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
On this day four years ago, myself and other American volunteers who had rallied to the defense of Ukraine at Mariupol swore our loyalty to each other as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine, named after the legendary unit of the Spanish Civil War, independent of any state control and not in the chain of command of the Ukrainian armed services of which the official International Legion is a part, though some of us were also in Ukrainian uniform.
Such a force offers a scope of action normally beyond that of uniformed combatants, of which we took full advantage. To make mischief for the enemy among his own and behind his lines is a special joy.
This is balanced with the omnipresent fact that nonuniformed combatants are not protected by the Geneva Convention, and will if captured be shot as a spy. It’s a game for those with nothing left to lose, or for whom personal survival is not a victory condition. Hence my term for such actions, Last Stands.
For myself, there are things we must Resist if we are to remain human, and our duty of care for others counts no costs. We must ever and always act in solidarity, allyship, and as guarantors of each other’s humanity, and claw our way out of the ruins to make yet another Last Stand, regardless of hope of victory or even survival. This is what it means to live as a human being, nothing more or less.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace; such are my principles of action.
Why Mariupol?
My study of the problem as informed by Putin’s known plans and intentions of global imperial conquest and dominion in re-founding the Russian Empire revealed control of the Black Sea as the key to his invasion of the nations of the Mediterranean. Crimea was under Russian occupation, but remains vulnerable without a land route, and Mariupol was the nearby major port. Odesa remains open due to its unique status as a bastion of criminal syndicates also under protection by foreign powers which rely on her, being a de facto pirate kingdom which suits Russia to use as a back door; this left Mariupol.
As I wrote in my post of April 18 2022, Last Stand at Mariupol: Fight at the Steel Works; Russia wants to conquer Ukraine for the same reason Japan invaded Manchuria; because it is an industrial heartland and breadbasket from which the conquest of the world may be launched, and the warm water ports of Mariupol and Odesa are key to this imperial plan of dominion, as well as to control of a land corridor to Crimea.
The sixty-five ports of the Black Sea connect Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, and all of these with the Mediterranean, dominion of which Russia has long disputed with Turkey in Libya and Syria. If Russia intends to follow the conquest of Ukraine with that of Eastern Europe, the capture of Romania’s Port of Constanta would open the whole of the Danube region to invasion. The Black Sea remains as crucial to the dominion of the Mediterranean, and of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as it was when Mithridates VI of Pontus contested for it in his wars with the Roman Empire, or at the Battle of Gallipoli which we seem doomed to refight in Crimea and the Ukrainian seaboard inclusive of Mariupol.
We must seize control of the Black Sea or prevent Russia from doing so, to deny its use as a launching pad for the imperial Russian conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
So I wrote as the Russian Army cordoned off the city and began rounding up its citizens to be summarily executed or sent to slave labor camps in Russia, and as I organized an escape for around four hundred survivors. We regrouped in Warsaw and many became leadership cadre for cells operating in Russia against the Putin regime, mainly comprised of Polish and expat Russian and Ukrainian volunteers but also with members of the European intelligence and special operations community. So while we failed in the defense of Mariupol, a new armed Resistance was born from her ruins.
Thus far and despite a great many attempts, Putin eludes us; but we did assassinate Prigozhin, who I regarded as my counterpart among the enemy and direct opponent, and destroy his power in the Wagner Group now incorporated into the Russian Army and no longer able to wag the dog.
Mariupol occupies a special place in my imagination along with the Siege of Sarajevo, events which define the limits of the human so horrific were they. The Russian genocide and erasure of Mariupol was characterized by its organized mass murders, rapes, and tortures of civilians, the mobile factories of cannibalism which turned people into army rations, the use of a new hyperbaric terror weapon as crematoriums to hide their crimes, and the abduction and enslavement of children. All of this the world and I have seen before and doubtless will again; nor was I truly disturbed by being buried in a tunnel collapse under bombardment and crawling out for several hours, through the remains of the dead and among the lost voices of the dying whom I could not help. But I spent a couple days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russian Army and their partners, a crime syndicate called the Butterfly Collectors, were doing with some of the stolen children and young girls brought into special facilities on military bases far way in Russia; torture brothels whose spectacles were broadcast to the world on the dark web in shows which I hope you cannot imagine.
In Ukraine the differences between liberty and tyranny draw blood, and become moral absolutes. And to the designed horror and abjection of Total War as practiced by Russia and created by Franco and Hitler, tested at Guernica and Mariupol, we must reply with refusal to submit and the violence of liberation struggle against oppression.
All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none. By Any Means Necessary, as the phrase coined by Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands and made famous by Malcolm X goes.
To all tyrants I say with the words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar underlined by Nelson Mandela in the book known as the Robbin Island Bible to authorize direct action against the Apartheid regime; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Here follows the essay in which I worked through the possibilities and consequences of direct action and the use of force in the defense of Ukraine.
March 6 2022, How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; There is a line in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Power That Preserves, third novel of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, spoken of a hero who refuses to be summoned to the rescue because in his other world, our own, a child has been bitten by a snake and must be saved; “Could I damn a world to save the life of one child? I’m not sure I could make that choice.”
Today we contemplate its opposite; I’m not sure I could make the decision to let the world burn and trigger the extinction of humankind to save the life of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose mad imperial conquest of Ukraine now threatens the future of us all.
The life of one war criminal versus the incalculable horrors he will bring; I could not choose to save a monster who may destroy us all over saving humankind and our world.
The violence of the slaver cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains., as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours teaches us.
A senator with whom I am not usually aligned made an entirely reasonable suggestion recently, for which he has been denounced in the media by friend and foe alike, even AOC for whom I have already declared in the next Presidential election, regardless of whether or not she is on the ballot.
I am having difficulty understanding why this suggestion was not embraced with great bipartisan enthusiasm, given our history. After all, assassination and overthrowing inconvenient governments is something we do all the time. We even manufacture or capitalize on unforgiveable just causes of war like Russia’s firebombing of a nuclear site this week to launch imperial conquests of our own; the terror attack on the Twin Towers provided a pretext to seize the heroin fields of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq, sacrifices to our shared rituals of public grieving and need for vengeance, and Hearst’s fictions regarding the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave us the Spanish-American War, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands which we stole simply because we could, and later the Presidency of the war’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
Go us? We normally seize such chances with great avarice.
Perhaps we are growing up, we humans, and abandoning the use of force and violence. The question is whether we can survive to reach the stage of childhood’s end; and this is the inherent dilemma of force and power, for such forces are dichotomous, bidirectional, and have unintended consequences.
As written by Joan E Greve and Vivian Ho in The Guardian; “Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after the South Carolina senator suggested Vladimir Putin should be assassinated in order to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Graham first made the suggestion in an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday evening, and he then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral.
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.”
Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Graham added in a separate tweet: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”
Despite immediate criticism of Graham’s comments from left and right in the US, he doubled down on the idea in a Friday morning interview with Fox & Friends. “I’m hoping somebody in Russia will understand that he is destroying Russia, and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,” Graham said.
American lawmakers of both parties responded to Graham’s comments with shock, dismay and outrage, pointing out the danger in demanding the assassination of a leader whose troops are currently engaged in shelling nuclear plants.
“I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid [a third world war],” the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar said in a tweet.
Republican members of Congress were no less critical, as Senator Ted Cruz derided Graham’s suggestion as “an exceptionally bad idea”. “Use massive economic sanctions; BOYCOTT Russian oil [and] gas; and provide military aid so the Ukrainians can defend themselves,” Cruz said. “But we should not be calling for the assassination of heads of state.”
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene – the extremist congresswoman who has sparked outrage for, among other things, comparing coronavirus-related restrictions to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust – chimed in from the right with criticism of Graham.
“While we are all praying for peace [and] for the people of Ukraine, this is irresponsible, dangerous [and] unhinged. We need leaders with calm minds [and] steady wisdom,” Greene said on Twitter. “Not blood thirsty warmongering politicians trying to tweet tough by demanding assassinations. Americans don’t want war.”
White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We are not advocating for killing the leader of a foreign country or regime change. That is not the policy of the United States.”
Really? When has this not been precisely our national policy? President Biden ordered the assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, a man in Syria whom our state claimed without any evidence was the new leader of ISIS, who if the charge was true was a danger only to our common enemies al Qaeda and the Assad regime, mass murdering his entire family merely to divert attention from his many failures, just as Trump had done the year before with his supposed predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Did America not assassinate Salvador Allende and attempt countless times to assassinate Fidel Castro, both heroes as great as any American President?
Did we not kill in massive and horrific numbers to win our freedom from the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, from slavery in the Civil War, and from fascism in the Second World War?
We are a nation founded in death and terror through the words with which George Washington sent twelve thousand soldiers to put down the Whisky Rebellion of 1792 and demonstrate the power of the new federal government to enforce taxes; “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.”
Do not speak to me of the moral superiority of America.
O my brothers, sisters, and others who walk with me through this age of fire, wherein liberty and tyranny hang in the balance and possibly the survival or extinction of humankind, I thank you for the time we have spent together in conversation here, which I cherish as a refuge from the world, as a theatre in which I may process my reactions to the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, and as a forge of action in the performance of my chosen roles as a truthteller, a maker of mischief for tyrants, and in becoming a fulcrum of change.
Ours is a universe of Chaos, irrational and uncontrollable, and circumstances beyond the scope of our volition may visit disaster and life disruptive events upon us at any moment, for any reasons or none at all, and if by chance this is the last thing I have the opportunity to write, I want you and everyone who has been part of my life to know that you have helped me find balance for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of our freedom and the beauty of the world, healing in the redemptive power of love, and hope for our future possibilities of becoming human in poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
If by chance you knew our time here in which to do and be the things that bring meaning and value to our lives may number not millennia but hours and days, what would you do and be? Do and be that now, and never stop; for as Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night, we become what we pretend to be. What matters here is that our performances of ourselves are chosen and owned by us, and that we own the stories in which we live.
The most important question to ask of a story is; whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are about to pass through a Rashomon Gate event, of fracture, relativization, the bifurcation of timelines and propagation of alternate futures and realities, and all bets are off as to what awaits us on the other side.
And all of this because a mad tyrant cowers and rages in his warrens of darkness, fragmented and torn apart by the demons which inhabit him as his dreams of empire and dominion fall apart and in accord with Newton’s Third Law create the forces of their own destruction, much as with his predecessor Adolf Hitler at the end, with one crucial difference; beneath his finger lies the button which will launch nuclear annihilation, and it calls to him, whispering; ”Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
So, as Alfred Doolittle said to Higgins in My Fair Lady, “I put it to you; and I leave it to you”; do we save one life and damn the world?
As I wrote in my post of February 22 2022, Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Malcolm X; We are shaped by our histories as narratives in which we play our parts; and we also change and seize ownership of our histories and our stories as we perform and enact them.
This brings us back to issues of unequal power, identity, and the social use of force and violence, issues which the life and works of Malcolm X center and bring into terrible and wonderful focus.
His principle of action, By Any Means Necessary, is like a riddle challenge uttered by a Zen master, for which there is no single interpretation, and to which no words but only deeds may give answer. It is a principle which helped set us free from history, and which in the end rebounded on him and killed him.
A dangerous idea, for the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law and always acts in both directions, action and reaction, unpredictable and slippery in one’s grasp. Yet an idea must be dangerous if it is to be useful in the struggle for liberation.
The violence used by a slavemaster cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains, as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours has been paraphrased, an extension of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master versus slave morality. This dictum has its reverse; the state has no legitimate authority to use death, violence, force, or control in the repression of dissent, theft of citizenship or violations of our universal human rights, or authorization of identities. This got Trotsky killed by Stalin, as he rightly called out tyranny and terror as tyranny and terror regardless of what those who would enslave us call themselves.
Revolutionary struggle, protest movements, and wars of liberation use force and violence to achieve a society free of inequality when there are no other means possible, due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle when the tyranny and terror of authority, state force and control, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege answer dissent with repression because they are without legitimacy and have only fear to keep the slaves at their work. Those who would enslave us refuse to negotiate because they see only themselves as human, and without debate we are left only the sword.
Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
How do such terrible things arise and seize hold of us, shaping us to their uses?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021 Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne; Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now like Saturn a monstrous cannibal god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
I have no use for anything that limits our power to resist evil; the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, or the limits of our humanity.
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the French and American Revolutions and their imperial successor states, those of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism as taught to us by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita and by his model Thomas Mann in Death in Venice are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
How does a revolution seize power without becoming a tyranny? How shall we gather the force and will to resist unjust authority, without enforcing our own notions of the good on others in our turn?
This is the dilemma of power; that we must wield force to take it from our oppressors, and that we must relinquish it when it is ours and refuse to shape our fellows to our will.
We must refuse to submit to authority if we are to seize our liberty; and we must refuse to subjugate others that they may do the same if we are to avoid becoming the monsters we hunt.
I like and empathize with the character of Victor in Mary Shelly’s allegory of the origins of evil, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster in all his magnificence, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, about the interplay of these selves in the growth of the psyche and processes of becoming human, and about the political consequences of otherness and monstrosity.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of dominion and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and 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. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the processes and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
It is a modernity which can unfold limitless possibilities of becoming human, or like Pandora’s Box and the Lament Configuration of the toymaker LeMarchand in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos unleash horrors beyond our imagination, as Putin now threatens to do with nuclear war and annihilation.
With Putin like Dr Strangelove hypnotized by the siren call of his missiles and their promise of ultimate power, the power of total destruction and the end of humankind, chanting Oppenheimer’s ritual invocation; “Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!”, the question before us all changes.
Nuclear annihilation whispers from the darkness, unleash me, and I’ll make you powerful. But this is a lie, for such power will also consume us and steal our souls.
The great question to which we must now find answer is no longer when is it good to be bad, but how much of our humanity we are willing to sacrifice for our survival as a species.
As I wrote in my post of February 5 2020, Democracy Falls in America: the Acquittal of Traitor Trump; At the end I am driven finally to reconsider the position of the great, flawed idol of my youth Malcolm X; by any means necessary.
By any means necessary; this is a horrible, terrible principle of action, one fraught with endless possibilities of inhumanity and malign power, yet if we are forced to a resistance of survival as was Camus, who wrote for those who must claw their way out of the ruins of lost positions and face yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival, how else may we combat our dehumanization?
We must never surrender hope, for our resistance can triumph over anything but the loss of our faith in ourselves and one another. So long as one of us remembers the dream of freedom, we may yet redeem our humanity.
My answer to the Republican subversion of democracy remains NO!
Yet beyond this, we must fight not merely against fascism but also for democracy and the universal rights of man. As we resist fascism to defend equality and freedom as our common human rights, so we must use force and violence against social and institutional systems, structures, and ideologies and not persons, for we may seek truth together nonviolently with those with whom we disagree as the signal virtue of democracy and humanism, even with our enemies as brother warriors.
Resisting evil means resisting that of others against our universal humanity, but it also means resisting the seduction of evil and power and of our own use of force to compel others.
Power is the evil impulse which births monsters.
So often in history those who commit true atrocities are utterly convinced of the justice of their cause, Gott Mitt Uns, are informed and motivated by narratives of victimhood and have abandoned the self-questioning which is the fulcrum of a free society of equals. This, too, we must resist.
For this is why revolutions, once power has been seized and tyranny overthrown, may become themselves tyrannies, and why I prefer to let others run amok and be ungovernable to the specter of authoritarian social control.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
And remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
Further illumination may be found in Anthony Burgess’ masterpiece Napoleon Symphony, a tragedy of Napoleon and Beethoven’s Eroica and a novel whose discovery was a defining moment of my fourteenth year and has remained with me ever since, despite my teenage adoration of Napoleon as a hero of revolution and liberation, a universal genius and ideal of human being.
Here is the ground of struggle between tyranny and resistance under imposed conditions of systemic unequal power in the use of social force and violence, and between seizures of power as ownership of identity versus the falsification of authorized identities in the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; history, memory, identity.
Read it as I did beneath a print of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, depicting a Shadow pantheon with the wonderful image of the rebel Titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape and his three gorgon daughters to his left under signifying masks of Death, Madness, and Desire (I found Disease redundant and renamed her Desire as a better balance of forces, plus she is depicted as a three aspected goddess to the right as Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance); really, what more could a boy ask for?
And here is the dynamism of our relationship with our shadow self and all that we fear and experience as disgust and revulsion, fear of nature and of our instinctive selves externalized and projected as fear of otherness, loss of self and of control, and degradation to an animal state which drive identity politics and social constructions of race, gender, and class or caste which includes nationalism and sectarian faith, especially when overwhelming and pervasive fear and real existential threats are weaponized by authority in service to power, as Malcolm X was falsified by Elijah Muhammed’s Black Muslim separatist nationalism as his herald, in reaction against the greater historical and systemic evils and multigenerational trauma and inequality of white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
Processes of transformational change and social adaptation are chaotic and interdependent, and their causes are circular or more complex as we can see in the case of Malcolm X and liberation struggle, and in all such histories. This is one lesson we can learn from Malcolm X; there is no just authority. And those who claim to speak for you often do so as a primary strategy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and in your subjugation to tyranny.
A second such lesson is that racism in general, and all divisions and social hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, compel submission to authority through the weaponization of fear as an arbiter of our most important relationship, that of the conscious and unconscious or shadow self, which can be read in how we feel and think about nature and those truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. We define ourselves through figures of otherness who represent unintegrated parts of ourselves and define the limits of the human; freaks, monsters, and all those beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and that which we claim as ours.
For this fear of nature as the origin of racism I have a simple solution; let us embrace our monstrosity, and perform violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden as sacred acts of Chaos in pursuit of truth.
The third gift of Malcolm X to our limitless future possibilities of becoming human is a life lived in revolutionary struggle and resistance against systems, structures, and institutions of unequal power as direct interrogation and engagement with the state as embodied violence, and with the consequences of the use of social force.
He died for our chance to learn these three things, how authority falsifies and subjugates us as a primary historical process, how racism and other inequalities of power are born of fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dichotomous and bidirectional nature of violence and the dialectical processes of the use of social force in tyranny and terror and in resistance and revolution, and as a martyr and teacher of wisdom Malcolm X is a figure of liberation who belongs to all humankind.
How can we disambiguate the violence of the “slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains” as Trotsky phrased it, of tyranny and carceral states from revolutionary struggle and liberation, of action in accord with our duty of care for others and our interdependence and solidarity from the enforcement of virtue and imperialism?
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2022, A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi ; To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”
“Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”
Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.
Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.
Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”
There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.
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.
A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; 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.
Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, 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. 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.
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 Nuremberg-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 his puppetmaster Putin, his model Hitler, and his mirror image al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty, the state as embodied psychopathy and violence, and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to disrupt civilization itself and return us to a pre-democratic barbarian tyranny.
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 wrote on October 28 2019; and so I must write now of Biden’s secret face and heart of darkness, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, linked now for eternity as figures of terror, murderous retribution, and cruelty.
State terror and imperialism has met sectarian and patriarchal terror as tyranny and organizations of institutionalized violence and power; we can only hope now that they will recognize their twin image in the mirror of death which war and acts of force and violence confront us with, and walk away from the precipice which threatens to consume us all.
As Ken Kesey said in his historic speech to a peace protest against the war in Vietnam recorded in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
Every word of this remains true, in these and all cases of tyranny and the institutional terror of carceral states of force and control, of authorized identities and falsification by propaganda and rewritten histories, of imperial conquest and dominion and colonial exploitation and enslavement. It is also true now of Russia in the invasion of Ukraine.
As I wrote here of Trump we may also say of his master Putin; for Traitor Trump is but a negative space and shadow cast by his original type, and both are atavisms of fear and force, chasms of emptiness which nothing can fill, no amount of dominion and control of others, displays of wealth and power or vainglorious strutting, to which no sacrifices of things loved by others or the terror and pain of their victims can suffice, for such is the nature of psychopathy and of politics as a theatre of cruelty.
What does this mean?
For us in this moment and in the context of the question of violence and the social use of force, it means that in the unequal balance of power between Russia and Ukraine, wherein real people are dying because someone has the power to steal what they have, a predator for whom nothing is real or has meaning but force and power, we must find answer to the declaration of Ayn Rand’s monstrous protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead as he commits rape; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Who will stop Putin’s conquest of Ukraine?
If they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; not divided by hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, nor defeated by learned helplessness and terror, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit as one unconquerable and united humankind.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. There is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
For me, this is simple; the nation invading another is in the wrong. This is no different from chancing to discover a policeman kneeling on someone’s neck, in which case our duty of care for others requires us to save the life of the person who is being murdered right in front of us, regardless of any irrelevant details like which of them has the badge and the gun, the authority and the power, by any means necessary.
Law serves power, and there is no just authority.
Even if neither nation is a democracy, and victims of unequal power have no inherent moral burden of virtue as Shaw teaches us with the figure of Arthur Doolittle in My Fair Lady, one of them stealing the lives and freedom of the other as the right of sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy, and independence cannot be just, and must be opposed.
By any means necessary.
While the political origins of conflict are often ambiguous, its consequences for the people in the path of a conquest are not. As my long term goals remain a united humankind and a stateless society which has abandoned the social use of force and control and with it all laws, authorized identities, and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, and the emergence of a free society of equals from divisions of exclusionary otherness, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, I stand with Ukraine and with any liberation movement of sovereignty and independence anywhere, and with the people of Russia against the oligarchy and Putin and for all democracy movements against tyranny.
Let us stand in solidarity as a band of brothers, wherever men hunger to be free.
Our duty of care for others sometimes requires us to place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. I am only one man, and not extraordinary, with nothing but my witness of history and my vision of our future possibilities of becoming human to hurl against the chasms of darkness and the terror of our nothingness in the face of overwhelming force and amoral imperial and carceral states.
But I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
Here I would declare Sic Semper Tyrannis, but this is a phrase from the shadows and legacies of our history from which we must emerge, and includes the assassinations of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, whose killers I despise and would not align myself with.
I do not trust certainties or those who act in their name, Gott Mitt Uns bearing a history of atrocities and terror which has no equals, and includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, and the Holocaust. As Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Instead I will say with the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds, and I hope in a way which preserves and reflects the moral ambiguity, contingency, and relativity of the original in the film; “Now that I can’t abide. How ’bout you, can you abide it?”
Here are the references from my essay; first among them my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted on August 24 last summer as I joined the defense of Afghanistan after its fall:
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
The future chosen for us by those who would enslave us:
20 Days In Mariupol film trailer
War as it is; brutal, cruel, horrific, and often absurd. But also
a ground of struggle in which our humanity is refined
and can be clawed back from the darkness.
2000 Meters To Andriivka – Official UK Trailer
The Undeserving: Alfred P. Doolittle’s Speech in My Fair Lady
The Conscience of the King: Star Trek Season 1, episode 13
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
The Tempest, Folger Shakespeare Library, by William Shakespeare, Paul Werstine (Editor), David Lindley (Editor), Israel Gollancz (Preface & Glossary), Barbara A. Mowat (Editor)
Herein I write a manifesto of action as Socratic dialog and Swiftian satire, which as stated in the title questions “the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence”.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty declares, my intent is “to incite, provoke, and disturb.”
Consider also that I claim the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen as Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and that I do these things in performance as what Foucault called a truth teller, in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling.
In this essay I interrogate a set of interdependent problems which I believe are central to the project of becoming human we all share, and the consequences of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force posed to us by the situation we face in this moment, and here I use the term moment in the ways that Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou did, wherein a monstrous tyrant threatens nuclear war and the extermination of all humankind on a whim of infantile tantrum, and we must choose one or the other.
It is a dilemma which like all use of social force makes us complicit in evil, a primary strategy of fascism in our subjugation, and which reproduces the conditions from which states arise as embodied psychopathy and violence, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Badiou claims events are fundamentally indeterminate and structured by the dialectics of possibility and impossibility, maybe-maybe not as my mother used to say to students who asked her for positional declarations, judgements, authorized versions, singing the words and bouncing her hands from side to side.
For Derrida, as my friend Rene Troy Tun has described, “the event in its absolute singularity is thus resistant to cognitive description, critical objectification, interpretive reduction, and theoretical elaboration.”
Here with this primary existential question of human being, meaning, and value I struggle to find synthesis; like the performance of our identities, this process need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
If we have no answers, we must learn to ask better questions.
In this tilting at windmills I use Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars as my model, a magisterial work which comes in male and female versions and whose meaning changes with a difference of seventeen lines between them.
How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? Do we save one life, that of a mad tyrant who will destroy us, and damn the world?
22 березня 2026 року – річниця заснування у 2022 році бригади Авраама Лінкольна України в Маріуполі
Цього дня чотири роки тому я та інші американські добровольці, які згуртувалися на захист України в Маріуполі, присягнули на вірність один одному як бригада Авраама Лінкольна України, названа на честь легендарного підрозділу часів Громадянської війни в Іспанії, незалежного від будь-якого державного контролю та не вхідного до ланцюжка командування українських збройних сил, частиною яких є офіційний Міжнародний легіон, хоча деякі з нас також були в українській формі.
Така сила пропонує можливості дій, які зазвичай перевищують можливості бійців у формі, чим ми повною мірою скористалися. Завдавати шкоди ворогові серед своїх та в тилу – це особлива радість. Це врівноважується повсюдним фактом, що бійці без форми не захищені Женевською конвенцією, і якщо їх візьмуть у полон, їх розстріляють як шпигунів. Це гра для тих, кому нічого втрачати, або для кого особисте виживання не є умовою перемоги. Звідси мій термін для таких дій – Останні битви.
Для мене є речі, яким ми повинні протистояти, якщо хочемо залишатися людьми, і наш обов’язок піклуватися про інших нічого не коштує. Ми повинні завжди і вічно діяти в солідарності, союзництві та як гаранти людяності один одного, і вибиратися з руїн, щоб зробити ще один Останній бій, незважаючи на надію на перемогу чи навіть виживання. Ось що означає жити як людина, нічого більше чи менше.
Не пропонувати цілі, не попереджати, не залишати слідів; такі мої принципи дії.
Чому Маріуполь? Моє дослідження проблеми, засноване на відомих планах і намірах Путіна щодо глобального імперського завоювання та панування у відродженні Російської імперії, показало контроль над Чорним морем як ключ до його вторгнення в країни Середземномор’я. Крим був під російською окупацією, але залишається вразливим без сухопутного шляху, а Маріуполь був найближчим великим портом. Одеса залишається відкритою завдяки своєму унікальному статусу бастіону злочинних синдикатів, які також перебувають під захистом іноземних держав, що покладаються на неї, будучи де-факто піратським королівством, яке Росія використовує як задні двері; Це залишило Маріуполь. Як я писав у своєму дописі від 18 квітня 2022 року «Останній бій у Маріуполі: Бій на сталеливарному заводі»; Росія хоче завоювати Україну з тієї ж причини, з якої Японія вторглася в Маньчжурію; тому що це промисловий центр і житниця, з якої можна розпочати завоювання світу, а тепловодні порти Маріуполь та Одеса є ключовими для цього імперського плану панування, а також для контролю над сухопутним коридором до Криму. Шістдесят п’ять портів Чорного моря з’єднують Румунію, Болгарію, Грузію, Молдову, Туреччину, Росію та Україну, і всі вони з Середземномор’ям, панування над яким Росія давно оскаржує з Туреччиною в Лівії та Сирії. Якщо Росія має намір після завоювання України завоювати Східну Європу, захоплення румунського порту Констанца відкриє весь Дунайський регіон для вторгнення. Чорне море залишається таким же важливим для панування в Середземномор’ї, Східній Європі, Північній Африці та Близькому Сході, як це було, коли Мітрідат VI Понтійський боровся за нього у своїх війнах з Римською імперією, або в битві при Галліполі, яку ми, здається, приречені повторити в Криму та на українському узбережжі, включаючи Маріуполь.
Ми повинні захопити контроль над Чорним морем або перешкодити Росії зробити це, щоб заперечити його використання як стартового майданчика для імперського російського завоювання та панування в Середземномор’ї, Європі, Африці та Близькому Сході.
Тож я писав, коли російська армія оточила місто та почала збирати його громадян для негайної страти або відправлення до таборів рабської праці в Росії, і коли я організовував втечу для близько чотирьохсот тих, хто вижив. Ми перегрупувалися у Варшаві, і багато хто став керівним складом осередків, що діяли в Росії проти режиму Путіна, які складалися переважно з польських та емігрантів-російських та українських добровольців, а також членів європейської розвідки та спільноти спеціальних операцій. Тож, хоча ми зазнали невдачі в обороні Маріуполя, з його руїн народився новий збройний Опір.
Поки що, попри численні спроби, Путін вислизає від нас; але ми справді вбили Пригожина, якого я вважав своїм колегою серед ворогів і прямим опонентом, і знищили його владу у групі Вагнера, яка тепер входить до складу російської армії і більше не може виляти собакою.
Маріуполь займає особливе місце в моїй уяві разом з облогою Сараєво, подіями, які визначають межі людського, настільки жахливими вони були. Російський геноцид і знищення Маріуполя характеризувалися організованими масовими вбивствами, зґвалтуваннями та катуваннями цивільного населення, мобільними фабриками канібалізму, які перетворювали людей на армійські пайки, використанням нової гіпербаричної зброї терору як крематоріїв для приховування злочинів, а також викраденням і поневоленням дітей. Все це бачив світ і я.
раніше і, безсумнівно, знову буде; мене також не турбувало те, що мене поховали в обвали тунелю під бомбардуванням, і я кілька годин виповзав звідти крізь останки мертвих і серед втрачених голосів вмираючих, яким я не міг допомогти. Але я провів пару днів, блюючи та долаючи стадії шоку, коли дізнався, що російська армія та їхні партнери, злочинний синдикат під назвою «Колекціонери метеликів», робили з деякими викраденими дітьми та дівчатами, яких привезли до спеціальних установ на військових базах далеко в Росії; тортурували борделі, чиї видовища транслювалися всьому світу через даркнет у шоу, які, сподіваюся, ви не можете собі уявити.
В Україні різниця між свободою та тиранією призводить до кровопролиття та стає моральним абсолютом. А на задуманий жах і огиду тотальної війни, яку практикувала Росія та створили Франко та Гітлер, випробувані в Герніці та Маріуполі, ми повинні відповісти відмовою підкорятися та насильством визвольної боротьби проти гноблення.
Увесь Опір — це війна з ножем, бо хто не поважає жодних законів і жодних обмежень, не може ховатися за жодними. Будь-якими необхідними засобами, як говорить вислів, введений Сартром у його п’єсі 1948 року «Брудні руки» та прославлений Малкольмом Ікс.
До всіх тиранів я звертаюся словами Шекспіра з «Юлія Цезаря», підкресленими Нельсоном Манделою в книзі, відомій як Біблія острова Роббін, щоб дозволити прямі дії проти режиму апартеїду; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Here in five acts as in a theatrical performance of myself do I offer my thoughts on Poetry Day.
Act One
A definition of terms, or What is Poetry?
First before all must be the true names of things.
Words matter. They can divide us, and they can unite us. Words can exalt and defile; they can shape our images and possibilities of becoming human and create or limit the worlds to which we can aspire, they can replace stones we hurl at one another and heal the pathology of our disconnectedness.
Always treasure words, for they represent the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and harbour imaginal creative power. We bear them forward as memories, histories, identities, like the shells of fantastic sea creatures; sounds which are analogies of form or what Gaston Bachelard called coquilles au parole.
So also do they bear us forward, and await their moment of wakefulness as seeds of becoming.
Act Two
Being an Apology for my digressive ars poetica; my writing style is idiosyncratic and strange, but so am I.
Once I sailed on the Lake of Dreams, was wooed by Beauty but claimed by Vision; and in such visions I fell into a sea of words, images, songs, histories, layered and interconnected with one another like a web of reflections and the echoes of voices lost in time, a wilderness of mirrors which capture and distort and extend ourselves infinitely in all directions.
Here is a shadow self of our histories which we drag around behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tale and tail, legacies from which we must emerge to create ourselves anew and those which we cannot abandon without losing who we are.
Here my intertexts are manifest, seize and shake me with tumultuous voices and untrustworthy purposes, for where do our histories end and we begin?
We cannot escape each other, my shadows and I.
Act Three
An offering, ephemeral as memories borne by perfume and soaring on the wind, up into the gaps of reality through the gates of our dreams, to the Infinite, free from the flags of our skin, of which only echoes and reflections remain, etched upon our histories by the lightning of illumination to balance against the terror of our nothingness.
Sounds and Echoes
Once there was a sound
Without a shell to echo it
Not the vast roar and thunder
Of the sea
And her moonstruck tides
Chaos and the birth of universes
Undulating with the splendor of life
In all our thousands of myriads
Limitless possibilities of becoming
Dance with the Impossible in rapture and terror
Hope and despair, faith in each other as solidarity of action
Versus the pathology of our disconnectedness
And the lightning shatters us with fracture and disruption,
Sublimes the chasms of darkness we are lost in
A negation which is also a gift
Opening spaces of free creative play
Such is the embrace of death as liberation
From the limits of our form,
The flaws of our humanity,
And the brokenness of the world.
We escape the spirals of our shell
Soar among celestial spheres
Become exalted and defiled
Free and nameless as wild things
I am sound and echo
Abandoning the shell I have sung myself free from
Where am I now?
Act Four
Manifestoes of Action; poetry as revolutionary struggle.
As I wrote in my post of October 14 2021, On Art as Poetic Vision, Transgression, Seizure of Power, Reimagination, and Transformation: a Manifesto; Why do I write?
I offer here a manifesto of art as poetic vision, reimagination and transformation in the contexts of the performance of identities and in the guerilla theatre of political action and revolutionary struggle.
Art is transgressive when it challenges and violates our ideas of normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, it is a seizure of power and refusal to submit to authorized identities which confers freedom and autonomy through becoming self-created and self-owned, Unconquered and beyond subjugation by force and control, and it is poetic vision as Surrealist reimagination and transformation when it depicts and guides our passage through the labyrinth of time, history, memory, and the falsification of our captured and distorted images in the wilderness of mirrors, lies, and illusions, to enact our rapture and exaltation, our transcendence into realms of dream and of vision wherein rules do not apply and when it seizes us with truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Art is intended to question and transform the rules and substance of human being, meaning, and value; to discover within the boundaries and interfaces, the silent and empty places of change and the limitless adaptive potential of systems, of unknowns, disconnects, misaligned juxtaposition and strange angles of view, new possibilities of becoming human.
I first understood the power of the unknown as a force of liberation as a boy whose bedroom wall was a collage of Bosch prints, curious and strange, which I would project myself into as dream gates. William S. Burroughs, beatnik friend of my father the counterculture theatre director, would show up for dinner without warning and tell weird fairytales into the night; he also drew curious figures into the collage of heavens and hells, and here was a definition of art and of its purpose; transformation of the possibilities of becoming human through reimagination and ecstatic poetic vision.
This is why I claim as the purpose of my writing to incite, provoke, and disturb; change and growth originate in disruption, fracture, and chaotization, and in the four primary duties of a citizen; to question, mock, expose, and challenge authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
This free space of play, of the unknown as unclaimed space and the adaptive potential of a system, whose boundaries like the known shores on our maps of becoming human frame the range of choices and act as authorized identities and an intrinsic limit on freedom as future possibilities, remains outside and beyond all limits and systems of knowledge, like Gödel’s Theorem; no matter how much we learn and shift the boundaries of the known universe, the Infinite remains as vast as before, conserving ignorance.
If so the task of becoming human involves Bringing the Chaos; reimagination and transformation, the violation of normalities and transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden to free us of the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and of authorized identities, to create limitless possibilities of becoming human as seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
As I wrote in my post of December 21 2022, We Are the Toys of Santa’s Workshop, and We Are Made of Words; On this day of winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and possibly as democracy itself begins to die from lack of faith as Tinkerbell warns us with the ritual command to clap our hands lest the faeries die, as Russia and China test our will and threaten to unleash global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, pandemic, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only one year ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
Now is the time to rage against the dying of the light.
When those who would enslave us come for any one of us, let them find an America and a humankind not subjugated with learned helplessness or divided by exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but united in solidarity and resistance.
And in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Owning our stories as the songs of ourselves is a primary human act in which we become autonomous and self-created beings; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the seizure of power over the ownership of ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
If we imagine the processes of our construction as a vast workshop like that of Santa’s elves, I believe that the parts of our assemblage are words and the rules for using them to create meaning as grammar.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In this cause Joyce chose language as the lever of change, for he shared a primary insight with Wittgenstein that language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and is therefore our primary ground of being and identity, and its corollary that when all rules are arbitrary we must change the rules to own the game. As my father once said to me, never play someone else’s game.
Joyce was a master of languages and chose this as his instrument for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, and for the rebirth of civilization.
And this love of languages as free creative play in which we ourselves are the artifact and product of our art is what caught my attention and created my teenage identification with Joyce. For I love languages and had grown up with three voices; English as my primary and home language, though shaped by immersion in the rhythms and phrases of the King James Bible and the Dutch language of the Reformed Church which surrounded me in the town where I was raised. Languages are a hobby of mine, often grounded in reading books which have immeasurably shaped my own writing and speaking style and turn of phrase.
Chinese is my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with my teacher of martial arts, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese literature, and much else, who spoke, in addition to superb British English full of Anglo-Indian and Shanghailander idiom, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as Mandarin, Japanese, and other languages, having served in the Chinese military from 1924 when he joined the Whampoa Military Academy through the Second World War, escaping the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in 1969 when my father arranged for him to teach me. He was a window into other worlds and times to me, was Sifu Dragon.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though limited to conversational proficiency, legacy of a formative trip in the summer of my fourteenth year just before starting high school.
It was during that summer, my first solo foreign travel, to train as a fencer with a friend from the tournament circuit for the Pan American Games planned to be held there the following year, that I witnessed a crime against humanity, the massacre of street children who had swarmed a food truck, a trauma and disruptive event followed by weeks in which I helped them evade the police bounty hunters who ruled the streets as apex predators.
From the moment I saw what the guards were shooting at beyond the walls of the palace in which I was a guest, I chose my side, and I place my life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We all seek paths of healing from trauma, and of hope and the redemptive power of love in transforming the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world. I found such paths in literature as poetic vision, and in our languages and our stories as instruments with which we can operate directly on our psyche and take control of our adaptation and the evolution of human consciousness as an unfolding of intention. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and for this primary insight I owe the effects of reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
In Joyce I found a figure I could identify with who was also struggling to parse and bring meaning to a primary trauma which exposed the hollowness and edifice of lies and illusions of which our world is made, in his case the fall and ruin of civilization itself from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions. I had begun my search for meaning and my Freshman year of high school by reading Anthony Burgess’ Napoleon Symphony, a novel which questioned my hero Napoleon and illuminated two of my other heroes Beethoven and Klimt, then turned to the study of language itself; S. I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action, Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, and Wittgenstein’s TLP, before discovering Joyce.
James Joyce’s linguistics scholarship was immense; he took Italian as his third academic language, taught himself Dano-Norwegian as a teenager to read his adored Ibsen in the original, and his modern languages degree cites Latin, Italian, French, German, and Norwegian. He loved languages and studied them as a game, as do I; his adult fluency included Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian, Finnish, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, and Modern Greek.
All of this went into his masterpiece Finnegans Wake, written in a private language filled with games and experiments of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety according to the principle of Wittgenstein that because all rules are arbitrary they can be reimagined and changed at will and ourselves with them, a language densely layered with literary allusions and references, loaned and invented words, and of signs with multiple meanings like the paths of a labyrinth. You need a working knowledge of several languages to get the jokes; no wonder I loved him.
I’m not sure it’s intended to communicate anything, so coded and laden with puzzles is his new language; like the notation for the principles of a system by which to create and order the universe. He spent the rest of his life searching for the lost runes able to break and reforge the oaths and bindings of existence, to renew ourselves and our world; perhaps he found them.
Though I may claim no such realization of a guiding vision of our limitless possibilities of becoming human though I find reflection in his Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us, Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake demonstrated for me a great truth which has illuminated my understanding ever since; we are made of our ideas and of our stories, and forged with our words and our languages.
We are what Gaston Bachelard called shells of speech, coquilles au parole, bearers of stories as memory, history, and identity, shaped by the passage of time and our interdependence with each other as prochronisms or the histories expressed in our forms of how we solved problems of adaptation and change.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to one another?
Can we not then change and transform ourselves with our stories through reimagination and poetic vision, as new and beautiful things freed from the legacies of our histories and the limits of other people’s ideas of virtue, beauty, and truth?
Let us seize the stories of which we are made, and become glorious.
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2020, The Transformative Power of Art: a Manifesto; The transformative power of art, its ability to reframe our ideas about self and other, to shift boundaries, reassign values, reclaim history and identity from silence, erasure, marginalization, and the authorization of inequalities of power and divisions of exclusionary otherness; these are among the vital functions which make art a primary human and social activity.
Art as poetic vision precedes and parallels politics as a means of changing our civilization and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; it represents a power held by autonomous individuals and communities against the tyranny of state force and control. Politics is a social art which is primary to our interdependent human nature and processes of becoming human. Through our words, images, and performance we can question, mock, expose, and challenge authority and incite, provoke, and disturb others in bringing transformational change to the systems and structures within which we are embedded, and I hope liberate us from them.
Art is life, for it involves us personally and directly in processes of adaptive growth and in renegotiation of our social contracts and relationships with others, both personal and political, and informs and motivates the performance of our identities.
If we are caught in a rigged game, we must change the rules and terms of struggle. “Rules are made to be broken” to paraphrase General MacArthur; order destabilized, authority delegitimized, traditional systems and structures interrogated, limits transgressed, force and control resisted and abandoned, and new truths forged and possibilities of becoming human discovered.
We must question, expose, mock, subvert, transgress, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. For there is no just authority.
Let us seize control of our own narrative and representation, of our memory, history, and identity.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2021, The Year in Review; In these last days of 2021, my thoughts turn to the year in review; to Defining Moments, both for myself as a witness of history and for the world as informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value and of memory, history, and identity, the stories of which we are made, and to the causes I have championed and the threats to our future possibilities of becoming human which remain.
Herein I write as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and in the role Foucault described as a truth teller in reference to parrhesia and the four primary duties of a citizen; to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty proclaims, my intent is to provoke, incite, and disturb, and I hope that you have found my daily journal useful as a resource for international antifascist action and resistance, revolutionary struggle, liberation and democracy movements, forging networks of allyship and solidarity, founding autonomous zones, and seizures of power both personal and political.
During my years as a Forensics teacher and debate coach, I began the first day of each new year with a demonstration of purpose. On my desk I would place a solid base with the words; “This is a fulcrum”. Across it I would set a teeter totter saying; “It balances a lever.” And finally; “When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.” Such is my hope now for us all.
Truth telling as an ars poetica is about the regenerative and transformational power of truth in the sense that Keats used when he spoke of beauty, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”
But truth telling is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky. On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Act Four
A benediction
May yours be days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
Act Five
A coda in the form of Modern American Literatures reading lists, which like all reading lists that claim to represent a canon of literature is nothing less than a set of authorized identities.
Here I have disambiguated Modern American Poetry from authors who cannot be represented among the six ethnicities to make it easier for people to find authors who speak for them and offer spaces to grow into, as the original purpose of my lists, which eventually included 27 national literatures, was for choice reading for high school students free from state and school board control or any criteria other than quality.
Collected Poems, 1912-1944, Hippolytus Temporizes and Ion, Helen in Egypt, Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall and Advent, HERmione, Palimpsest, White Rose and the Red, The Sword Went Out to Sea: Synthesis of a Dream, (as Delia Alton), H.D.
The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
A, Complete Short Poetry, Le Style Apollinaire: The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire, Bottom: On Shakespeare, Prepositions +: the Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky
Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky, Mark Scroggins
The Collected Poems, The Bell Jar, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
(Karen V. Kukil Editor), Sylvia Plath
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Heather Clark
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll
Collected Poems 1947-1997, Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, Deliberate Prose – Essays 1952 to 1995, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews 1958-1996, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971, Alan Ginsberg
The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, Bill Morgan
Revolutionary Letters 50th Anniversary Edition, Spring and Autumn Annals, The Poetry Deal, Diane di Prima
Mountains and Rivers Without End, The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, Gary Snyder
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems, Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire, Diane Ackerman
Selected Poems, Michael McClure
The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton: A Biography, Diane Wood Middlebrook
The Maximus Poems, The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (George F. Butterick Editor), Muthologos: Lectures and Interviews, Charles Olsen
What Does Not Change: The Significance of Charles Olson’s “The King-Fishers”, Charles Olson’s Reading: A Biography, Ralph Maud
The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition, Stephen Fredman
Ground Work I: Before the War, Ground Work II: In the Dark, Selected Poems, Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan
Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, Bertholf editor
Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness, Peter O’Leary
On Opening the Dreamway, James Hillman
A Poet’s Mind: Collected Interviews with Robert Duncan 1960-1985, Wagstaff
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, Michael Duncan
The Dead and the Living, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002, Stag’s Leap: Poems, Arias, Sharon Olds
Selected Poems, Robert Bly
Collected Poems: 1950-2012, Adrienne Rich
The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly
Averno, The Triumph of Achilles, Faithful and Virtuous Night, Proofs and Theories, American Originality, Louise Gluck
The Lost Spells, Robert Macfarlane
Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015, Just Kids, M Train, Year of the Monkey, Devotion, Patti Smith
Best World Poetry
Germany
The Novices of Sais, Novalis, Paul Klee (Illustrator)
Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche
The Lost Gold of Exploded Stars: complete poems, Georg Trakl
Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, Paul Celan
Conjurations: poems of Sarah Kirsch
Britain & Ireland
The King James Bible, William Tyndale
The Tempest, Midsummer Nights Dream, Shakespeare
Complete Poems and Selected Letters, John Keats
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Khan, Coleridge
Complete William Blake
Lord Byron: The Major Works, McGann ed
John Milton: The Major Works, Goldberg & Orgel eds
Finnegans Wake, Ulysses, James Joyce
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems & Three Plays, Yeats, Rosenthal ed.
Selected Poems, Prose Occasions 1951-2006, Thomas Kinsella
Crow, Tales From Ovid, Cave Birds: an Alchemical Romance, Birthday Letters, Howls & Whispers, Gaudette, The Oresteia, Prometheus on his Crag, Ted Hughes
Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Ali Smith
China
Bright Moon, White Clouds: Selected Poems of Li Po, Li Po, J.P. Seaton
(Translator)
The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Du Fu, David Hinton (Translator)
Eastern Europe
Chanson Dada: Selected Poems, Tristan Tzara
New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001, Czesław Miłosz
France
The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire
Rimbaud: complete works, Rimbaud, Schmidt ed
Treasures of the Night: collected poems, Jean Genet
Verlaine: Selected Poems
Pierre Reverdy, Caws ed
Selected Writing, Apollonaire
Mallarme: Prose and Poetry, Caws ed
Stone Lyre: Poems of Rene Char, René Char, Nancy Naomi Carlson (Translator), The Word as Archipelago The Word as Archipelago, René Char, Robert Baker (Translator), Selected Poems, René Char, Mary Ann Caws (Editor)
India
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, Mīrābāī, Robert Bly & Jane Hirshfield (Translators)
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, Miller trans
Collected Poems, Jeet Thayil
Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
Islamic Peoples
Concerto al-Quds, Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, Adonis
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Mahmoud Darwish
Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks
The Rub’ai yat of Omar Khayyam, Stubb & Avery eds
Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths: Poems, Sholeh Wolpé
The Book of Mansur Hallaj: Selected Poems & The Tawasin, Mansur al-Hallaj,
Paul Smith (Translator)
Iraqi: Selected Poems, Iraqi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Divan of Hafez Shirazi, Hafez, Paul Smith (Translation)
Divan of Sadi, Saadi, Paul Smith (Translator)
Japan
Basho’s Narrow Road, Sato trans
Matsuo Bashō, Basho and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary, Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson, Makoto Ueda
The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda, Sumita Oyama
River of Stars: Selected Poems, Yosano Akiko
I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda, Momoko Kuroda, Abigail Friedman (Translator)
Jewish People
The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Alter ed
Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
Poems 1962-2020, Louise Glück
Latin America
Selected Poems, Jorge Borges
Five Decades: 1925-1970, Pablo Neruda
Selected Poems, Octavio Paz
Poems of Cesar Vallejo
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 – 1972, Alejandra Pizarnik
Russia
Collected Poetry, Alexander Pushkin
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Scandinavia
Journeys in Dream and Imagination: The Hallucinatory Memoir of a Poet in a Coma, Artur Lundkvist, Carlos Fuentes (Introduction)
May you find love to balance our fear, joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, hope to balance despair, beauty to balance the horror of war and violence, vision and illumination with which to reimagine and transform ourselves and liberate us from systems of unequal power, and the faith to use all of this to heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Kahlil Gibran in The Gravedigger; “Once, as I was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, “Of all those who come here to bury, you alone I like.”
Said I, “You please me exceedingly, but why do you like me?”
“Because,” said he, “They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”
In this celebration of Eid Al Fitr, love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, bring joy, hope, and faith in solidarity with others.
With Ramadan ends the time of truce, and as I now contemplate the possibilities for making mischief for tyrants such as Netanyahu and his criminal regime of genocide, ethnic cleansing, kleptocracy, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and his co conspirators in America including the criminal Trump regime, questions of justice in its myriad forms and dimensions arise yet again to shape my ideas of struggle in the liberation of Palestine and the anti imperialist struggle for the sovereignty, independence, and self determination of Iran.
Nor will I forget or abandon my sacred calling to bring a Reckoning for my brothers and sisters in resistance and revolutionary struggle in Kashmir, Myanmar, and wherever men hunger to be free.
Herein a Gordian Knot of dilemmas and conflicting values, goals, and ideals shift and change like a mirage; bringing a Reckoning to perpetrators of violence and restoration of balance to their victims, in a world with few innocent and many who are both perpetrators and victims.
ن عادلا في الميزان كما يوجه سورة 55 الرحمن 9 من القرآن الكريم
“Be just unto the balance”, as Surah 55 Ar Rahman 9 of Holy Quran commands.
How may we be just unto the balance with those who do not regard us as fellow human beings, and to whom all outsiders beyond whatever boundaries of us and them are not truly human and merit no human rights?
Where does the balance of justice and of our humanity lay?
How may we disambiguate the crimes of and Reckoning owed by monstrous tyrants of imperialist states and that of the subjects in whose name they act? Wherein lies complicity?
When confronted by Rashomon Gate Events wherein we choose our fates and the sets of possibilities of becoming human within which we will live, how may we disambiguate that which exalts us from that which degrades and dehumanizes?
Always we are captives of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, from which only love has the power to redeem us and return to us our souls.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Sheikh AbdurRahman Sudais-Surah Ar-Rahman w/ English Trans
أتمنى أن تجدوا الحب الذي يُوازننا ويُخلصنا من الخوف، والفرح الذي يُوازن رعب العدم، والأمل الذي يُوازن اليأس، والجمال الذي يُوازن رعب الحرب والعنف، والرؤية والنور الذي نُعيد بهما تصور أنفسنا ونُغيرها ونُحررها من أنظمة القوة غير المتكافئة، والإيمان الذي يُمكّننا من استخدام كل هذا لشفاء عيوب إنسانيتنا وكسر العالم.
كما كتب خليل جبران في “حفار القبور”: “ذات مرة، بينما كنت أدفن أحد موتاي، مر بي حفار القبور وقال لي: من بين جميع الذين يأتون إلى هنا للدفن، أنتَ وحدك من يُعجبني.”
قلتُ: “أنت تُرضيني كثيرًا، ولكن لماذا تُحبني؟”
“لأنهم”، كما قال، “يأتون باكين ويذهبون باكين، وأنت تأتي ضاحكًا وتذهب ضاحكًا فقط.” في هذا الاحتفال بعيد الفطر، أحبّوا كما ضحكتم في وجه جلادكم، وانشروا الفرح والأمل والإيمان تضامنًا مع الآخرين.
مع حلول رمضان، ينتهي زمن الهدنة، وبينما أتأمل الآن في إمكانيات إلحاق الأذى بالطغاة مثل نتنياهو ونظامه الإجرامي القائم على الإبادة الجماعية والتطهير العرقي والفساد وجرائم الحرب والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، وشركائه في أمريكا، بمن فيهم نظام ترامب المجرم، تتجدد أسئلة العدالة بأشكالها وأبعادها المتعددة لتشكل أفكاري عن النضال من أجل تحرير فلسطين.
هنا، تتشابك المعضلات والقيم والأهداف والمُثُل المتضاربة وتتغير كالسراب؛ محاسبة مرتكبي العنف وإعادة التوازن لضحاياهم، في عالم قليل الأبرياء وكثير من الجناة والضحايا.
ولن أنسى أو أتخلى عن دعوتي المقدسة لمحاسبة إخوتي وأخواتي في المقاومة والنضال الثوري في كشمير وميانمار، وفي كل مكان يتوق فيه الرجال إلى الحرية.
ن عدلا في الميزان كما يُوجَّه سورة الرحمن 55 من القرآن الكريم
اعدلوا في الميزان كما يُوجَّه سورة الرحمن 55 يوجهنا القرآن الكريم في الآية التاسعة:
كيف نُنصف في الميزان مع من لا يعتبروننا بشرًا، والذين لا يُعتبرون جميع الغرباء، مهما كانت حدودنا، بشرًا حقيقيين، ولا يستحقون أي حقوق إنسانية؟
أين يكمن ميزان العدل وإنسانيتنا؟
عندما نواجه أحداث بوابة راشومون التي نختار فيها مصائرنا ومجموعات الاحتمالات لنصبح بشرًا ونعيش في ظلها، كيف نُميز بين ما يُعلينا وما يُهيننا ويُجرّدنا من إنسانيتنا؟
دائمًا ما نكون أسرى لخاتم فاغنر من الخوف والقوة والجبروت، الذي وحده الحب قادر على تخليصنا منه وإعادة أرواحنا إلينا.
في النهاية، كل ما يهم هو ما نفعله بخوفنا، وكيف نستخدم قوتنا
In a fiendish and horrific atrocity and war crime, Netanyahu and Trump on this day one year ago coordinated a dual-front bombing campaign of genocide against the Palestinians; Netanyahu bombs a civilian aide corridor to divide Gaza into Bantustans as Trump bombs Yemen to break our counter blockade of the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid.
Such monstrous crimes now find echoes and reflections in the Iran War, Israel’s mad dream of imperial conquest and dominion of her neighbors to subjugate them in a Greater Israel, purchased with American taxes and lives.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and slavery, designed famine and war crimes against children and other civilians; this is the state of Israel in all her horror and terror, and now of Vichy America under the Trump regime and his Theatre of Cruelty.
Israel and America together are Atrocity Regimes of no laws but authoritarian rule by force and fear, no morality but hate, no grand dreams of our humanity and citizenship as equals but nightmares of fascist race, faith, and national identity.
Herein we witness again a great and terrible truth; no matter where you begin with ideas of kinds of people, with hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
The future of the whole Middle East may be read in the scrying glass of the Yemen and Palestine theatres of World War Three, which one year ago prefigured the crisis in the Straight of Hormuz and the Gulf States theatre of the Iran War.
How did we come to this pass, bombing the people we should be allied with in liberation struggle?
As I wrote in my post of January 12 2024, Victorious Red Sea Campaign Globalizes the Gaza War; A victorious Red Sea Campaign and counter-blockade of Israel by allies of Palestinian liberation struggle, the Houthi of Yemen, long an arm of the Iranian Dominion in protracted conflict with the Arab-American Alliance in sectarian civil war become a Great Powers proxy war, has with genius and daring in commerce raiding isolated Israel from material support for her war of terror and ethnic cleansing, and globalized the conflict.
America and Britain have attacked Houthi targets in Yemen in reply, as South Africa brings charges against Israel for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The counter blockade has been victorious in isolating Israel from support in balance to their war crime of blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. Now as Israel’s co conspirators in ethnic cleansing America and Britain viciously murder the champions of humanity in Yemen, we must bring the war home and demonstrate that no one may dehumanize another from any safe haven anywhere on earth. And should any such regime of state terror send arms to Israel, those ships must be sunk at sea or destroyed in port throughout the world.
Israel has made a killing jar of Gaza, but a bigger one can be placed around it by giving terror no safe haven anywhere. Our amoral and tyrannical President Biden has failed to use the best means of pressure to win an end to Israels campaign of genocide in BDS; by his complicity we are left with only direct action and war to the knife in Resistance.
What is War to the Knife? A phrase and idea of conflict and struggle which come to us unchanged from Old Norse in the time of the Vikings; Krieg Pa Kniven, fitting for a unifying principle of action of a global pirate brotherhood of liberation struggle such as that of the Free Port of Hodeidah from which I now write.
All Resistance is war to the knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
Who are the Houthis and how did the US and UK strikes on Yemen come about? As written by Archie Bland and Bethan McKernan in The Guardian, in an article of the same title; “The US and UK have launched airstrikes on more than a dozen sites used by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, according to US officials.
The strikes are the most significant military response to the Houthis’ persistent campaign of drone and missile attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea, which began after Israel’s war in Gaza broke out. Here’s how we got here:
Who are the Houthis?
The Houthis are a Yemeni militia group named after their founder, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, and representing the Zaidi branch of Shia Islam. They emerged in the 1980s in opposition to Saudi Arabia’s religious influence in Yemen. The group, which has an estimated 20,000 fighters and whose official name is Ansar Allah, runs most of the west of the country and is in charge of its Red Sea coastline.
What is the group’s relationship with Iran and the war in Gaza?
The Houthis are backed by Iran as part of its longstanding hostility with Saudi Arabia and are supporting Hamas in the war in Gaza. Soon after the Hamas massacre on 7 October, the Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi said his forces were “ready to move in the hundreds of thousands to join the Palestinian people and confront the enemy”.
What has been happening in the Red Sea?
The Red Sea, one of the world’s most densely packed shipping channels, lies south of the Suez canal, the most significant waterway connecting Europe to Asia and east Africa. Yemen is situated along the sea’s south-east coast, where it meets the Gulf of Aden.
Shortly after the start of the Gaza war the Houthis began launching missile and drone attacks at vessels in the Red Sea, most of which were intercepted by US and Israeli countermeasures.
The situation escalated on 19 November, when militants used a helicopter to seize a car carrier chartered by a Japanese company and linked to an Israeli businessman, abducted the crew. The Houthis said all vessels they perceived as linked to Israel or its allies would “become a legitimate target for armed forces”.
Multiple attacks on vessels followed, mostly without success, but many shipping companies nevertheless decided to bypass the Red Sea route and divert around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, significantly adding to journey times and cost.
How has the US responded?
On 18 December the US announced the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian in response to the Houthi attacks.
The US refrained from direct confrontation until 31 December, when US Navy helicopters fired on a group of small boats attempting to board a container ship that had requested their protection. The deaths of 10 militants marked a new phase in the crisis.
On 9 January US and British warships shot down 21 drones and missiles fired by the Houthis, in what London called the largest such attack in the area. On 10 January, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said further attacks could prompt a western military response.
What was happening in Yemen before the Gaza war?
The Houthis had been gaining support around the turn of the century from Shia Yemenis fed up with the corruption and cruelty of the longtime authoritarian president and Saudi ally, Ali Abdullah Saleh, particularly during the aftermath of 9/11 and the US invasion of Iraq. Popular protests and several assassination attempts forced Saleh to resign in 2012.
In 2014 the Houthis allied with their former enemy Saleh to seize the capital, Sana’a, and overthrew the new western-backed president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, a year later. After Hadi was forced to flee, the exiled Yemeni government asked its allies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to launch a military campaign, also backed by the west, to drive out the Houthis.
A catastrophic civil war ensued that the UN estimated led to 377,000 deaths and displaced 4 million people by the end of 2021.
The Houthis in effect won the war. An April 2022 ceasefire prompted a significant decline in violence, and fighting has largely remained in abeyance despite the official expiry of the truce in October.
How were the attacks by the Houthis seen in Yemen and Saudi Arabia?
Some Yemenis see the Houthi operations as a legitimate means of exerting pressure on Israel and its allies in defence of Palestinian civilians, and analysts say the Houthis’ intervention has helped shore up their domestic support. The militants also believe attacks in the Red Sea can make them a more significant global player, synonymous with Yemen as a whole despite the presence of an internationally recognised government in the south of the country.
Meanwhile, the Saudis are attempting to normalise relations with Iran, and finalise a peace deal that could recognise Houthi control of the north of Yemen. They have been anxious about any response from the US that could complicate its effort to withdraw from the country.
What does this mean for the future of humankind? As written in an editorial in the World Socialist Web Site, in an article entitled The US/UK attack on Yemen and the global eruption of imperialist war; “The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally condemns Thursday’s attack by the United States and United Kingdom against Yemen. With no popular mandate, with no congressional or parliamentary authorization, without even an attempt at a serious explanation, the Biden administration in the US and the Sunak government in the UK have carried out an illegal act of war against an impoverished nation.
The attack on Yemen is a major escalation of the developing war in the Middle East. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US and its imperialist allies in NATO have overseen a massive militarization of the region, directly targeting Iran. This is itself part of an expanding global war, including the US-NATO war against Russia and the developing economic and military conflict against China.
US President Joe Biden did not even see fit to go on national television to explain the launching of a new war, under conditions in which there is overwhelming popular opposition to the expansion of war in the Middle East. As the Pentagon was planning to attack Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was admitted to the intensive care unit of Walter Reed Hospital, with the knowledge of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but unbeknownst to the president. This bizarre episode underscored the reality that US war-making is operating on autopilot, increasingly outside the pretense of civilian oversight.
As always, the rationale provided to justify the war is a pack of lies. Biden declared that the missile strikes were “defensive” and “a direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks.” The American media, with the same breathless reporting that has accompanied every US military operation, proclaims that a country with a gross domestic product 700 times smaller than the United States is carrying out “intolerable” actions, against which the American military is “forced” to defend itself. Overnight, Yemen’s Houthis have been turned into a new bogeyman, requiring urgent military action without any discussion or explanation.
In coordination with the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the United States has dispatched to the Middle East a massive military armada, consisting of two aircraft carrier battle groups, multiple guided missile destroyers, an unknown number of submarines and dozens of warplanes. These forces have provided logistics, reconnaissance, and target selection to Israel, in a deliberate effort to provoke retaliation from Iran and its allied forces such as the Houthis.
Yet, supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.”
How will this unfold over time?
As written by Patrick Wintour, Diplomatic editor in The Guardian, in an article entitled Houthis show resolve that western strikes will be hard pushed to shake; “The near-official slogan of the Houthi movement is: “God is the Greatest / Death to America / Death to Israel / A curse upon the Jews.” Crowds of supporters in the group’s northern Yemen strongholds have been chanting it for more than 20 years, ever since the phrase was brought back from Tehran at the turn of the century, when it was first directed at the then Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
So those who claim the Houthis are not serious in attempting to block Israeli-linked trade in the Red Sea underplay the extent to which the defence of Palestine is a foundational principle of the Houthi movement, and highly popular among Yemeni people. The rebel stance over the past two months has afforded this relatively obscure Shia group a status in recent weeks that even Hezbollah in Lebanon cannot claim. They are deeply authoritarian, but skilled mobilisers of popular opinion.
And as far back as 2014, Houthi leaders discussed with clerics in Tehran how “the road to Jerusalem” lay through the Red Sea.
The narrowness of the Bab el-Mandab strait is a gift from geography. In August 2018, the Houthis attacked two Saudi oil tankers to challenge Riyadh. Knowing that a third of Israel’s trade was with the far east, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by warning Iran and the Houthis not to block the waterways.
Houthi attacks since then have been marked by elements of bravado – but also sophisticated improvisation.
Starting in October and early November, Houthi forces launched missile and drone barrages targeting the Israeli port town of Eilat – even downing a US-made MQ-9 drone in the Red Sea region on 9 November. However, as the month progressed, the targets increasingly reverted to international shipping.
On 14 November, the Houthi military spokesperson, Yahya Sarea, announced that the group would “not hesitate” to target Israeli ships. Five days later, on 19 November, Sarea expanded the threat to any ships in the Red Sea flying the Israeli flag or operated or owned by Israeli companies. He also called on other Red Sea countries to assist in identifying Israeli-affiliated ships, which often sail without flags.
Within hours, Houthi forces pulled off a PR coup by hijacking the Galaxy Leader, a Japanese-operated cargo ship with links to the Israeli billionaire Abraham Ungar. The group released footage of the assault, in which masked men leapt from helicopters on to the ship and held the crew at gunpoint. The Houthis still have the ship, and their social media influencers suggest it could be a destination for tourists or even wedding parties.
By 9 December, with weekly big demonstrations stoked in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, the Houthi leadership announced it would target all ships sailing to Israel regardless of ownership. It has been proud to publish pictures of the joint operations room in Hodeidah, a port that the west now regrets deciding not to try to recapture in 2019.
The Houthis were also willing to tweak the noses of the Gulf monarchies. As a neo-state actor – unlike Iran-backed militias in Iraq – the Houthis have also been keen to denounce them, especially their enemy Saudi Arabia, for failing to match its solidarity with Palestine.
For instance, the Houthi leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, in a speech on 14 November said: “The scene in Saudi Arabia, while Gazans are murdered, is a form of moral and humanitarian apostasy and contrary even to tribal customs.” He denounced the series of international business conferences and cultural events in the kingdom as “the season of dancing and depravity”.
This also puts the Houthis’ many internal enemies potentially at a disadvantage, unsure whether to condemn Houthi adventurism or risk the appearance of abandoning the cause of Gaza.
For the most part, the Houthis’ domestic opponents, such as the increasingly influential president of the Southern Transitional Council, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, have not held back from criticising the group. On 18 December, Zubaidi visited the Bab el-Mandab strait area saying he was “leading defence efforts against Iranian-backed Houthi hostilities” challenging strategic trade routes. Tareq Saleh, a member of the anti-Houthi Presidential Leadership Council, also promised to protect the Bab el-Mandab strait.
Even after Thursday’s attacks, the deputy head of the department for media at the Yemeni General People’s Congress, Abdel Hafeez al-Nahari, blamed the reckless and adventurous actions of the Houthis.
One possibility is that the UAE and Saudi Arabia will decide to increase the price the Houthis pay by increasing their support to the forces in the south of Yemen, arguing that advances by land, and not missiles launched from offshore fleets, will eventually dislodge the Houthis.
At some point, the Houthis may fear they are throwing away too much to help Gaza. The faction is almost entirely reliant on imported foodstuffs and nearing bankruptcy, so throwing away the financial benefits of the potential peace deal with the Saudis – including the payment of outstanding civil service wages – would be a big sacrifice.
Ultimately, it may be the spoils of peace – rather than the threat of western war – that will persuade the Houthis to hold back.”
On what stage of history is this morality play performed?
As I wrote in my post of August 17 2020, Divide and Conquer; A Program For Audiences of the Tragedy of Yemen; Plutocratic oligarchy, water scarcity, diminishment of oil wealth, the disruption and impoverishment of a labor shift due to Western policies and traditional kleptocracy which transformed masses of agricultural workers into an urban precariat with few and uncertain jobs and no social safety net, unwinnable sectarian wars and the legacy of a thousand years of rule by Shia imams which the Houthis were founded to restore; the origins of conflict in Yemen are complex but triggered by a struggle to control dwindling resources between elites and those who do the hard and dirty work for them.
Ecological disaster and economic collapse, results of our civilization’s dependence on oil and its status as a strategic resource, have in Yemen demonstrated the fate which awaits us all if we cannot abandon fossil fuels. Yemen will be without water in a generation if nothing changes; the wells which sustained agriculture are running out, and with them the food supply. Villages have become ghost towns, cities shantytowns, and the people vulnerable, and that was before the war. Those not waiting to die became angry, and acted to seize their nation and their survival from those who had stolen it.
Yemen exploded in Revolution during the Arab Spring; the metropolis of Sana’a was in continual social transformation and struggle from 2011 through 2013. The call for democracy and an end to the Saleh regime, corruption, nepotism, plunder by the wealthy which had leveled the labor and middle classes, and the abolishment of sectarian divisions were common throughout the Arab world, and resonate today with the global Reckoning which began in April of 2019 in Sudan.
In Yemen the Arab Spring lasted years because the military split into factions; Ali Abdullah Saleh’s rival Ali Mohsen al Ahmar joined the Islah quasi-Islamist opposition party as protector of the protestors, at the head of his army. Revolution became a civil war.
Collapse of a transitional government brokered by America over the terms of its proposed Constitution triggered a realignment in 2014, the Houthis who had fought Saleh, whose government had been overthrown in 2011, for years joining with his supporters. With the Houthi seizure of Sana’a and the north and their army about to capture the transitional government in Aden, its President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia and asked for intervention. A Civil War became a Great Powers Proxy War.
So began the current war in March of 2015, with the bombing and invasion of Yemen by the Coalition of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan, and Senegal, with America providing thousands of air strikes, special operations and other direct military support, weapons, diplomatic cover, and underwriting the cost. The UAE and much of the Coalition sees Islah as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood; Islah sees them as puppets of American imperialism.
The UAE counters the Houthi regime in the north by using Salafi militias to control the South, including the Southern Transitional Council which seized Aden in 2019 and in April of this year has declared its independence from the UN and Coalition backed government; Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has long been a powerful member of the Southern alliance, and held the large port city of Mukalla for a year from 2015 to April 2016. ISIL has declared the South a caliphate, and all three of these groups fight each other and the Coalition government in exile in Saudi Arabia as well as the Houthis and Iran.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had ruled Yemen from Unification in 1990 til 2012 and north Yemen since 1978,, broke with the Houthis in 2017; he was killed and his army defeated in two days of street fighting in Sana’a, leaving a Houthi pro-Iranian faction in sole control of the North. You may have noticed that I capitalize the terms North and South here; they were two very different nations until unification in 1990, the North a traditional Shia society, the South a Socialist state forged by its liberation struggle from the British Empire, which had been the Crown Colony of Aden from 1839 to 1967, Sunni by faith and ethnically and culturally Arabian rather than Persian.
As al-Jazeera observes, “Commentators in the Arab Gulf States often claim that Iran now controls four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana’a.” I regard this as a fact beyond dispute; two Great Powers conflicts of dominion are playing out in the Middle East concurrently, one between Turkey and Russia, the other between Iran and the Arab-American alliance led by our colony Israel.
Nor can the costs of this conflict in Yemen be disputed; fifteen thousand civilians killed, eight million hungry from famine, one million cholera victims, twenty two million in need of assistance. In a devastating sectarian war which has totalized the destruction of infrastructure and social institutions, the Sunni Arab Coalition has blockaded Yemen to cut off the Shia Houthi Islah from support by Iran.
It was not always thus, this litany of woes, this broken mirror of our flaws and image of the failure of our systems, wherein ecological catastrophe has brought economic and political ruin and the horrors of war. Once Yemen was beautiful and wealthy, smelled of frankincense and myrrh, and was a crossroads of global trade. It can be so again.
Here is a Rashomon Gate dilemma of civilizational scale; from the Arab viewpoint they are engaged in a war of survival against the conquest of the Arabian Peninsula by Iran in a pincer movement from its southern tip in Yemen and from the north in Syria and Lebanon, and from Iran’s viewpoint they are defending a traditional and isolated ally against a merciless Arab conquest aimed directly at their faith and a rapacious American imperialism whose objective is assimilation of their people and exploitation of their resources.
Yemen is a humanitarian disaster, and it is an American humanitarian failure. Our fingerprints are all over this crime scene. We must reclaim our heart and return to the vision of our founders as guarantors of democracy and the rights of autonomous individuals to freedom of religion, and abandon and foreswear all use of force in matters of conscience and faith. We must stop fueling this destructive war, and let people believe as they choose.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
Of course there is nothing unique in Trump bombing Yemen; in January 2024 Biden became the second American President to try to kill me personally, the first being then-Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969. And Trump has merely stood aside while others did the bombing, as he was put in power to do by his agent handler and puppetmaster Vladimir Putin; I first realized Trump is a Russian agent when he was taking the Oath of Office after the Stolen Election of 2016, with Russian bombs falling on American service men he had abandoned in Syria.
We began this year by bringing a Reckoning for Syria with her liberation from Russia’s puppet Assad regime, proving that Russia is not invincible and can be beaten; with luck we may do the same here in America with the Trump regime.
And in the balance of history between liberty and tyranny is not only the fate of democracy in America, but also the survival of the Palestinians and the Ukrainians, and so much more besides; our humanity and the possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of March 19 2024, Israel Unleashes the Third Horseman: Famine in Gaza; Netanyahu now rides upon his black horse of famine, bringing his mad dream of the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem with all of its attendant shadows lingering from the Holocaust.
As the passage in Ezekiel 14:21 warns us when the Infinite unleashes the “Four disastrous acts of judgement” to bring a Reckoning against the Elders of Israel for crimes of idolatry, the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
Israelis and Palestinians are one people divided by history, divisions shaped in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Perhaps Aynn Rand saw truly in this one prediction of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, as she is often paraphrased from her novel The Fountainhead; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
If we wish to preserve our humanity, our reply must always be “All of us, in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and an emerging United Humankind.”
The Gaza War has as its major theme the question of human rights, and if such an idea will have a place in whatever future we may choose. Here then is a retrospective of my witness of history of this conflict, and of its consequences for human being, meaning, and value, and of the choices we make about how to become human together.
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2024, O Israel, Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls; We celebrate this glorious victory of solidarity over division in the Trial of Israel, with joy and dancing in the streets.
O Israel, ask not for whom the bell tolls.
Though for now it stops short of a call for ceasefire and a ruling of Israeli guilt in genocide, this judgement is a stunning and swift victory for the liberation of Palestine which finds Israel guilty of genocidal intent, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity in a way which delegitimates the state of Israel itself as a regime of tyranny and state terror and an outlaw nation of imperial dominion and colonial enslavement and theft, as well as the brutal Netanyahu settler regime which has made of the Holy Land a vast Auschwitz.
And all of this plays out on the stage of the world as exposure and truthtelling of atrocities and calculated state terror perpetrated not against criminals who committed atrocities on October 7, but against civilian populations who had nothing to do with it; seventy percent of the victims of Israeli terror are women and children. How does a child being Palestinian hurt you?
But of course to the fascists of the Netanyahu regime, only people like themselves are truly human, and this mass death and terror is what happens when you begin with such ideas of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, identitarian politics, nationalism, theocratic tyranny, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. No matter where you begin along this spectrum of fear and hate, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
While South Africa leads the championing of our humanity, and has ignited a global anticolonial rebellion against the dominion of Europe and America, two parallel and interdependent storylines trace across the Trial of Israel like leprosy; the attack on the hospital at Khan Younis, and the complicity of Biden the Baby Killer and America along with the UK in Israeli ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
In balance against such forces of darkness we now have two historic victories; the success of the Red Sea Campaign in counter-blockading the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the international solidarity of liberated colonies in calling out an emperor who has no clothes in the Trial of Israel.
As I wrote in my post of November 29 2023, International Day of Solidarity With Palestine; On this International Day of Solidarity with Palestine, I write to apply the Occam’s Razor of simplification to the complex and emotionally charged issue of Palestinian-Israeli relations and the problem of the double minority by asking a question; what best serves the joy of humankind?
So many other ways to construct such a question, especially as principles of becoming human through revolutionary struggle and seizures of power under imposed conditions of struggle which include falsification, commodification, and dehumanization as systems of oppression; of death, learned helplessness, abjection, horror, and divisions of authorized identities?
How best to create a free society of equals as a United Humankind through secular democracy and universal human rights?
How to balance our uniqueness as individuals within a diverse and inclusive society?
How to level all hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness and annihilate all systems of unequal power?
How to bring the Chaos, disruption, fracture, change, and democratization of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and escape the legacies of our history and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
How to reimagine and transform the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value?
How to free ourselves and each other under imposed conditions of struggle which require violence and the use of social force in seizures of power, without becoming the authority we struggle against and using force and violence to enforce our own ideas of virtue?
Israeli atrocities and war crimes in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has confronted us all with our complicity in evil, and the world is whiplashed in horror and abjection as our leaders betray us and abandon the principle of universal human rights by which our civilization is sustained, a civilization now in processes of collapse and subversion by fascism at the dawn of the Age of Tyrants. But this also means everything is in question, power can be seized, and new futures chosen, if we act in solidarity in times of chaos as a space of free creative play.
As Guillermo del Toro teaches us in Carnival Row; “Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Clearly we must have true equality if our rights and liberties are to remain universal in the shadow of state force and control. So also are freedom and equality possible only when we are free of authorized divisions of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
What prevents us, here in America and throughout the world, from seeing this humanitarian disaster as it is? First are elite interests of wealth and power, which have created an American colony and imperialist military giant for the purposes of dominance of the Middle East and control of the strategic asset of oil, of which Traitor Trump’s diplomatic campaign on behalf of recognition of the state of Israel by her neighbors is among the most recent forms of the historic and perfidious Arab-American Alliance, another is Biden the Baby Killer’s hugging the war criminal Netanyahu and sending a Navy ship to help terrorize civilians rather than break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid and silence the bombs of ethnic cleansing.
That we have used the threat of Iranian influence and the ancient Sunni-Shia vendetta to divide and conquer the region, legitimize the conflicts in Yemen and Gaza as test cases of our hegemony, and destabilize democracy movements in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran as well as perpetuate the disenfranchisement and ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine by Israel speaks to America’s true motives; not to champion peace and freedom, but to secure wealth and power through war and tyranny.
I believe the secondary cause of our blindness to the injustices of the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a legacy of the Holocaust and how we process historical narratives of victimization. Once anointed as a victim, and crowned with a white hat of blameless innocence, that figure in our imagination becomes incapable of wrongdoing in any other way. We think in terms of Good and Evil as a cosmic struggle of dichotomous forces, and of showdowns at high noon in the Westerns which are primary narratives of imperial colonialism and the apologetics of power, not in terms of the flaws of our humanity. Absolutes are simpler.
Ambiguity and moral relativization disrupt authorized identities and systems of oppression; this is their great value in revolutionary stuggle.
We are all capable of both good and evil actions, of misunderstandings, conflicted and nuanced feelings and responses, and failures of compassion. And we tend to ignore rather than confront things like moral grey areas which make us uncomfortable; this is called cognitive dissonance reduction, and it means we tend to keep doing things we know are wrong if we have a good story to justify our actions and the belief that God is on our side. The most terrible atrocities in history have been perpetrated in this way.
Here I must say plainly that I support the creation of a secular democracy in which all human beings, Palestinian and Israeli alike, are exactly equal both in fact and under the law, that I support the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel and the liberation of Palestine from Occupation and Blockade, and that Israel as presently constituted is a fascist tyranny of state terror which is guilty of crimes against humanity in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
A post has typified the bifurcated and dichotomous dialogs which have attached themselves to the war in Gaza; it says “If you have the power to turn off your enemy’s food, water, and energy, and attack them at your leisure, you are the bad guy.”
To this someone relied; “If you have the power to attack, rape and kidnap over 200 hostages, and hide them in a hospital, you are the bad guy.”
Here follows my reply, in one paragraph; Yes, we are all bad guys here. The use of social force has no justifications; but as resistance struggle against imposed conditions of unequal power, it may be necessary. The violence of the tyrant, the conqueror, the occupier, or the slave master cannot be compared to the violence used by the slave to break his chains. What has happened here is that both Hamas and the Netanyahu regime have delegitimated themselves in war crimes and unforgivable acts of terror which violate our universal rights. Both seek to subjugate the people in whose name they claim to act to make them complicit, a primary strategy of terror. And only love and solidarity of action against Hamas and the state of Israel by the people of Israel and Palestine together can overcome state tyranny and terror.
This leaves us with the question asked by Tolstoy and Lenin in very different works, one which founded the principles of nonviolent resistance used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the other which began the Russian Revolution; What is to be done?
For myself and my comrades, we have a clear and simple mandate of action in three parts; Unite the Israeli and Palestinian peoples as equal citizens in a democratic secular state wherein faith and ethnicity have no legal standing, defend all civilian noncombatants, their universal human rights, and their access to humanitarian aid, and bring a direct and personal Reckoning to all war criminals on both sides.
As a child in 1969 at an event with my mother that began as a protest against the Occupation of Palestine and American responsibility for its injustices by investment of the University of California and other state institutions, in People’s Park Berkeley, Bloody Thursday May 15, I was in the front line when the police opened fire on the crowd; this was my first death and rebirth, by which I mean Most Sincerely Dead and without life signs for some while, when for a moment I stood outside of time and beheld the possible futures, timelines, and alternate realities which propagated from that moment, the limitless possibilities of becoming human and the terrible chance of a coming age of fascist tyranny, war, the fall of civilization, and the extinction of humankind which may yet come to pass if we cannot reimagine and transform ourselves and our society, and find healing for the flaws of our humanity, the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and the brokenness of the world.
Over fifty years later, I fought in the defense of al Aqsa and the Third Intifada; will we still be fighting for our humanity and our liberty fifty years from now, or fifty thousand?
My hope is that our successors in future generations will have forged a free society of equals and abandoned the use of social force, will have no tyranny or state terror to resist, and can live their lives in joy and love and not in struggle as have I.
We must dream better dreams, and stand together in solidarity of action to make them real.
Who do we want to become, we humans?
Let us choose one another and not the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, equality, diversity, and inclusion and not the divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, liberty and not the centralization of power and authority to a carceral state owned by the wealthy, democracy and not tyranny, hope and not fear, love and not hate.
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2021, The Defense of al Aqsa: Liberty versus Tyranny in Jerusalem; We may have witnessed the advent of a Third Intifada this night, in the Defense of al Aqsa and the street fighting in Gaza which followed, ignited by the perfidy and imperial conquest of a xenophobic and fascist state of Israel which regards no one but their own tribe and faith as truly human, and which has perpetrated an unprovoked and deadly attack as an act of state terror and a crime against humanity on the peaceful worshippers at one of the most sacred mosques in the Islamic world, a demonstration of power and dominion which follows weeks of provocations, assaults, and acts of propagandistic dehumanization against the people of Palestine.
Like the Second or al Aqsa Intifada which lasted four years from 28 September 2000 to 8 February 2005, unresolved issues of an Occupation now in its fifty fourth year since the June 7 1967 Conquest of Old Jerusalem by Israel, which the State of Israel celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar as Jerusalem Day today by attacking al Aqsa, and a Catastrophe ongoing now for seventy three years since Nakba Day May 15 1948, have coalesced around the symbolic value of al Aqsa, which has a contested dual identity as the Temple Mount in Judaism.
Chances of de-escalation and averting a war depend now not on local factors but on the response of the international community, for history has here become a trap which collapses to ensnare us in its jaws, and outside forces must liberate us from the failures of our system’s internal contradictions.
Will America disavow and renounce its colony of Israel, Queen of her imperial policy in the Middle East and control of the strategic resource of oil? Can international unity and the pressure of Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction free us from the tyranny and terror of an Apartheid regime as it did in South Africa?
Or is war the only reckoning humankind can offer, or will accept?
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post; “On Monday night, militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli military exchanged rocket fire and airstrikes amid a deadly escalation of violence. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, armed groups based in blockaded Gaza, launched a barrage of rockets that landed near Jerusalem and in parts of southern Israel, injuring at least one person. Israeli airstrikes in retaliation killed at least 20 people in Gaza, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, including nine children.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “terrorist groups” in Gaza had “crossed a red line” with their rocket attacks. But the latest explosion of hostilities has a long tail, following numerous aggressive actions by both Israeli security forces and far-right Jewish supremacist groups in Jerusalem. Two weeks ago, bands of Jewish extremists, including some settlers from the West Bank, marched through Palestinian-populated areas of the holy city, chanting “Death to Arabs,” attacking bystanders and damaging Palestinian property and homes. Israeli attempts to evict a number of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah — a microcosm of what Palestinians view as part of a long history of dispossession and erasure at the hands of the Israeli state — had stirred Palestinian solidarity protests in various parts of the occupied territories and Israel proper.
It also raised tensions ahead of the commemoration of Jerusalem Day on Monday, an official Israeli holiday celebrating the capture of the city during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. A planned annual march by far-right ultranationalist Israelis was called off after authorities rerouted its path at the last minute. Large numbers still made their way to the Western Wall and sang an extremist vengeance song against Palestinians.
“The Hamas rocket attacks, which included the first strikes against Jerusalem in several years, came after running clashes among Israeli police, Palestinian protesters and far-right Jewish Israelis around the Old City,” my colleagues reported. “Among the hundreds injured were seven who were hospitalized in serious condition, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent. Video footage circulated on social media of Israeli police officers brutally beating a detained Palestinian man.”
How can America support the state of Israel in tyranny and terror, conquest and plunder? It’s a question asked in tones of outrage, sorrow, and bafflement since the advent of the Nakba on May 15 1948, the Day of Catastrophe which began the Occupation of Palestine and the systematic enslavement and genocide of its people in the wake of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem. How is this legitimized?
A friend has recently reframed this question for me; “I loved and embraced the Jewish tradition, joining a synagogue and working alongside its Rabbi. When I witness the treatment of Palestinians by the Jewish government of Israel, I am overwhelmed by feelings of confusion and anger. Unable to reconcile this immorality, I question the very foundation of my faith. Where is the good and moral uprising of international Jewish voices condemning the government’s path? I’ve lost faith in being Jewish.”
What is clear to me is that this crisis of faith is also an existential crisis of identity, a situation of utmost gravity and danger which also holds the potential for reimagination and transformative rebirth, a personal echo of a parallel civilizational crisis from which humankind and the global community of nations must find a way to emerge and free ourselves of the legacies of our history. Here is my reply:
The state of Israel is not identical with the Jewish faith, though the fascist-imperialist faction which Netanyahu represents would like everyone to think so.
A nation based on the assignment of its citizens to a tribal identity, the sectarian weaponization of faith in service to power and an authorized national identity, a military society with universal compulsory service, and a reconstructed Hebrew language of national unity has used identity politics to subjugate its citizens to the centralized power of tyranny; Israel is a fascist state of blood, faith, and soil no less than that of the Nazis.
Add to this toxic mix a kleptocratic regime which has propagandized narratives of historical victimization to legitimize massive theft and imperial conquest of other people’s nations and one thing is clear; Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
You may know from my many references to the incident in my writing that I am an antifascist, sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet in 1982 in Beirut, during our fight against the Israeli invasion and siege. In the forty years after, I have been a hunter of fascists and a revolutionary engaged in struggle for the liberation of humankind against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and against tyranny and authoritarian regimes of force and control, for democracy and its ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, and for our universal human rights. In this cause I place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
A Palestinian homeland, and justice for its people, has been among my goals since that summer so long ago. Like the goal of liberation of Ireland from British colonial rule, it remains to be achieved. In question is the idea of freedom and citizenship as the sovereignty and independence of peoples from foreign colonialism and authoritarian tyranny, and the primacy of a nonsectarian state free from divisions and hierarchies of faith, for who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
I also support the idea of an Israeli homeland, and see no reason these two states, Palestine and Israeli, should be mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Why must citizenship be bound by the limits of geography, or states by borders?
Why must one people’s Return mean another’s Exile?
To be clear, I am on the side of anyone threatened with hate crime regardless of any other factors; in riot and war my test for the use of force is simple; who holds power?
I am on the side of all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. This applies equally to Jews and Muslims, Israel and Palestine, and any other human beings regardless of who they are, and especially without any moral burden of merit as Shaw teaches us with the character of Alfred P. Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
Some Israelis who would disagree with me on the question of Palestine and militarism in imperial conquest and regional dominion have been allies in the cause of hunting Nazis, but are blind to their own complicity in this evil due to seeing themselves as victims and defenders of victims rather than perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
This is about fear, and the destructive cycle of abuse and violence. Not membership in any group or authorized identities of belonging, hierarchies of the elite and the elect, and divisions of exclusionary otherness. The origins of violence and the social use of force are universal, historical, and systemic, and absolutely not in any mythical evil impulse, original sin, or inherent depravity of man.
The Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force belongs to no one, but to apersonal systems of unequal power. I understand all too well how power makes us feel safe, the seductive beauty of weapons which make us arbiters of virtue, and how elite membership confers entitlement; this works the same for nations as for individuals, in the playground, prison yard, and contested public spaces like the Temple Mount which is also al Aqsa.
When faith is appropriated by authority for legitimation in identity politics, identity itself becomes confused and ambiguous. To become free, we must seize ownership of ourselves as self-created and autonomous beings.
This is why the primary duties of a citizen are to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
I think of the problem of human evil and its cycle of fear, power, and force in the case of states which become the tyrannies they fought to liberate themselves from, and this is true of anticolonial revolutionary states generally because of the historical legacies of victimization and the imposed conditions of struggle, in this way; victims often become abusers because their identity is organized around power as the only means of escape and survival in a world wherein no one can be trusted.
When trust has been abrogated and proven empty and without meaning, when the capacity to bond with and feel the pain of others in empathy has been broken and one is without pity or remorse, when fear is overwhelming and generalized and has been shaped by authority to the service of power, victims learn that only power has meaning and is real. We must not allow our abusers to become our teachers.
While every such issue has its own unique origins and history, the problem itself is universal, and relates to what one fears, and how that fear is shaped by authority as identity. From our perspective as Americans interpreting events in the classic problem of the double minority typified by Israel and Palestine, how we perceive issues has much to do with how they are framed by our informing and motivating sources.
In the end we are defined by what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
The first question to ask of any story, and the most important, is simple; whose story is this?
We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, of lies and illusions, falsifications of ourselves, distorted images and reflections, echoes and authorized identities which disfigure, disempower, and steal our souls.
How shall we answer those who would enslave us? Our authenticity and autonomy is realized through seizure of power, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind as a free society of equals.
We Americans tend to see things in terms of white hats and black hats, as in the Western films which serve as origin myths and archetypes of our national character. Once victim status has been conferred, such groups and persons become white hats and good guys, incapable of evil and diametrically opposed to whomever must then be black hats. It’s a terrible way of choosing national policy.
Sadly, we humans can be good and evil at once, the flaws of our humanity echo and reflect the brokenness of the world. It is a truth proven once again tonight in al Quds or Jerusalem depending on to whom one is speaking and in what language, as Gaza burns from the onslaught of an Israeli Defense Forces run amok much the same as the night almost four decades ago in Beirut when they tried to burn Genet and I alive in our café, as a dozen human beings from whom everything but hope has been stolen swear vows to each other to hold a position covering the escape of the women and children trapped by the Israeli attack until all are safe, in a final defense not of al Aqsa Mosque, magnificent and beautiful and filled with significance, monument to the human impulse to reach beyond ourselves and to the limitless possibilities of becoming human, a stage fit for the glorious deaths of heroes, but of the disembodied screams of strangers among the nameless warrens of a derelict antiquity.
Against the chasms of emptiness and nihilistic barbarism of a world of darkness and fire, of fear and force, I have only words to offer, and I write to you what I have said to my comrades who have chosen to stand with me; I’ve lost count of Last Stands, but I’ve risked everything against impossible odds and survived more times than I can remember, and all that matters is that we abandon neither ourselves nor one another, that we refuse to submit, for this is the moment of our freedom, and it can never be taken from us.
From this night, Palestine is free, for we can be killed, but we cannot be conquered.
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2023, Stand With Humankind: On Today’s Global Rally For Palestine; Since the disruption and fracture of our ideas of universal human rights in the October 7 terror attack perpetrated by the Netanyahu regime of Israel and their partners in theocratic tyranny Hamas which delegitimized both and destabilized the world order, a great struggle between democracy and tyranny, love and hate, hope and fear has been raging in Gaza, where the fate of humankind hangs in the balance and our future possibilities of becoming human are being chosen in the great game of chance that is war.
Here, as in far too many times and places, a few unconquerable heroes and those who stand with them in solidarity as a band of brothers against the darkness of barbarian atavisms of brute fear and force and a nihilistic regime wherein only power has meaning and fear is the only means of exchange, die in the forlorn hope of buying with their lives time for civilization to awaken to the threat of fascist tyranny and imperial conquest.
How will we answer the test of our humanity in this moment of existential threat? Who do we want to become, we humans? A free society of equals or a world of masters and slaves?
For these are the stakes of this game in which we now play; liberty or tyranny.
Today the Rally For Palestine throughout the world demonstrates our solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, a glorious defiance of fear weaponized in service to power by authority and of the fascisms of blood, faith, and soil through which they divide and subjugate us.
For this time of darkness and sectarian violence ends only when both Israelis and Palestinians, one people divided by history, unite to liberate each other from those who claim to rule in their name and as mouthpieces for a god of universal brotherhood and love of which they have made instead an idol of cruelty and death.
Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
When those who would enslave us come for us, as they always do, let them find not a people subjugated by learned helplessness nor divided by hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, but a United Humankind unconquerable in solidarity and refusal to submit.
To tyranny and fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, genocides, plunder and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Let us reply to tyranny and terror with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
War transforms the question of our authorship of ourselves with existential primacy; where do we ourselves end, and others begin? How may we negotiate this boundary of the Forbidden and interface with alien realms of human being, meaning, and value, with division and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness or with solidarity, diversity, and inclusion, with fear or with love?
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
There are no Palestinians, no Israelis; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2023, I Stand With Humankind Against Theocratic Tyranny and Terror: the Hamas-Israel War Unfolds As the Sacrifice of Innocents to Power; When Rome was once engulfed in famine riots, the Emperor was asked if the ships in Egypt should load grain to feed the people or sand for the arena to divert them. “Load sand” was the infamous reply; and it seems it is still true today.
What can I say that has not already been said, what can I do that has not already been done, hundreds of times over across decades of Resistance to fascisms of blood, faith, and soil of every kind and description, to carceral states of force and control, to violations of our universal human rights and the idea central to democracy and our civilization that all human beings are equal and worth exactly the same, regardless of hierarchies of belonging and otherness, whether they are ours or different blood, faith, nationality?
How can I demonstrate that it is better to be a free society of equals than a prison world of masters and slaves?
Above the lands regarded as holy by three faiths a bone white moon like a dead fish eye regards us with implacable wrath in our horror and monstrosity, a rotten and poisonous holiness perverted by authorities who subjugate us by claiming to speak in the name of the Infinite and a ground of struggle not merely between them but also between humanity and dehumanization, barbarism, atavisms of instinct, and what madness and evil may together do as fear and faith are weaponized by those who would enslave us.
In reference to an article entitled Biden says West Bank settlers ‘pouring gasoline on fire’ as Israel prepares for Gaza ground invasion, I wrote; Biden the Baby Killer sputters incoherent threats at people who resist their subjugation, dehumanization, brutal repression of dissent, and genocide by the Occupation. “Who are you to fight back, you slaves, you nonwhite filth”, Biden spits in fury at the glorious defiance of those who hunger to be free. American is a shameful and squalid factory of death.
In reply to Lina Khatib’s article in The Guardian entitled Despite their rhetoric, neither Iran nor Hezbollah want an escalation of war in the Middle East. Here’s why, I wrote; I hope this has it right, but I fear our enemies wish to provoke massive death and destruction among their own peoples to forge unity and delegitimize western values. They will sacrifice anything to engineer a conflict of civilizations. And they have partners within the Israeli alt right and diaspora just as Hamas does, eager to perpetuate and secure their dominion and hegemony over their own Jewish people.
This whole ritual breaking of taboos as war crimes by Hamas is a performance designed to provoke retaliation as war crimes by Israel, to dehumanize and criminalize Israelis caught between the lies and tyranny of the state and the fear of an enemy willing to demonize itself, fear weaponized in service to power by both Hamas and her partner in terror Israel. Yet there remains an escape clause in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; the redemptive power of love.
Let us unite to liberate each other, the Jews from the state of Israel and the Palestinians of Gaza from Hamas. For those who stand between each of us and the Infinite serve neither.
And to the words of Queen Rania of Jordan as reported by Christiane Amanpour of CNN, I replied; Shocking to me as well, though sadly unsurprising. Our ideology of human rights is an apologetics of imperial and colonial power. This disruptive event of the shocking Hamas attack is designed to delegitimize Israel, America, and the whole ideology of democracy and human rights, and if we play this game by such rules of escalation and revenge the enemy wins, and our civilization falls.
Why bomb Gaza, except to kill the children of others in trade for your own killed children? I very much doubt that the leaders of Hamas have trapped themselves in the killing box of Gaza, nor that if I were to say to Israel; I will bring you the heads of your enemies, in trade for the lives of the people of Palestine who have nothing to do with the criminals who abducted and murdered the children of Israel, that this offer would be accepted.
For the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem so long dreamed of by Netanyahu and his settler-thief regime of theocratic imperialists reveals the true intention of the regime as genocide, and I suspect the attack was planned jointly by Hamas and Israel or by an unknown third force whose interests are opaque but clearly inimical to the peace and democracy process that was thriving across sectarian lines before the attack. The sabotage of the anti-Netanyahu democracy movement in Israel and of the peace and solidarity movement to unite Palestine and Israel is the true purpose and primary result of the Hamas attack.
Whose wealth and power is founded on selling arms to Israel? Now we see why Biden is pitching a Holocaust of the Palestinians rather than liberating Gaza from Hamas as the natural consequence of this humanitarian tragedy.
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.
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 Israels Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem; in this I rejoice to be wrong about human nature. 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 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.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors; Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror. I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state and not her people mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of total war and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
Here is the memorial I wrote for my friend, assassinated in Gaza by an Israeli sniper during the fighting over two years ago; June 21 2022, We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human; Death is the ultimate life disruptive event, the mirror image of Chaos as creative force and the adaptive potential of a system.
This day I have re-enacted the stages of grief process as I relive an event of a year ago, caught in the labyrinth of its story, and as always with such complexes of memory, history, and identity I emerge through its passage with changed perspective.
Some stories can shatter our lives, but also free us from the legacies of history and the limits of our former selves.
This is a story which has become interwoven with my annual reading of Sartre’s works in celebration of his birthday, a juxtaposition which I find wholly appropriate, illuminating, and strangely hopeful.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
We choose our friends and lovers from among those reflections which embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves or fully integrate into our consciousness and personality; and it is the interface between these two bounded realms, the Ideal and the Real, which I am driven to interrogate today.
Here is where the art of questioning lives, at the intersection of Socratic method and classical rhetoric, the dialectics of history, and the problematization of our motives, feelings, and processes of ideation through the methods of psychotherapy.
We speak of the juxtaposition of imaginal and actual realms of being as a form of Dadaist collage as pioneered by Tristan Tzara and instrumentalized as methodology by William S. Burroughs which creates the universe of our experience, of the discontiguous, relative, ambiguous, and ephemeral nature of truth described by Akutagawa in Rashomon Gate and the methods of fiction exemplified by Raymond Queneau as applied to identity and self construal, and idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty as dyadic forces of the psyche which work themselves out through our relationships with ourselves and with others. These three parallel and interdependent processes shape who we become, and how we instrumentalize others in our self creation.
We must first own the fact that dealing with our memories of someone is not the same as the lived experience of our history; it is all one sided and has been moved into an interior space of performance, and in which reimagination and transformation is ongoing. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski teaches us, nor is our idea of a person equal to the actual person themselves.
What parts of myself do I embody as a figural space into which to grow in the character whom I have thought of as Cleopatra, with all of the ambivalence, power, legacies of cultural history, and liminality such an identification implies, how do I imagine her now, and what kind of story have I cast us in?
I think of her now in terms of Rachel McAdams’ wily, sophisticated, and transgressive Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, as she became throughout the twelve years of our work in liberation struggle for the independence of Palestine, with elements of Millie Bobby Brown’s fearless, brilliant, and utterly without boundaries Enola Holmes as she began, bearing onward the colours of a beloved and presumed martyred family member in the course of investigating his disappearance. I am reasonably certain that this is not how she saw herself.
For illumination as to how a Palestinian woman might imagine herself, the characters she may choose to play as role models and the stories she may embody as ritual enactments, even a highly unusual one such as she, we may look to the wonderfully rich culture of Palestine’s female film directors and authors; of auteurs Annemarie Jacir, Maysaloun Hamoud, Mai Masri, and Farah Nabulsi, and of novelists Susan Abulhawa, Liana Badr, Ghada Karmi, Sahar Khalifeh, Hala Alyan, and Sahar Mustafah.
Bearing in mind that all such reading lists are nothing less than a set of authorized identities. As Margaret Atwood so splendidly demonstrates in her works, our intertexts are primary in the construction of our identities, including those of sex and gender, as mimesis and as dialectical processes of history.
And this is where it never ceases to be fascinating, the study of human being, meaning, and value and the limitless possibilities of becoming human. For in the sphere of our relationships with others, parallel and interdependent with our relationships between the masculine and feminine halves of our psyche, each co-evolves with the other in recursive processes of growth and adaptation to change in the construction of identity.
I say again; we interpret the actions of others and form relationships on the basis of our self-construal and ideas of ourselves, and we use our relations with real people to shape who we wish to become.
How does this work out in real life? As a personal example of the discontiguous gaps of meaning in the interfaces between bounded realms of masculine and feminine personae, a free space of creative play, I offer the artifacts of memory of a figure which may or may not align with the martyr I know only by her Code Name: Cleopatra.
Of the Last Stand in which we met and forged an alliance, betrayed and caught in a trap which we turned against our enemies who had trapped themselves in with us, which I think of as the final battle scene in the film Mr & Mrs Smith, this operatic quest was set in motion by the conflict of dominion between Hamas and al Qaeda in Gaza during August of 2009, during which the forces of light prevailed over those of darkness in the victory of Hamas, with Israel playing each against the other through infiltration agents, spies, deniable assets, and use of a special Recon team masquerading as various Arab factions to commit atrocities against presumed rival Arab groups in a classic policy of divide and conquer. This space of play was complicated by clan vendettas such as hers, and the usual political and religious fragmentation, crime syndicates, mercenary forces, tribalism, corruption, and the shadow wars of foreign states.
Our paths crossed several times over the next twelve years, always in memorable circumstances, sometimes as allies and others as rivals, often as both. Which of these is the real and true version of her, or of myself? Such iterations of our images are without number, like the captured and distorted selves in funhouse mirrors aligned to reflect into infinity.
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, lies and illusions, rewritten histories, state secrets, alternate realities, authoritarian faith which devours truths. This I contrast with its opposite, journalism and the witness of history as the sacred quest to pursue the truth. We are made counterfeits of ourselves by systems of elite hegemonic power such as patriarchy, and by those who would enslave us, through capture of our stories as theft of the soul.
James Angleton, evil genius of the C.I.A.’s Counterintelligence Service 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 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, archetypes and transpersonal figures like the anima which concerns us here, create our personae through stories, a network of memories, histories, and identity; and they do so for their own purposes, which we do not always understand.
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?
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2021, The Hope of Humankind: On Becoming Autonomous Zones as Agents of Chaos and Transformative Change; A friend has written in despair of our significance and hope for the liberation of humankind, of the impactfulness of our lives and our struggles which balance the flaws of our humanity against the monstrous and vast forces of a system of dehumanization, falsification, and commodification; for to be human is to live in a state of existential crisis and struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Today is the birthday of Jean Paul Sartre, and so this event finds me reading once again his magnificent reimagination of Jean Genet in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr; Genet who set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982.
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell with its iconic crack, I am broken open to the suffering of others and the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
This morning I awoke to a call to identify the body of a friend missing and believed killed in Gaza by Israeli terrorists in the savage street fighting which followed the rocket attacks of last week, which I was unable to do; I searched for my friend in this sad and ruined form, like the skin of a wild thing which has sung itself utterly away, and could recognize nothing.
Where is my friend, agile, lithe, mercurial, fearless, insightful and quick witted, who always had four scenarios running and three escape routes, who survived against impossible odds through improvisation and leveraging chaos, whose vision could discern true motives within the secret chambers of the human heart and play them like an instrument as songs of rapture and terror, who chameleon-like and protean could shift identities as needed and behind their masks move among her enemies unseen?
I never knew her true name; perhaps she no longer had one, as is true for so many of us who play the Great Game of futures and the possibilities of becoming human, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling in the novel Kim. My own names are numberless as the stars, like those of an actor who has played multitudes of roles in films and theatres of many kinds.
She first entered my orbit during the victorious struggle of Hamas against al Qaeda for dominion of Gaza in August of 2009 in Rafah, an Egyptian Palestinian drawn into the maelstrom of war like countless others by family duty and vendetta.
Yet she said no to authority at great peril when she could have said yes and become a slave, stood in solidarity with others when she could have run; this was a choice, one which confers agency, autonomy, and self-ownership as a seizure of power in a limited and deterministic context. Refusal to submit is the primary human act, one which cannot be taken from us, wherein we become Unconquered and free, and able to liberate others.
So it is that we may escape the wilderness of mirrors in which we wander, a realm of lies and illusions, captured and distorted images, falsification and the theft of the soul. For the authentic self, the image which we seize and claim as our own, flies free of its mad circus of seductions and traps. Hence we achieve our true selves and form, in rapture and exaltation as beings of our own uniqueness.
Impossible that such grandeur could be reduced to its material form, like the abandoned shell of a fantastic sea creature which has grown beyond its limits and moved on, to realms unknown.
The lines spoken by Hamlet while holding the skull of his friend Yorick came unbidden to my thoughts; “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?”
For twelve years you danced with death, and danced away laughing, until today.
Farewell, my friend; I’ll see you in the eyes of the defiant ones, who bear your fire onward into the unknown, and with it I hope your laughter. Our successors will need both fire and laughter, if the future we win for them is to be equal to its price, and worth living in.
Our lives are like the dragon’s teeth sown in the earth by the Phoenician prince Cadmus from which warriors arise; from each, multitudes. For we live on as echoes and reflections in the lives of others, in the consequences and effects of our actions, in the good we can do for others which gathers force over time, and in the meaning, value, and possibilities we create.
How can choosing death and freedom be better than submission to authority and its weaponization of fear and force?
My experience of accepting death in confronting force and violence finds parallels in the mock executions of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Maurice Blanchot, and I’m not done challenging state terror and tyranny and forces of repression. I’m going to stand between people with guns and their victims in future, as I have many times in past, and here I find resilience among my motivating and informing sources; Sartre’s total freedom won by refusal to submit, and Camus’ rebellion against authority which renders force meaningless when met by disobedience, give me the ability to claw my way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
And all who are mortal share these burdens with me. In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathology of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
19 مارس 2026: ذكرى هجمات القصف المشتركة بين ترامب ونتنياهو في إطار حملة الإبادة الجماعية؛ نتنياهو يقصف ممر المساعدات المدنية في غزة لتقسيمها إلى “بانتوستانات”، بينما يقصف ترامب اليمن لكسر حصارنا المضاد للحصار الإسرائيلي المفروض على المساعدات الإنسانية.
في عمل وحشي ومروع وجريمة حرب نكراء، قام نتنياهو وترامب – في مثل هذا اليوم قبل عام – بتنسيق حملة قصف مزدوجة الجبهات تهدف إلى الإبادة الجماعية ضد الفلسطينيين؛ فبينما يقصف نتنياهو ممر المساعدات المدنية لتقسيم قطاع غزة إلى “بانتوستانات” (جيوب معزولة)، يقصف ترامب اليمن لكسر الحصار المضاد الذي فرضناه نحن رداً على الحصار الإسرائيلي للمساعدات الإنسانية.
إن مثل هذه الجرائم البشعة تجد الآن أصداءً وانعكاسات لها في “حرب إيران”؛ ذلك الحلم الذي صاغته إسرائيل لتحقيق الغزو الإمبراطوري والسيطرة على جيرانها بهدف إخضاعهم وضمهم إلى “إسرائيل الكبرى”، وهو حلمٌ تم شراؤه بأموال دافعي الضرائب الأمريكيين وأرواحهم.
الإبادة الجماعية، والتطهير العرقي، والاستعباد، والمجاعات المُصممة عمداً، وجرائم الحرب المرتكبة ضد الأطفال وغيرهم من المدنيين؛ هذا هو وجه دولة إسرائيل بكل ما فيه من رعب ووحشية، وهو الآن أيضاً وجه “أمريكا الفيشية” في ظل نظام ترامب وما يسميه بـ “مسرح القسوة”.
تشكل إسرائيل وأمريكا معاً “أنظمة وحشية” لا تعترف بأي قوانين سوى الحكم السلطوي القائم على القوة والخوف، ولا تعرف أي أخلاق سوى الكراهية، ولا تحمل أي أحلام سامية تتعلق بإنسانيتنا ومواطنتنا المتساوية، بل لا تنتج سوى كوابيس عنصرية وفاشية قائمة على العرق والدين والهوية القومية الضيقة.
وهنا، نشهد مرة أخرى حقيقة عظيمة ومروعة؛ فمهما كان المنطلق الذي تبدأ منه في تصنيف البشر وتحديد “أنواعهم” المختلفة، ومهما انغمست في بناء التسلسلات الهرمية والتصنيفات المعقدة للانتماء و”الآخرية” الإقصائية، فإنك ستجد نفسك حتماً في النهاية واقفاً عند بوابات “أوشفيتز”.
إن مستقبل منطقة الشرق الأوسط بأسرها يمكن قراءته واستشرافه من خلال “مرآة الغيب” المتمثلة في مسارح العمليات العسكرية في اليمن وفلسطين، والتي تُعد بمثابة جبهات لـ “الحرب العالمية الثالثة”؛ وهي الجبهات التي تنبأت – قبل عام واحد – بالأزمة التي اندلعت لاحقاً في مضيق هرمز ومسرح العمليات في دول الخليج ضمن سياق “حرب إيران”.
كيف وصلنا إلى هذا المنحدر الخطير؟ وكيف أصبحنا نقصف الشعوب التي كان الأجدر بنا أن نتحالف معها في نضالها من أجل التحرر؟
Persian
۱۹ مارس ۲۰۲۶، سالگرد حملات بمباران مشترک ترامپ و نتانیاهو در کارزار نسلکشی: نتانیاهو راهروی کمکهای غیرنظامی در غزه را بمباران میکند تا آن را به بانتوستانها تقسیم کند، در حالی که ترامپ یمن را بمباران میکند تا محاصره متقابل ما علیه محاصره کمکهای بشردوستانه اسرائیل را بشکند.
در یک جنایت و جنایت جنگی وحشیانه و وحشتناک، نتانیاهو و ترامپ یک سال پیش در چنین روزی، یک کارزار بمباران نسلکشی در دو جبهه علیه فلسطینیان را هماهنگ کردند. نتانیاهو یک راهروی کمکهای غیرنظامی را بمباران میکند تا غزه را به بانتوستانها تقسیم کند، در حالی که ترامپ یمن را بمباران میکند تا محاصره متقابل ما علیه محاصره کمکهای بشردوستانه اسرائیل را بشکند.
چنین جنایات هولناکی اکنون در جنگ ایران، رویای ساخته شده اسرائیل برای فتح و سلطه امپریالیستی بر همسایگانش برای مطیع کردن آنها در یک اسرائیل بزرگ، که با مالیات و جان آمریکاییها خریداری شده است، پژواک و بازتاب مییابد.
نسلکشی، پاکسازی قومی و بردهداری، قحطی طراحی شده و جنایات جنگی علیه کودکان و سایر غیرنظامیان؛ این دولت اسرائیل با تمام وحشت و ترورش است، و اکنون ویشی آمریکا تحت رژیم ترامپ و تئاتر ظلم او.
اسرائیل و آمریکا با هم رژیمهای قساوت هستند که هیچ قانونی جز حکومت استبدادی با زور و ترس، هیچ اخلاقی جز نفرت، هیچ رویای بزرگی از انسانیت و شهروندی ما به عنوان برابر، بلکه کابوسهای نژاد، ایمان و هویت ملی فاشیستی ندارند.
در اینجا ما دوباره شاهد یک حقیقت بزرگ و وحشتناک هستیم؛ مهم نیست که با ایدههای انواع مردم، با سلسله مراتب و طبقهبندیهای تعلق و دیگری بودنِ طردکننده از کجا شروع کنید، همیشه به دروازههای آشویتس میرسید.
آینده کل خاورمیانه را میتوان در آینه دیدبانی صحنههای یمن و فلسطین جنگ جهانی سوم خواند، که یک سال پیش بحران تنگه هرمز و صحنه کشورهای خلیج فارس در جنگ ایران را پیشگویی کرد.
چگونه به این مرحله رسیدیم، بمباران مردمی که باید در مبارزه آزادیبخش با آنها متحد باشیم؟
News of 2026: Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon Theatres of War
War in Iran, chaos in the Gulf, repression in the west: and the thread that binds them all is Palestine
12 يناير 2024 اذهب يا فريق الانتفاضة! حملة البحر الأحمر المنتصرة تعولم حرب غزة
إن حملة البحر الأحمر المنتصرة والحصار المضاد المفروض على إسرائيل من قبل حلفاء النضال من أجل التحرير الفلسطيني، والحوثيين في اليمن، الذراع الطويلة للهيمنة الإيرانية في صراع طويل الأمد مع التحالف العربي الأمريكي في الحرب الأهلية الطائفية، تصبح حربًا بالوكالة بين القوى العظمى، لقد عزلت الغارات التجارية، بعبقرية وجرأة، إسرائيل عن الدعم المادي لحربها الإرهابية والتطهير العرقي، وعولمت الصراع.
رداً على ذلك، هاجمت أمريكا وبريطانيا أهدافاً للحوثيين في اليمن، بينما وجهت جنوب أفريقيا اتهامات ضد إسرائيل بارتكاب جرائم إبادة جماعية وجرائم ضد الإنسانية.
لقد انتصر الحصار المضاد في عزل إسرائيل عن الدعم المتوازن لجريمة الحرب المتمثلة في منع وصول المساعدات الإنسانية إلى غزة. الآن، بينما يقوم المتآمرون مع إسرائيل في التطهير العرقي، أمريكا وبريطانيا، بقتل أبطال الإنسانية بشراسة في اليمن، يجب علينا أن نعيد الحرب إلى الوطن ونثبت أنه لا يجوز لأحد تجريد إنسان آخر من أي ملاذ آمن في أي مكان على وجه الأرض. وإذا أرسل أي نظام إرهاب دولة أسلحة إلى إسرائيل، فلابد من إغراق تلك السفن في البحر أو تدميرها في الموانئ في جميع أنحاء العالم.
لقد صنعت إسرائيل غزة بمثابة وعاء للقتل، ولكن من الممكن وضع وعاء أكبر حولها من خلال عدم منح الإرهاب ملاذاً آمناً في أي مكان. لقد فشل رئيسنا غير الأخلاقي والمستبد بايدن في استخدام أفضل وسائل الضغط لوضع حد لحملة الإبادة الجماعية الإسرائيلية في حركة المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات؛ ومن خلال تواطؤه، لم يتبق لنا سوى العمل المباشر والحرب حتى السكين في المقاومة.
ما هي الحرب بالسكين؟ عبارة وفكرة عن الصراع والصراع تصل إلينا دون تغيير من اللغة الإسكندنافية القديمة في زمن الفايكنج؛ كريج با كنيفن، مناسب لمبدأ العمل الموحد لأخوية القراصنة العالمية للنضال من أجل التحرير مثل ميناء الحديدة الحر الذي أكتب منه الآن.
كل المقاومة هي حرب بالسكين، فمن لا يحترم أي قوانين ولا حدود لا يجوز له أن يختبئ وراء أي شيء.
Persian
12 ژانویه 2024 برو انتفاضه تیمی! کمپین پیروزمندانه دریای سرخ جنگ غزه را جهانی می کند
کمپین پیروزمندانه دریای سرخ و محاصره متقابل اسرائیل توسط متحدان مبارزات آزادیبخش فلسطین، حوثیهای یمن، بازوی طولانی سلطه ایران در درگیری طولانی با اتحاد عربی و آمریکایی در جنگ داخلی فرقهای تبدیل به جنگ نیابتی قدرتهای بزرگ شد. با نبوغ و جسارت در حمله تجاری، اسرائیل را از حمایت مادی از جنگ ترور و پاکسازی قومی منزوی کرده و درگیری را جهانی کرده است.
آمریکا و بریتانیا در پاسخ به اهداف حوثی ها در یمن حمله کرده اند، زیرا آفریقای جنوبی اسرائیل را به اتهام نسل کشی و جنایت علیه بشریت مطرح می کند.
محاصره متقابل در انزوای اسرائیل از حمایت در برابر جنایت جنگی آنها در ممانعت از کمک های بشردوستانه به غزه پیروز بوده است. اکنون که توطئهگران اسرائیل در پاکسازی قومی آمریکا و بریتانیا قهرمانان بشریت را در یمن وحشیانه به قتل میرسانند، ما باید جنگ را به خانه برگردانیم و نشان دهیم که هیچکس نمیتواند دیگری را از هیچ پناهگاه امنی در هیچ کجای زمین از انسانیت خارج کند. و اگر چنین رژیم ترور دولتی به اسرائیل اسلحه بفرستد، آن کشتی ها باید در دریا غرق شوند یا در بندرهای سراسر جهان نابود شوند.
اسرائیل یک کوزه کشتار از غزه ساخته است، اما میتوان کوزه بزرگتری را در اطراف آن قرار داد و به وحشت پناهگاه امنی نداد. بایدن رئیس جمهور غیراخلاقی و ظالم ما از بهترین ابزار فشار برای پایان دادن به کارزار نسل کشی اسرائیل در BDS استفاده نکرده است. با همدستی او ما تنها با اقدام مستقیم و جنگ به چاقو در مقاومت باقی میمانیم.
جنگ به چاقو چیست؟ عبارت و ایده ای از درگیری و مبارزه که بدون تغییر از نورس قدیم در زمان وایکینگ ها به ما می رسد. کریگ پا نایون، مناسب برای یک اصل متحد کننده عمل یک برادر دزدان دریایی جهانی مبارزه آزادیبخش مانند بندر آزاد حدیده که اکنون از آن می نویسم.
تمام مقاومت ها جنگی است تا به چاقو، زیرا کسی که به هیچ قانونی و هیچ محدودیتی احترام نمی گذارد، نمی تواند پشت هیچ کدام پنهان شود.
We celebrate today the one hundred fifty fourth anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, a glorious legacy of Resistance in which all humankind shares. It conjures for me visions of the Bacchantes, a society of women revolutionaries who printed tickets with an image of the god of ecstasy and poetic vision on one side and the address of an enemy of the people on the other, bearing the legend “good for burning”. Distribution of the lottery tickets was through street runners as if it were an illegal gambling ring, something of no real interest to the police; teams bearing axes and torches would converge on the target as a flash mob.
An ancestor of mine was one of them, called the Red Queen in reference to the character in Alice in Wonderland due to her signature method of assassination, a friend of figures of the Commune including Karl Marx, Gustave Courbet, Arthur Rimbaud, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and a comrade of Louise Michel; she was among the members of the Garde Militaire of the Commune who later immigrated to San Francisco as an intact unit, with their banners and uniforms.
The secret society of revolutionaries descended from the original Garde Militaire of the Commune throughout the world remains among the most influential of covert military organizations which are independent from and not authorized by any nation, though clearly not unique in this. I have always enjoyed the splendid irony that many of the world’s criminal syndicates originate exactly as the intelligence and special operations communities which are their counterparts and opposing forces do, as a final court of appeal of the people against tyrants and systems of oppression; crime and law enforcement, revolution and tyranny, the secret policeman and the rebel, arise together and are interdependent. As I have often written, the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce of resistance.
As her descendent and successor in revolutionary struggle, the Red Queen provides me with an informing, motivating, and shaping source; among her principles of action are the following:
First, always go for the enemy leadership and decapitate the bosses. Literally, with an ax; then burn everything they own and everything they use to create wealth and power to the ground. The wealth of elites must be totalized if we are to take their power, just as their heirs must be purged to destroy the class system of inherited wealth, power, and privilege.
Second, always strike without warning and anonymously with overwhelming force when and where the enemy is weakest.
Third, never use the same trick twice; or rephrased be unpredictable to achieve surprise.
I imagine her as a combination of Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes, which depicts the key figures of Suffragette history Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Sylvia, Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns.
When you dream of ur-sources of historical identity and archetypal figures who can act as guardians and guides of the soul and provide spaces to grow into, dream big.
Sustained and relentless waves of liberation actions and revolutionary struggle continue to hammer the world’s tyrannies of authoritarian force and control and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil with massive protests and electoral activism, and as we did in the Autonomous Zones of Seattle, Portland, and New York and hundreds more throughout the world, we will emerge victorious from the fight against unequal power and oppression because whosoever refuses to submit to force and defies authority and those who would enslave us becomes Unconquered and free. Each of us is a Living Autonomous Zone, ungovernable as the tide, uncontrollable as the wind; we are wild things, who serve no masters.
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in al Quds-Jerusalem, Moscow, Hong Kong, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Barcelona, and dozens of other cities in every continent of earth, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and by Louise Michel, veteran of the Paris Commune entitled the Red Virgin of Montmartre, who first flew it as an anarchist banner when she led the Paris worker’s revolt of March 9 1883; freedom versus tyranny, refusal to submit to authority, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of fear as the basis of human exchange and the social use of force as a principle of human organization.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by none.
Vive la Commune!
La Commune (Paris, 1871), Peter Watkins Auteur, 1ª parte
Eliane Annie Adalto, Pierre Barbieux, Bernard Bombeau
La Commune 1871 (2ème partie)
Chants de la Commune
The Paris Commune: Anarchy in the French Republic
The Paris Commune by Karl Marx. Audiobook of 1871 Address to the Int’l Workingmen’s Association
Storming heaven: The Paris Commune
Ideas of my ancestor the Red Queen
Helena Bonham Carter’s Eudoria Holmes in Enola Holmes
Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns
the Paris Commune, a reading list
Paris Babylon: The Story of the Paris Commune, Rupert Christiansen
An ancient length of iron rests hidden among my tools, pitted and scarred from many battles and acts of sabotage, artifact of a heritage of resistance which reaches back into antiquity and connects us with the lives of others who refused to submit to authority; in this case the unconquered Irish.
A workingman’s tool that can be used as a weapon, this is a traditional iron crow, a term whose first written use was in a poem in 1386 which describes the wicked triangular punch like a crow’s beak at the terminus of its curved handle, now called a crowbar, wrecking bar, or infamously as Edward Abbey did a monkeywrench, and normally now with wedged clawfoot prybars at both ends instead of just the foot, originally a pirate’s boarding weapon and breaching tool which by the early 1400’s had developed into the bec de corbin; Joan of Arc’s helmet has a strike imprint from one along the cheekplate.
I will tell you two stories of the origins of this fragment of our history, one American and the other of the Old World. Both are true, if in different ways.
Probably forged by my partner Theresa’s grandfather, the great socialist politician and labor organizer John F. McKay, blacksmith by trade though he published and edited several newspapers, and carried by him as a walking stick for some thirty years, this particular crowbar struck fear into company thugs and strikebreakers and brought hope to workingmen and their families.
He began life as do many Americans, bearer of a historical legacy of survival and resistance; his father Hugh McKay had been a schoolteacher kidnapped at Inverness into service in the British Navy, who had killed or grievously wounded a British officer in a sword duel aboard ship, and was released by a sympathetic jailer before he was to be hanged. He jumped ship and swam the St Lawrence River to freedom in America.
As an Industrial Workers of the World unionist and with his friend Eugene V. Debs, John F. McKay defied and challenged authority throughout the world to forge a better future in which no worker can be used against another. He began this life work as a Montana state senator in 1918-1922; for union organizing among the miners and loggers he was excommunicated by the Church, and defeated an assassin sent against him.
An infamous event from this period was the Centralia Massacre of November 11 1919, in which a local Washington State headquarters of the IWW was attacked by members of the American Legion who had been called on by the town council to restore order during a strike; they surrounded and fired on the building, and a young IWW man who happened to be a World War One veteran fired back, killing several of them. The remaining strikebreakers stormed the building, killed several of the office staff, and castrated, dragged behind cars, and lynched others. Their mutilated bodies were hung about town; captured survivors were convicted on trumped up charges and given sentences of 25 years. From this abattoir emerged a champion of the people; I believe this event began John F. McKay’s shift from political to direct action. At the end of his term in the senate he became a full time IWW organizer.
In 1930 he moved to Spokane and founded the All Worker’s Party, and with the hundreds of men he organized kept thousands of people alive during the Great Depression, by raiding trains for food to distribute while his teams turned the power and water back on for families who had no cash to pay the utilities with, among other things.
And with this wrecking bar in his fist he fought for liberty, equality, and justice for the rest of his life.
Before we reach back into antiquity to share a second origin story, here are my recommendations for reading into the history of Ireland; Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, Tim Pat Coogan’s 1916: One Hundred Years of Irish Independence, The Troubles: Irelands Ordeal 1966-1996, and Wherever Green is Worn: the Story of the Irish Diaspora, and Fintan O’Toole’s The Irish Times Book of the Century and The History of Ireland in 100 Objects.
As we move further in time from our point of reference, possibilities multiply, meanings change, and futures become ambiguous; so it is with the past as well. So we turn from history to myth, and an origin story from which the Clan McKay constructs its identity.
Possibly this crowbar is the haft of the ax of Sigurd the Mighty, Norse King of Orkney, who in 892 became the only man in history to have been bitten to death by a decapitated head. It happened this way; that in a great battle he struck off the head of Maelbrighte the Poisonous, Gaelic King of Moray, whose line were the last independent Irish rulers of Scotland, the original ancestor being anointed king by St Patrick himself, and a direct ancestor of all persons McKay and MacKay from Niall of the Nine Hostages, High King of Tara. Sigurd the Mighty tied the head of Maelbrighte the Poisonous to his saddle, and the head bit his leg which became infected and killed him.
After generations of war the grandchildren of these two kings who had killed each other in battle united in marriage, becoming like many Scots a blend of Irish and Viking, figures of the origins of Scotland. The great ax was a wedding present, and a peace treaty.
The malefic ax, consecrated to the Viking trickster god of battle, magic, and poetry, Odin, whose name means Master of Ecstasy and Fury, referring to the twin arts of poetry and war, and on the other side to the Irish Crow of Battle, death, time, magic, and transformation, the goddess Morrigan, Queen of Death and Nightmares, in equal part, as a peace offering at a wedding which unified the two peoples in the historic struggle for dominion, and signaled the birth of a new nation.
Thus multigenerational trauma and vendetta became the forge of a new nation. Sociologists call it the Brazilian Solution; described by Ciara Nugent and Thais Regina in Time “As Brazil emerged from the slavery era in the 1900s, elites in the country promoted an idea of the country as a “racial democracy”—a supposedly harmonious mixing of Indigenous, white European, and Black African cultures. But at the same time, politicians, the media and academics also encouraged the descendants of enslaved Africans and indigenous communities to marry and have children with the descendants of white colonizers. Some conservative Brazilians still idealize their country as a racial democracy, where racial discrimination or conflict cannot exist.”
I believe this practice began with Alexander the Great requiring his soldiers to marry Afghan women and so render everyone blood relatives rather than imperial colonists and indigenous subjects. I wonder how well it would work for Double Minority nations like Israel and Palestine or in Northern Ireland; the unification of the Irish Kingdom of Albany whose dual capitals were Belfast and Inverness may be a poor example, as it did not have a comparable problem of sectarian division as national identity, Catholic versus Protestant and Jewish versus Muslim.
Though clearly absurd for any state to enforce a policy of intermarriage en masse, and fraught with peril and vile abuses of power, one could begin by sending all the children to the same schools together as we do in America, and let nature take its course. It remains a primary goal of public education, wherein everyone begins as equals and mixes freely to level all divisions of class, race, and faith, which is why Lincoln enacted the system after the Civil War.
In Northern Ireland, one would of course begin with an independent and sovereign nation, committed to our universal human rights and total decolonization at all levels of society and realms of human being, meaning, and value, with a secular state where all are equal before the law and no divisions or institutions of faith are authorized.
Thus the wrecking bar of the great John McKay and possibly a relic of the peace that united the Irish and Norse peoples of Scotland sings to me of liberty and equality, and of the redemptive power of love to free us from the legacies of our history.
And so this battered thing of dual origins and secret history waits among the other tools of my trade, that of resistance, chaos, anarchy, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
Of these it whispers secrets, awakens lost histories, restores forbidden senses of awareness and vision, opens doors of possibilities, and sends beautiful, terrible dreams of things which may have been or yet may be.
Such is the legacy of humankind, which belongs to all of us. Seize and use it without fear, and build a better humanity and a better future for us all.
Crowbar of John McKay, possibly haft of the ax of Sigurd the Mighty, Norse King of Orkney. Who in 892 became the only man in history to be bitten to death by a decapitated head.
Ireland, a reading list
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,
The question remains of how to Resist; how to make of our lives, whole and entire, a glorious and heroic performance of Resistance and defiance of Authority and its systems of oppression, force, and control?
Herein I look to the iconic figure of a Joan of Arc of our time; as I wrote in her eulogy.
July 26 2023 Sinead O’Connor’s Glorious Legacy of Resistance; “Fight the Real Enemy”
We have lost a Pythian seer who revealed truths we did not wish to see, one too beautiful for this world, for these truths.
But the legacy of glorious Resistance she left for us all endures, freed now from the limits of its form in one tiny and delicate woman who would not stay down, who at terrible costs rose again and again to fight on in solidarity with those whose voices have been stolen, and sing liberty for them against the vast unanswerable forces of our oppression.
As written by Sylvia Patterson in The Guardian, in an article entitled Nothing compares: how Sinéad O’Connor’s fearless activism helped change the world; “They tried to bury me,” she says. “They didn’t realise I was a seed.”
Let us live as did she; as Dragon’s Teeth, our lives sown in the design of time and our human nature as seeds of change, transformation, and rebirth.
Sinead O’Connor was broken and driven mad by the forces of systemic oppression with which she wrestled, especially those of theocratic tyranny and sexual terror embodied in the Church and its authorized identities of patriarchal subjugation and dehumanization of women, though such are sadly universal to our historical civilization and not limited to any organization of faith or other determination by context, yet she refused to abandon her sacred mission to pursue the truth nor wavered in her lifelong cause as an artist to bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world through her transcendent songs of ourselves.
Though reviled, mocked, and made outcast like Don Quixote she never hesitated to tilt at the windmills that might be giants. She held her demons close, in a titanic struggle her form could neither contain nor withstand, and like Ahab hurled defiance into the endless chasms of nothingness which surround us and our fragile and ephemeral islands of light as human being, meaning, and value; “To the end, I shall grapple with thee.”
No more magnificent life is possible than this, and no greater glory; as written on the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis, “I believe nothing, I hope for nothing; I am free.”
This is her monument; the songs she gave us all in hope that one day we may all become free, and the actions we her successors may perform to make the dream real.
This night, listening to her ethereal voice wailing in lamentation for the injustices of our history, I have wept, I have raged, I have been seized with her visions of our possible futures and shaken in the fist of her voice, and I have found new purpose and illumination. As the leader of the Matadors said when they rescued me from the police death squad the summer of my fourteenth year; “We can’t save everyone. But we can avenge.”
For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the future which must be redeemed.
We may say of Sinead O’Connor what is said of Vincent Van Gogh in Doctor Who; “She transformed the pain of her tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of the world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one will ever do it again. To my mind, that strange, wild woman was not only among the world’s greatest artists, but also one of the greatest human beings who ever lived.”
My friend Tevin who works at our gym, and with whom I enjoy conversing of an evening, has asked me what to read for his US citizenship test; herein is my reading list for the project.
An immigrant from the Caribbean, he is brilliant, witty, curious about everything as was I when young, a flawless speaker of English with no accent whatever who sounds like a university professor, and doesn’t have the historical or social context that someone who grew up here does; this gap he intends to bridge.
By lack of context I mean he didn’t know who the Black Panthers were when it came up in conversation, heroes of mine whom I feel a young Black man should know about.
But of course for the purpose of citizenship one must begin with a general overview of our history and depth readings in our founding documents and how they embodied the Humanist philosophy of the Enlightenment as liberty, equality, and anti-imperial revolutionary struggle.
Beyond that I wish to offer readings in the history and literature of the African American diaspora, which provides models of becoming human and illumination into the social group he will be joining in becoming a US citizen.
American History and Government For Citizenship, a reading list
These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore
This is the standard textbook for AP American History in American high school; intended for seniors in the Academic Placement program, like British A levels, who will be testing at year’s end for university credits, as these classes replace freshman university ones and so save both time and money for university-bound students as well as greatly increasing odds of admission to top tier institutions. I taught AP classes for many years, and while nothing can replace the open debate with ones peers a classroom offers, you can read the same texts.
It’s a thousand pages long, with media website learning support and teaching materials; it’s the book I advise reading if this is a new area of scholarship, and a whole course at Senior high school or Freshman university level.
For teens and adults with high English literacy who may be planning a university education, schools and educational settings, and scholars new to the field. Its possible every American high school student applying to university did this course, so here’s where you win competitive parity.
Next, a couple good books on the Constitution and the issues it attempts to solve. Very useful for the citizenship test, and for performing citizenship as a co-owner of the state.
The U.S. Constitution: Explained–Clause by Clause–for Every American Today,
As I wrote in my post of February 3 2026, A Reading List for Black History Month As Resistance; This year’s Black History Month in America will be different from all that have come before, and I hope from all those yet to come, for it has been erased from our federal holidays by the Fourth Reich regime of Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump, white supremacist terrorist clown and degenerate monster and freak, who wishes to erase Black and other nonwhite people with their history. This I cannot abide, to quote the magnificent Lt Aldo Raine from Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
And Lt Aldo Raine shows us precisely how to deal with Nazis like Trump and all his witless and amoral minions who would enslave or annihilate us and all who are different from themselves.
Let us remember always the great principle of Malcolm X; “By any means necessary”. For all Resistance is War to the Knife, and those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
Now we must demonstrate our solidarity with each other, disbelieve and disobey all authorities who seek to divide and subjugate us, and celebrate our stories each and every day in open and public defiance and liberation struggle on the stage of the world and history. Perform an Act of Refusal to Submit to state terror, ethnic cleansing, silence and erasure, and dehumanization each and every day, and do so with joy in our diversity and infinite uniqueness, in our guarantorship of each other’s parallel and interdependent universal human rights and rights as citizens, and in our transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden.
We all have a common problem to solve as we grow up and become human; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. To tell the stories of others who are silenced by systems of oppression and the legacies of our history is an act of genocide or of liberation struggle, depending on whether or not one is amplifying the voices of the oppressed in solidarity and allyship.
The first question to ask of any story is, Whose story is this?
We come now to the question of the Canon; Whose stories are we to teach? And this is a question embedded in another like a set of puzzle boxes; Who decides?
A reading list is nothing less than a set of authorized identities; herein I hope to offer figures in which we can all find reflections of ourselves, and imaginal spaces to grow into. I choose them first on the basis of being voices of the community which they represent, interrogate, and offer models of possible identities for, second for quality, cultural significance, and relevance.
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
The African Diaspora is a field of study all by itself, but this is the finest general history, which is useful in understanding African-American social and cultural history.
Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Bloom & Martin
Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years In Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)
A Testament of Hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, James Washington editor
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, Clayborne Carson ed
Black Feminist Thought, Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins
Malcolm X: a life of reinvention, Speaking Truth to Power: essays on race, resistance, & radicalism, Manning Marable
Roots, The Autobiography of Malcom X, Alex Haley
The Black Panthers Speak, Foner ed
Black Power: the Politics of Liberation, Stokely Carmichael
The Angela Davis Reader
The Cornel West Reader, Black Prophetic Fire, Hope on a Tightrope: words and wisdom, Cornel West
I Am Not Your Negro (Peck ed), Go Tell It On The Mountain, Just Above My Head, Jimmy’s Blues and other poems, The Price of the Ticket: collected nonfiction 1948-1985, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and other conversations, James Baldwin
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, David Levering Lewis
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again: a Zora Neal Hurston Reader, Alice Walker ed, Zora Neal Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past And Present (Amistad Literary Series) Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah
Native Son, Black Boy, The Richard Wright Reader, Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Critical Prespectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds
Cane, Jean Toomer
The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Plays, New & Collected Poems 1964-2006, Going Too Far: essays, Mixing It Up: essays, Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto, Ishmael Reed
The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
All Night Visitors, Clarence Major
Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Harold Bloom ed
The Color Purple, Living by the Word, The Temple of My Familiar, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers , The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom ed
A Langston Hughes Reader
Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Complete Stories, Maya Angelou
The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader, The Fiction of LeRoi Jones, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, S.O.S. : Poems 1961-2013, Amiri Baraka
Beloved, Song of Soloman, The Bluest Eye, A Mercy, Jazz, Desdemona, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (the Harvard Lectures), Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Kwame Anthony Appiah eds
Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A. D., Bass Cathedral, School of Udhra, Whatsaid Serif, Splay Anthem, Nod House, Blue Fasa, Nathaniel Mackey
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Collected Poems, The Collected Plays, ZAMI: a new spelling of my name, Audre Lorde
John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Devil in Silver, Lucretia and the Kroons, Big Machine, The Ballad of Black Tom, The Changeling, Victor Lavalle
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, Citizen: an American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, Jean-Michel Basquiat
The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste
The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman
The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.
Palmares, Gayl Jones
Sho, Douglas Kearney
Living Weapon: Poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillip
Postscript: On the Uses of Literature In Constructing Identity
Such a long and amazingly diverse list! As you may know from my writing on literature, I choose only what merits inclusion in the canon, which I define as an authorized set of possible identities, on the basis of quality alone. If the work can stand alongside Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot, it’s in; and all of the works on my reading lists meet that standard. I marvel at how far we have come as a civilization and a nation since I began teaching forty four years ago.
For my semester of student teaching as required for the California English Teaching Credential I chose Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X as my subject, which involved writing lesson plans and activities, tests, essay questions, and gathering context readings, all of which I revised throughout the term as I discovered I’d been assigned by happy chance to a school where the Principal was one of Malcolm X’s proteges and a community for whom the Black Panthers were folk heroes and sometimes the parents of my students. All of these personal witnesses to history had differing interpretations of what amounted to a secret history of resistance.
From them I learned something of incalculable value for a lifelong student of the intersections of literature, history, psychology, and politics; no work exists in isolation, but is a living thing which shapes and is shaped by its readers as both idea and experience. Each of us has his own Malcolm X, his own King Lear and Orlando; we bear within us myriads of reflections and potentialities, and all of them are equally true.
To all of the authors of our civilization and our nation, who have created and thrown open the gates of possibility and becoming human, I thank you.
To all those who in reading have journeyed with me on this grand voyage of discovery, and who have charted their own topologies of human meaning and value, I thank you.
African American History, a retrospective of my writing
January 7 2026 Anniversary of the 1923 Burning of Rosewood
January 11 2026 Why Are Police Evil? Police Are Evil When States Are Evil, and States Are Inherently Evil, For All States Are Embodied Violence: the Case of Tyre Nichols
January 19 2026 A Figure of Our Best Selves: Martin Luther King Day, In the Shadow of A Figure Of Our Worst Selves and the Anniversary of the Inauguration of Traitor Trump
May 25 2025 Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle Against Racist Police Terror As A System of Oppression
August 7 2025 Institutional White Supremacist Terror, Vote Suppression, Dehumanization and Theft of Black Citizenship: Case of the Texas Gerrymandering Walkout on the 60th Anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act
August 28 2025 Get Your Knee Off Our Necks: Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington Led By Dr Martin Luther King in the Years of the Fall of America
This night the gates of infinity are opened, letting angelic figures of our true selves and possibilities of becoming human through; wishes may come true, visions be realized, the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world find healing in our defining and inherent human powers of faith, hope, and love.
On this night over one thousand four hundred years ago a man looked into the future and made it real, to use the phrase from the film The Great and Powerful Oz, or believed an impossible thing and set it free to become so in Lewis Carroll’s terms and the famous line in Tim Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland. Both reference moments of exaltation and vision such as the event celebrated tonight throughout the Islamic world as a tidal change and Defining Moment of humankind, which finds echo in ibn Arabi’s idea of the alam al mythal, the Logos in the Biblical book of John the Evangelist, the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism’s Book of the Dead, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, and Jung’s Collective Unconscious. In such ideologies we are negative spaces, shadows, dreams, echoes and reflections of ideal forms within the unknowable Infinite, ourselves and our reality transforms of messages and a field of being as abstract information which unfold into actualities; as in Yoda’s line which paraphrases Einstein; “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
If true, we can know nothing directly about the Reality which creates and interpenetrates us, for we are its shadows, or so Plato describes in the Allegory of the Cave; yet poetic vision and metaphorical truth allow us to escape the limits of our form. Holy Quran is a record of one such journey, a reimagination of Abrahamic faith which unfolded for the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, over twenty three years of conversations with the being of illumination which manifested to him as Jibril.
Any origin story which founds a new religion defines its meaning and is also a negotiated truth and a ground of struggle for those who claim it and each other as their own, and the story of the Message is no exception, having been argued and fought over ever since and sciences of abrogation and hermeneutics evolved from the same text, but for myself what is most important is the Message as an event and a thing in itself and not its claims and interpretations; the emergence of transpersonal consciousness as transcendence, vision, and its transformational effects as Awakening.
Herein the Infinite seizes and shakes us in its jaws like a lion, and all is forever changed.
For with poetic vision we may win freedom from the limits of our form, escape the legacies of our history, birth new futures and ways of being human together, and create and define ourselves anew.
Go up into the gaps and embrace the dreams of the Infinite.
Surat Al-Qadr (The Power) | Mishary Rashid Alafasy | مشاري بن راشد العفاسي | سورة القد
The Illuminated Hafiz: Love Poems for the Journey to Light
by Hafez, Michael Green (Illustrator), Saliha Green (Illustrator), Nancy Barton (Editor), Omid Safi (Foreword), Coleman Barks (Translator), Robert Bly (Translator), Peter Booth (Translator), Meher Baba (Translator)
Suhrawardi: The Shape of Light, by Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, Tosun Bayrak (Preface), Shaykh Muhammad Sadiq Naqshbandi Erzinjani (Afterword), Hadrat Abdul-Qadir al-Jilani (Foreword)
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes, by Fakhruddin Iraqi, William C. Chittick (Translator), Peter Wilson (Goodreads Author) (Translator), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Foreword)
The Four Last Great Sufi Master Poets: Selected Poems, by Paul Smith (Translator), Shah Latif, Nazir Akbarabadi, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Muhammad Iqbal
15 مارس 2026 ليلة القدر المباركة: ليلة بهيجة من الرؤية الشعرية وإعادة تصور وتحويل إمكانياتنا اللانهائية في أن نصبح بشرًا
في هذه الليلة ، تفتح أبواب اللانهاية ، مما يسمح لأشكال ملائكية وشيطانية من ذواتنا الحقيقية وإمكانيات أن نصبح بشرًا ؛ قد تتحقق الأمنيات ، وتتحقق الرؤى ، وتجد عيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسار العالم الشفاء في قوتنا المميزة للإيمان والرجاء والمحبة.
في هذه الليلة منذ أكثر من ألف وأربعمائة عام ، نظر رجل إلى المستقبل وجعله حقيقيًا ، باستخدام العبارة المأخوذة من فيلم أوز العظيم والقوي ، أو صدق شيئًا مستحيلًا وحرره ليصبح كذلك وفقًا لشروط لويس كارول. والخط الشهير في فيلم تيم بيرتون أليس في بلاد العجائب. يشير كلاهما إلى الحدث الذي تم الاحتفال به الليلة في جميع أنحاء العالم الإسلامي باعتباره تغييرًا مدًا للجزر وتحديد اللحظة للبشرية ، والتي تجد صدى في فكرة علم الميثال ، والشعارات في الكتاب المقدس ، وباردو في البوذية التبتية ، ومخيلة كوليردج الأولية ، وفكرة يونغ. اللاوعي الجماعي. في مثل هذه الأيديولوجيات نحن فضاءات سلبية لأشكال مثالية داخل الغيب ، يحولنا نحن وواقعنا الرسائل التي تتكشف إلى حقائق ؛ كما في سطر يودا الذي يعيد صياغة آينشتاين ؛ “كائنات مضيئة هي نحن، وليس هذا الأمر الخام.”
إذا كان هذا صحيحًا ، فلا يمكننا معرفة أي شيء بشكل مباشر عن الواقع الذي يخلقنا ويخترقنا ، لأننا ظلاله ، أو هكذا وصف أفلاطون في قصة الكهف ؛ ومع ذلك ، فإن الرؤية الشعرية والحقيقة المجازية تسمح لنا بالتهرب من حدود شكلنا. القرآن الكريم هو سجل لواحدة من هذه الرحلات ، إعادة تصور للإيمان الإبراهيمي الذي انكشف للنبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم ، على مدى ثلاث وعشرين عامًا من الأحاديث مع كينونة النور التي تجلت له على أنها جبريل.
أي قصة أصل تؤسس دينًا جديدًا تحدد معناها وهي أيضًا حقيقة متفاوض عليها وأرضًا للنضال لمن يدعيها ويطالب كل منهم الآخر بكونه ملكًا له ، وقصة الرسالة ليست استثناءً ، حيث تم الجدل والنزاع حولها. منذ ذلك الحين ، ولكن الأمر الأكثر أهمية بالنسبة لي هو الرسالة كحدث وشيء في حد ذاته وليس ادعاءاتها وتفسيراتها ؛ ظهور الوعي العابر للشخص باعتباره السمو والصحوة.
هنا يمسكنا اللانهائي ويهزنا بين فكيه مثل الأسد، ويتغير كل شيء إلى الأبد.
لأنه من خلال الرؤية الشعرية قد نربح الحرية من حدود شكلنا ، ونولد مستقبلًا جديدًا وطرقًا لكوننا بشرًا معًا ، ونخلق ونعرف أنفسنا من جديد.
اصعد إلى الفجوات واحتضن أحلام اللانهائي.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 21 مارس 2023 ، حول الرؤية الشعرية كإعادة تخيل وتحويل لإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا ؛ هنا في خمسة أعمال كما في أداء مسرحي لنفسي ، أقدم أفكاري في يوم الشعر.
فعل واحد
تعريف للمصطلحات أو ما هو الشعر؟
أولا وقبل كل شيء يجب أن تكون الأسماء الحقيقية للأشياء.
الكلمات مهمة. يمكنهم تقسيمنا ، ويمكنهم توحيدنا. يمكن للكلمات أن تمجد وتدنس. يمكنهم تشكيل صورنا وإمكانياتنا في أن نصبح بشرًا وإنشاء عوالم نطمح إليها أو تقييدها ، ويمكنهم استبدال الحجارة التي نرميها على بعضنا البعض وعلاج أمراض انفصالنا.
كنز الكلمات دائمًا ، لأنها تمثل أنواع الأفكار التي يمكننا امتلاكها وإيواء قوة إبداعية خيالية. نتحملها إلى الأمام كذكريات وتواريخ وهويات ، مثل أصداف مخلوقات بحرية رائعة ؛ الأصوات التي هي تشبيه بالشكل أو ما أسماه غاستون باشيلارد coquilles au parole.
هكذا هم أيضًا يدفعوننا إلى الأمام ، وينتظرون لحظة يقظتهم كبذور للصيرورة.
الفصل الثاني
كونه اعتذارًا عن استطرادي ars poetica ؛ أسلوبي في الكتابة خاص وغريب ، لكن أنا كذلك.
بمجرد أن أبحرت في بحيرة الأحلام ، استغلت بيوتي لكن فيجن تطالب بها ؛ وفي مثل هذه الرؤى سقطت في بحر من الكلمات والصور والأغاني والتاريخ ، متعدد الطبقات ومتشابك مع بعضها البعض مثل شبكة من الانعكاسات وأصداء الأصوات المفقودة في الوقت المناسب ، برية من المرايا التي تلتقط أنفسنا وتشوهنا وتوسعنا إلى ما لا نهاية. في جميع الاتجاهات.
إليكم ظل ذاتي لتاريخنا نتجول فيه وراء أنفسنا مثل حكاية ذيل الزواحف غير المرئية ، والموروثات التي يجب أن نخرج منها لنخلق أنفسنا من جديد وتلك التي لا يمكننا التخلي عنها دون أن نفقد من نحن.
هنا تظهر نصوصي البينية ، تشدني وتهزني بأصوات صاخبة وأغراض غير جديرة بالثقة ، إلى أين ينتهي تاريخنا ونبدأ؟
لا يمكننا الهروب من بعضنا البعض ، أنا وظلي.
الفصل الثالث
عرض ، سريع الزوال كذكريات يحملها العطر ومتصاعدًا في الريح ، يصل إلى فجوات الواقع عبر بوابات أحلامنا ، إلى اللانهائي ، الخالي من أعلام بشرتنا ، التي لم يبق منها سوى أصداء وانعكاسات محفورة عليها تاريخنا من خلال برق التنوير لتحقيق التوازن ضد رعب العدم لدينا.
اصوات وصدى
ذات مرة كان هناك صوت
بدون قذيفة لترددها
لا الهدير الهائل والرعد
التابع
وموجات المد والجزر لها
الفوضى وولادة الأكوان
متموجة بروعة الحياة
في كل ما لدينا من آلاف الملايين
احتمالات لا حدود لها في أن تصبح
الرقص مع المستحيل في نشوة الطرب والرعب
الأمل واليأس ، الإيمان ببعضنا البعض كتضامن للعمل
مقابل علم أمراض انفصالنا
والبرق يحطمنا بالكسر والاضطراب ،
يسمو فجوات الظلام التي ضلنا فيها
نفي وهو أيضًا عطية
فتح مساحات للعب الإبداعي الحر
هذا هو اعتناق الموت كتحرير
من حدود شكلنا ،
عيوب إنسانيتنا ،
وانكسار العالم.
نهرب من حلزونات قوقعتنا
حلق بين الأجرام السماوية
تعظموا ودنسوا
حرة ومجهولة مثل الأشياء البرية
أنا سليم وصدى
تركت القشرة التي غنيت نفسي منها
اين انا الأن؟
الفصل الرابع
بيان العمل ؛ الشعر كنضال ثوري.
كما كتبت في مقالتي في 14 أكتوبر 2021 ، حول الفن كرؤية شعرية ، والتعدي ، والاستيلاء على السلطة ، وإعادة التخيل ، والتحول: بيان ؛ لماذا أكتب؟
أقدم هنا بيانًا للفن كرؤية شعرية ، وإعادة تخيل وتحويل في سياقات أداء الهويات وفي مسرح حرب العصابات للعمل السياسي والنضال الثوري.
يعتبر الفن عدوانيًا عندما يتحدى وينتهك أفكارنا عن الحياة الطبيعية واستبداد أفكار الآخرين عن الفضيلة ، إنه استيلاء على السلطة ورفض الخضوع للهويات المرخصة التي تمنح الحرية والاستقلالية من خلال أن تصبح ذاتية الإنشاء ومملوكة للذات ، لا يُقهر ويتجاوز القهر بالقوة والسيطرة ، وهو رؤية شعرية كإعادة تخيل وتغيير سريالي عندما يصور ويوجه مرورنا عبر متاهة الزمن والتاريخ والذاكرة وتزوير صورنا الملتقطة والمشوهة في برية المرايا والأكاذيب والأوهام ، لتفعيل نشوة الاختطاف والتمجيد ، وتجاوزنا في عوالم الحلم والرؤية حيث لا تنطبق القواعد ، وعندما تصطادنا بالحقائق الجوهرية في الطبيعة والمكتوبة في جسدنا.
كل الفن الحقيقي ينجس ويمجد ، يسلّخنا بالنشوة والرعب أمام الحقائق اللامحدودة والسرية لأنفسنا.
يهدف الفن إلى التشكيك في قواعد وجوهر الإنسان ومعناه وقيمته وتغييرها ؛ لاكتشاف داخل الحدود والواجهات ، أماكن التغيير الصامتة والفارغة وإمكانات التكيف اللامحدودة للأنظمة ، والمجهول ، والانفصال ، والتجاور المنحرف وزوايا الرؤية الغريبة ، وإمكانيات جديدة للتحول إلى إنسان.
كما نتعلم من جون كيج في الموسيقى ، وهارولد بينتر في المسرح ، وبيت موندريان في الفن ، فإن المساحات الفارغة هي التي تحدد المعنى وترتبها ؛ وفي التاريخ ، يجب أن نستمع إلى الأصوات التي تم إسكاتها ومحوها بعناية ، لأن الفراغ هنا يتحدث إلينا عن القوة السرية والوظائف والعلاقات الرئيسية التي يجب أن تخفيها السلطة للحفاظ على هيمنتها علينا.
مساحة اللعب الحرة هذه ، للمجهول على أنها مساحة غير مُطالب بها وإمكانات تكيفية لنظام ، حدوده مثل الشواطئ المعروفة على خرائطنا في أن تصبح إنسانًا تشكل إطارًا لمجموعة الخيارات وتعمل كهويات مصرح بها وحدود جوهرية للحرية كمستقبل الاحتمالات ، تظل خارج وخارج كل حدود وأنظمة المعرفة ، مثل نظرية جوديل ؛ بغض النظر عن مقدار ما تعلمناه ونغير حدود الكون المعروف ، فإن اللانهائي يظل شاسعًا كما كان من قبل ، مما يحافظ على الجهل.
إذا كان الأمر كذلك ، فإن مهمة أن تصبح إنسانًا تتضمن جلب الفوضى ؛ إعادة التخيل والتحول ، وانتهاك الأمور الطبيعية وتجاوز حدود المحظور لتحريرنا من استبداد أفكار الآخرين حول الفضيلة والهويات المرخصة ، وخلق إمكانيات لا حدود لها لتصبح بشرًا مثل الاستيلاء على السلطة.
ترتيب يخصص ؛ الفوضى تستقل.
نحن ما أسماه غاستون باشيلارد أصداف الكلام ، وحمل المشروط ، وحاملي القصص كذاكرة ، وتاريخ ، وهوية ، شكلنا بمرور الوقت وترابطنا مع بعضنا البعض على شكل استباقيات أو تواريخ يتم التعبير عنها في أشكالنا عن كيفية حلنا. مشاكل التكيف والتغيير.
ألسنا القصص التي نرويها عن أنفسنا وعن أنفسنا وعن بعضنا البعض؟
لا يمكننا بعد ذلك تغيير وتحويل أنفسنا بقصصنا من خلال إعادة تخيل ورؤية شعرية ، كأشياء جديدة وجميلة تحررت من تراث تاريخنا وحدود أفكار الآخرين عن الفضيلة والجمال والحقيقة؟
دعونا نغتنم القصص التي صنعناها ، ونصبح مجيدًا.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 24 أغسطس 2020 ، القوة التحويلية للفن: بيان ؛ القوة التحويلية للفن ، وقدرته على إعادة صياغة أفكارنا عن الذات والآخر ، لتغيير الحدود ، وإعادة تعيين القيم ، واستعادة التاريخ والهوية من الصمت ، والمحو ، والتهميش ، وإجازة عدم المساواة
أفعال القوة وتقسيمات الآخر الإقصائي ؛ هذه من بين الوظائف الحيوية التي تجعل الفن نشاطًا إنسانيًا واجتماعيًا أساسيًا.
الفن كرؤية شعرية يسبق السياسة ويوازيها كوسيلة لتغيير حضارتنا وإمكانيات الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة ؛ إنه يمثل سلطة يمتلكها أفراد ومجتمعات مستقلة ضد استبداد قوة الدولة وسيطرتها. السياسة هي فن اجتماعي أساسي لطبيعتنا البشرية المترابطة وعمليات التحول إلى إنسان. من خلال كلماتنا وصورنا وأدائنا يمكننا التشكيك في السلطة والاستهزاء بها وفضحها وتحديها والتحريض على الآخرين وإثارتهم وإزعاجهم في إحداث تغيير تحويلي في الأنظمة والهياكل التي نترسخ فيها ، وآمل أن نحررنا منها.
الفن هو الحياة ، لأنه يشركنا بشكل شخصي ومباشر في عمليات النمو التكيفي وفي إعادة التفاوض بشأن عقودنا الاجتماعية وعلاقاتنا مع الآخرين ، على الصعيدين الشخصي والسياسي ، ويعلمنا ويحفز أداء هوياتنا.
إذا وقعنا في لعبة مزورة ، يجب علينا تغيير قواعد وشروط النضال. “تم وضع القواعد ليتم كسرها” لإعادة صياغة الجنرال ماك آرثر ؛ زعزعة استقرار النظام ، ونزع شرعية السلطة ، واستجواب الأنظمة والهياكل التقليدية ، وتجاوز الحدود ، ومقاومة القوة والسيطرة والتخلي عنها ، وتزوير الحقائق الجديدة ، واكتشاف احتمالات التحول إلى إنسان.
يجب علينا أن نشكك في السلطة ونكشفها ونهزأ بها ونخربها ونتجاوزها ونتحدىها عندما يتعلق الأمر بمطالبتنا. لأنه لا توجد سلطة عادلة.
دعونا نتحكم في سردنا وتمثيلنا وذاكرتنا وتاريخنا وهويتنا.
دعونا نكون غير مهزومين ، بلا إتقان ، وأحرار.
دعونا نكون قادرين على الفوضى والفرح والتحول والثورة.
كما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 30 كانون الأول (ديسمبر) 2021 ، The Year in Review ؛ أكتب هنا كدعوة مقدسة للسعي وراء الحقيقة ، وفي الدور الذي وصفه فوكو بأنه راوي الحقيقة في إشارة إلى الحس والواجبات الأساسية الأربعة للمواطن ؛ للتشكيك في السلطة ، وكشف السلطة ، والتحايل على السلطة ، وتحدي السلطة.
خلال سنوات عملي كمدرس للطب الشرعي ومدرب للمناظرات ، بدأت في اليوم الأول من كل عام جديد بإظهار الهدف. على مكتبي كنت أضع قاعدة صلبة بالكلمات ؛ “هذه نقطة ارتكاز”. عبرها كنت أضع ترنحًا يتأرجح قائلاً ؛ “إنه يوازن بين رافعة.” وأخيراً “عندما يسألك والداك عما تتعلمه في الطب الشرعي ، أخبرهم أنك تتعلم أن تصبح نقطة ارتكاز وتغيير ميزان القوى في العالم.” هذا هو أملي الآن لنا جميعًا.
إن قول الحقيقة كقصة شعرية تدور حول القوة التجديدية والتحويلية للحقيقة بالمعنى الذي استخدمه كيتس عندما تحدث عن الجمال ، “أنا متأكد من قداسة عواطف القلب وحقيقة الخيال – ما هو الخيال يعتبر أن الجمال يجب أن يكون حقًا – سواء كان موجودًا من قبل أم لا – لأن لدي نفس فكرة كل عواطفنا كما في الحب ، فكلها في سامية ، وخلاقة في جمالها الأساسي. ” أو كما يعلمنا الرومي. “دع الجمال الذي تحبه يكون ما تفعله.”
لكن قول الحقيقة يتعلق أيضًا بالرؤية الشعرية باعتبارها إعادة تخيل وتحويل ؛ أن نحلم بشيء مستحيل ونجعله حقيقيًا ، كما تعلمنا أليس عند سرد الأشياء الستة المستحيلة في معركتها مع Jabberwocky. في طريقها لمحاربة تنين ، ورؤيته لأول مرة مروعة ، تشير أليس إلى ماد هاتر في فيلم تيم بيرتون الجميل ؛ “هذا مستحيل.”
الذي يقول له حتر ، “فقط إذا كنت تؤمن بذلك”.
“في بعض الأحيان ، أؤمن بستة أشياء مستحيلة قبل الإفطار.”
“هذه ممارسة ممتازة ، ولكن الآن فقط ، قد ترغب حقًا في التركيز على Jabberwocky.”
هكذا فقط.
الفصل الرابع
دعاء
أتمنى أن تكون أيامك أيام مجد وحرية ، وتجاوزات مضيئة ، وتمجيد للروح البشرية التي لا تُقهر ، وقول الحقيقة والوحي ، وأداء هويات غير مصرح بها كمسرح حرب العصابات والاحتفالات الجماعية بتنوعنا والإمكانيات اللامحدودة للإنسان معنى وقيمة نشوة النشوة ورؤية العيش خارج كل الحدود ، حيث لا شيء ممنوع.
في النهاية كل ما يهم هو ما نفعله بخوفنا وكيف نستخدم قوتنا ؛ افعل شيئًا جميلًا معك.
Our humanity has been hollowed out and consumed by those who would enslave us as the raw material of elite wealth, power, and privilege, and in the dark mirror of the Israeli crimes against humanity in which the Trump regime is fully a partner and co-conspirator, including the genocide of the Palestinians and the Zionist mad dreams of an imperial Greater Israel built on the bones of their neighbors, which seizes and shakes the world in the Iran War and threatens global economic collapse and a forever war like those of Vietnam and Afghanistan which ended with the abject and total defeat of America, we witness the collapse of all values and the failure of democracy in America.
For this event threatens not only the collapse of our economy and of international law, but the idea of our universal human rights and on the domestic front of these wars, as nonviolent protestors against ICE white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing are convicted of terrorism in Texas for such spurious crimes as wearing black bloc clothes or printing leaflets to hand out, of citizens as co-owners of the state who are guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Since that fateful day in Beirut during the Siege when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance I have fought to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness. In the shadows of the Third World War which now engulfs the whole Middle East from Palestine to Iran as well as Ukraine, the Age of Tyrants begins.
We are no longer a beacon of hope to the world and a defender of our liberty, equality, and humanity, but merely one predatory tyranny among many, fighting over scraps of our planet’s wealth as we destroy it and ourselves along with it.
If we pulled back from the brink today, would it be possible to avoid the six to eight centuries of horrific wars between grim totalitarian states ending with our extinction which I foresaw in a few moments when I was thrown from my body by a police grenade and stood outside of time at Bloody Thursday 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley?
America was once a grant utopian illusion wherein each of us is exactly the same as every other, in a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s humanity. Are we a Band of Brothers still?
How shall we welcome the Stranger? In a universe wherein our humanity is defined by the principle Welcome the Stranger as a Brother, as our taxes buy the deaths of children in Palestine and Iran, are we human still?
I wonder now if there’s anything left of America to restore, or of our humanity.
To paraphrase Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the USA;
I’m ashamed to be an American,
Because I know that I’m not free,
And I’ll resist to the end
The men who lied to steal my rights from me
But the Vichy America of the Fourth Reich under the Trump regime is not the real and true America, but an illusion cast by the evil wizardry of information warfare and propaganda funded by Trump’s sponsors among the Russian oligarchs and led by his puppetmaster and agent handler since 1987, Vladimir Putin.
The world and humankind does not need our grief; it needs our refusal to submit and our solidarity of action.
And to all tyrants I say with Ahab; “To the end, I shall grapple with thee.”
There are some things which should be true even if they never were, including these words written by Thomas Jefferson with which America was created; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Not because they are immutable laws of the universe, nor because they define the human and exalt us above the level of beasts, nor because each of us are bound to the others and bear a burden of guarantorship for each other’s human rights, but because all of this might become true, if we act as though it is.
This is the enactment of the healing of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, and a duty of care no one may ignore and remain human.
So I sing for the future of an America that might be, regardless if it never was;
“And I’d gladly stand up
Next to you and defend her still today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land (love this land)
God bless the USA”
If we’re going to restore democracy to America, we need all the help we can get. As Mandela said of his alliance with the Soviet Union I say of the Infinite; “We are not in a position to refuse help from anyone.”
Someone more clever than I must puzzle out how to rescue Christianity from capture by Fourth Reich and its coalition of patriarchal sexual terrorists and white supremacist terrorists who weaponize faith in service to power as Christian Identity theocracy. This must be a primary mission of revolutionary struggle, if we are to liberate our nation and the world.
In the meanwhile, let us lift each other up as best we can.
As I wrote in my post of July 4 2025, What Does Freedom Mean Now?; “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; with these immortal words of Patrick Henry to the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, in a situation very much like the one we face now under the onslaught of imperial conquest by Russian in the wake of the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024, our abandonment of the principle of universal human rights and our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, our abandonment also of human rights and of the rights of citizens and idea of citizenship itself in the ethnic cleansing ongoing against nonwhite migrants by the ICE white supremacist terror force and a military force of occupation, the capture of our Supreme Court and Congress as instruments of subversion of democracy, the ongoing second mad reign of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump and capture of the state as Vichy America under the Fourth Reich, and the treasonous and dishonorable coup attempt by the Deplorables of the Fourth Reich’s deniable assets being only the American theatre of the Third World War, in which we have held ourselves aloof in forbearance of the use of force to secure our Liberty and allowed a brutal and amoral enemy to ravage the world unchallenged, with these words Patrick Henry began the American Revolution, and we are still fighting it today.
“If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” He then aimed a dagger at his heart in imitation of Cato the Younger, martyr of the Republic of Rome as it became an empire under Julius Caesar.
Patrick Henry was referencing the suicide speech of Cato the Younger according to Cassius Dio, in Roman History 43.10; “I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.”
Here as always, the force and power of tyrants and their carceral states to compel subjugation and consent to be governed as enslavement and dehumanization finds its limit in the simple refusal to obey, for force is brittle and authority hollow without belief in its legitimacy, and this is a power and inherent human quality which cannot be taken from us.
Who so ever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free.
Among the many nuanced meanings of Independence Day, this remains among them, and it is why we celebrate our Liberty and all who have waged revolution to win it for us.
As we celebrate Independence Day, I offer you a meditation on the contradictions of power, the frailty of order, the illusion of authority, the relativity of truth and the falsification of history in service to power and authority in the form of a story, originally written as a demonstration of Gogol’s method of creating symbols and referential to Ionesco, Kafka, and Akutagawa.
It also contains a true retelling from my family history of a decisive moment when the fate of humankind hung in the balance, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas of 1776, as related to me by my father and to him from his before from the witness of my ancestor Henry Lale who fought at Washington’s side here and in the great Forlorn Hope for a free society of equals that is our nation.
A Declaration of Liberty
I woke that fateful morning, ready to join the other rhinoceroses on the parade ground, when fussing with the shiny bits on my uniform I chanced to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and to my horror discovered that my horn had gone missing.
It was a magnificent horn, a horn of vainglorious strutting, of midnight blue and royal purple like the stains of grandeur and of marvelous sins. In its place was this soft monkey nose, useless in butting heads; worse, someone might think it funny, and I’d have to bring the pain- but how to maintain order without a horn?
It was all the fault of the Devil Weed I had consumed the night before, in an excess of drunken salute to one of the original members of my command, lost in a nameless action in a fight for freedom the world will never know the true history of. Even his name is unknown, an identity assigned upon enlistment; we are the night watch, who hold an invisible line that others may sleep and live in happy ignorance of the chaos and the thousands of myriads of relentless existential threats which surround us.
Throughout much of my life my nation has been the man to my left and the man to my right, fellow bearers of secrets; maybe I’ve been wrong about that.
As to the Devil Weed, it was grown from magic seeds, seeds of transformation, change, and renewal handed down, planted & re-harvested every few years, from the hand of George Washington to an ancestor of mine as payment for a wager just after crossing the Delaware on Christmas of 1776 under cover of night and a storm.
Washington had said, “We’ve eaten all the dogs, burned all the wood, and my balls are frozen to my last bit of lead shot. We can’t cross against the ice floes, and if we stay on this side of the river we die and the Revolution dies with us.”
And Henry my ancestor said “If you go I’m coming with you, but who will come with us? Do these men have another fight in them? Frozen, starving, too many barefoot in the snow, with one man in three in hospital and unfit for duty? Whoever isn’t drowned or crushed by the ice landing a ten mile night march through a storm to the enemy, and then an attack on a fortified garrison with neither powder nor ammunition? I’ll bet you we can’t cross that river and survive, and I’ll buy a night at the best whorehouse in Philadelphia for the whole army if you can pull that off.”
Everything became still as the attention of the whole camp was riveted.
Washington stood, naked but for a red blanket he had wrapped about himself like a toga, and for long moments met the eyes of his men. “Done, and I’ll give you and every man with us a pouch of George’s Own Devil Weed if we live to celebrate. Starved, frozen, and down to the last bullet, I’ll still take that bet. We are Americans.
We are no longer ragged misfits and outcasts begging scraps from our masters feet like dogs; from this moment forward we are not colonists divided against each other by a distant empire but Americans united in our Liberty.”
There were cheers, but not yet a race to the boats. They really were starving and frozen, and for many the coming fight would be down to the knife and tomahawk. So Washington put in his set of false teeth, the pointy cannibal ones made by the Indians he once lived among who taught him how to fight and how to lead. He grinned his terrible grin, and said, “Imagine the Hessians at Trenton, eating and drinking their way through winter with storehouses full of everything we need, firewood, food, fine boots and woolen uniforms, guns and powder, all waiting for men bold enough to take them. Warm they are, with fat goose and roast beast. I’m coming to dinner with the enemy. Who’s coming with me?”
And they rose cheering, and followed him into folly and into glory. Victory or Death, Washington’s password at the Battle of Trenton, became our family motto ever after; certainly it described the conditions of the fight, of the Revolution, and of the fragile nature of Liberty and America.
The American Revolution was an anticolonial struggle which overthrew the system of aristocratic privilege and monarchy, in which some of us are better than others by condition of birth. With all our faults, this is something we may celebrate still.
But there were other stories, things no one made a heroic painting of to hang in a national gallery, both of our origins and throughout our history. Sometimes because the cover story is so much better than the truth, as with the abominable and tragic fate of Amelia Earhart, cannibalized within hours of her island’s liberation by her captors after some eight years of unspeakable depravities; and sometimes because the truth is ambiguous and a relativistic multiplicity which depends on who’s telling it, a Rashomon Gate which transforms us as we go through.
Liberate the Dominican Republic with only a printing press, a radio station, and an airplane to drop leaflets, with the loss of a single foreign national and no American casualties, weighed against the countless deaths of the landing at Inchon? Wonderful. But who can really claim a monster like Trujillo as a friend, as we had for decades before?
Often it is also horrible, something necessary to survival which betrays the ideals and goals we work to achieve and protect, an accommodation with evil. And it is this last category of secrets which provides leverage for our enemies, propagating outward across time like the leprous tracks of an invisible and malign corruption.
Our lives have reflected one another, Henry and I, the revolutionary and the secret agent, as in a dark mirror. We cannot escape each other.
My ancestor helped win the Revolutionary War and create America; I helped bear the message of that Revolution to unknown shores as a Promethean fire and seeds of transformation, among many other things. The dream of America; a free society of equals, Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, a firewall against tyranny and fascism, a new idea of humankind in which no one is better than any other by reason of birth and the age of inequalities is ended, free from colonialism and empires, from slavery and identitarian nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and all the kings and tyrants toppled from their thrones. All too often revolutionary struggle has been corruptive of its own ideals, heroes become tyrants, and Liberation become imperial conquest.
The American Revolution, an anti-colonial struggle against an Empire and the system of aristocracy, and the tidal wave of revolutionary struggle it unleashed to reimagine and transform the world and human being, meaning, and value in thousands of myriads of mutinies and rebellions of the new Humanist order against the old Authoritarian paradigm, in every corner of the earth and among all its peoples, a glorious Liberation of the infinite possibilities of becoming human. None of these things happened in the way you have been told.
If I could go back to the beginnings of things, to the Original Lie that founded America and the consequences and events that tipped the balance of the world toward fascism, the equality of all human beings and the glorious revolution against ideas of aristocracy which failed to free the slaves or to liberate us from systems of oppression and unequal power other than monarchy and colonial bondage to a foreign empire, could all the wrongs that came after be redressed? Could we win back our freedom, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, redeem the promise of a free society of equals, and relight the torch of Liberty?
So I scribbled a note retiring my captaincy in the Deniable Forces of the secret police, stepping through the mirror into the monkey world and transforming as I had so many times before, though never before alone.
I had some wrongs to put right.
And here are some thoughts of mine on the subject of Liberty; Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,
is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, expose, mock, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. These are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Victory or Death; so said George Washington at the Battle of Trenton of the Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others.
Victory or Death; so must we ever answer tyrants and those who would enslave us.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be Bringers of Chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my journal of May 29 2023, This Memorial Day, Let Us Send No Armies to Enforce Virtue, But to Liberate Only; We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial Day, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars including the First and Second World Wars and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and World War Three ongoing now, and countless others.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate-Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine last year, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
So I wrote two years ago, when I still hoped for a Restoration of America. But much has changed.
We now face near certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an age of civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. As a teenager sorting the primary trauma of my death on Bloody Thursday, March 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, when I was hurled from my body by the force wave a police grenade and beheld myriads of possible futures as I stood outside of time, I calculated the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred; as of now we have passed a point of no return. I cannot foresee any chance of the survival of democracy nor of humankind beyond the next thousand years. We fight now, like the Romani who rebelled at Auschwitz, only to choose the manner of our deaths. I will not go quietly.
The question now is whether all that we have lived and dreamed, we humans will be utterly erased and become nothing or if something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and begin to wonder and to question.
But I could be wrong, and unable to envision possibilities which may still save us. For this chance we must resist, and unite in solidarity against our dehumanization by those who would enslave us.
Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom. But every act of Resistance lets us claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, if only for a time.
We fight now not to defeat the enemy, for our annihilation is as certain as that of the Old Gods before the tide of the Giants of Frost and Old Night when entropy swallows the universe, but to remain Unconquered; like Jacob wrestling the angel in defiance of unstoppable forces or Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea fighting to the last. For this is our victory, this refusal to submit, a victory of the human among endless chasms of the Abyss, and it cannot be taken from us.
The American Revolution is an ongoing process, not only an event of two and a half centuries ago but also occurring now, and without end. This is the America I believe in and fight for; one which ceaselessly adapts, changes boundaries into interfaces, and exalts our humanity.
Where do we find ourselves now, in this moment of decision and constellation of Rashomon Gate Events which converge upon us? How did we arrive here, at the Gates of Auschwitz with the evil leering clown Trump bearing the key? And how might we unwind this fate?
In America we have tracked and for a brief time brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies, and those which remain have abandoned our universal human rights in complicity with Israel in the genocide of the Palestinians. Here appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. Ukraine and Palestine are tests of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe and the fall of civilization, a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
On this Fourth of July, which finds us prisoners of a captured state led by a mad idiot traitor, Nazi revivalist, Rapist In Chief, and Russian agent whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the dismantling of the institutions of our common welfare, figurehead of a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and bankrolled by plutocrats who wish to destroy our capacity for mercy, fracture our solidarity as a Band of Brothers and our duty of care for each other, degrade our humanity, enslave us, and turn us into commodities in service to their wealth and power in parallel with the Fourth Reich’s theft of our citizenship and transformation into subjects rather than co owners of the state, I think now of my family motto, Victory or Death, Washington’s password during the Battle of Trenton which followed the Crossing of the Delaware.
We began thus, in a desperate gamble to seize the future, which found reflection in the landing at Normandy on D Day to liberate the world from Nazi tyranny in the most terrible war the world has ever known, a war to define our humanity and who has the power to do so, a war for the future possibilities of becoming human. And we find ourselves here again.
We inhabit this space at all times, at the Gate of Decision; for this is what it means to be human.
I close my interrogation of America and the legacies of our history with a reference to the line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar underlined by Nelson Mandela at Robbin Island to authorize direct action against the Apartheid regime, in circumstances and imposed conditions of struggle very like those we face now in America and much of the world, which we must meet with seizure of power and revolutionary struggle against state tyranny and terror and systems of oppression.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Victory or Death: Washington Crosses the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, 1851.
The future to which Trump has led us; The Gates of Auschwitz.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness and belonging, you always end up at the Gates of Auschwitz.
But we are not fated to enter here, and as Dante warns us at the Gates of Hell to Abandon Hope. We can Resist, and in so doing choose differently.
Joy to balance the terror of our nothingness:
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – I Won’t Back Down (Official Music Video)
Here is the book that reminded me who we are, we Americans, and what’s worth fighting for;
How shall we see and understand images of war, death, pain, horror, and evil such as those of war films, which both glorify and authorize violence and the use of social force in the manufacture of virtue and national identity, and interrogate, subvert, and liberate us from such systems of control as stories which possess us and from which we must emerge?
How can we give answer to such darkness in our own lives?
What does our future look like? To this end I have assembled here my references in iconic films of war, with a word of caution; the wars of the Age of Terror and Tyranny will be fought with weapons unimaginable to us now and incomparably destructive as measured against those of the Second World War.
The Republic or the Tyrants? The Choice Jefferson Faced in 1776 Is Now Ours in 2025
Will we defend the dream of self-rule, or surrender to the very powers our ancestors bled to escape?
Thom Hartmann
The American Revolution wasn’t just a break from Britain — it was an uprising against three ancient tyrannies: warlord kings, the morbidly rich, and theocrats. Today, those same forces are clawing their way back into power, and if we don’t fight them now, everything the Founders built could collapse.
In the Declaration of Independence and throughout his years of personal correspondence, Thomas Jefferson (and multiple others among the Founders) identified three historic tyrannies that he and his colleagues fought the Revolutionary War to overthrow and replace with a democratic republic.
The first were the warlord kings, who’d been conquering nations and peoples for millennia and, by 1776, were considered “normal” by most citizens of the world. These were families who, in the earlier years of their countries, had acquired power by conquest: war, pillage, rape, and the subjugation of the people they’d vanquished.
These warlord kings justified their oppression by claiming their god had decreed their rule, that might makes right, and maintained their rule over generations by the threat of violence. In America’s case, we experienced increasing oppression and taxation throughout the rule of King George II, which got far worse when George III took over Great Britain in 1760.
The second were the morbidly rich, known in that era as lords and ladies, barons and dukes, earls, counts, marquess’, and princes and princesses. They were the owners of the East India Company, for example, against whom our revolution commenced with the Boston Tea Party in late 1773.
Jefferson and Adams, in particular, had lengthy correspondences — often quoting the philosophers who inspired the Enlightenment — about how “the rich” always worked to corrupt popular governments and should never be trusted with control over America.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his 1762 Economie Politique, which inspired and informed our nation’s Founders, noted that the main job of a republic “is found in rendering justice to all, and especially in protecting the poor against the tyranny of the rich.”
Jefferson (who died in bankruptcy) agreed; in a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, he wrote:
“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”
In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson amplified the point:
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”
And Rousseau was also echoed by John Adams in a November 15, 1813 letter to Jefferson:
“When Aristocracies are established by human Laws and honour and Wealth and Power are made hereditary by municipal Laws and political Institutions, then I acknowledge artificial Aristocracy to commence: but this never commences, till Corruption in Elections become dominant and uncontroulable.”
The third tyranny that our Founding generation overthrew were the theocrats: the popes, mullahs, preachers, priests, and even the King proclaiming himself the head of the Church of England.
By the 1770s, rightwing Christians had largely taken over much of New England; they provoked a teenage Ben Franklin to flee Massachusetts for Philadelphia to get away from the mandatory Sunday church attendance and taxes to fund the clergy. In his book Toward the Mystery he wrote:
“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
Similarly, both Jefferson and Adams (among others) wrote at length about how the Christians of their day were constantly trying to corrupt government and what a battle they faced in that regard.
In the place of these three forms of government, the men who put together America proposed a constitutionally-limited democratic republic, a nation where the power rested with and was derived from the people themselves, rather than coming down from on-high kings, theocrats, or the morbidly rich.
Throughout the quarter-millennia of America’s existence, we’ve repeatedly had to fight back against warlords, plutocrats, and theocrats.
When a handful of wealthy families took over the South, the warlords of the Confederacy declared war on us. The morbidly rich have challenged our government multiple times, most famously during the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, and in the years since the Reagan Revolution. And preachers seeking political power have been a constant thorn in our side, from the Scopes Monkey Trial to today’s efforts to insert Christianity into our public schools, the Constitution be damned.
And here we are again.
We have a president who thinks of himself as the king of America, issuing proclamations as if he has a divine right. He’s an oligarch himself, and has built a corrupt alliance with other oligarchs in America, Russia, and around the world to enhance his own wealth and power. And since the days of Reagan the GOP has embraced the religious right, who now are so in thrall to the Republican Party that they can reliably hand electoral victories to rightwing candidates.
So, like our nation’s Founders, we must remember, resist, and reform.
We must remember the three historic tyrannies and teach our young people about them and the ever-present danger of their return. Promote history and civics. Remind people of the oppression our forebearers faced. Update our educational system so the true history of our nation can be taught.
We must resist Trump’s and the GOP’s efforts to turn America into an oligarchic, theocratic, neofascist kingdom. Show up in the streets. Contact your elected representatives (Congress’ number is 202-224-3121) all the way down to local officials and let them know you want a democratic republic. Show up for public meetings like school boards, county commissions, city councils, etc., and demand an end to big money’s, big defense contractors’, and big religion’s control over our political system.
And we must reform America’s political system that’s been captured over the past 50 years by massive transnational corporations and the billionaire class. Get money out of politics. Overturn Citizens United. Make voting a right rather than a mere privilege.
If we fail, two-and-a-half centuries of blood, sweat, and tears will have been wasted as America slips into the type of warlord/oligarch/theocrat capture that’s been the fate of Russia, Hungary, Egypt, Turkey, and so many other formerly democratic nations.
But if we succeed, we’ll have a serious opportunity to finally make America a fully inclusive nation, a beacon of liberty, and a “land of the free and home of the brave” we can all be proud of.
That’s worth fighting for with everything we have. See you in the streets on No Kings Day…
Torch of Liberty 
