uno e invicta en la negativa a someterse.

27 de noviembre de 2023 Una sombra fascista captura a Argentina: Javier Milei

      La tiranía ahora nos habla a través de una nueva máscara, mientras El Loco ocupa un lugar central en Argentina. La vorágine de miedo, poder y fuerza que crea tiranías de fuerza y control, genera guerras de conquista y dominio imperial y encuentra su forma final en genocidios y deshumanización son sistemas universales de opresión, legados de nuestra historia de los cuales debemos emerger.

      El mal se origina en el miedo, miedo a menudo abrumador y generalizado al que las autoridades al servicio del poder han dado forma y objetivo. La centralización del poder en estados carcelarios es inherente a las sociedades humanas porque sus causas son; de ahí las hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios de las élites que se basan en jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad excluyente y la subyugación de las castas de esclavos.

      Hacer una idea sobre un tipo de personas es un acto de violencia.

       La política es el arte del miedo, como me enseñó mi padre, y en Argentina nuestro miedo nos habla como un eco y reflejo del nuestro, y revela el parasitismo de las relaciones de Estados Unidos con el mundo a lo largo de nuestra historia.

       Aquí hablo del Terror Rojo, la Lista Negra de Hollywood y otras formas nacionalistas de fuerza social que utilizaron el miedo para fabricar consentimiento, centralizar el poder y legitimar la autoridad después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

     Este fue nuestro Segundo Período Imperial, desde el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta la caída de la Unión Soviética, influenciado por nuestra asimilación de la élite nazi a nuestras comunidades de inteligencia y fuerzas especiales en el momento de su fundación, cuando la OSS se convirtió en la CIA y la Jedburg. Los equipos se convirtieron en los Boinas Verdes.

      Siendo el Primer Imperio Americano la Conquista y las políticas de Destino Manifiesto que comenzaron con el genocidio de los Nativos Americanos, se globalizaron con la guerra contra los Piratas de Berbería del Norte de África que fundaron la Infantería de Marina, y alcanzaron su apogeo en nuestra conquista del Imperio Español en 1898, que nos dio las Islas Filipinas, Cuba y Guam mientras robamos las islas hawaianas porque pudimos, y terminó con la caída de la civilización en La guerra para acabar con todas las guerras.

      El Tercer Imperio o Período Imperial de la historia estadounidense comienza con Nueve Once y posiblemente termine con nuestro abandono de Afganistán; esto no está escrito y ahora está en nuestras manos.

      ¿Cómo ha remodelado Estados Unidos y el mundo la histeria anticomunista de la era posterior a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, que yo llamo el Segundo Imperio?

      Primero, una guerra cultural total emprendida por el estado contra sus propios ciudadanos que nos dio reversiones de nuestros valores como In God We Trust on our money, que nos pide que no creamos en el Infinito sino en la autoridad del estado para hablar en Su nombre. el Juramento a la Bandera que sustituye al Estado por nosotros mismos como sus copropietarios como fuente de autoridad en una sociedad libre de iguales y por nuestra lealtad mutua como solidaridad y un grupo de hermanos, hermanas y otros.

      En segundo lugar, una guerra de dominio imperial que impone hegemonías de riqueza, poder y privilegios por parte de las élites en todo el mundo, a veces centradas en la apropiación del petróleo como recurso estratégico, pero también simplemente en la ocupación de espacios como en un juego de go. Los ejemplos de la campaña global de terror y tiranía de Estados Unidos a través de estados proxy proliferan rápidamente a partir de la codificación del Método de Yakarta por la CIA en 1965 contra Sukarno, y se convierten en una interminable letanía de males, atrocidades, depravaciones, genocidios y trabajo esclavo; el Genocidio Maya en Guatemala y las guerras encubiertas en Centroamérica que resultaron en el Escándalo Irán-Contra, la alianza feroz y depravada de Estados Unidos con el régimen del Apartheid de Sudáfrica, la Guerra de los Mil Días en Vietnam, todo un Nudo Gordiano de maldades e intervenciones incluyendo nuestra locos intentos de asesinato contra Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba y otros héroes de la lucha por la liberación a quienes un Estados Unidos fiel a nuestros ideales fundacionales habría aclamado como hermanos en la revolución anticolonial y habría apoyado en lugar de estar en contra.

      En Argentina, los ecos y reflejos de nuestra historia nos confrontan con las consecuencias del fracaso de la empatía como subversión de la democracia, y todos deberíamos prestar atención al hombre detrás de la cortina mientras las luces de la libertad se apagan y caen en la oscuridad una a una. uno en todo el mundo.

      Porque como nos enseña George Santayana en La vida de la razón; “Quienes olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla”.  

     Para ubicar este evento disruptivo en un contexto histórico, debemos verlo como un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor.

      Como escribí en mi publicación del 19 de enero de 2023, Ecos y reflejos del imperialismo estadounidense y la Operación Cóndor en las democracias desestabilizadas de América del Sur; Junto a mi escritorio cuelga una reproducción del cuadro de Théodore Géricault de 1818, La balsa de la Medusa, tan brillantemente interrogado en la Historia del mundo en diez capítulos y medio de Julian Barnes, que creo que es maravilloso y una alegoría perfecta de nuestra actual situación política y económica. y el dilema ambiental como metáfora del capitalismo y el fascismo como formas de canibalismo de la humanidad y de la democracia, las causas principales del colapso inminente de nuestra civilización, y posiblemente también de la extinción de nuestra especie. Sólo para recordar lo que está en juego en este momento de la historia y en la lucha revolucionaria, y en mis escritos aquí como testigo de la historia y un llamado sagrado en la búsqueda de la verdad.

     Los monstruosos males de la desigualdad sistémica han surgido una vez más de la oscuridad como un depredador de emboscada para apoderarse de las naciones de América Central y del Sur en sus fauces, y no es casualidad sino intencionalmente. La tiranía busca la caída de la democracia a través de la falsificación, infiltración y subversión de sus instituciones, en un eco y reflejo de la Operación Cóndor de la CIA que una vez promulgó la conquista imperial y el dominio de nuestro hemisferio como Destino Manifiesto.

     En la desestabilización y captura del Estado a través de la guerra económica, social y política en Perú, la ruina de Venezuela en ataques implacables que la han convertido en un Estado fallido, y en las absurdas y horribles insurrecciones de enero en Brasil y en los propios Estados Unidos hace dos años. Liderados anteriormente por Nuestro Payaso del Terror, el Traidor Trump, los Estados Unidos de América han actuado como representantes y títeres del Cuarto Reich.

      Se nos puede achacar mucho más que esto, incluido el colapso y la ruina de Centroamérica y la tierra de nadie de barbarie entre Colombia y Venezuela, el estado fallido de México y los desafíos monumentales que enfrenta el pueblo de Chile, todos ellos resultados de la intervención estadounidense. impulsado por las hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios a las que sirve nuestra nación.

      Estas son las condiciones impuestas de la lucha revolucionaria que enfrentamos ahora en todo el continente americano y el mundo. Estamos abandonados por nuestros líderes y aquellos que nos esclavizarían y a la deriva en una pequeña balsa de civilización fundada en el foro de Atenas como una sociedad libre de iguales que se cuestiona a sí misma, mientras nos devoramos unos a otros en erudita impotencia y desesperación.

       A esta crisis existencial de fe mutua y de esperanza en nuestro futuro podemos responder con los poderes que aún nos quedan como seres humanos; amor, esperanza, fe, rechazo a someterse a la autoridad y solidaridad de acción en resistencia.

      Aquí está la gran prueba de nuestra humanidad planteada por el Evento de la Puerta Rashomon de nuestro momento histórico; ¿en quién queremos llegar a ser los humanos? ¿Amos y esclavos condenados al fracaso y a la nada, o una Humanidad Unida que vive ahora en los albores de nuestra gloria?

          Sobre la Operación Cóndor escribí en mi diario del 7 de abril de 2021, Cómo el imperialismo estadounidense creó nuestra crisis humanitaria en la frontera; En abril de este año hace cuarenta y seis años, Estados Unidos lanzó la Operación Cóndor, una campaña global para desestabilizar y reprimir a los gobiernos y movimientos socialistas y defender el capitalismo como fuerza hegemónica y sus jerarquías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegios. Esto sigue siendo relevante para nosotros hoy porque es el origen de muchas de las fuerzas de empuje que impulsan oleadas de refugiados hacia nuestra frontera, y de la horrible crisis humanitaria y prueba de nuestra democracia creada por el imperialismo estadounidense.

      Migración es una palabra que oculta tanto las condiciones que la desencadenan como nuestra propia complicidad en crearlas como consecuencia de nuestras políticas de colonialismo, militarismo anticomunista y guerra económica que duran décadas; devastación ecológica con su sequía y hambruna, pobreza y desestabilización social y política, una era de tiranía y terror estatal, genocidio y limpieza étnica, fe armada y su terror sexual patriarcal, y guerras multigeneracionales.

      En términos de refugiados que huyen a Estados Unidos en busca de seguridad y supervivencia, así como de libertad e igualdad, estamos hablando principalmente de Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua, aunque la zona infernal de Colombia y Venezuela ahora representa a muchos, y con el colapso de la región central autoridad en México y su degeneración en una región de señores de la guerra, oligarcas y sindicatos del crimen feudal, tenemos refugiados del propio México, así como trabajadores estacionales tradicionales.

      El trabajo migrante es trabajo esclavo; Esta es la gran verdad que Estados Unidos nunca ha enfrentado y por la que ahora debe responder ante las masas que sufren en nuestra frontera. Sectores enteros de nuestra economía funcionan con él; agricultura en la que la mano de obra se convierte en un recurso estratégico ya que pasamos hambre sin ella, pero también el cuidado de niños y ancianos, la hospitalidad y algunas manufacturas. amer La riqueza y el poder de Ica son creados para nosotros por otros a quienes exportamos los costos reales de producción, otros que deben permanecer invisibles y explotables como mano de obra ilegal no regulada para exprimirles hasta el último gramo de valor para nuestras elites. De esta manera utilizamos la disparidad económica como arma al servicio del poder y los privilegios, y creamos y mantenemos jerarquías de alteridad excluyente y supremacía blanca.

      Los intereses de las hegemonías de riqueza y poder de las élites convergen aquí con los del privilegio racial y la supremacía blanca en una toxicidad histórica, en paralelo con el surgimiento del estado carcelario como instrumento para volver a esclavizar a los ciudadanos negros como trabajo penitenciario y la represión de la Movimiento por los Derechos Civiles, y lo han hecho desde sus orígenes. Uno de esos puntos de origen es la apropiación, el ocultamiento y la instrumentalización por parte de Estados Unidos de los criminales de guerra nazis en la represión de la disidencia y la conquista del mundo.

      El Cuarto Reich del que Trump fue una figura decorativa no surgió de la nada como Atenea de la cabeza de Zeus, sino que fue una invención del imperialismo estadounidense. Como tal, su historia y su carácter como amenaza global a la democracia pueden estudiarse en la crisis de refugiados y migraciones que ha dado origen, y en los legados del uso del fascismo por parte de nuestra nación como instrumento de dominio en las Américas, durante tanto tiempo. lo usábamos para conquistar a otros, nos estaba usando a nosotros para apoderarnos de los Estados Unidos de América y del mundo.

      Como escribí en mi publicación del 18 de febrero de 2020, Guatemala: Nuestro Corazón de Tinieblas; Mientras secuestramos y encerramos a refugiados en campos de concentración y prisiones secretas, y expulsamos a otros de regreso a un México cuyo gobierno está inactivo ante el poder de sus organizaciones criminales, debemos reflexionar sobre las causas de esta histórica migración masiva desde el Corredor Seco de Guatemala en Centroamérica. , El Salvador, Honduras y Nicaragua; ¿Por qué sucede esto y qué se puede hacer para solucionar los problemas que lo provocan?

      La sequía y la hambruna causadas por el calentamiento global y el cambio climático son causas inmediatas claras y factores desencadenantes de la migración actual, que tienen sus raíces en la historia del colonialismo estadounidense y la guerra económica capitalista. Estas condiciones han empeorado problemas de larga data de pobreza endémica y violencia y criminalidad generalizadas, legados del colonialismo histórico y de las políticas e intervenciones imperialistas y capitalistas estadounidenses, que describí en mi publicación del 4 de septiembre de 2019; Existe una conexión interesante entre el caos que creamos en Centroamérica, que está provocando un éxodo masivo de inmigración a nuestras fronteras, y la teoría de la conspiración del reemplazo islámico de los europeos que inspira nuestra mayor amenaza terrorista hoy; Muchos de los supremacistas blancos que gobernaron Argelia como colonia de Francia, principalmente ex soldados nazis que se unieron a la Legión Extranjera después del final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, fueron contratados después de su caída en 1962 por el gobierno de los Estados Unidos para gobernar El Salvador y Guatemala como regímenes títeres para proteger nuestras ganancias corporativas.

      Con ellos vino la misma ideología y el mismo sueño de una patria y asilo para los nazis fugitivos, y una base de operaciones segura y plataforma de lanzamiento para el Cuarto Reich, como el de aquellos que huyeron de la caída de la colonia de Argelia como un etnoestado blanco a Francia y culparon a Charles de Gaulle por su abandono, y cuyos descendientes forman ahora el núcleo del Frente Nacional de Jean-Marie Le Pen.

      Entre los efectos directos de la asociación secreta entre Estados Unidos y nuestros antiguos adversarios nazis se incluyen:

      La toma de Guatemala en 1954 por la CIA de Eisenhower, que reemplazó a un marxista que se había apoderado de tierras propiedad de la United Fruit y las redistribuyó entre campesinos indios con un vendedor de muebles de Honduras, Castillo Armas. Durante el curso de este golpe, Estados Unidos bombardeó la ciudad de Guatemala, mató a 9.000 comunistas, disolvió los sindicatos, expulsó a los ocupantes ilegales, elaboró una lista negra de unos 70.000 izquierdistas, construyó escuadrones de la muerte y prisiones secretas, dio rienda suelta a la tortura y el bandolerismo, creó una sociedad duradera. frente político, el MLN, y empezamos a sacar provecho de nuestras plantaciones.

      La toma de Guatemala en 1961 por la C.I.A. El oficial Willauer al frente de 200 hombres, un abogado de Harvard que había volado como primer oficial de Chennault con los Flying Tigers en China. Guatemala fue el escenario de la invasión de Bahía de Cochinos a Cuba. Quizás algún día explore este incidente con todos ustedes, pero en este contexto sólo deseo citar una fuente y un testimonio de la historia; porque mi primo Raymond Eigell entrenó y dirigió la fuerza que desembarcó en Cuba durante la Bahía de Cochinos.

     A lo largo del período 1960-63 de una guerra civil que continuó hasta 1996, Estados Unidos aplastó una rebelión pro Castro utilizando seis agentes de la CIA. bombarderos, tropas de choque cubanas exiliadas y boinas verdes que aprovecharon la oportunidad para probar teorías de contrainsurgencia utilizadas más tarde en Vietnam y contra disidentes estadounidenses, incluidos los Panteras Negras, el Movimiento Indio Americano y los Estudiantes por una Sociedad Democrática.

      El ascenso en 1974 de un funcionario de Armas nombró a Alarcón para la presidencia de Guatemala, quien institucionalizó el MLN, declarando “Soy fascista y he tratado de modelar mi partido según la Falange Española”. Era, por supuesto, un agente de la CIA. agente. Nixon lo llevó una vez a su peregrinación anual para consultar con lo que llamó su consejero espiritual, el infame criminal de guerra nazi Josef Mengele.

      La toma del poder y la presidencia en 1982 de Ríos Montt, un maestro evangélico de escuela dominical y amigo personal de Jerry Falwell y Pat Robertson, quien suspendió la constitución, reemplazó las cortes por tribunales secretos, intensificó la guerra de tierra arrasada, la tortura y las desapariciones de sus predecesores y una cosa más. Durante este, el período más terrible de la guerra civil en toda Centroamérica, cuando Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras eran de hecho una sola nación gobernada por restos de los nazis que habíamos trasplantado de la Argelia francesa como regímenes títeres estadounidenses, y con la plena autoridad de Ronald Reagan y Ríos Montt utilizaron al protestantismo como arma contra la invasión de la teología católica de la liberación.

      Durante los 18 meses del genocidio maya, en el que sus escuadrones de la muerte mataron a 3.000 personas cada mes y aniquilaron 600 aldeas, también instituyó un sistema de trabajos forzados en campos de concentración inspirados en el sistema de apartheid de Sudáfrica y gobernados por el terror utilizando a antiguos británicos. unidades de policía y de la Milicia Naranja Protestante contratadas en Belfast, una fuerza mercenaria que tenía pasaportes de Hong Kong espléndidamente legales, cortesía del gobierno de Thatcher.

      Durante más de 35 años de guerra civil en Guatemala, incluida la campaña genocida de limpieza étnica de Ríos Montt contra los indios nativos, alrededor de medio millón de indios fueron asesinados, más de un millón fueron reclutados para el servicio militar y utilizados contra su propio pueblo, y decenas de miles fueron expulsados a México. como refugiados, y la mayoría del resto trabajó hasta la muerte en los campos de concentración. Ningún ejército americano vino a liberarlos; no eran blancos y a nadie le importaba mientras las ganancias fluyeran. Guatemala es el Congo belga de Estados Unidos; nuestro corazón de oscuridad.

      Pienso en esto todos los días mientras como mi plátano matutino, porque cada uno es la forma viva de un llanto silencioso, el fantasma de una lágrima, el recuerdo de la atrocidad y el horror, algo como muchos otros de frágil belleza y fugaz placer conquistado. por la brutalidad y el robo de la esperanza, el dolor, la sangre y la muerte se manifiestan. Por los muertos y por los agravios del pasado nada puedo hacer; son los vivos quienes deben ser vengados y el futuro el que debe ser redimido.

      La fundación de ARENA en El Salvador en 1981 y la presidencia entre 1982 y 1983 de Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, hijo de uno de los legionarios e inmigrantes originales del Cuerpo Africano/OEA argelino francés y líder de escuadrones de la muerte desde 1972, cuando fue entrenado en el Escuela de las Américas de Estados Unidos, a menudo llamada escuela para criminales de guerra. Durante el pico de la guerra civil en 1983-84, alrededor de 8.000 personas fueron asesinadas cada mes en El Salvador.

      El golpe de estado hondureño de 1963-75 y la dictadura militar de Arellano, para cuyo régimen se acuñó el término República Bananera, y, por supuesto, la conducción de la Guerra de la Contra a partir de 1980, que incluyó la invasión hondureña de Nicaragua en 1984, apoyada por 5.500 tropas estadounidenses.

      Juntos, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras fueron gobernados durante más de una generación por Estados Unidos a través de nuestros tiranos títeres y los partidos ARENA y MLN que creamos. Pero hay más; mucho más, de los cuales mencionaré aquí sólo cuatro breves ejemplos más.

      El gobierno de Brasil de 1964 a 1985 por el Partido Arena y su legado de tortura y terror de Estado que terminó con la quiebra total de la nación.

       El golpe militar de 1976 en Argentina y la guerra civil que le siguió, durante la cual desaparecieron unas 20.000 personas. De nuestras participaciones anteriores; Perón había sido un protegido de Franco y Mussolini, y Evita fue asesinada no por nosotros sino por la Inteligencia del Vaticano con envenenamiento por radiación debido a la campaña de Perón contra la Iglesia; muy parecido al destino del emperador Habsburgo Maximiliano de México, cuyo plan para apoderarse de las propiedades de la Iglesia provocó una revuelta masiva y el abandono de los aliados europeos, excepto Francia, que envió la Legión Extranjera cuyas atrocidades deslegitimaron el dominio colonial. El Vaticano también dirigió la ruta de escape suiza utilizada por Otto Skorzeny y otros oficiales de las SS durante la caída del Tercer Reich, a quienes contratamos más tarde, en unidades intactas en sus antiguas filas, y se fusionaron con sus homólogos para crear la CIA y las Fuerzas Especiales. El halago más descarado que he oído jamás dirigido a Oliver North fue compararlo con Skorzeny.

      El asesinato de Allende en Chile en 1973 y el apoyo al régimen de Pinochet que mató a uno de cada cien de sus ciudadanos.

      En cuanto a México, hace mucho tiempo nos apoderamos del suroeste, incluidos Texas y California, trazamos una línea en la arena para convertir la disparidad en un arma y crear un recurso masivo de mano de obra cuasi esclava ilegal y, por lo tanto, explotable, y ahora llamamos extranjeros a todos los que están en el mundo.

     Por otro lado, quien viene aquí a recoger la fruta, lavar los platos y limpiar los baños, nuestros propios sobrinos y sobrinas, hijos y nietos, se reirían en la cara ante la sugerencia de que se ensucien las manos ellos mismos.

     El fascismo es un pecado de orgullo cuyos efectos todavía reverberan, propagándose hacia afuera en círculos cada vez más amplios como una fuerza de contagio como las ondas de una piedra arrojada a un estanque. Y de ello somos cómplices todos los que nos llamamos americanos.

     Debemos crear un futuro mejor que el pasado.

March 23 2026 With Spring Returns Hope

We welcome and celebrate these first days of spring, which follow the vernal equinox of winter’s last night of glorious darkness under a silver moon like the eye of a terrible and mad god, a night filled with the wailing of the numberless dead children cast upon seas of unknowable despair and horror in Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine, in the concentration camps of America now a captive state of the Fourth Reich under a Russian puppet tyrant, in the other theatres of World War Three and dozens of other conflicts not of their making throughout the world.

     This is our normal; and as I have often written, normality is deviant.

     As their names are erased and become nothing by the rain of death sent by monstrous tyrants to whom only people like themselves are truly human, I feel each like a brand on my flesh which I must now bear forward into the future.

     Speak to me of “good people on both sides” when you have held the dying who do not know why they have been killed.

      Nor for whose profit.

     Since the first bandit king enslaved others to do the hard and dirty work in creating his wealth and glory, and set armed thugs and overseers to keep them in service to power, humankind has suffered under the brutal enforcement of law and order which maintains the engines of our commodification, falsification, and dehumanization.

     Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just Authority.

     Wars of imperial conquest and dominion, colonialism and occupation, and of ethnic cleansing and genocide such as we now witness unfolding in Palestine,   Ukraine, and throughout the Middle East as the Israeli-American war to conquer a Greater Israel from the nations of the Iranian Dominion becomes generalized, are forms and consequences of far more massive and near universal systems of unequal power and oppression, and this we must resist.

     Let us “place our bodies on the gears of the machine” of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as Mario Savio teaches us, and our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth. Only then, in solidarity, can we begin to realize our possibilities of becoming human.

     Such are my thoughts among endless chasms of darkness, as the seasons change this night.

     But with the dawn came a day of songbirds, the first flowers of crocuses and daffodils, rebirth, change, and the joy of total freedom to balance the terror of our nothingness. Such is the magic of nature, for with spring returns hope.

      Soon my cherry trees will flower, and though the blossoms will also fall their great and precious beauty is in part defined by their ephemeral and transitory nature, unique and irreproducible as is ours, and one day we will soar with them on the wind, if we are lucky, and know enough to surrender control to the tides of change and go with them, to ride among the unknowns.

      At any moment, for any reason or none at all, our dances with Death will come to an end; she will dip us, and let go, and we will fall, endlessly and forever.

      I will not go quietly, and as the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982 goes I will resist and cease not, and abandon not my fellows. And if I must rise from the ruins to make yet another Last Stand after a lifetime of Last Stands, beyond hope of victory or survival, I will bet my refusal to submit against any earthly power or tyranny, and the same for the unconquerable human will to be free.  

      Once while leading a discussion in my English class on identities as imposed conditions of struggle, a student asked, in reference to ethnicity and the histories of our possessing ghosts, “What are you?”  I answered, quoting my favorite death poem of the kamikaze pilots; “I am a leaf on the wind.” Over twenty years later it showed up as the signature line of Hoban Washburne in the telenovela Firefly and the film Serenity and now is pervasive in pop culture; I know the line found its way into film from a student in that class because the character is replied to by another exactly as I was; “What does that mean?” Regardless of the context as my personal history, the principle remains true for all of us fragile and mortal beings who in living surf the vast and unfathomable probability waves of unfolding futures; how to live with grandeur under imposed conditions of struggle in which everything in life is more powerful than we are.

      Among the natural cycles of change of which we are expressions, Spring offers us the chance for reimagination and transformation, and begins the festival of Ostara we now celebrate as Easter or Day of the Bunny Goddess.

     All things are now possible; how shall we use this power?    

     Here are some of my previous interrogations of the idea of hope, which I preface with a brief history of the praxis or action of the value of hope in my life mission to discover and engage the origins of evil and in the reimagination and transformation of myself and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value as transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, seizures of power from authority, violations of normality, and freedom from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.

     How does hope work? As resilience and a sustaining function, what is its adaptive value in survival under our imposed conditions of struggle?

     As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession; As a student of the origins of evil I studied everything, but especially the nexus of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, and wrote, spoke, taught, and organized always, for democracy and liberation from systems of unequal power and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for our universal human rights and against dehumanization, tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for the values of a free society of equals; among them liberty, equality, truth, and justice.

      During vacations from graduate school and teaching English, Forensics, and Socratic seminars in various subjects through the Gifted and Talented Education program at Sonoma Valley High School and my practice as a counselor, I like Don Quixote wandered the world in search of windmills that might be giants at which to tilt.

     One day I crossed beyond our topologies of meaning and value and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden into the unknown, the blank places on the maps of our becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, and never returned. I live now where the dragons dwell, and I wouldn’t trade a moment of the life I have lived for any treasure on earth, for I am free.

     It happened like this; one day I was driving from my day job teaching high school in Sonoma as a sacred calling to pursue the truth to my third profession, teaching martial arts being the first and all then running at the same time, in San Francisco where I practiced the repair of the world as a counselor and healer of the flaws of our humanity, things I loved but had begun to feel determinative of my scope of action, when the lightning of insight struck. In that moment of illumination I realized that I was literally in Hell, trapped in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, for I had lived the same day more times than I could remember and was about to do so yet again. And I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to do this.

     I recalled a line of poetry from a book on the game of Go, handwritten variously in Chinese, Japanese, and English which had mysteriously been left at the front door of our home when I was in seventh grade; “This is a message from your future self; I return from living fifty thousand years rapturous in sky, to find you living in a box. Seize the heavens and be free.”

     We had just brought down the Berlin Wall, and all things had become possible. So I wondered, what if we brought down all the other walls, beginning with my own?

     So like Milton’s rebel angel I escaped from Hell and took a wrong turn to the airport where I bought a ticket to the Unknown; the agent asked me where I wanted to go, and I said the other side of the world. I had no idea where I was flying to, and when I arrived in glittering Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the possibilities of epicurean delights were ones I could have explored at home in San Francisco had I wished, I once again found a Forbidden Door to the Unknown in a bus station beside a temple of Ganesha with a map that showed where all the roads ended in nothingness, an enormous empty space along the spine of the Malay Peninsula. I didn’t want to do what everyone else did; I wanted to do what no one else did. So I took a bus to where the road ends, where a dirt track led into the forest of the Cameron Highlands, and with nothing but whatever happened to be in my pockets began walking into an unmapped wilderness.

     So began a journey from which I have never truly returned, which may be described with the words of Obi Wan to Luke Skywalker as “some damn fool idealistic crusade.”

     Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something of our humanity might be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.

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

     What if we told students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all, and the best you can do is survive another day in refusal to submit and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the Abyss since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.

      Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.

       Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us.  In our refusal to submit, disobedience, disbelief, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces or terrorizes us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.

     Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

     Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?

     Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another last stand, there is hope.

     And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.

      Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as wild things who are masterless and free.

      So for examples of the action of hope in my life, and my witness of history. Why then do we hope? What good is it, that we evolved such a thing?

     All I have to offer in this are words, ephemeral and impermanent as leaves taking flight in the wind; a poor substitute for the golden coins which should be laid upon our eyes to bear us to unknown shores where we may be free from the limits of our form and the material basis of our lives under unequal power as imposed conditions of struggle.

      We must struggle against such authoritarian forces of coercion as a universal process of becoming human, and against tyranny and terror our best defense is solidarity, loyalty, mutual aid and interdependence, faith in each other, and our duty of care for each other. If these should fail, those who would enslave us win.

     A maker of mischief, I; and a bringer of Chaos, bearing songs of liberation. I cannot free us from the systems of unequal power which entrap us, but I can illuminate their limits, flaws, and internal contradictions which will inevitably bring about their collapse, and if we all of us act together we may seize our power to reimagine and transform our possibilities of becoming human and the choices we make about how to be human together.

     And maybe one thing more; a spell, if you will, or a wish; I reach once more into Pandora’s Box to problematize and interrogate hope as a balance for despair.

     As I wrote in my post of September 27 2020, What Do We Need Now to Forge A Future For Humankind?; We live in interesting times,  a phrase attributed in popular culture as Chinese but coined by the father of Prime Minister Chamberlain in a speech of 1898, possibly a paraphrase of the line “Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos” in a short story of 1627 by Feng Menglong; beset by complex and interdependent problems; existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, and confronted by a political crisis of identity driven by pervasive and overwhelming fears and the modern pathology of disconnectedness. This is a moment of decision, with extinction and civilizational annihilation hanging in the balance, of the wonder and terror of total freedom, and our choices will gloriously expand the possibilities of becoming human or cast us into oblivion. 

     History begins with us, or ends with us.

     What do we need now if we are to forge a future for humankind?

      So I asked the question three years ago, which I revisit now to recontexualize the praxis of hope as historical and political as well as personal and psychological, one which shapes us both as individuals and as nations.

      Here follows a Book of Hope, to balance against despair in surviving life disruptive events, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.

        What is hope, and how is it useful?

       Hope is power, an inherent and defining quality of human being, and a primary force of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization.

      Hope dances with faith and love as parts of us which cannot be taken from us, a final space of free creative play which escapes the darkness and those who would enslave us, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and resistant to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and their carceral states of force and control.

     Hope is also a fulcrum of change not only for ourselves in becoming human, but also of seizures of power in revolutionary and liberation struggle, a form of poetic vision which allows us to see beyond the limits of our material and social conditions to diagnose systemic flaws and contradictions and find new ways of being human together.

     These aspects of hope as recursive processes of change, adaptation, and growth in living systems, social, political, and psychological as well as biological ecologies which construct us, make of hope a kind of freedom inborn in us, and interconnected with ideas of agency, autonomy, and liberty.

     How can we find the will and power to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival? This has been the great question of my life posed by existential threats in the first three   dances with Death and the first two Last Stands which created and defined me; first when the police opened fire on the student protestors my mother and I were among at Bloody Thursday in People’s Park Berkeley 1969 and I died and beheld myriads of possible human futures in a moment outside of time, second when I was nearly executed by police bounty hunters in Brazil in 1974 for refusal to stand aside from the street children they were authorized to kill for being who the system made them, and third in Beirut 1982 when I was given the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet as we refused to surrender to the Israeli soldiers who had just set fire to our café and expected to be burned alive.

     In my very long journey to becoming who I am now, I began from the position of Camus regarding hope that it is an instrument of our subjugation to authority through faith weaponized in service to power and the falsification of lies, illusions, rewritten histories, authorized identities, and alternate realities; the Wilderness of Mirrors, to use Angleton’s iconic metaphor. Hope for me then must be abandoned if we are to become free; with time I began to see instead hope as a form of freedom, one crucial to our defiance of authority and seizures of power. 

      If the Wilderness of Mirrors is our prison, it is also our arena; and here we must escape being prey for those who would enslave and dehumanize us, and become the hunters.

      First, here is the place from which I began, as I wrote in my post of August 20 2019, On Becoming Human; This morning I was rereading my favorite stories by H.P. Lovecraft on his birthday and writing some thoughts about his work in my literary blog Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium, sister site to this one, when I realized that his surreal mythology illuminates the existential crisis of meaning and values which confronts us in America today and in the world at large in what is rapidly becoming a post-democracy global civilization under the Fourth Reich, and that we have faced similar peril after both World Wars as western civilization destroyed and recreated itself; how can we go on when the values of the Enlightenment, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, have failed us? It is as if we looked to the heavens for signs and portents of guidance, only to find writ large the words, “I do not exist.”

     One’s interpretation of a universe empty of meaning and value except for that which we ourselves create, a Nietzschean cosmos of dethroned gods as explored by Sartre and Marx or a Lovecraftian and Pauline one of Absurdist faith, referential to classical sources, of mad, idiot gods who are also malign, tyrannical, and hostile to humanity, ideal figures of Trump and his lunatic presidency of Absurdist-Nihilist Theatre of Cruelty whose acts reference Artaud and Pirandello, rests with our solution to the riddle of Pandora’s Box; is hope a gift, or the most terrible of evils?

     Hope is a two- edged sword; it frees us and opens limitless possibilities, but in severing the bonds of history also steals from us our anchorages and disempowers the treasures of our past as shaping forces. Hope in its negative form directs us toward a conservative project of finding new gods to replace the fallen as we so often do with liberators who become tyrants, or like T.S. Elliot of gathering up and reconstructing our traditions as a precondition of faith. This is why the abandonment of hope is vital to Sartrean authenticity and to the rebellion of Camus; we must have no gods and no masters before we are free to own ourselves. The gates of Dante’s Hell, which bear the legend “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” lead to ourselves and to our own liberation.

    True freedom requires disbelief. Freedom means self-ownership and the smashing of the idols.   

      Freedom can be terrible as well as wonderful. Among the most impactful stories I ever heard from my mother was how she went to the grocery store after my father died and experienced a full stop lightningbolt awakening, thinking, “What do I want? I know what my husband wanted, what my children want, but I don’t know what I want.”

     It is in this moment in which we claim our nothingness that we free ourselves of all claims upon us, a transformative rebirth in which we become self-created beings.

     Now imagine humanity after civilization destroyed itself twice in the last century’s world wars, and is now in the process of doing so again in an undeclared World War Three being savagely fought in ten theatres of war, facing that same awakening to freedom and to loss, wherein our old values have betrayed us and must be forged anew, and we are bereft of signposts in an undiscovered country, exactly the same as a widow on her first trip shopping for dinner for no one but herself.

     Who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?

     Our responses to this awakening to possibilities tend to correspond with one of the primary shaping forces of historical civilization; the conserving force as exemplified by T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, and the revolutionary force as exemplified by Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

     Everyone possesses and uses both forces just as all organisms do in terms of their evolution. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of structural form as identity, or ruptures to our prochronism, the history of our successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

      For both nations and persons, the process of identity formation is the same. We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human. This individuation is controlled by a second or historical principle; humans create themselves over time, and a third or social principle; humans create each other through their connections and relationships including the means of exchange. And these three principles, which concern our self-construal, history and memory, and social interconnectedness in multiple frames, can produce conflicts with each other which must be negotiated in liberation struggle.

     This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership and control of identity or persona, a term derived from the masks of Greek theatre, between the masks that others make for us and the ones we make for ourselves.

     As I wrote in my post of January 20 2021, The Turning of the Tide: With Inauguration Day Comes the Return of Hope; With this Inauguration Day comes the return of hope as a fulcrum of resilience and renewal; now begins the great work of reimagining America and ourselves.

     I have a complex relationship with the idea of hope, with the ambiguity, relativity, and context-determined multiple truths and simultaneity of meaning which defines hope, that thing of redemption and transformative power which remains in Pandora’s Box after all the evils have escaped, as either the most terrible of our nightmares or the gift of the miraculous depending on how we use it. 

      As Dorothy says to the Wizard of Oz and makes him admit of himself, hope is a humbug, but it is also a power which cannot be taken from us by force and control, and like faith of which it is a cipher holds open the door of our liberation and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.

    Hope is a seizure of power.

    As we believe, so we may become.

    Human being, meaning, and value originate in this uniquely human capacity to transcend and grow beyond our limits as an act of transformation, rebirth, and self-creation, and as a seizure of power over our identities. Among other things it allows us to escape the flags of our skin and inhabit that of others; to forge bonds through empathy and compassion and enact altruism and mercy. 

    This is what is most human in us, a quality which defines the limits of what is human, and which we must cherish and conserve as our most priceless gift. 

     Hope is the thing which can restore us to ourselves and each other, unite a divided nation and begin to heal our legacies of historical inequalities and injustices, and it can be wielded as an instrument which counters fear. Hope is the balance of fear, and fear is a negative space of hope; and because fear births hate, racism, fascism, hierarchies of elite privilege and belonging and categories of exclusionary otherness, hope is a power of liberation and of revolutionary struggle.

     What do I hope for now, watching the Inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as love triumphs over hate and diversity and inclusion over racism as national policy? I hope that the ideals and values we have embraced today as symbols will in time become real.

      And I hope that the peaceful transfer of power and the viability and resilience of democracy will never again be threatened or called into question by any act of treason, tyranny, or terror.

      Regarding that I have a story to share with you about a previous election, during which the Cambodian refugees who had been assigned for acculturation to my mother as a high school English teacher with a facility for languages, all vanished overnight from the town. They returned to her classroom in family groups two to three weeks later, and she asked them where they went. One of them answered; “To the hills. New President, soldiers come now.” She told them that can’t happen here, and the reply was “That’s what we thought before Pol Pot.” I imagine that’s what most of us thought, before Trump.

     President Biden and Vice President Harris bring us hope and promise of a Restoration of democracy and our universal human rights, and to work toward unity and healing the nation. In this great cause let us work together with them to restore honor to our nation and create a free society of equals built on objective and testable truth, impartial and fair justice, liberty, equality, and a secular state.

     Let us raise again the fallen cause of the American Revolution, and bear it forward into the future.

     Amanda Gorman, America’s National Youth Poet Laureate, a cum laude graduate of Harvard in Sociology, delivered a brilliant and visionary inaugural address in which hope is a major theme with her poem, The Hill We Climb. In an NPR interview she said she studied the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Winston Churchill in writing it, and has signposted her references to the play Hamilton on Twitter, a poem completed on the most terrible night of our history, when Trump unleashed a mob of white supremacist terrorists under a Confederate battle flag to seize our capitol and execute our representatives in the January 6 Insurrection;

“We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,

Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.

And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,

It can never be permanently defeated.

In this truth, in this faith we trust.

For while we have our eyes on the future,

History has its eyes on us.”

     Her article in Harper’s articulates her major source and reference as she describes herself writing The Hill We Climb in terms of occupying the same historical space as Emily Dickenson did in writing her great meditation on hope as the Civil War began in 1861, “Hope” is the thing with feathers”;  “I’ve come to realize that hope isn’t something you give to others. It’s something you must first give to yourself. This year has taught us to find light in the quiet, in the dark, and, most importantly, how to find hope in ourselves. 2020 has spoken, loud and clear as a battle drum. In 2021, let us answer the call with a shout.”

     Here is the text of her poem This Place (An American Lyric):

“There’s a poem in this place—

in the footfalls in the halls

in the quiet beat of the seats.

It is here, at the curtain of day,

where America writes a lyric

you must whisper to say.

There’s a poem in this place—

in the heavy grace,

the lined face of this noble building,

collections burned and reborn twice.

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square

where protest chants

tear through the air

like sheets of rain,

where love of the many

swallows hatred of the few.

There’s a poem in Charlottesville

where tiki torches string a ring of flame

tight round the wrist of night

where men so white they gleam blue—

seem like statues

where men heap that long wax burning

ever higher

where Heather Heyer

blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant

of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising

its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—

a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,

strutting upward and aglow.

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas

where streets swell into a nexus

of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,

where courage is now so common

that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.

There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide

where a single mother swelters

in a windowless classroom, teaching

black and brown students in Watts

to spell out their thoughts

so her daughter might write

this poem for you.            

There’s a lyric in California

where thousands of students march for blocks,

undocumented and unafraid;

where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom

in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.

She knows hope is like a stubborn

ship gripping a dock,

a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer

or knock down a dream.        

How could this not be her city

su nación

our country

our America,

our American lyric to write—

a poem by the people, the poor,

the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,

the native, the immigrant,

the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,

the undocumented and undeterred,

the woman, the man, the nonbinary,

the white, the trans,

the ally to all of the above

and more?

Tyrants fear the poet.

Now that we know it

we can’t blow it.

We owe it

to show it

not slow it

although it

hurts to sew it

when the world

skirts below it.      

Hope—

we must bestow it

like a wick in the poet

so it can grow, lit,

bringing with it

stories to rewrite—

the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated

a history written that need not be repeated

a nation composed but not yet completed.

There’s a poem in this place—

a poem in America

a poet in every American

who rewrites this nation, who tells

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—

a poet in every American

who sees that our poem penned

doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

There’s a place where this poem dwells—

it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell

where we write an American lyric

we are just beginning to tell.”

I am a leaf on the wind; scene from Serenity

Amanda Gorman reads her poem at inauguration

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2165.The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_23

The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51330.The_Trial_of_Socrates?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_10

Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State, Nikos Kazantzakis

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74004.Friedrich_Nietzsche_on_the_Philosophy_of_Right_and_the_State?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_37

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

The Psychopathic God, Robert G.L. Waite

Julius Caesar, Oxford School Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Harold Bloom (Editor)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13006.Julius_Caesar?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13

Curiosity Unleashed: Waterhouse’s ‘Pandora’

Pandora’s Box, by John William Waterhousehttps://i.pinimg.com/originals/3d/d8/fb/3dd8fbee15bb35ba5597b9ad16bf0dd8.jpg

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