Who is Santa Claus, where did he come from, and how did he become a universal figure in our culture associated with Christmas?
A priest became infamous around this time last year for telling children that Santa was a marketing character for Coca-Cola while performing the role of listening to wishes, a partial historical truth but one which misses the point; the poetic truth is that Santa embodies wishes as vision and as hope.
He is also far more ancient and subsumes a number of important functions, the origins of the figure of Santa Claus being in rituals of ecstatic trance and vision, underworld journey, and the dispersal of Sami tribal ritual and symbolism.
What this short film, focused on the use of amanita mushrooms, well documented as the pan-European witch’s flying potion, neglects to mention is that Finnish scout-snipers were employed by Gustave Adolph of Sweden, leader of the Protestants in the Thirty Years War, against the Catholic Holy Roman Empire; and roamed throughout Europe in the first half of the 1600’s, spreading their customs, including Santa, as heroes of the Reformation.
A wise elder in red and white as a figure of the magic mushroom, in a sled drawn by reindeer, bringing gifts of healing and welcomed with feasts, flying.
Santa and the Lord of Misrule who presided over the harvest and midwinter festival of Saturnalia which the Church had appropriated as Christmas are negative spaces of each other, Janus like figures which mirror and were conflated with one another; Santa the bringer of gifts, feasts, and reconnection with the mysteries of the spirit and dream world, and Saturn’s proxy ruler who represents transgression and suspension of laws and limits of the Forbidden and reversals of order and authority, but also an amok time of madness and the dangers of an authoritarian tyranny of whims.
The Underworld Journey and dream quest element of Santa’s myth, primarily an Orphic ritual of poetic vision and ecstatic trance, are universal in human cultures, and find a parallel in the Greco- Egyptian faith of Asclepius, found throughout the Roman Empire, in which patients entered guided healing states in dream incubation chambers. The historical leader of the Roman community in England after the fall of Imperial dominion, Ambrosius Aurelianus, on whom the literary figure of Merlin was based was a priest of the Greco-Egyptian Asclepius whose symbol the Caduceus is now universalized as a medical emblem. This faith from the dawn of our civilization of the Serpent of Wisdom and Healing, rooted in oracles and dreams, has modern parallels in the dream navigation and interpretation arts of the Kagyu Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhists, the Naqshbandi Sufis, Jungian psychology, and Surrealism.
In the words of Jean Genet, who set me on my life’s path in swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut 1982; “It takes a long time dreaming in darkness to live with grandeur.”
This suggests possibilities for reclaiming Christmas as a traditional festival of family and community healing, and a universal celebration of the revisioning of oneself and humankind.
In this time of reimagination and transformation, we dream new selves and new futures; we destroy and recreate our universes and realities, and free ourselves and each other to explore unknowns. Such times of change offer us new identities as liberation struggle, and emergence from the legacies of our histories.
Enacting the role of the Lord of Misrule, let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden, defy our limits and those who would enslave us to their laws and ideas of virtue, and perform the violation of normalities and seizures of power. Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
Enacting the role of Santa Claus, let us be beneficent dispensers of mercy and compassion, healers of historic and systemic injustices, and champions of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. Let us dream new dreams, and find the courage to make them real.
Let us embrace our darkness and discover new possibilities of becoming human.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night; of wonders, raptures, and glorious transformative vision.
In my thirties I realized I had never read the Bible, though I had read into most everything else including the Zen Buddhism and Taoism I was raised with in formal study for ten years beginning at the age of nine, Kabbalah and European grimoires of magic during my teenage years as part of an obsession with Wittgenstein and the idea of language as a field of information which underlies material reality and influenced by the Surrealist William S. Burroughs and the weird variant rituals and magical performances devised by he and my father, the study of Jungian psychology and Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology from my senior year of high school onward though I read the entire folklore study The Golden Bough by Frasier in sixth grade, a reading through the works of Shankara and Ramakrishna in freshman year at university followed by an apprenticeship with a priestess of Kali in my mid twenties, enthusiasms for Coleridge, Keats, and Blake around the same time, followed by a mad love for the poetry of Rumi which led me into studies of Islam and Sufism, and as I turned thirty I had begun a twin study in Nepal as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana order and in Kashmir of Islam as a scholar of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism.
When I realized I had never read the Bible or anything of Christianity other than the splendid Quatrains of T.S. Eliot, because of my revulsion for how it was instrumentalized as theocratic terror and patriarchal sexual terror, crusades and Inquisitions, the Divine Right of Kings, submission to authority, repression of dissent, and the valorization of slavery and imperial conquest both historically and among the hideous Apartheid community of the Reformed Church in which I grew up as an outsider, symbolized for me by the burning of an old woman as a witch when I was a boy by a mob which included fellow children whom I knew from school, I then set forth a plan of study and interrogating historical source materials to answer a question; Who was the historical Jesus, and how does he differ from the mythic Jesus?
My notes from this project, in part written during my travels through the Holy Land, here follow.
Who was the historical Jesus, how does he differ from the Jesus of myth and Biblical literature, and what did the authors who created him as a character of fiction do to shape him to their own purposes?
So much of this story is fiction stolen from a broad spectrum of older sources and faiths which Christianity assimilated and replaced, or invented over the last two millennia, that it is difficult to disambiguate between historical and mythic truths which have been presented by authorities in service to power as simple truths without nuance.
I have never been a Christian, and no member of my immediate family has ever been a Christian while I was living, my mother having left the Church at the age of twelve because a nun broke her finger with a ruler for asking too many questions. She walked out of Catholic school that day and never returned, either to the faith or its institutions of force and control. During her many years of teaching High School English, she always told that story on the first day of school every year, and would then hold up her broken finger to the class and say; “We are not silent. We question authority, and we test all claims of truth.”
My partner Theresa MacKay’s family similarly renounced and abandoned the Catholic Church over the issue of authoritarian force and control, in their case a generation further removed when her grandfather John F. MacKay, Industrial Workers of the World labor organizer who traveled with Eugene V. Debs, refused an order by his priest and Archbishop to stop a strike with the words “If you’re that easily bought, we have nothing to say to each other”, and was excommunicated. The Church and the company they were in the pay of acting together then sent an assassin to murder him, whom he defeated.
No fools, we; nor do any whom I claim as my own believe and obey authority unquestioning, for there is no just Authority, and we must test all claims of truth, especially by those who claim to speak and act in the name of the Infinite as a strategy of dominion. He who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
There is always, in all times and civilizations since the introduction of mass slave labor and priest-kings, some predatory liar or fantasist in a gold robe who seeks to trick others into doing the hard and dirty work, and these heinous criminals as a class authorize the most brutal of thieves as kings and legitimize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, even when they are not sending forth crusades and inquisitions to enforce sanctioned ideas of virtue and identity in service to power.
But was it ever anything more than this, a con game on a national and global scale? Anything other than tyranny and terror? Other than fear, fear of death, plagues, disasters, famine, the uncontrollable wildness of nature, weaponized in service to power?
For those who believe, Christianity must be more, though I never could see what that might be. More than slavery, conquest, class war and subjugation. For some of the slaves it may render docile for the benefit of their masters it may help to make the fear controllable, but at terrible cost. All states are embodied violence, but theocratic states also falsify, dehumanize, and steal the souls of their subjects.
Thus tyranny is the price of security in all systems of unequal power, and most especially for carceral states of force and control, and it always grows more terrible still until it collapses, because security is an illusion, though one very profitable in the short term for the enforcers of hegemonic elites.
Though any such possible designs and purposes are opaque and beyond the scope of my interrogation here, we can probe the edges of institutionalized faith and submission to authority as legitimated by the mirage of deranged fantasies and historical and literary invention by questioning how such stories come to be, and in questioning its purposes, designs, and the motives of their storytellers we may begin to define the shape of the inherent ambiguity at the hear of Christianity; the origins and differences between the historical Jesus and the literary or mythic Jesus, and the ways in which each serves power.
This story of the life of a historical and mythic Jesus I shall try to question, using the instruments of both literary and historical criticism which I normally apply to politics and current events, from original sources.
First we must question the origins and sources of the story as given in the synoptic gospels; here I signpost that no such figure of a man-god who is sacrificed as a redeemer can be constructed from Jewish sources; it is almost wholly a pagan story which assimilates elements of Greco-Roman mystery cults and other Middle Eastern cultures. Some of these we can articulate clearly and without chance of misattribution or error.
The Visit of the Magi bearing gifts to the baby Jesus is a retelling of the visit of Tiridates to the future Emperor Nero.
Matthew appropriates titles and claims regarding Jesus from the official cult of the Roman god-emperors, part of his idea of Jesus as god rather than a man.
Matthew also uses the story to explain away the prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem with the fact that Jesus was from Nazareth.
The plot of Herod, setting of the story, is fiction which has no mention in Herodian records.
On the subject of the baptism of Jesus, the story of the dove as a symbol of the Shekinah or Wisdom is an appropriation of the shamanic trance recorded in the Magical Papyrus of Paris, and typical of magic universally. The story is a vision quest, but not that of Jesus.
The phrase “son of god” is a title of the Roman Emperor attributed to Jesus by later admirers.
“Holy Spirit”, an appropriation from the Hebrew Shekinah which erases the feminine half of the original deities, is another term from Egyptian magic.
The bird which deifies baby Jesus in the story is a messenger of the gods in Egyptian myth, like the Greco-Roman Hermes, which also grants powers of mystical flight to the heavens and resurrection of the spirit after death.
This is also the origin of the belief, popular during his life, that Jesus was possessed by the Spirit of the Air, Beelzebub.
Jesus “could do no miracles” in his hometown, because his miracles all relied on the belief of his audiences, and those who actually knew him knew he had no magic powers at all. It is the belief of the subject, not the powers of the psychosomatic healer, which are at work in his miracles, though they were also not performed by Jesus historically but appropriated from the miracles or medicine shows of others.
Jesus says “Your faith has healed you”, also he is unable to do miracles in the presence of the uncredulous.
This was before his followers, long after his death, invented the story of the virgin birth appropriated from Hellenic sources to deify him.
Jesus’ hostile attitudes toward his mother and other family are understandable for a boy who was well known to be an illegitimate bastard of a Roman soldier.
The mythic Jesus shares several symbols in common with the shadow figure in Jungian terms. Like Prometheus, he defies the Law of the gods to bring the sacred fire to humankind, is torn apart in the Passion like the Old King in alchemy and remade, an eternal recurrence of dissolution and rebirth as punishment also similar to Loki. He is a light bringer, like Lucifer, and like the Instructor or serpent in the Garden of Eden with which he is identified renews himself in shedding his skin.
Symbols of the Christ figure or mythic Jesus include the viper, raven, lion, night-heron, eagle, and fish.
The fish as a symbol of Christ identifies him with Saturn, the cannibal father of the gods whose festival Christmas appropriates.
The fish or ichthys is also a symbol of the Babylonia fish god Oannes. In India the fish symbolizes the Redeemer Mari. The Thracian Riders had a Eucharistic fish rite, as did the Phoenician fish goddess Atargatus.
Saturn is the Star of Israel, meaning justice, which is set atop our Christmas trees. The Sabbath is held on Saturn’s Day, and both Saturn and Ialdabaoth, the highest arcon, had lion’s faces.
Saturn is a “black star” identified with the Dragon or Leviathan, and a symbol of the Demiurge which creates the universe.
Saturn is also identified with the ass, Israel’s totem god as well as that of the Syrian donkey god whose title Jesus sometimes uses when invoking god.
Also a symbol of the sun god and of Apep and Set in Egypt.
It is possible to interpret the mythic Jesus as having a double nature, one of heaven and one of the depths, which echoes the relationship of the historical Jesus and his twin brother Thomas, and his story one of integration and becoming whole.
In the Pistus Sophia, Mary says that a spirit descended to Jesus as a child, an exact doppelganger, and when Jesus kissed the spirit they became one.
The Temptation, then, is clearly a struggle to wholeness with the Shadow or unconscious self, who like the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow we must embrace or be possessed by as an intrusive force.
Christ is called the fish to identify him as an indwelling presence in the depths of the oceanic Great Mother, a light in the vast darkness of the sea. He is born in Pisces, dies as a lamb in Aries, and describes the procession of the equinoxes, displaying his relation to both hunting and gathering mythologies. His followers are fishes and “fishers of men”, he feeds multitudes with fish and is himself eaten as a fish, and whole followers were named pisciculi or Little Fishes.
Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany follow the universal pattern of mystery religions of rebirth; he is a type of Osirus and of Odin, hanging on the Tree of Life at Midwinter to renew the earth.
Baptism by water is a recapitulation of this mystery, and a rebirth; “You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him”, Col. 2:12.
The water of baptism reenacts birth and symbolizes the universal congress of potentialities, which precedes all form and creation. Christ is clearly immersed in the transpersonal psyche.
“In mysteries of rebirth, the individual is initiated by the spirit mother, the feminine creative principle. This is the totality of nature in its original unity, from which all life arises and unfolds, assuming in its highest transformation the form of spirit,” as Newman writes.
Jonah “sees the light” which is Christ in the belly of the sea monster. As the son of the Shekinah and her figure as Mary, whose designation as a virgin refers to the original meaning of the word as “a woman under her own authority”, Jesus has a shared authority to baptize others with the Holy Spirit, where John had only symbolic water.
During his own baptism in a vision, Jesus sees the Holy Spirit or power of the Shekinah descending from the heavens as a dove, and thereafter commands spirits and heals in the name of the Mother.
Christ thus re-enacts the Lekha Dodi as performed in Jerusalem, restoring the Shekinah to Israel as does every Jewish home on the Sabbath. When he says; “There is no approach to the Father, but through me,” he means there is no approach to the Father but through the Mother, symbolized by the dove.
Images of the Bride of God as Wisdom or the Shekinah include Hosea 2:19, Amos 5:2, Isaiah 1:8 and 10:32, Jeremiah 4:31, 18:13, and 15, Lamentations 1:15 and 2:13, Micah 4:10, Zephaniah 3:14 and 15, Zechariah 2:10 and 9:9, Baruch 3:9 to 4:1, Ecclesiasticus, and the Song of Solomon.
In Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom’s descent into the Abyss parallels the underworld journey of Anath, the virgin goddess of Canaan and a probable original version of the Jewish goddess.
Before 600 BC, Jerusalem harbored worshippers of Astarte, who bears the title Queen of Heaven which became part of the Shekinah and later of Mary’s myth, a faith discovered by Jeremiah in Egypt and assimilated into Judaism, J 7:18 and 44:15-19.
Much of the story of Judaism is of its interdependence with and assimilation of Egyptian mythology, which was swallowed entire by Christianity as a third epoch of faith. Another is the civilizational shift as patriarchy replaced the original matriarchal faiths as interrogated by Maria Gimbutas.
A stele of Anath’s faith in Egypt hails her as “Queen of Heaven and master of all the gods,” titles assimilated to the figure of Mary Theotikos or God-Bearer.
Papyri from the 5th century BC show Jews at Aswan worshipped Yahweh and Anath together in the same temple, origin of the twin altars of Yahweh and the Shekinah in later Judaism.
A Phoenician inscription on Cyprus reads; “To Anath, strength of Life.” Here she was equated with Athene, both virgin warriors.
In Sumeria, she is Nin-Kursag the Life Giver, Mother of All, Queen of the Gods, and also Inanna.
In Babylon she had a monstrous form before creation, and a bright one after as Ishtar.
Syrians worshipped her as Astarte, a version of Asherah.
In Egypt she was primarily Neith, and secondarily Isis.
In Asia Minor she appears as Cybele, Lady of the Animals.
In Rome she was Diana, Lady of the Moon.
Over time and in practice, all of these myths and forms of the Great Mother became one, assimilated into Christianity as the Mother of God and her sacrificial son, Baal and Asherath, Isis and Osirus, Cybele and Attis, Mary and Jesus, and all of these reflections of Yahweh and the Shekinah as a quaternity.
Beside the vast question of sources and the transformations of meaning over time with assimilation of previous mythologies, any Biblical scholarship must wrestle with the numerous questions of contradictions in statements of fact arising both from differing ideologies and intentions on the part of the authors of the gospels and the time frame as they were written between forty and 70 years after the death of Jesus, and the inventor of Christianity as a religion, Paul, had never met him and freely reimagined Jesus as a literary character drawn from classical mystery faiths.
Did Jesus disrupt the temple market at the start of his career as in John 2:13-16, or at the end as in Mark 11:15-17?
Was he crucified before as in John 18:27 or after the Passover meal?
Beyond discrepancies in the narrative, there is the question of whether the four gospels originating from the Q document were designed to obscure rather than reveal, to evade Roman authorities? Clearly those who wrote of the secret doctrines shared by Jesus only with his disciples, called the Keys to the Kingdom, summoning spirits and opening gateways to imaginal realms, believed so. There are over twenty fragments of works repressed by the Church in the Apocrypha of the New Testament.
Some changes in translation were deliberate as well; changing “young woman” and “woman under her own authority beholden to no man” as descriptors of Mary to “virgin” in the sexual sense move Jesus into the space of a Greek demigod, often born of a virgin.
“Almah” in Hebrew means “young woman”, which during the third century translation into Greek was given as “parthenoi” or virgin. This was based on a translation of Isaiah 7:14, and found only in Matthew 1:23, a deliberate gloss as parthenoi cannot be derived from almah. The story we know as the Bible is filled with such misdirections and falsifications.
Jesus was never referred to as Son of the Virgin, and there are reasons for this. Court records of Rabbi Eliezar name Miriam the Hairdresser as an adultress with a Sidonian archer in the Roman legion named Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who while stationed in Palestine became the father of her twin sons Thomas and Jesus. There is only one individual soldier by that name in Imperial records, and he is buried at Bingerbruck in Germany. The mother of Jesus was also prosecuted in Roman court as an adultress by the family of her husband Joseph.
Jesus ben Pantera figures in Rabbinical literature as a healer. His mother is recorded as subsequently making her living by spinning while wandering in exile as an adultress.
When the book of Matthew gives the genealogy of Jesus as “son of Mary” rather than of Joseph, it clearly means father unlawful. The forebears list includes only four other women; Rahab, the madam of a brothel, Tamar, a temple prostitute whose children were born of incest, Ruth who was a fornicator, and Bathsheba, another adultress. The meaning here is quite clear.
We have two truths, of a historical Jesus who was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, and of a mythic Jesus born of a virgin and a god.
The birth story in the Gospels is also unreliable and contradictory; did the good news of his birth come to Joseph in a dream as in Mt, or did the angel Gabriel bring it to Mary as in Luke?
In Luke Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for a Roman census, in Matthew they already lived in Bethlehem; both cannot be true.
The census under Quirinus’ Governorship did not take place until 6 AD at the earliest possible date, when Judea came under Roman rule.
In Herodian records there is no mention of killing children; this is a clear fiction stolen from the story of Moses, intended to identify Jesus with Moses as a fellow bearer of God’s word.
Mary’s Magnificat in Luke 1:46-55 is an obvious retelling of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, and she is closely modeled on Hannah generally in Luke.
What may we say of the myth of Christ as a literary character without ambiguity, once he is freed from the limits of the historical Jesus?
Christ is the Logos or Word of God, which I identify as the undiscovered universal language of Wittgenstein and James Joyce, the Primary Imagination of Coleridge, the alam al mythal of Ibn Arabi, and the Bardo in Buddhism. Christianity appropriated the idea of the Logos from Philo of Alexandria, a Jew, and from the tradition of Platonic philosophy which continued to shape the new faith.
Christianity split the Queen of Heaven into two figures, mother and wife of Jesus, to circumvent the classical configuration of the avatar of the Infinite and sacrificial man-god being both the son and husband of the goddess as it was originally throughout the ancient world.
Mary is the English equivalent of the Hebrew Miriam, name of both the mother of Jesus and of the Magdalene who is now generally imagined to have been his wife. But Mary or Miriam was not a personal name at all, but a title; the Egyptian prefix meri- combined with the Hebrew Yam as a name of God to produce Meri-Yam, Beloved of God, a title of the Shekinah.
It is a title shared by the Magdalene, who since Robert Graves book King Jesus has been thought of as his bride at the Wedding at Cana, to fullfill the requirements of Davidic kingship. I myself regard the idea of Jesus as the legal heir of the throne of Israel as beyond the chance of possibility. He was the despised bastard child of an enemy soldier, and there are four other breaks in the line of succession as given, so not only was he perceived as illegitimate and possibly as a non-Jew, the claim of Davidic kingship is counterfactual.
Christian mythology casts Jesus in the role of a classical dying and resurrected man-god; Jesus is Baal to Asherath, Adonis to Aphrodite, Attis to Cybele, Osirus to Isis, and also Orpheus who descends to the underworld to redeem the dead, Thoth-Hermes who is a guide of the soul, and the god of ecstatic trance and poetic vision, Dionysus.
The syncretic nature and construction of Christianity guaranteed its success as an instrument of assimilation and the imperial conquest and dominion of the Roman Empire. This was the true purpose and design of its inventor, Paul of Tarsus, whose mission as an agent of the empire was to transform a Jewish independence and anti-colonial insurrection into a tool of subjugation and control.
There are also problems with the narrative which bear directly on the identification of Jesus with the Messiah of Judaism and of being the Son of God.
First, claiming to be the Son of God was not a crime under Jewish law, so the whole story of trial by the Sanhedrin and of the Crucifixion is fictive.
During the Second Jewish Revolt of 132 AD, Rabbi Akiba acclaimed the rebel leader Simon Bar Kochba; “This is the King Messiah.” Akiba was laughed at, but the claim itself was no offense.
Use of the phrase “Son of the Blessed” or “Son of God” in reference to oneself or others was no capital crime, not in Mishnah nor in pre-Mishnah law. These expressions are often found in Jewish literature; the reference to sitting at the right hand of power in Mark 14:62 is no different from King David’s sitting at the right hand of God in Psalm 110:1.
Therefore the story of the charge of blasphemy against Jesus is fiction, written by a non-Jew with no knowledge of Jewish law.
The charge which Pilate was compelled to act on was that of being a magician, as Jesus was popularly believed to exorcise demons by the power of Beelzebub which possessed him. In other words, a madman prosecuted as a charlatan.
When asked; “Which is the first of all commandments?” in Mark 12:29-30, Jesus does not call for belief in himself but repeats the Shema Israel in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, as might any Jew.
Jesus then offers another commandment; “Love your neighbor as yourself, Mark 12:30. This is a quote from Leviticus 19:18, found again in Ecclesiastes and a paraphrase of the commandment in the Tobit 4:15; “Do to no one what you would not want done to you.”
Rabbi Hillel, when asked by a gentile to teach him the whole of the Law while he stood on one foot, said; “Whatever is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study.”
Herein the teachings of Jesus are strictly Jewish within the historical context of its literature, which I would hold as credible to the historical Jesus.
The mythic Jesus as created by Paul and later authors does not even speak of the Jewish god, but of pagan gods.
Here we return to the bird in the vision of Jesus, an Egyptian element and messenger of the gods thought to grant spiritual flight and resurrection of the soul after death.
Similarly, the “Living God” to which Jesus refers as “Io” or donkey is Osirus, sacrificial and ever-resurrecting god who is both son and husband of the Great Mother, and also linked to the Syrian donkey god.
The Father possibly refers to not one but two gods, a Trickster figure like the serpent or Instructor who is both guardian and guide, and the Living God whose death and rebirth Christ recapitulates.
During his Vision Quest, Jesus encounters the Instructor, the serpent of Eden who far later was identified with Satan the rebel angel, whom Jesus defeats in a Sphinxian riddle contest, crossing the underworld threshold which he guards and acquiring him as a guardian and familiar. Jesus should always be depicted in art with his Serpent, for from this moment in his story they are linked much as Buddha is depicted with the monkey at his feet who symbolizes his animal nature and is his theriomorphic form.
The figure of Christ as Logos belongs to a much later period of neo-Platonic philosophy. This series of transformations over time of the figure of Jesus raises the question of the purpose, origin, and relationships with competing narratives and faiths of the Christian Church.
There is almost no congruence between the historical Jesus and the myth of Christ invented by his followers. This was largely due to the influence of Paul, who had never met Jesus and was free to imagine him in any way he thought useful to his mission. Paul was before his vision on the road to Damascus a hunter of Christians for the Roman Empire which regarded the new cult as a rebellion, and may have been a Roman intelligence agent throughout his institutionalization of the church whose purpose in inventing the Christian faith as we know it now was to transform a threat into an asset by changing the narrative, as a revolutionary cult of Jewish anticolonial liberation became through Paul’s reimagination a classical cult of a sacrificial man-god which authorized the Imperial state.
In any case this was certainly the effect of Paul’s intervention in history.
Paul waged a campaign against the churches founded by the family of Jesus, his twin brother Thomas who by 4 AD was in India and founded the Church which the Portuguese were surprised to discover in 1498, the Church of his elder brother James in Jerusalem, and the Nazarean Church founded by his mother in Syria, historically important because originally this was the Church of the Prophet Mohammed, and the idea of Jesus as a saint and not a god in the Quran originates with the Nazareans in Syria.
Paul and the Church he founded suppressed or falsified the story of Jesus as an instrument of political power; a close reading of the life of Jesus reveals the process of his assimilation to Hellenic mystery faiths and instrumentalization to the legitimation of Roman Imperial colonial rule.
Only in those Churches outside the Church of Rome did any reliable account of his teaching truly survive; in India, Syria, Persia, Egypt, and Ireland.
I believe it is more useful to us to read “Jesus the Messiah” as Jesus the Liberator.
Here we must question the idea of Messiah to mean King of Israel, and the claim to Jesus to the throne as championed so memorably by Robert Graves.
This is not unique; every King of Israel of the House of David is referred to as a Messiah.
Many pretenders to the throne assumed royal titles and privileges; Messiah was a claim of rulership and not of divinity.
Herod, a non Jew ruling in the name of a Roman Emperor who required worship as a god, set the stage for a Davidic restoration and anticolonial revolt.
Luke and Matthew attempt to legitimize the claim of Jesus to Davidic kingship by citing a genealogy broken by four women, and fail to mention that Jesus was well known not as a royal prince but as the bastard of an enemy soldier whose mother was exiled as an adultress.
Regarding the social position and class membership of Jesus, which would have been crucial to his later leading an all-class revolution against the Empire, carpenter in Greek means a craft or guild master; skilled labor probably owning his own shop and tools and with apprentices.
Jesus was literate in Pharisaic sources, not a professional scholar or Rabbi but educated and middle class. His stepfather Joseph was also a carpenter, so this was a family trade in which he grew up.
Some of Jesus’ followers were wealthy and influential members of the elite; Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, and Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward.
Matthew and Mark describe the Wedding at Canae as a royal wedding; the 300 denari worth of spikenard alone would be nearly ten thousand pounds Sterling today. John states that Mary of Bethany performed the ritual, sister of Lazarus. The following day Jesus entered Jerusalem in a triumphal parade like a victorious Roman general, which was attended by anti-Herodian partisans and like a royal investiture.
The Apostles provide an illuminating window into the social and political context of the life of Jesus, and the character of his acts. Here emerges a historical Jesus with whom I can identify and find common cause.
Simon the Zealot, as named in the Acts and in Luke, among a number of the Apostles so identified, Zealot being a member of the revolutionary council at war with the Roman Empire and engaged in struggle against the Vichy regime of Herod.
Simon bar Jonas as given in John, a name meaning Simon the Anarchist.
Simon Called Peter, a man operating under an alias meaning the Rock.
Of course there is Judas Iscariot of whom we have the beautiful Gospel of Judas, the Sicari or Daggermen being an organization of assassins.
Luke the Doctor, who wrote of Paul’s conversion while in prison together in Rome. Paul broke with the Nazarean churches which held that Jesus was a man and not divine, and created Christianity from fragments of Mithraism, the cult of the Roman army, as well as the Egyptian cult of Osirus, and others including the Orphic Mysteries and faiths of Tammuz and Zoroaster.
Thomas the Twin, twin brother of Jesus who traveled through Parthia, Persia, and India founding churches, and died at Mylapore in India near Madras.
James the Just, elder brother of Jesus and head of the church in Jerusalem. Simeonon, cousin of Jesus, assumed control of the Nazarean Church after the execution of James by Rome as a revolutionary, and moved the church to Syria and Iraq. The Prophet Mohammed was a member, and the Quran reflects its doctrines.
Mary Magdalene, presumed wife of Jesus, buried in a tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea with other relatives and notable characters from the story. Her Gospel is interesting indeed.
Jesus of course escaped capture by Rome at the Battle of Gethsemane when a cohort of the legion raided his base of freedom fighters, the whole idea and narrative of his Trial and Crucifixion being fictional; Jesus is enshrined where he died in Kashmir, in full Roman armor.
Regarding how he was understood by his followers decades after the failure of his independence revolution and escape, in the stories written by them Jesus was crucified between two Lestai or freedom fighters.
Acts 21:20 claims that the Christians of Jerusalem were known as “Zealots for the Law” meaning Jewish rather than Roman law.
With disambiguation of the historical from the mythic Jesus arises the question of his miracles and exorcisms, and of his possession or madness.
In John 7:20 and 8:52 a crowd says of him; “You have a demon,” meaning he was a madman but also reflecting the popular idea of him as being possessed by Beelzebub. John 10:20 says “He has a demon and is insane,” Luke 4:23 has “Doctor, heal thyself.”
Other sources in which Jesus is thought to heal the possessed or mad through command of a demon which possesses him include Matthew 9:34, 10:25, and 12:27, Luke 11:19, and John 8:48. Obviously his traveling medicine show was quite memorable; it was his recruiting tool for freedom fighters.
The phrase “the Holy Spirit” is sometimes used like calling the sidhe the Little Folk in Ireland or the Fates the Kindly Ones; the followers of Jesus did not wish to anger the demon which possessed him.
Mark 6:14 is a prayer to Horus stolen directly from Egyptian sources.
Jesus was during his ministry or medicine show thought by his followers to own the spirit by which John the Baptist had performed similar miracle cures.
Jesus never claims to be sent by god, never uses “thus saith the lord” to authorize his own words. Only once in the Gospels does he call himself; “Christ, son of the Blessed”, and this is an invention of the author of Mark 14:6. In fact Jesus avoids direct questions of this kind.
The claim of his divinity as a sacrificial man-god hinges on the Night Trial and Crucifixion, which is an impossibility. This is claimed to occur during Passover, when Jews cannot leave their homes, and as I have pointed point, claiming to be the Messiah is not blasphemy. Blasphemy would have been punished by stoning, not being handed over to a foreign occupier.
Roman records charge him with using a title of the Roman Emperor and as a charlatan and magician.
The account in John is more accurate; there is no trial before the Sanhedrin, and no Messianic claims which would have bothered no one. This version of events has Jesus arrested at a nocturnal meeting, and his followers were armed.
Jesus was identified by his tattoos or tribal scarification, the “marks of Jesus” which he gave to at least one of his disciples; this is interesting because you cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have a tattoo. This was an act of defiance which would have made him an Outsider, and not a member of the Jewish community much less a leader of it.
Jesus promises to send a “spirit of truth” to “be in you” and “foretell things to come” after his death, John 14:16 and 26.
In John 20 and 22 he sends a spirit into his followers by blowing on them. This conferred the power to exorcise demons or cure illness to his followers, who cast out demons by his name in Luke 10:17.
His disciples also practiced black magic, sending demons into enemies in I Corinthians 5:33.
Jesus clearly sends the spirit of Satan to Judas in the communion bread during the Last Supper; “I have judged to give him to Satan for destruction.”
To shake the dust from ones shoes is the casting of a curse.
Jesus used dividing spells to set followers against their families so they would come under his power in Matthew 10:35. Also, conversion was won by use of love spells.
Cures of psychosomatic illnesses, quieting hysterics, and rousing from hysterical coma or raising the dead were among the tricks of his medicine show used to win followers.
Some of the miracles of Jesus are simple retellings of cures from the life of Apollonius; for example, the story of the Youth of Nain parallels Apollonius’ raising of a dead girl in Lucian.
Jesus calming a storm is appropriated from the lives of Pythagoras and Empedocles.
The feeding of multitudes miracles are literary fictions intended to compare him with Elisha, who fed a hundred where Jesus fed thousands.
Turning water to wine is a story borrowed from the Dionysian festival at Sidon.
The escapes and invisibility spell of Jesus is also appropriated from Apollonius, who escaped the court of Domitian.
In Matthew 16:19 Jesus gives his disciples the Keys to the Kingdom Within; powers to “bind” and “loose” or command spirits.
The title “Son of the Living God” belongs to Osirus, the direct model of the mythic Jesus; and also associated with Iao, the Sacred Donkey whom he invokes.
There are 232 miracles in the synoptic gospels, omitting all parallels in Matthew and Luke to Mark, all in Luke to Matthew, and all general prophecies.
A number of Dionysian elements drive the narrative of Jesus’ story; the symbolic cannibalism of the Eucharist has no precedents in Judaism, but recalls the rites of the Bacchae and the rituals of Dionysus. Jesus used dancing, feasts, and wine in ritual performances throughout his traveling medicine show, and if he or his followers intended to create a cult of ecstatic trance much becomes clear.
The visions of the Disciples, of Jesus walking on water, flying, meeting the prophets on the mountain, are cases of visions induced by hallucinogens administered surreptiously at communion or feasts and proclaimed as miracles.
The early Church offered feasts, dancing, wine, often communal living, visions and spectacles of healing and exorcism; possibly also the original version of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
The exorcisms were clear and specific; “This kind cannot be made to leave by anything but a secret prayer”, Mark 9:28.
In Mark 1:12, “the spirit drove him to the wilderness”; after the Temptation “angels served” him, as he had won the command of spirits.
The Temptation is an apologetic story intended to explain away the fact that Jesus did nothing expected of the Messiah; not the military conquest of anywhere, providing food for all, or abolishing death and disease.
The god by which Jesus conjures, Io, donkey god of the dead in Egyptian and Essene faiths, who was cast into the abyss on which the city of Qumran is built.
I do not believe the claim that Jesus was a member of the Essene community, and the Essene Teacher of Righteousness lived a hundred years too soon to be identical with Jesus, though he or some of the authors of the gospels were clearly influenced by Essene doctrines.
Jesus also conjured by command of Obot, spirits of the Underworld, ghosts or gods like that conjured by the Witch of Endor. “Son of God” was in some cases originally “son of Ob” or of Spirits, denoting that he had undergone a shamanic underworld initiation and was possessed by and in command of spirits.
What did Jesus teach? His faith or system of magic seems to me to consist of a series of mystery initiations like those throughout the classical world; rites for acquiring a spirit guardian, secret names of Powers by which to conjure, and the rites of vision by which to travel to imaginal realms as described in the Kabala, the ascent of the soul through the Tree of Life. Herein disciples escaped the bounds of Mosaic Law by awakening an inner Adamic man beyond sin, becoming gods.
The problem with this is that Jesus never wrote anything; we have only what is said about him by others, all of whom have their own motives and their own idea of Jesus. The Jesus of Gnostic and Neo-Platonic philosophers is a philosopher bearing secret wisdoms and often a magician as well, the Jesus of anticolonial revolutionaries is an ideologist of revolutionary struggle, and the Jesus of tyrants is a tyrant.
The Jesus of Paul, the Christian faith he invented, and the Church which he founded are something else entirely. And inescapable.
We could do much worse than follow the path of Tolstoy, who made the Sermon on the Mount the whole of his faith and basis of his work in the world. Regardless of who Jesus was or what the historical Jesus may or may not have said and done, the Sermon on the Mount is worthy of the Infinite and as guidance in becoming human.
If so, the Jesus whom we aspire to realize in our lives as the Imitation of Christ or otherwise taught universal brotherhood and love, nonviolence, and the equality of all human beings.
Beyond this we have only the Wilderness of Mirrors and the legacies of our history.
Ascending and descending,
The Angels move in two directions
Along Jacob’s Ladder,
-Light and darkness conjoined.
Climb this Ladder
The above and the below,
Which is the body of
The Unknowable Infinite!
Anything can be an Angel,
Were we to wrestle it.
In the dance of the historical and mythic Jesuses we now trade partners to question the implications of his teachings as philosophy.
First is the Inclusive Principle, which paraphrases Rabbi Hillel who is the primary source of things the historical Jesus might have actually said; “You shall love the lord god with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind”, Matthew 22:37. This is identical to Isaiah’s First Principle, the Unity of Being, which establishes a three part modality of being with soul as a unifying force between eros and logos.
Second is the direct commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” in Matthew 22:39, which reinforces the Inclusive Principle.
The Infinite is in this ideology a gestalt or universal wholeness, which underlies our reality and our individual souls; an idea familiar as Jung’s collective unconscious, Coleridge’s Primary Imagination, ibn Arabi’s alam al mythal, and the Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism. Herein love is boundless.
These two ideas are both a metaphysics and an ethics; each of us is an image of the Infinite which we bear within us, and our actions toward one another should honor the Infinite within the other.
The idea of New Creation in Christianity, that we are returned to the sinless state of Adam before the Fall in Christ, is a prototype of the Doctrine of Impermanence in Islam, borrowed from Maimonides, that man is free though the Infinite is timeless and limitless because God destroys and recreates the universe with each moment, and God cannot know the future til it happens.
So, what function does Christ serve which is unique?
Not the redemption from sin, for he is unnecessary for this; but the union of opposites and restoration of balance through transformative processes of the Tree of Life as a Universal Man who represents us all as we mount through its spheres and subsume their qualities.
As Isaiah 53:5, “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” is referenced by Rabbi Shimon; “When God wants to heal the world, he strikes one righteous man with affliction, through him bringing healing to all.”
In other words, in Judaism there is nothing unique or special about what Christian doctrine calls substitutive atonement, nor of the story of the Passion which is central to Christianity; it is a role which may be performed by anyone. The world is redeemed through any ordinary human, who is merely righteous, in each generation; whereas the importance of the Christ figure for Christians is that he performs the roles of the sin eater, scapegoat, and sacrifice. The uniqueness of Jesus as Christ is true for Christians, and no one else.
So we return to the question of the meaning of calling Jesus the son of god. First, all Jews are sons of God. There is a secondary meaning in Kabbalah where son of god refers to a sephirah called Beauty of Israel.
“The Blessed Holy One has one son who shines from one end of the world to another. He is a great and mighty tree, whose head reaches toward heaven and whose roots are rooted in the holy ground,“ Zohar 2:105a.
Here also is another point of divergence, for where in Christianity Jesus is identified with Adam, in Kabbalah the Son of God, meaning all humankind, is identified with the Tree of Life.
The Cosmology of the Kabbalah symbolized by the Tree of Life contains the following spheres; Keter or nothingness, annihilation, and undifferentiated emanation, Hokmah or Wisdom, Dinah which is the Mother principle or totality of all individuation, Hesed or Love, Gevurah or Power, Fiferet or Beauty which balances Power and Love, Neza or endurance, Hoda or majesty, Yesod or the Axis of the World as written in Proverbs 10:25, Malkuth or the Shekinah and hierosgamos of the divine opposites. Above the sephiroth is the Ein Sof or Unknowable Infinite. Also there is the Knesset Israel, the community of faith; “One who enters must enter through this gate”, Zohar 1:76.
What have we learned?
I remain unclear about the idea of god as written in the Bible and primary sources; sometimes it speaks of “obot” or spirits which are the same as gods and demons, sometimes the word used is “ruach”, specifically the ghost of the dead. At other times the specific powers of the Judaic god are invoked by their names, as in Adonai and Jehovah. Sometimes the reference is to the Canaanite donkey god, sometimes it is the Living God, a title of Osirus. Here the epochs of history may be peeled like the layers of an onion to reveal the construction of the idea of the Infinite in Abrahamic faiths as a prose of adaptation and change.
Was Jesus attempting a syncretic reformation of Judaism from its Egyptian sources, or are the broadly classical sources of the gospels and their Hellenizing authors at work?
We know that some of the gospels are direct quotes and paraphrases of older sources, the Gospel of John shaped by the Dead Sea Scrolls, Mary’s Magnificat from the story of Hanna, with direct copy of passages from Egyptian magical works. Parts of the story of Jesus are stolen from the lives of pagan magicians, and major elements of Christianity are assimilations from pagan sources, the Mithraic Eucharist being a prime example.
What of his miracles?
Miracles such as the suppression of hysterical symptoms and hallucinations induced by trance and psychotropics in the traveling medicine show of Jesus have been reproduced under laboratory conditions through hypnosis. Many of the skin conditions called leprosy in classical times are now regarded as curable psychosomatic illness. Jesus used a Direct Command technique of hypnosis, ”speaking with authority”, and was himself aware that he healed by suggestion and not through spirit possession; “your belief has healed you”.
Now as then and commonly throughout the religions of the world, the experience of nonordinary states of consciousness lies at the heart of the religious experience, used to trick people into believing strange things and most especially the words of those who claim to speak for the Infinite. There has always been someone in a gold robe who cons other people into doing the hard and dirty work, who weaponizes faith in service to power and authorizes hierarchies of the Elect as kings, enforcers, and slaves.
Jesus probably used hallucinogens, initiatory rituals of ecstatic trance and vision, performances of healing and exorcism, and communal feasts to induce these states, as the mystery cults in Malta, Anatolia, and throughout the ancient world did, though psychological manipulation alone can achieve the same results.
Fundamentalism uses similar methods of thought control today; with speaking in tongues, for example, classic behavioral conditioning techniques of modeling, cueing, and reinforcement train worshippers to self induce hysterical seizure.
Of course Jesus did perform one true miracle; he led an all-class revolution against the Roman Empire. For some of us, revolutionaries, that’s enough to find him an intriguing and useful model of action.
I believe nothing which offers others a means of control over me. But I believe in history.
Such is my Reckoning with Jesus, devil of my childhood, central figure of Christianity which has been a devil to humankind with its kings and crusades and Inquisitions.
So I wrote half a lifetime ago, from research conducted mainly in Jerusalem after a journey through the Arabian Peninsula and parts of the Frankincense Trail inspired by reading Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands.
My objective was to discover the lost historical Jesus beneath the layers of his myth as a fictional character in other people’s stories; to this end I read things written about him by both his friends and his enemies, and traced their sources as best I could.
During my recent time in Damascus, when not overthrowing the Assad regime or hunting his torturers and the Nazi founded bioweapons programme with its hideous medical experiments at the heart of the regime’s state terror through the hell of underground prisons, I reread possibly the best and most true account of the invention of Christianity by its founder Paul, Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas. Here follows my review on Goodreads.
The best books of 2020, the ones we’ll still be reading a thousand years from now, include:
A reimagination of the life of St Paul and the origins of his Absurdist Faith and invention of Christ and Christianity, a fiction destined to consume the Roman Empire and replace it with an empire of faith more terrible still, and born of sexual terror, resistance and revolution against state tyranny and imperialist colonialism, and the inchoate vileness of authority and a regime of torture and fear from which the only escape is madness and the only liberation is seizure of power, a power which is corruptive and poisonous and will turn like vipers on those who would use it to subjugate others.
Christos Tsiolkas has in Damascus given us a rare account in fiction of the true history of Christianity’s founding, an incantation of fearful imagery which recalls William Blake’s poetic reimagination of the Bible, a song of resistance against patriarchy and authorized identities of sex and gender, and an interrogation of the nature of power.
In part a sustained dialectics of sanity as obedience to authorized identities including those of sex and gender and madness as resistance and liberation which equates to ecstatic vision, and locates the whole of spiritual experience within the domain of self-ownership versus appropriation as revolutionary struggle and offers a unified theory of psychology and political action, the themes of Damascus hold the origins of our civilization in juxtaposition with our own time to discover Faith, Hope, and Love as informing and motivating sources of renewal and transformation.
A vivid and unforgettable vision of a world divided into masters and slaves, and the emergence of the idea of equality before the Infinite which revolutionized the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
It has recently been suggested by the party of treason and theocratic tyranny and terror in America that we should all read the Bible in public school; this I think an excellent idea, because you cannot understand European art, music, or literature, and much of history, without the Bible.
My problem is with the state authorization of specific interpretations of the Bible; America was in part founded to free us from centuries of religious wars which had come before.
As we enter the final days of Christmas season on this Midwinter Solstice, the day of most profound and deepest darkness, a time much of America will be consumed by orgiastic buying as displays of elite class membership and obligatory feasts often with people we don’t actually like or deeply know, adrift in a universe without imposed values living lives of random chaotic episodes of being which form no grand design, ephemeral and illusory, subjected to totalizing passions and caught in vast invisible systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization enslaved to authority and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege like Charlie Chaplin eaten by the gears of the machine he serves in The Factory, let us confront the meaninglessness of life and the terror of our nothingness not with abjection, despair, and helplessness but with the joy of total freedom.
When there are no rules, there are no impossibilities.
On the darkest day, the seasons change.
Merry Christmas, and don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote of the annular solar eclipse in my post of October 1 2024, Our World Is Destroyed and Recreated in This Ritual of the Black Sun Wherein Our Humanity Is Eclipsed By the Legacies of Our History; As the season of Halloween is signaled tomorrow by the new moon, it opens and coincides with the annualar solar eclipse of October 2 and the Ritual of the Black Sun as symbolized despair, abjection, grief, and fear, illuminated with great beauty and horror in Stanton Marlin’s study of the alchemical works of Jung in The Black Sun: alchemy and art of darkness, William Blake’s Book of Urizen, and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, my three primary references on this subject.
And this ritual of transformative rebirth occurs in the wake of our witness and remembrance of the war crimes and atrocities of the Hamas terror attack on Israel on Black Saturday on October 7 2023, a disruptive event which has led to America’s abandonment of the idea of universal human rights, and trigger event of the now two years long Israeli terror, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against the civilian population of Palestine, metastasis of the seventy years of imperial conquest and colonial Occupation by Israel which preceded it and created the conditions for Black Saturday as liberation struggle, Israeli crimes against humanity in which America and others are complicit as our taxes buy the deaths and mutilations of children, we have never since the liberation of Auschwitz needed more the purgative and redemptive powers of the Ritual of the Black Sun as the embrace of our darkness, our terror, and our rage.
To hunt our monsters we must embrace our monstrosity, and this is an origin of the cyclical nature of atrocities such as Black Saturday and the Genocide of the Palestinians, and why we must abandon the tyranny of the Good with its hierarchies of belonging and otherness, authorized identities, narratives of victimization, legacies of history, demonization of enemies, and the horrible seductiveness of sending armies to enforce virtue.
No matter where you begin with such recursive forces of destruction and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz. We are there still, all humankind, part of our souls captive in its dark mirror.
There are two possible replies to an event of this kind, which disrupts and fractures systems of order on the positive side and violates our humanity as degradation and dehumanization on the negative like a Janus coin of mirror reversals; with fear and its mad children rage and violence, or with love and its praxis as compassion and mercy.
To bring harm or healing, enforcement of virtue and the tyranny and terror of wars of imperial dominion and conquest and the centralization of power to authority and carceral states of force and control, or solidarity as guarantors of each others universal human rights and democracy as co- owners of the state in a free society of equals.
As written by Wendy Syfret, author of The Sunny Nihilist: : How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy, in Aeon; “Exhausted by the modern pressure to squeeze meaning out of every moment? Here’s a radical way to reset your priorities.
In theory, the pursuit of a meaningful life is noble. Foundational concepts of community, ethics, logic, morality, consciousness and equality were born from the investigation of meaning. From Aristotle and Plato to the entire oeuvre of John Hughes, the urge to wrestle with the point of it all has inspired great works of art, literature and film. But today something’s gone awry and the pursuit of meaning inspires more angst than awe. The search has moved from a private pursuit to a marketable product.
The rise of meaningless meaning
Let me demonstrate with a game, ‘spot the meaningless meaning’. Next time you’re at the supermarket, pharmacy or really any non-enlightened space of commerce, pay attention to what the products are attempting to offer. One might expect a barrage of quality and utility assurances: ‘these chickpeas are low sodium’, ‘this facemask is non-irritating’. But, increasingly, aspirations are higher. A chocolate bar isn’t skim (skimmed) milk powder and sugar, it’s a chance to create an intergenerational family moment. A lipstick isn’t a bullet of colour to light up a drawn face, but a weapon of radical self-expression.
Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout.
The fixation with making all areas of existence generically meaningful has created exhausting realities where everything suddenly really, really matters. Daily newsletters flood our inboxes, prescribing never-ending tasks and goals to meditate over and mark as complete. In the shower, we listen to podcasts about making this day count, then towel off and cram in a few minutes of mindful journalling about what we managed to meaningfully achieve the day before.
But as meaning moves from a long-term exploration to a daily metric, it’s creating new problems. When we’re not immediately able to locate meaning in our actions, jobs, relationships and consumer products, we’re left feeling like anxious, empty failures. The once-noble pursuit that built culture and helped us carve out rewarding existences becomes just another task on the endless checklist of a ‘good life’ that we’re never quite able to tick off.
Nihilism as a solution
So what’s the alternative? Is the answer to embrace a state of pointless, nihilistic chaos? Yeah, pretty much. At least that’s what’s worked for me.
For the past few years, I’ve been consumed by nihilism. Reading that, it would be fair to assume things haven’t been peachy. But my descent into the controversial philosophy hasn’t been a grim road of despair and hopelessness. Quite the opposite. It’s become one of the most illuminating and fortifying parts of my life.
Rejecting the urge to seek and denote meaning to all things has changed the way I assign value and spend time. It has challenged what I focus on and, most importantly, what I disregard. I’ve found that a kind of optimistic or ‘sunny’ nihilism highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the power of sunny nihilism, it’s necessary to begin with the philosophy itself.
The broadest explanation of nihilism argues that life is meaningless and the systems to which we subscribe to give us a sense of purpose – such as religion, politics, traditional family structures or even the notion of absolute truth itself – are fantastical human constructs; inventions to make the randomness of existence feel a little more orderly. Or, as nihilism’s poster boy Friedrich Nietzsche put it: ‘Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.’
Breaking it down further, the American philosopher Donald Crosby divides nihilism into four main forms: moral, epistemological, cosmic and, perhaps the best-known, existential. Moral nihilism rejects fundamental ideas of right and wrong; epistemological nihilism takes issue with absolute truth; cosmic nihilism considers nature to be inherently indifferent and hostile; and finally we reach existential nihilism, in many ways the culmination of all these considerations, which probably keeps most people up at night – the basic idea being that there is no meaning to life, everything is pointless.
Reading all that, it’s fair to argue that nihilism is kind of a bummer. These ideas do pose the risk of curdling into a kind of toxic nihilism that leaves the individual feeling despondent and overwhelmed. What’s the point of doing anything if nothing matters? If there is no inherent understanding of good and bad, why try to lead a moral life? If everything is pointless, why even get out of bed?
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism
While I’ll admit that the message that nothing matters – not your job, god, universe, certainly not what type of canned goods you buy – is an overwhelming thought, it doesn’t have to be. Set against this never-ending obsession with locating (or, too often, purchasing) meaning, it can be liberating.
When I contemplate life’s pointlessness, I begin by remembering that, in the scope of all human history, I really matter very little (a rather cosmic approach). My issues and concerns are mute. My successes and failures will all be forgotten. As will the achievements and stumbles of everyone around me (existential nihilism at its finest).
While I may feel dwarfed by the scope of endless and apathetic time, the smallest elements of my life begin to expand. If nothing matters long-term, my focus shifts to this moment. I understand that the present, however mundane, is as fleeting, temporal, fragile and forgettable as the greatest events in human history.
Nihilism makes me wonder about what I do and don’t pay attention to. Is what another person thinks of me imbued with greater meaning (or meaninglessness) as compared with a brush of jasmine tumbling over a neighbour’s fence? Not really. So why am I consumed by one while ignoring the other?
By his own description, Nietzsche ‘philosophise[d] with a hammer’, breaking open large ideas and challenging his readers to see what could be reformed with the pieces. In this way nihilism, like all philosophies, is a tool to explore parts of our lives. As with any tool, it can be picked up and put down, used to create or destroy; outcomes and executions are dependent on the user’s intent. It is up to you to decide if you will fall into the destructive grooves of toxic nihilism, or opt for something a little lighter. You may not have a purpose, but you do have agency. It’s this reading of nihilism that I think about when considering a life without meaning.
But how does one go about picking up such a tool and using it in a positive way? This Guide will help you embrace sunny nihilism and avoid its toxic alternative.
Think it through
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism
The challenges posed by nihilism weren’t lost on Nietzsche, who had an elegant way of explaining how the philosophy can serve as a destructive or constructive force. According to him, passive nihilists absorb the messages of meaninglessness and are threatened. They fear the void so scramble to fill it by indulging in any offering of it. As Nolen Gertz wrote in Aeon in 2020, this form of blind self-protection is a ‘dangerous form of self-destruction’.
He added: ‘To believe just for the sake of believing in something can lead to a superficial existence, to the complacent acceptance of believing anything believed by others, because believing in something (even if it turns out to be nothing worth believing in) will be seen by the passive nihilist as preferable to taking the risk of not believing in anything …’
Which is how we end up back in the trap of meaningless meaning. Or standing in the supermarket aisle, trying to convince ourselves that a can of chickpeas really does matter.
As a more constructive alternative, Nietzsche ushered individuals to evolve into active nihilists. That is, to stare into the abyss and see the absence of meaning not as a tragedy but as an opportunity. To consider it a space to fill with your own values, to define how you want to be in the world and what you believe to be true. An active nihilist isn’t intimidated by chaos, they recognise it as a chance to create something new and better.
In my own journey toward sunny nihilism, I landed somewhere in the middle. I wasn’t horrified by a lack of absolute truth, but I also didn’t rush to write my own. Rather, I chose to pause, stare into the void, and consider the freedom of nothingness.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning
Whereas nihilism can prompt reflection and widen your view on existence, the commercial hijacking of meaning plays into the vulnerabilities of the passive nihilist, contributing to our era’s epidemic of self-obsessed selfishness. It not only encourages you to centre every action around yourself, but it deceptively presents this as a noble act. When you embrace this kind of personal mythmaking, you give yourself permission to spend a lot of time thinking about your own life, actions and experiences.
Speaking to Politico magazine in 2020, Virginia Heffernan, the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016), said: ‘the recent fantasy of “optimising” a life – for peak performance, productivity, efficiency – has created a cottage industry that tries to make the dreariest possible lives sound heroic.’
To help you avoid this decadent trap, it is worth being vigilant of, and guarding against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act – by positioning every brand, product or service as somehow meaningful.
Are those period undies really a symbol of rebellion, or just a convenient sanitary product? Does the bottle of hot sauce in my fridge truly mark me as an iconoclastic thrill-seeker, or just indicate a robust gut flora? Is my bank really helping me invest in family values and community, or do I just appreciate the low fees if I deposit a set amount each month?
While writing this article, I was conveniently served an advert for ‘Florence by Mills’, the new teen skincare range from the actress Millie Bobby Brown (I appreciate the algorithm recognising my youthful spirit). The entire range is clad in the familiar pastel colours and toothless message of ‘empowering young people through something something’ of so many personal care products. But the ‘Feed Your Soul Love U a Latte’ mask stood out in particular. Turns out it’s never too young to preach that enlightenment can be achieved in a 15-minute topical treatment.
I hope that the young people browsing these products are resilient enough to not fall into such narratives; that they’re able to pause to ask what these cheap exchanges are calling on them to invest emotionally or financially. Will this purchase make them happy, or is it an example of what Heffernan cautioned against when she said we were out to make ‘the dreariest possible lives sound heroic’?
Recognise the happy side of nihilism
When promoting nihilism as the antidote to the commercialisation of meaning, I tend to meet the same repeated questions: if there’s no point, then why do anything? Why get out of bed? Wash your hair? Treat another person with kindness? Not fall into a quivering heap?
I’m reminded of an episode of the Netflix sitcom The Good Place (2016-20). Chidi – a character who happens to be a moral philosopher – has the kind of existential crisis that inspires these queries. During his breakdown, he walks a classroom of philosophy students down the major paths where humanity has attempted to locate meaning and understand how to live an ‘ethical life’. After cycling through the arguments of virtue ethics, consequentialism and deontology, he finally declares that all these pathways to meaning lead nowhere (it’s worth watching the show to hear Chidi explain why) before concluding that nihilism is the only logical philosophical view – at which point he has a full meltdown.
While I love Chidi, I find the scene frustrating for how narrowly it presents this cause and effect. Such a response has always puzzled me. After all, did you get out of bed this morning to search for the meaning of life or for a cup of coffee? Again, are such grand questions really bringing such grand comforts?
In contrast to Chidi, another pop-culture figure shows how nihilism can inspire greater happiness. In the film The Beach Bum (2019), Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, an epicurean, once-iconic, Florida-based writer. His is a woozy and colourful tale of excess and hedonism that involves a lot of drinking, drugs, avoided responsibility, and sex. All of which are indulged in with few consequences.
Watching The Beach Bum, you feel you’ve seen this movie before, you know to wait for the fall, when Moondog will collapse under the weight of his shirked responsibilities and the system will catch up to him. Except the fall never comes. After seeing it at South by Southwest film festival, the critic Hazem Fahmy wrote: ‘Rather than simply not address these issues, the film goes out of its way to remind us that nothing in this strange dimension truly matters.’
Moondog doesn’t care about anything, he lives for pleasure. Towards the end of the film, he outlines his life’s mantra to a reporter: ‘We’re here to have a good time.’ For all this destruction, and clear disregard for rules, values and consequences, Moondog isn’t punished. By the end of the film, he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and several million dollars. Although, true to form, he shows they’re meaningless too (I won’t spoil the finale).
Moondog’s embrace of nihilism demonstrates that, when you stop focusing on a greater point, you’re able to ask simpler but more rewarding questions: what does happiness look like right now? What would give me pleasure today? How can I achieve a sense of satisfaction in this moment? Most of the time, the answers aren’t complex. They’re small delights already at hand – time spent with loved ones, a delicious meal, a walk in nature, a cup of coffee. Or, in Moondog’s case, a lot of booze and parties.
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness
Moondog’s experience sounds great to me, but it leads to a second concern surrounding nihilism. It might not make you miserable, but what about everyone who has to hang out with you? If nothing matters, you’re not part of some larger plan and you’re not held accountable by any rulebook. Motivated only by what feels good in the moment, what’s stopping you acting only for your own interests?
Nietzsche was mindful of these pain points, writing in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): ‘He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
Nihilism asks us to toss out meaning and gaze into the void that’s left in its place. But rather than being a simple, terrifying black hole, a void can prompt reflection. It’s a space to be filled with whatever you want. In that way, nihilism can serve as a funhouse mirror, reflecting and distorting your own beliefs. Approach it with pain and fear, and those feelings will be magnified. Go to it looking for a way to excuse gross behaviour, and you’ll find it.
Stare into the abyss
Give it a go yourself. Take a moment to truly submit to your own smallness in the Universe. To admit you are meaningless. That you don’t matter. That your name, ego, reputation, family, friends and loves will soon be gone.
This needn’t be a destructive experience. Once the discomfort passes, and your ego abates, stop to consider – how has your understanding of your own time and energy changed? Is your job really so important when coupled with the knowledge that even the greatest achievements in human history will eventually be lost to time? Are the issues, people or situations that cause you stress or pain actually worth the worry when you remember that no one will ever remember or really be impacted by them?
The only real impact these earthly concerns have is on what they take you away from: things that may not ‘matter’, but at least bring you joy.
Focusing on the scale of your own life, and how insignificant it is, also allows you to ask: OK, if I don’t matter, and neither do the issues that take up so much of my time, how does the world show itself differently? If I’m no longer the centre of my own universe, what takes that space?
You might start wondering what you want to last after you’ve gone, and what needs to be protected and treasured.
I considered these points recently while witnessing a widely affecting mass collision with nihilism – the delivery of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The shots showed an inconceivable array of distant galaxies that existed billions of years in the past. It was an overwhelming view that crashed into any understanding we have of time, scale and distance – not to mention the potential for life and realities beyond our own. Responding to it, it felt like the whole world had a mass awakening to individual inconsequentialism.
But the reaction wasn’t mass depression or hopelessness. It was awe. People wondered over the beauty and scale of worlds they could never truly comprehend. They saw how their own lives barely register on a cosmic level, that our own galaxy wasn’t even a blip. This sense of our own meaninglessness was humbling. It didn’t break people’s hearts but excited them, reminded them of the inconceivable beauty and majesty of existence. People felt thankful for being a dot in an endless sky, to be part of this cosmic tapestry, even if just for a meaningless moment.
It takes guts, but you too might find that the abyss reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself. Art, community, the people you love, their right to feel safe, respected and well. If you’re looking for somewhere to redirect all this formerly self-involved energy, start there. In place of existential angst, psychological annihilation or selfish abandon, you can find relief in larger causes.
Try a light meditation on death
When I’m overwhelmed, remembering that one day I won’t exist makes whatever’s stressing me appear small. Accepting this finality transforms the bland environs I’m ignoring into an overwhelming buffet of smells, sights and experiences that suddenly feel impossibly rare.
This ‘mindfulness of death’ is central to the work of the artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher Nikki Mirghafori. To access this feeling, she counsels trying a form of ‘death meditation’ to help confront your fear of death, and experience the strange wonder that can come from that.
To try it, she instructs meditating with the mantra ‘this could be my last breath’. The theory is that by doing so, you work through the terror a little at a time, observing what comes to the surface during the practice and confronting each fear until you eventually reach a place of peace.
Mirghafori posits that, by accepting your own mortality and facing life’s impermanence, you can align the way you live with your truest values. It’s many people’s lack of interest in contemplating death – and as such, how precious and fleeting our lives are – that allows so many to waste their time.
I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. It’s like rehearsing your final moments, inviting your mind to flood with fear, regret, longing, loss, love and gratitude. When you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival. Even after you’re done, it’s impossible to not enter the rest of your day with a degree of elation at being alive.
Doing it, I’m reminded of what Epicurus once said: ‘Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ Epicurus didn’t believe in life after death, as either a punishment or a reward. He taught that life and all it could offer was happening to us right now.
Just as nihilism has become associated with narrow-minded destruction, Epicurus is often synonymous with hedonism and a ceaseless pursuit of selfish pleasures. But in reality, he was certain this kind of living would usher people away from materialism and greed. His ‘pleasure principle’ championed being and doing good, arguing that, with one precious life to enjoy, not a moment should be wasted in guilt or anxiety over pain caused to others. The only way to feel truly good was to treat people well.
Remember pointless pleasures
I’d like to end by lightening things up a little. One way to refocus on the pointless pleasure that actually forms the bedrock of our lives is to start a ‘nice things’ list. Across the day, make an effort to jot down moments, people and events that make you happy.
I’ve been doing this for years. Reviewing my own rambling lists, I’m always surprised by the simplicity of the entries: the smell of fresh basil, an excellent joke, two dogs meeting in the street. Alone they are innocuous (and usually overlooked), but together they flavour my days with endless sweetness. Learning to pay attention to them returns me to what actually provides solace in my day, training me to not overlook the now for the promise of the one day.
So often in the pursuit of greater meaning we erase not only the joy of these forgotten delights, but also their collective power. Yes, a flock of galahs on my nature strip, or crying to a Paul Kelly song, or the spasmodic energy of Junior Bake Off (my most recent entries) are not life-altering – but, taking time to notice and appreciate them, they form the sum of their parts. A handful of treasured beats becomes a good day, a good week, a good year, a good life. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
Key points – How to be a happy nihilist
The rise of meaningless meaning. The search for meaning used to be a noble pursuit, but it’s become commercialised and now inspires more angst than awe.
Nihilism as a solution. This is the philosophy that says life is meaningless. Handled with care, it can be liberating.
The cleansing power of sunny nihilism. This is a kind of optimistic nihilism that highlights the delicate beauty of existence, the absurdity of life, and the exciting chaos of the everyday.
Understand the difference between passive and active forms of nihilism.
Passive nihilists scramble to fill the void with anything to hand; active nihilists are undaunted, and fill the space with their own values.
Stay alert to meaningless meaning. To avoid passive or toxic nihilism, it pays to be vigilant of, and guard against, the ways the world is trying to convince you that you’re partaking in a sacred act.
Recognise the happy side of nihilism. When you stop focusing on a greater point, you’ll find you can ask simpler but more rewarding questions, such as: what does happiness look like right now?
Nihilism doesn’t have to spiral into selfishness. When you stare into the abyss, it reframes your attention to things you hope will last for a little longer than yourself.
Try a light meditation on death. I can report that this is a terrifying exercise. But when you imagine each breath to be your last, each breath becomes a gift on arrival.
Remember pointless pleasures. From the smell of fresh basil to an excellent joke, start a ‘nice things’ list. Meaningless, sure. Precious, absolutely.
Why it matters
The young philosophers embracing nihilism
For uplifting and earnest examples of nihilism’s application, check out the way younger philosophers are exploring it. Two TEDx talks by teenagers stand out in particular. In 2018, Elias Skjoldborg, a student at Harwood Union High School in Vermont, used the platform to introduce his take on ‘optimistic nihilism’. In short, he argues that if life is meaningless – and we are not pinned to some greater existential task or goal – then we may as well focus on finding happiness during this brief, meaningless flash of consciousness we call existence.
When he says ‘if you died right now, it wouldn’t really make a difference in the big picture. Had you never been born, nobody would really care,’ he presents it as good news. He adds: ‘That life has no meaning is not a reason … to be sad.’ Rather, he explains, if our lives are needless, then the only directive we have is to figure out how to find happiness in our momentary blip of consciousness. Skjoldborg suggested that his audience get hobbies, help others, solve problems rather than creating them, and just try their best.
Skjoldborg is not alone in his observations. In his talk a year earlier, Siddharth Gupta, a student at Kodaikanal International School in India, also opened up about how nihilism has helped him. Giving his talk the title ‘Confessions of an Existential Nihilist’, he explained how his belief that life was worthless had given him the ‘opportunity to find meaning in all that I do’.
Meanwhile, over on YouTube, Khadija Mbowe, a Gambian Canadian vlogger on sociology and media, recently looked at nihilism and absurdism in a video asking if life still had value if it was a meaningless random occurrence within an uncaring universe. Clad in a bright orange graphic T-shirt with matching statement makeup, Mbowe looked like any other luminous member of Gen Z, asking: ‘What does our life, our existence, mean when we don’t believe we’re put here for a reason?’ as easily as if they were reacting to a viral mukbang video. Drawing on references from as broad a field as James Baldwin and RuPaul’s Drag Race, Mbowe asks big questions that don’t lead to dense, depressing answers. Instead, this vlogger’s takes are thoughtful, exploratory and ultimately hopeful.
Each generation has a tendency to make the case for why their set of circumstances is especially dire. But for young people coming of age during rolling crises of pandemics, climate catastrophes and quaking world economies, they might have a strong case for being particularly hard done by. Yet basking in the aforementioned reflections of these fresh-faced philosophers, one feels a little lightened, not only by their constructive interpretation of nihilism, but also by the resilience it appears to offer them.
Links & books
In my book The Sunny Nihilist: How a Meaningless Life Can Make You Truly Happy (2021), I explore not only the modern tendency to overinvest in meaning, but also the darker consequences of such a relationship. In particular, how it intersects with our notions of work, love, family, capitalism and politics. I also explore how people can detangle themselves, and how gratifying it is to do so.
The literary darlings Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder and Lisa Taddeo all frequently return to themes of millennial nihilism in their work. Meanwhile, the writers Jia Tolentino, Susan Sontag and Jenny Odell are looking more broadly at our interest in meaning, worth and community in a way that intersects with these ideas. Their deep folios of writing are edifying reading – I suggest starting with Tolentino’s Trick Mirror (2019) and Odell’s How to Do Nothing (2019), both books are as digestible as they are illuminating (and have personally been reliable elevated small-talk fodder for the past few years).
I already mentioned the TV show The Good Place (do check it out if you haven’t already), but nihilism is present in many of our other favourite entertainment offerings, such as BoJack Horseman (2014-20), a cartoon that follows a clutch of humans and anthropomorphic animals as they navigate Hollywood, fame, and their own cycles of ambition and destruction. One nihilistic moment involved Mr Peanutbutter, a lovable and dim-witted Labrador who is a successful TV actor, consoling his then-wife by tenderly reminding her: ‘The Universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t the search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense and, eventually, you’ll be dead.’ I promise it’s funnier than it sounds.
Nihilism has found its way to other screens too. The films Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Palm Springs (2020) both show how fun and bombastic these ideas can be. Although my personal favourite surprise nihilistic resource might just be SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-). If a chatty sponge can’t convince you of the chaotic charm of existence, I’m not sure what can.”
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.
Where do we begin, and where do we go from here? A reading list on Existentialism and Sartre:
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn provides an excellent guide to his life and work. Flynn’s Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, is the best general work of its kind, and his massive interrogations of ideas of history in Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 1: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History, and Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, are great followup studies.
For an insightful discussion of Existentialism which gives you a seat at the table during its founding, read Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others.
The Labyrinth: An Existential Odyssey with Jean-Paul Sartre, by Ben Argon is a graphic novel of rats caught in a maze and trying to discover a path to freedom, as are we all.
Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It,
by Ronald Aronson details the 1952 rupture and the fragmentation of the postwar Left.
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology: Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, by Tilottama Rajan is an excellent history of relevant ideas.
The A to Z of Existentialism, by Stephen Michelman is a dictionary of 300 entries clarifying the ideas of its major figures including Sartre, De Beauvior, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and others.
The Pursuit of Existentialism: From Sartre and de Beauvoir to Zizek and Badiou, by Irwin Jones examines Existentialism as a historical force.
Movies with Meaning: Existentialism through Film, by Daniel Shaw is an essential guide to an intriguing field of study.
Primary Works and Studies by Author
Existentialism is a Humanism, Nausea, No Exit, The Wall, Being and Nothingness, To Freedom Condemned, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre 1939-1975, Literary Essays, Truth and Existence, Existential Psychoanalysis, Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Mallarmé or the Poet of Nothingness, Baudelaire, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, The Family Idiot, Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre: A Philosophical Biography, by Thomas R. Flynn
The Second Sex, The Mandarins, Conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir
The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, The Rebel, The Possessed, Albert Camus
A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky
Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, C.G. Jung
On Nietzsche’s Side, The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot
Thomas the Obscure, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Infinite Conversation, The Space of Literature, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Community of Lovers, Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, Christophe Bident
The Thief’s Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, Treasures of the Night: collected poems, The Declared Enemy, Fragments of the Artwork, Prisoner of Love, Jean Genet
Genet: a biography, Edmund White
The Hélène Cixous Reader, Cixous, Sellers ed, foreword Jacques Derrida
Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Verena Andermatt Conley
The Magic Lantern, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews, Ingmar Bergman
The Odyssey, a modern sequel, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
The Essential Kierkegaard, Hong eds.
Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard,Clare Carlisle
I and Thou, Between Man and Man, Martin Buber
Martin Buber, Diamond
The Text as Thou: Martin Buber’s Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, Steven Kepnes
Learning Through Dialogue: The Relevance of Martin Buber’s Classroom, Kenneth Paul Kramer
Waiting for Godot, The Unnameable, Samuel Beckett
A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Hugh Kenner
Kangaroo Notebook, Beyond the Curve, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map, Secret Rendezvous, Woman of the Dunes, Kobo Abe
The Idiot, The Crocodile, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Diary of a Madman, Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
Strange Library, 1Q84, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
The Trial, The Castle, The Complete Stories, The Zürau Aphorisms, Franz Kafka
Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch
Franz Kafka: a biography, Max Brod
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
The Nightmare of Reason: Kafka, Pawel
Existentialist Psychotherapy
Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to Clinical Metatheory, Betty Canon
Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, by Viktor E. Frankl
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, by Lacan
Philosophy of Existence, by Karl Jaspers.
Of general interest to literary scholars:
Écrits: A Selection, Jacques Lacan
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Žižek
The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, Paul Rabinow
Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophy, Specters of Marx, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida
Desert Islands: And Other Texts, 1953-1974, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Gilles Deleuze
Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences, Slavoj Žižek
The Theory of the Novel, Soul and Form editors John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, The Historical Novel, Goethe And His Age, Essays on Thomas Mann, Solzhenitsyn, György Lukács
Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?, In Defense of Lost Causes, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, First as Tragedy Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, by Jean Baudrillard, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor)
What are they all arguing about? Origins of Existentialism in Husserl’s Phenomenology: an outline
Phenomenology: The Basics, Husserl’s Phenomenology, by Dan Zahavi
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Maurice Alexander Natanson
Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs,
by Jacques Derrida
Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology, by Leonard Lawlor
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, by Theodor W. Adorno
On this day before winter solstice, darkest of all our days, and with the light possibly 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 the idea of our universal human rights dies in the ruins of Palestine, as Russia’s atrocities in the Third World War engulf Ukraine and the world, as China tests our will and threatens to unleash the conquest of the Pacific Rim, as the American state is systematically dismantled by the Nazi-Confederate Christian Identity theocracy of a white supremacist fanatic, sex predator and trafficker, and Russian spy Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief whose mission is the fall of democracy, and we face dystopian futures of global nuclear war and the fall of civilization, as the survival or extinction of our species hangs in the balance under threats of war, unknown pandemics to come, and ecological catastrophe, as the Pentagon on this day only four years ago issued rebukes without accountability as tacit authorization to the fascist infiltrated and subverted military units on the brink of mutiny and civil war in service to Trump and the Fourth Reich, it is good to remember who we are, who we have chosen to be, and who we wish to become.
We are made of words, assemblages like the toys of Santa’s workshop, constructions of history under imposed conditions of struggle versus authorized identities of ethnicity, gender, faith, and nationality, and other vast and ancient systems of oppression, characters in a performance, but whose story are we cast in, and for whose purposes are we made?
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, which demonstrates that all rules are arbitrary and can be reinvented as liberation struggle, 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 because the boundaries which divide our realities have become interfaces, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions of belonging and otherness 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.
Plato and his successors in western mysticism and in Romantic Idealism had already established a historical tradition which took this idea in other directions, as a religion and philosophy of the Logos to the alchemical faith of the sapientia dei which found full expression in Jungian Gnosticism and through neoPlatonism itself to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and was in the process of forming Surrealism, but 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, Chinese as my second language from the age of nine, study which included Traditional Chinese inkbrush calligraphy and conversation with a teacher who spoke, in addition to superb English, 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 through the Second World War, and as my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school. 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 nor Quixotic quest to create and affirm that which is human in us as he, 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 September 25 2023, My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages; Among my treasures where live the voices of my cherished companions through life which rest bound in leather or cloth, gilded and illustrated and written in strange inks or simply printed on creamy paper and smelling of vanilla and old saddles, histories of our conversations across vast gulfs of time and space awaiting the moment I need them again, lies brooding a symbol of the unknowability of the Infinite and the Conservation of Ignorance, the Sefer ha-Zohar or Book of Splendor.
Heart of the Kabbalah written by Moses de Leon in Spain and first published about 1275, I discovered this single volume edition in our family library, wedged between Encyclopaedia Britannica and the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series as a teenager while reading through both in their entirety over several years, and claimed it as my own.
This was during an enthusiasm which began as a high school Freshman for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his disciple James Joyce’s attempt to reinvent humankind through a new universal language in Finnegans Wake, and I recognized immediately that Kabbalah was a project of like intent, within the context of Tikkun Olam or Repair of the World.
Also there was for me a curiosity born of the fact that the Zohar was the historical model for Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon, both books written by madmen the reading of which induces madness and ecstatic vision. So Lovecraft’s disciple William S. Burroughs claimed to me, whose own sanity I doubted though not the sincerity of his word.
Written in a secret language? And filled with bizarre and utterly ambiguous symbols and metaphors? Of course I loved it.
That it was a forgery written for profit by a charlatan and rewritten later by a madman just made it better in my eyes.
But like the visions of the Infinite and the alam al mythal it contains, the Book of Splendor remained beyond my grasp, dancing in and out of my awareness like a shifting fire of darkness and light. That which fascinated, intrigued, and compelled also warded questioning and ultimately escaped me; printed as it was written not in Hebrew for which I might have found a teacher but in a coded scholar’s cryptodialect of Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, a precursor of Spanish and Portuguese which uses Arabic script, languages which remained opaque to me. And even if translated one must be thoroughly familiar with the symbolic system it references in the Talmud and Midrash before Kabbalah becomes comprehensible. This was the only thing I ever gave up on, entangled with the Moebius Loop of language like Ahab lashed to the whale by the lines of his harpoon in his mad quest to break through the mask to the Infinite; though I read Gershom Scholem’s foundational study Kabbalah when it was published during my Freshman year in 1974.
Languages allow us to think the thoughts of others, to escape the limits of our histories, authorized identities, and the flags of our skin and to create new identities which become a library of possible selves; and mine form an atlas of my travels beyond the boundaries and interfaces of my maps of becoming human into unknown realms of human being, meaning, and value, also a history and archeology of my becoming human. I have often written that a full accounting of my languages becomes ambiguous and problematic; but herein I now so attempt.
Let me stipulate at the outset of this project that I now recount successive waves of languages in which I became conversant or literate as I explored our world over a lifetime, and in no way claim to have been able to think in them all at once, but only a few at any time as needed during my studies and travels.
Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each a mask of identity bearing the liminal force of the circumstances in which I learned them and conferring their own persona and uniqueness.
My English is influenced by the King James Bible and the local Dutch community of my childhood hometown, whose speech was full of thee’s and thou’s. This was the culture of elite hegemonies of race and patriarchy authorized by theocracy against which I rebelled in claiming Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-text to the Bible, a Reformed Church community aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Here as a child I witnessed a witch burning, a cross burned on the front lawn of newlyweds whose union the town referred to as a mixed marriage, he being Dutch and she a member of the minority Swiss Calvinists, and both white Protestants speaking Germannic languages; during high school my fellow students began picking up stones to throw at a teenage couple from out of town at a ball game because they were kissing without being married, a public stoning which I just barely stopped.
How did I give answer to this?
At the first assembly of the new school year the incoming class was asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; “I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
Here I wish to make clear that my family were never part of any church whatsoever; we lived there because that was where my father got a job teaching English literature, Drama, and Forensics at the high school, where he also coached the Fencing and Debate clubs, and was my teacher in all of these. I describe my formative years growing up in Ripon California because it is helpful in understanding me to know that I grew up in a premodern world, the world the Enlightenment and its political form the American Revolution overthrew, though the Revolution remains incomplete in its realization and universalization both in America and throughout the world. This is what being an American means to me; to be a bearer of the Promethean Fire of liberation from systems of unequal power, where ever men hunger to be free.
Herein the question of home language as source identity becomes determinative; mine was English, though I inherit through my father the possessing ghosts of ancestors who were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian, though my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.
My paternal grandmother was Italian; of the Noce family whose stilt house in Bayou La Teche Louisiana was built from the ship they sailed from Genoa in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, its navigable approach guarded by ancient canon. My mother wrote a journal of a family visit with them in 1962; there was Quiller, a giant who could carry a railroad tie in each hand, all day long, the Silent Man who sat in his rocking chair on the front porch for three days without saying anything like a stone gargoyle, then fast as lightning whipped out a shotgun from under the blanket across his lap and fired into the swamp, and after several minutes of rocking declared; “Water moccasin,” a deadly poisonous snake. The women all wore pointy hats like cartoon witches, and I’ve never found any credible reference which might identify the ethnicity or historical period to which it belongs nor the origin of the pointed hat as a witch symbol; my aunties claimed to be hereditary priestesses of Persephone, Queen of the Dead and the Underworld, though this may have been a joke.
Beyond this I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus that Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship about, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, origin of the Berserkers, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.
I once described myself to the wife of a poetry professor as Roman with the words; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.” This was Anne Rice, whose poem about the revenge of the broken dolls will haunt my dreams forever, and who modeled the character of Mael in her novels on me as I was in the early 1980’s. Her idea of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a reference of mine to the classics of western civilization and the Dead White Men of our history and canon of literature; “We are all bearers of those who must be kept and those whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.”
In the line of matrilineal descent I am a direct successor to my great grandmother, whose story I told in my post of May 9 2023, A Legacy of Freedom Shared By Us All: Jewish American Heritage Month; Because the personal and the political are interdependent, and we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, I offer here a story from my family history as told to me by my mother of how Jewish people saved our family, when no one else would, and without whom none of us would have ever lived.
Upon the docks of America arrived a nine year old girl, alone and without a penny to her name or a word of English. A stranger, with no one waiting to meet her, no family, no friends, nothing. My maternal great grandmother Apollonia this was, with flaming red hair like my mother’s, whose family had put her on a ship to escape from Austria as their home burned, the sole survivor of her whole town so far as we now know.
She wandered the port of Seattle asking for help, in her five languages and in descending likelihood of recognition; French, Austrian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, and finally, in despair and fear that the reaction would be far worse than being abandoned to starve and freeze to death lost and alone among strangers, Yiddish.
This like a magic spell summoned a crowd, by happy chance not one armed with torches and axes. So a stranger was taken in and raised by Jewish people, a family of whom I know nothing, and thus our family’s survival is owed to the entire Jewish community and people.
This happened in 1873, year of the glorious Vienna World’s Fair but also the stock market crash in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War which began a twenty year Depression in Europe and the Jewish persecutions as they were blamed for it; also conflicts between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in their borderlands.
She it was who owned her own rifles and horses by the age of sixteen when she began her career as a hunting guide, and died in the saddle at the age of 95, rifle in her hand, having shot the bear that attacked her horses and killed her. The Indians buried her like the Huns buried Attila, on her horse and with her rifle, like a warrior princess.
I was born within days of her death, and as with all ancestors I bear her onward, literally as DNA and the stories which possess us as the ghosts of other lives; incarnated truths written in our flesh.
Historical context and the fact that my ancestor in the maternal line knew Yiddish, and was raised from age nine as a member of the Jewish community, makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, though my mother never claimed so and moreover was a radical atheist who raised us with no religious traditions at all. In so doing the family faith she liberated herself from was Catholicism, an artifact of her Austrian paternal line who were exiles of the 1919 fall of the Hapsburg Empire after 600 years.
My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court. This was the home language of my mother’s family, though grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian and its Triestino dialect, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
As a teenager immersed in Holocaust literature while working through the trauma of a near death experience in Brazil the summer before high school, my execution by a police death squad while rescuing abandoned street children they were bounty hunting having been prevented by the Matadors, and conversations with my mother as she wrote her study of psychosomatic muteness from the Soviet medical records and childhood therapy journal of Jerzy Kosinski which he fictionalized as The Painted Bird, I once asked her directly, Are we Jews?
To this she replied; “Everyone is a Jew. Everyone is someone’s Jew, someone’s scapegoat, someone’s Other. The great task of becoming human is to overcome our fear of otherness, while embracing our uniqueness.”
My Second Voice from the age of nine was Traditional Chinese; inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my decade of formal study of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Chinese and Japanese martial arts, and the game of Go I studied in both Chinese and Japanese.
This was through Sifu Dragon, who also spoke a very British English full of Anglo-Indian words and phrases which shaped my English through our conversations; my great teacher of martial and other arts he was, with whom my father arranged for me to study after I had retaliated against my fifth grade class for putting gum on my chair by poisoning everyone, only by chance without causing any harm to anyone beyond a brief nausea. Horrified that I might have become a nine year old mass murderer when my fellow students began throwing up, I told my father about it that night, to which he said; “You have discovered politics. Politics is the art of fear, and fear and power are the true basis and means of human exchange. Fear precedes power. Fear is a terrible master and an untrustworthy servant. So, whose instrument will it be? What you need is a way to use fear and power that restores balance instead of imposing dominion, and when confronted by enemies you must demonstrate you do not fear them in order to take their power.”
My Third Voice from the seventh grade is French, a legacy of having been sent to six years of French classes at the high school because I was beyond grade level in English, which I enthusiastically embraced along with Surrealist film and literature.
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.
Japanese I variously count as my fourth or fifth language as it developed over the years, becoming a greater passion at university when I was obsessed with Japanese poetry to the extent that I walked some of the Basho Road to see where he had written his masterpieces, and I claimed Zen as my religion on official forms through my twenties.
I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in he Moment of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
Though Arabic is my Sixth Voice, it has long become a natural language for me since first learning some Levantine Arabic in the summer of 1982, during the Siege of Beirut. This was when Jean Genet set me on my life’s path by swearing me to the Oath of the Resistance he had created in Paris 1940 from that of the Foreign Legion, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or even survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” And he gave me a principle of action by which I have now lived for over forty years; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
My Seventh Voice is Spanish, as fast upon my Baccalaureate graduation came the horrific Mayan Genocide and other atrocities of the monstrous Reagan regime, and the heroic Resistance of indigenous peoples to America’s imperial conquest of Central America which collapsed with the Iran-Contra Scandal. This theatre of revolutionary struggle includes that of the Zapatistas in the Yucatan; though later I formally studied Spanish from Argentine professors in one of my many graduate school programs, Spanish is a second or trade language for the people with whom I aligned myself, mostly speakers of Yucatec in Mexico or Quiche in the Guatemalan Peten among the Mayan group of over twenty languages, who were rebelling against the Ladino or Spanish speaking elites. So while I am literate in Spanish, I am conversant in two forms of Mayan.
Russian is my Eighth Voice, being the language of international solidarity at the time and of the Soviet advisors with whom I sometimes worked. I had some familiarity with it from my sister Erin, who began high school when I began teaching it, and used Russian as I had Chinese; as a second soul into which to grow as a self-created being, free from the legacies of our history. She studied for four years in high school with Lt Col Sviatislav Shasholin, USAF, who translated during the Nixon-Brezhnev talks and handled Soviet defectors, then went to UC Santa Cruz where she studied Russian language and Soviet Foreign Policy, graduating as Valedictorian of the Oaks International Studies School, then went to the Soviet Union as Pushkin Scholar at the University of Kallinin, a couple years before the Fall of the Soviet Union. Her first languages beyond English were Old Norse, Gothic, and Old Welsh, which she taught herself in seventh grade while researching Tolkien’s invented languages, so she could write poetry in them.
I currently write and publish in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Zulu, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and since the invasion in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and recently Italian and Dari, Afghanistan’s major language and like Urdu derived from Persian, all three of which are mutually intelligible. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.
Including dead languages with no broad communities of native speakers but of scholars of ancient literatures, those of my Buddhist and Islamic scholarship include Classical Tibetan from my time as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order of Buddhism in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I waged a revolution against the monarchy, and from my studies as a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufis in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I fought for independence against the invasion by India; Classical Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and the exception to the dead languages of scholarship classification as a universal language of Islamic faith in which one must be literature to be considered fully Muslim, Classical Quranic Arabic.
So, my literacy includes twenty three languages if we count Latin, which I’ve taught in high school; basic Latin is crucial if you are a new student in America whose native language is not English, especially for university-bound students and solving unknown scientific and technical terms. If you know Latin root words and conjugations, you will master English twice as fast.
My languages of conversational proficiency serve also as an atlas of my history; as Sir Richard Francis Burton says; “Where ever you go, learn the language; it’s the key to everything else.” We now leave the regions of literacy and explore the Atlas of my journeys in terms of conversational level proficiency.
During the 1980’s I was involved in liberation struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, which ended with the great victory in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988, in which I fought in my usual role of scout or reconnaissance. Here I learned some Zulu and Afrikaans, a fascinating Dutch hybrid language invented by the Cape Malay community using Jawi Arabic script, which incorporates elements of indigenous Khoisan and Bantu African languages and influenced by the Malay-Portuguese trade language Kristang.
From my time behind the Iron Curtain with the Romani my languages include Vlax Romani, the major Romani language and that of its heartland in Transylvania and Eastern Europe, and its origin or relative Vlachs or Aromanian, a Romance language created by the historical migrations and transformations of cultures in the borderlands between the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Venetian Empires, and influenced more by Greek than Slavic as a disambiguating characteristic from modern Romanian, a related language also originating in the Latin of the Roman Empire and its long centuries of disintegration and change.
Many Romani whom I knew spoke Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, and Hungarian interchangeably as code switching, and also spoke Hochdeutsch which is the second language of Hungary and of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as Standard German. During this time I made mischief with a crew led by Bluey, an Irish gypsy from London who spoke English laden with Cockney rhyming slang, 16th century Thieves Cant, and the hybrid Irish Gaelic-Traveller cryptolanguage Shelta, a complex patois he and his crew, who were from everywhere, used as a secret language.
From my time in the Golden Triangle and Shan States I learned Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, the Singpho language of the Kachin Confederation of northern Burma and India, and the Sino-Tibetan language of the Konyak Naga. This charts the midcourse of my original Great Trek across Asia; one day I was driving to work in San Francisco and realized that I was going to live the same day I had more times than I could remember, that I was living in Nietzsche’s Hell of Eternal Recurrence, and I broke the pattern and took a wrong turn. I found myself at the airport and bought a ticket for an unknown destination; I just asked for a flight to the other side of the planet.
This I discovered upon landing was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; on day three I realized everyone in its elegant business district was doing things I could have done at home in San Francisco if I had wanted to, so I decided to do what no one else was doing. I found a bus station with a map where all the roads ended in the Cameron Highlands, rode a bus nine hours into the empty spaces on the map, got out when the road became a dirt trail into the jungle, and began my journey. I crossed from Malaysia into Thailand, Burma, and India before coming to live alternately in Nepal and Kashmir for some while.
In Nepal my role as a monk of the Buddhist Kagyu Vajrayana order required literacy in Classical Tibetan, conversational Gorkali or Nepalese as it is the official language and spoken by half the population, Newari which is the language of Kathmandu Valley where I lived, Gurung which is a tribal language of the Annapurna region and a major language of my key allies the Gurkha military and the horse nomads with whom I operated across the border between Nepal and Kashmir, and some Hindi.
In Kashmir my scholarship of Sufism required literacy in Classical Quranic Arabic, which I had been studying for years already, Classical Persian, and Ottoman Turkish; the official language Urdu which is Hindi written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and conversational use of the Kashmiri language Koshur.
This period in the early 1990’s coincides roughly with the Siege of Sarajevo of which I am a witness, where I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.
From my voyages and treks in South Asia on a later journey, where I sailed out of Georgetown on the island of Penang as a home port, I Iearned Malay in which I am literate and so count among my Voices, this being the major language of the region, of sailors, and of my initial scholarship of Naqshbandi Sufism which is a pan-Islamic warrior brotherhood synonymous with the martial arts of silat, and Buginese which is the language of the Bugis people of the Sultanate of Sulawesi who are the primary shipbuilders and navigators of South Asia, where half of all shipped freight is still by sail, and of the pirates with whom I waged an antislavery campaign led by our Captain Starfollower.
Then came the Minangkabu of Sumatra where I studied the martial art of Raja Harimau, briefly I learned what I could of one of the many languages of the Mentawai Islands where I was castaway in a storm at sea and with an indigenous tribe built an outrigger or Oceanic Proa over a couple months to sail ten hours across open seas to the mainland of Sumatra, Iban which is a language of the indigenous Dayak peoples of Borneo, and Hokkien Chinese in its Penang and Singaporean variants which is understood throughout the Peranankan or Straits Chinese communities.
Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty four languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Croatian, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, Hungarian, Shelta, Afrikaans, Yucatec, and Quiche. and twenty seven of literacy, a total of fifty one.
Thus far I have learned much about human diversity as well as the things which unite us, but nothing whatever of a great key which will unlock our infinite possibilities of becoming human.
Yet in the questioning of our languages as tools of creating our identities, of human being, meaning, and value, and of emergence from the legacies of our history and systems of oppression, we may transcend our limits and boundaries of otherness and belonging, and become exalted.
Will the next language offer the clues needed to decode the secrets of our liberation and self ownership, of our reimagination and transformation of ourselves and how we choose to be human together? As my mother used to say to students who asked for some pronouncement or authorization, juggling possibilities with her hands; “Maybe, maybe not”.
This I wrote originally as a Postscript to my essay of September 8 2023, International Literacy Day: What is a Library For?
It became its own work when I realized I had never tried to fully count my languages nor assess the meaning of languages as having multiplicities of selves as masks to perform in reserve at any moment, nor as revolutionary acts which may change boundaries into interfaces.
May all the Voices of your languages build bridges and not walls. But how precisely can we do that?
Is there a universal language behind all our languages and personae, a code like DNA in our consciousness and a meta-grammar or innate rules as Chomsky argues by which we create and order human being, meaning, and value?
What truly lies beneath the surfaces of our illusory and impermanent selves, images like ephemeral jetsam which conceal a unified field of being, Infinite in extent? Can learning languages truly allow us to operate directly on our own consciousness and seize ownership and control of our own evolution, to inhabit the imaginal souls of others, abandon our divisions and pathologies of disconnectedness, and become exalted in our participation in the being of others and of all humankind?
What becomes of us, when we transcend ourselves through immersion in what Ibn Arabi called the alam al mythal, Coleridge the Primary Imagination, Jung the Collective Unconscious, and the ancients called Logos?
I am a man who has many souls, one for every language I am literate in, in which I can think and dream and compose, and like James Joyce I have discovered few answers, but many questions regarding our possibilities of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and humankind.
For this mad quest to become human, to breach the event horizons of our culture, the legacies of our history, and the limits of our authorized identities, obeys the principle of the Conservation of Ignorance, in which the Infinite remains vast and unknown regardless of what we know or how much we learn.
Only this I have learned; it is not the kinds of thoughts we are able to have which make us human, but how we use them in our actions toward others, to harm or heal.
Among all of these voices of possibilities of becoming human stands the Zohar in its silence, voice of the Infinite, and it says; “I bear secrets; open me.”
And I with Ahab reply; “To the end I will grapple with thee.”
A “Finnegans Wake” Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary, Riverrun to Livvy: Lots of Fun Reading the First Page of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”, by Bill Cole Cliett
In this season of merriment and joy, filled with archaic and strange rituals and densely encoded with signs and messages, which for many Americans begins with the annual pilgrimage to see The Nutcracker ballet, most especially a delight for young girls and a performance filled with visions of beauty and wonder in a world which lies just beyond our own, I am once again seized and shaken by the Uncanny Valley of bifurcated vison and Warhol-like off kilter juxtaposition in the breathtaking beauty of the music and dancing and the ghastly horror of its subtext, because I am reasonably certain that when our heroine flies over the glittering confection of Candyland to rule it with her Nutcracker Prince, she is dead.
The Nutcracker ballet is the American Book of the Dead.
What is the mysterious wound with all its blood, and her witness which the adults silence with disbelief, but an act of sexual predation? It recalls the horror of the Patriarchal system of oppression in the disbelief of women’s witness as a strategy of silencing, as brilliantly portrayed in the film The Invisible Man starring Kate Moss.
If the Nutcracker is a story of the destruction of a girl as a primal tragedy of patriarchy, with her death allegorized as a battle in Freudian terms of mice symbolizing feral, degenerate, and unclean male predators versus nutcracker soldiers of self discipline and allyship who must battle them for control of our wildness and animal nature within the arena of the male psyche, it is also an initiation myth with Drosselmeyer as a Trickster figure and a terrifying guardian of the Otherworld who is transformed into a protector and guide as he becomes the Nutcracker Prince, both projections of our heroine’s shadow self which must be integrated to achieve wholeness but also, horrifically, very real and an omnipresent threat in a world which enforces male privilege.
It is possible to construe and interpret the strange plot of Drosselmeyer as immortality magic, wherein he consumes Marie’s life force to transform himself into the boy prince who is also his doppelganger and presented as his nephew, for whom he prepares and arguably grooms Marie as a bride and ghostly underworld companion, a reimagination of the myth of Persephone.
Both victim and tragic heroine, Marie escapes the prison of a family which has groomed her to disbelieve in her own experience through fantasy which is menacing and seductive, a world of her own. Hoffman was an icon of German Romanticism who clearly intended to affirm the vision of the individual and the liberating power of poetical truth, but there is also a parallel narrative of survival in which the toymaker Drosselmeier is not only a trickster god or magician who liberates Marie by setting challenges to overcome and creating scenes which reveal and transform inner conflict, but also a tyrannical and abusive figure of a patriarchal tyrant god. Hoffman harnesses the initiation of a pagan seeress to Romantic ends, and preserves the ambivalence of the Toymaker figure in the folklore; a god who is both an ally and a predator of humankind.
Clive Barker wrote what is undoubtedly the most nightmarish and fiendishly compelling version of the myth of the Toymaker in the Hellraiser series.
Herein a tale of both ecstatic vision and the transcendence of the spirit through immersion in an imaginal realm of dreams and death, a core text of Romantic Idealism as codified by Coleridge, shares liminal space with our nightmares as a manual of gaslighting, induced alienation, and patriarchal sexual terror.
I’d like to keep the ritual of ecstatic vision and beauty, and emerge from the legacies of our history as Freudian horror, but in this ballet which is a ground of struggle between authorized identities and the liberation of self-ownership we cannot, for they are bound together, the angelic and the monstrous, like all humankind and the histories and systems of oppression we must resist.
What can it teach us as a story of growing up as Resistance?
Shatter the mirror and break free of the image others would trap you in; reclaim yourself and your agency.
As written by Blaine Greteman in The Week, in an article entitled The Creep of The Nutcracker: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer and what is he teaching our children?; “Now that the holidays are upon us and the productions of The Nutcracker ballet are coming hard and fast, it’s time to ask that age old question: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer?
The Nutcracker has always been a story about a young girl’s journey into adulthood and sexual maturity, and as Drosselmeyer creeps around the stage this year, in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore, he reminds us that the journey has always been fraught.
If you haven’t seen The Nutcracker in a while or have only absorbed bits of it through commercials playing Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” on infinite loop, the story goes like this: It’s Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum home, and daughter Clara makes herself useful preparing for a party, while her younger brother Fritz, who nowadays would clearly have been diagnosed with ADHD, makes trouble. Soon the guests arrive. While the adults are adulting, the children make their own fun, until a mysterious man appears, cloaked in black and wearing an eyepatch. This is Godfather Drosselmeyer, a clock and toymaker who, depending on the production, either entertains the children or genuinely frightens them.
Either way, he soon takes over the night’s festivities. He produces uncanny, life-sized clockwork toys, which seem to come alive and dance for the guests. He hands out presents — dolls for the girls, swords for the boys. Clara, his special favorite, receives a wooden nutcracker, which everyone admires and which her jealous little brother quickly breaks. But Drosselmeyer bandages the toy and places it in a bed beneath the Christmas tree, where Clara will later fall asleep with it in her arms.
Things then get strange. At the stroke of midnight, Clara wakes to see Drosselmeyer on the grandfather clock, exercising what now appear to be magical powers. The room around her grows, or perhaps she shrinks. In the ballet’s source story, E.T.F. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, this moment is undeniably traumatic, and her account of it is the first of many that the adults around her will refuse to believe. The toys come to life and do battle with an evil mouse king and his troops. This is, after all, unbelievable, unless we remember that Drosselmeyer has already done something like it once before with his dancing automatons. In Hoffman’s story, Drosselmeyer tells the girl, “it will all be over soon.” But rather than being relieved she calls him “evil” (böser) and is paralyzed with fright.
Most versions of the ballet then jump to what happens in Hoffman’s tale on a subsequent night, when the nutcracker, who has been under a spell of the mouse queen, takes his natural shape as a handsome prince and escorts Clara to the Land of Sweets. Leaving aside the blatant colonialism of the caricatures that follow, isn’t it just a little creepy that Clara’s good-looking escort begins as a gift from Drosselmeyer? In fact this toy, in Hoffman’s story, bears a “strange resemblance to Drosselmeyer” himself.
But that’s not even half of it.
In the original, but not the ballet, the girl’s vision is accompanied by a sharp feeling of pain, which she will later realize was caused by falling into a glass cabinet and lacerating her arm. Discovered by her mother in a pool of blood, she relates Drosselmeyer’s role in her accident only to have her mother and the attending surgeon dismiss the “silly stuff” as the product of her “lively imagination.” Godfather Drosselmeyer, however, privately suggests that he believes her. As one 19th-century translation put it, “smiling queerly,” he “took the little girl on his lap, and spoke more softly than ever” as he confirmed that her dream contained some element of truth. It’s hard not to get a little Freudian about all this, but even if we don’t read it as some sort of sexual allegory, the dynamic is clear and unsettling.
Up to this point in the original, Drosselmeyer has wooed the girl with a special gift, awed her with his abilities as a technician and a magician, and degraded her by dismissing her as a “foolish child” (unverständig Kind) who could not appreciate his skill. Now he is teaching her to disbelieve her own experience unless it can be verified by a powerful man like himself. As the story continues, he will berate her for speaking “silly, stupid nonsense” (dummer einfältiger Schnack) when she tries to tell others. After being humiliated several times, she stops trying.
“A hundred times,” Hoffman writes, “she thought of telling what had happened, to her mother, or to Luise, or at least to Fritz; but she asked herself, ‘Will any of them believe me?'” Finally she withdraws into herself, which only warrants further criticism: “[I]nstead of playing as she used to do, she would sit still and silent, her thoughts far away, till everybody faulted her for being a little dreamer.”
It was a similar form of manipulation that caused the actress and director Asia Argento to describe her encounters with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as “a scary fairy tale” and “a nightmare” in the story that initially exposed decades of Weinstein’s abuse. Weinstein so thoroughly warped her perspectives of herself and their encounters, said Argento, that he began to “sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me.” One of failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s accusers claimed he pushed her out of the car, saying: “You are a child. I am the district attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you.” He was almost certainly right.
In these cases, as in so many others that have come to light in recent weeks, we find similar differentials of power, age, and authority, leading women to keep quiet about what happened to them or even to adopt their abuser’s account. As another of Weinstein’s victims noted, “I just put it in a part of my brain and closed the door.” Drosselmeyer may not be a sexual predator, but he exactly follows the sexual predator’s script.
This matters because souvenir nutcrackers and swords are not the only things our children take home at the end of the show. For Clara as for The Nutcracker’s young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara’s? How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara’s imagination of herself?
Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.
Rather than a reason to run for the exits, however, I’d suggest that this could be one of The Nutcracker’s redeeming qualities. Art has a remarkable power to make the familiar strange and allow us to see it anew — an effect Bertolt Brecht called verfremdung, or “alienation.” Hoffman’s nutcracker tale is strange, yet familiar, in exactly this way, especially as Clara internalizes the disbelief she encounters when she tries to tell her story.
A Nutcracker production that forced us to reckon with Drosselmeyer’s true power would also allow us to consider what it would mean for Clara, or many Claras, to take it back. While Drosselmeyer is a master of gears and springs, after all, his real hold over Clara comes from understanding that everyone, including herself, will trust his account of her experience more than her own.
That’s a hard nut, but it is ready to be cracked.”
As written by Joan Hennessy in StudyHall.Rocks, in an article entitled The Nutcracker’s Holiday Spell Broken; “From the overture to the dance of the sugar plum fairy, The Nutcracker is two hours of uninterrupted sweetness, and, importantly, a moneymaker for ballet companies across the nation. Or, at least, it was until now.
A recent critique in The Week magazine (“The Creep of The Nutcracker”) points to sexual overtones between a principal character, the mysterious Herr Drosselmeyer, and the ballet’s young protagonist, Clara.
The context: Set at a Christmas Eve party, Clara (also called Marie or Masha in various versions), fights with her brother, Fritz, over a nutcracker given to her by Drosselmeyer, an eye-patch wearing friend of the family. After the party, the girl falls asleep and dreams that the nutcracker is a prince.
While vapid, the ballet has remained insanely popular for decades. Anyone enrolled in a ballet school for any length of time has been in The Nutcracker. Small towns have at least one performance; cities have multiple productions. The ballet would have sellout crowds if it were staged at a landfill.
Next Christmas, Disney will release a star-studded film version, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, featuring a performance by Misty Copeland, principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. Already, the trailer (below) has gone viral. That means next year’s holiday season promises wall-to-wall nutcrackers on stages and cinema screens everywhere — just as the story is getting a second, uncomfortable look.
The problem is Drosselmeyer, the story’s magical helper, who arrives for Christmas Eve celebrations carrying elaborate presents — in the ballet, life-sized dancing dolls. After the party, the revelers leave and Clara goes to bed. But later, she awakens and tiptoes into the parlor. Alone, she spots Drosselmeyer, who appears on top of a clock. He flaps his arms like an owl, writes George Balanchine and Francis Mason in the book, 101 Stories of the Great Ballets (Doubleday; 1975). The girl is thoroughly terrified.
At once beloved and creepy, Herr Drosselmeyer is ultimately confusing.
“For Clara as for The Nutcracker’s young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara’s?” asks Blaine Greteman, a professor at University of Iowa and a journalist, in The Week. “How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara’s imagination of herself? Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.”
This is the sort of thing that once you see, you cannot un-see. And if the criticism sticks, it could prompt dance companies and perhaps patrons to rethink their interest in the ballet. But in reality, it is also true that most productions miss the point of the original story, a coming-of-age fairy tale.
The ballet is based on The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). After Hoffmann’s death, Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) rewrote and softened the story. This version was used by Lev Ivanov while choreographing the ballet, which premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, 125 years ago this week, Dec. 17, 1892. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the famous score.
In 101 Stories of the Great Ballets, Balanchine (1904-1983) recounts portraying various roles during his boyhood in Russia. Decades later, American ballet companies began producing the ballet. But Balanchine, who had come to the U.S. in 1933, proved central to The Nutcracker’s place as a Christmas tradition. As ballet master of the New York City Ballet, he staged his choreography of The Nutcracker in 1954. A decade later, the company moved to a larger stage, the scenery was redesigned, and an over-the-top tradition was born.
In his book, Balanchine wrote that he based his version on the Hoffmann story. But Hoffmann’s tale is darker.
Early on, Drosselmeyer shows the children an elaborate model he has built — a castle, with clear glass windows and golden turrets. When the children are unimpressed, his mean streak surfaces. “An ingenious work like this was not made for stupid children,” he snaps.
He also gives the family a nutcracker, and in the book, the girl notices similarities between the toy and Drosselmeyer. She becomes convinced that the nutcracker is Drosselmeyer’s spellbound nephew.
Her mother tells her she has been dreaming and “now drive it all out of your head.” In a fit of tough love, her father threatens to toss the nutcracker and all her dolls out the window.
This sequence is at the heart of the story, for Hoffmann worked to balance his obligations and his artistic bent. Educated in law, he made his living as a legal official in Berlin.
“The struggle within Hoffmann between the ideal world of his art and his daily life as a bureaucrat is evident in many of his stories, in which characters are possessed by their art,” explains an article on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.
It is no accident that Clara prefers the nutcracker’s fantastical world to her parents’ reality. As the story ends, Drosselmeyer’s nephew comes to visit, and he looks much like a nutcracker brought to life. It is the nephew — not Drosselmeyer — who marries the girl. She grows to womanhood, but unlike others, refuses to leave her dreams behind.
At this hour, Hoffmann concludes, the girl is “queen of a land where sparkling Christmas woods and transparent marzipan castles, in short, where the most beautiful, the most wonderful things, can be seen by those who will only have eyes for them.”
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2020, Embracing Fear as Liberation from Authority and Control: Anarchy as a Path of Psychological and Social Freedom; Even more terrible than blaming the victim is when no one believes the victim; it is an erasure and silencing which is the particular horror of women, as the dread that no one is coming to help is that of the LGBT and other marginalized communities.
The degree to which we are trusted and believed, our authority, and the reach of our voices in witness are excellent and reliable measures of our power and our position in social hierarchies. As a measure of societies themselves, this will tell you about the relative democracy or tyranny of a culture.
What Matthew Jacobs calls The Ubiquity of Disbelief in his insightful criticism in Huffpost of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss, entitled Why Does No One In Horror Movies Believe The Female Protagonist?, and examines disbelief and the horror of disconnectedness as a disease of mistrust and failure of solidarity, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.
For the mechanism and pathology of fear is what drives patriarchy, unequal power, and inauthentic relationships, abstracts us from ourselves and one another as simulacra and creates aberrations of violence and sexual terror.
From fear are monsters born; yet it is our fear we must embrace to free ourselves of the tyranny of others and the spectre of authoritarian force and control.
We must not let fear define us; it is the degree to which we can embrace, learn from, and free ourselves from our fear which measures our freedom and enacts our liberation from the control of others.
For when we cannot be driven into submission by authority through fear and learned helplessness the use of force becomes meaningless as does its scale; thus do we reclaim our power and agency to define ourselves, and ownership of the performances of our identities.
Here follows the wonderful guide to The Nutcracker on GradeSaver:
“These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
What is a nutcracker?
A nutcracker is said to represent power and strength, serving somewhat like a watchdog guarding your family against danger. A nutcracker bares its teeth to evil spirits and serves as a messenger of good luck and goodwill. Long ago, rare or unusual nutcrackers were part of the social dining tradition.
This is the story of a young girl’s difficult, painful enlightenment to some basic truth’s about life on earth. For instance, the reader could easily interpret this entire plot as an existential crisis. In that case, Drosselmeyer’s gift of a clockwork world would be a way of showing Marie that chaos is necessary in life, or else everything is repetitive and boring (like that toy quickly becomes). She much prefers the dark chaos of her imaginary world where the stakes are life and death, where people take tragedy with communal support, and where (most importantly) no one is alone. Marie is probably mourning the death of her parents, which is implied in that they live with Drosselmeyer who is their godfather.
This newfound awareness of tragedy and death makes Marie’s imaginary world into a tool that she uses to ask difficult questions about life than she can otherwise handle emotionally. Look for a moment at just how violent this seven year old’s imagination is—she imagines a world of bitter warfare between two antithetical forces. She imagines the pain of loss for the community each time someone dies. Interestingly, she also imagines funeral rites and spells of mourning when bad things happen, and when the toy community loses someone, they all rally together to support one another.
Based on this, the reader can guess safely that Marie is struggling with something specific. She wants Drosselmeyer to be in community with her, so that he can help her more directly with the pain of her life. She needs help and support from someone, and these stories are like cries for help through which she invites Drosselmeyer into her mind and emotions. Sadly, he misunderstands this, and he has a hard time relating to her, so she stays fairly lonely in her godfather’s estate.
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Themes
These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
Imagination and the value of story
This story features the brilliant imagination of a young girl during Christmas time whose difficult life leaves her unable to sleep. At night, sometimes she wanders around her godfather’s estate, and she imagines an entire world. The novel depicts her imagination as if it is really happening, but the reader should distrust the narrator’s point of view about that, since her imagination seems real to her. That’s one of the most important design features of the novel, that her imagination seems real, because to her it is true. In a way, they’re more true in a greater sense than if they had been literally true. When she creates stories from her imagination, she learns from them authentically. With this domain of play, she can work through the various pains and fears of her blossoming mind.
Time, fate, and the loss of beauty
Marie’s young imagination becomes fixated early on with the passage of time and the inevitable loss of beauty. She is trying to reconcile the fact that as time passes, people age and their faces change, people get sick, and people even die (like her parents, perhaps; after all, she is at her godfather’s estate). In a word, she is concerned about the decay of the world toward some tragic end. Two major plot moments highlight this theme: The curse of Pirlipat where she goes from being beautiful to being hideous, and the death of the nutcrackers that started the war with the mice in the first place. Notice how the toys are human inventions (carved and painted), but the mice are agents of nature. That “man versus nature” conflict is also relevant to this theme.
Loneliness
The unspoken theme that gives this novel its melancholic feel is that no one believes Marie’s imagination. Not only is this tragic because Marie isn’t taken seriously, but it’s also a tragic indication that the person taking care of Marie is not comfortable or familiar with the way a kid’s mind works. Marie doesn’t need Drosselmeyer to believe her literally—she really just wants to talk about her emotions with someone, and telling him about her games is an attempt to be a little less lonely. When he thinks she’s just being silly, he rejects her further. These are all ways that Marie deals with loneliness, and perhaps she is even mourning. Her imaginary stories are dark and violent, and often the dreams involve a community rallying to support each other in the face of trauma and pain—which would be very desirous to Marie.
The imagined savior
One obvious symbol is the titular Nutcracker. In the context of the war against the mice, the Nutcracker is a savior character, because he will save the toy people from their impending doom. This is especially significant given that these characters belong to a religious community and they’re celebrating Christmas. In the context of Marie’s imaginary world, the savior character represents hope that the future can bring something good, in spite of Marie’s fear of time.
The clockwork world
When the children pester their godfather enough, they finally figure out what it is that he made for them—a little clockwork world with puppets that come out in time (like a cuckoo clock). They are fascinated by the world, but because the world is timed, it is predictable to them, and before very long, the kids are bored of the clock. They want something exciting and unpredictable, so Marie begins to invent an imaginary story about the toy world. The clock world represents the children’s unlikely preference for unpredictability. It is as if they understand that they are supposed to be entertaining themselves. By the end of the book, we know why—they are using their imaginations to deal with painful emotions.
The mice as a symbol for decay
Mice in the estate indicates the passage of time, because older houses tend to become infested with mice. Mice are also animals, which means they represent nature, because they are literally compelled by their nature. They are violent and they bring chaos and pain to the toy community. In other words, they make things worse over time, which makes them into a force of decay.
Pirlipat’s curse
In Marie’s imagination, she invents a beautiful princess. She imagines a beautiful girl, more beautiful than any other person in any universe. This makes Pirlipat archetypal because she is the “most” beautiful girl in the world, so she represents the fullness of Marie’s desire to be beautiful. So when Pirlipat is cursed with a hideous face, Pirlipat comes to represent Marie’s fear of being ugly.
The Christmas motif
This is a thoroughly “Christmas” story. It starts on Christmas eve, for starters. It concerns the basic theme of a young girl coming to terms with the horror and pain of life (by exploring imaginary stories in midnight trances). That might not seem very Christmas-like, but it absolutely is. In this story, the Christmas spirit is the opposite of time’s decay. Christmas represents hope and new life. It is important to consider that perhaps Marie is mourning the loss of her parents, which is something that would make Christmas very lonely and painful. It is not unusual for Christmas to represent such painful things for this specific reason.
Young and beautiful (Metaphor)
The battle was in full swing. The mice “continued to advance” and even overtook “some of the cannons.” There was so much “noise, smoke, and dust” that Marie could barely make out what was going on. However, one thing “she could tell for sure” was that “both sides were fighting as hard as they could.” Sometimes it seemed that the toys would win, and the other times it looked like the mice “would take the victory.” Madame Clarette and Madame Trudie “anxiously paced inside and wrung their hands.” “Am I to die in the flower of my youth?” Clarette asked. Indeed, she looked like the most beautiful creature alive and was too young to die.
Wonders (Simile)
The castle was beautiful, but “dull.” The children were clearly disappointed, for they were not allowed to play with it. However, their mother was mature enough to appreciate the beauty of Drosselmeier’s work. She “came over and asked to see the inside of the castle” and “the intricate clockwork that made dolls move.” So the judge “took everything apart and put it back together again,” which “cheered him right up.” He was so happy and pleased that he even gave the children “some beautiful brown men and women with gold faces” that smelled “as sweet and pleasant as gingerbread.”
An elegant look (Simile)
The tiny man wore “a beautiful hussar’s jacket of vivid violet with lots of trimming and buttons” and “matching trousers.” He also wore “the most beautiful” pair of boots that “a student, or even an officer, had ever worn.” They were so “tight on his legs” that they seemed “to be painted on.” It occurred to Marie that if Drosselmeier were to dress “as elegantly as the tiny man, he would not look nearly as handsome.” He was the most charming little man she had ever seen.
Sacks of wool (Simile)
“Inspired by the Nutcracker’s speech,” Fritz’s toy hussars made “the dangerous leap down from the second shelf to the floor.” They were not hurt, for they were dressed in “soft wool and silk” and were made of “cotton and sawdust.” So they plopped down like “little sacks of wool.” The Nutcracker, on the other hand, “would have almost certainly broken himself to pieces.” His body was “as brittle as linden wood.” He “would have likely broken his arms and legs” had not Madame Clarette sprang from the sofa to catch the Nutcracker “in her arms.”
Written by Julia Wolf
The most valuable
Marie had a reason to linger “near the Christmas table when the others had left” because “she had seen something nobody else seemed to have noticed.” After Fritz had “disengaged his hussars from parading about the tree, a splendid little man became visible.” His build left “much to be desired.” His “stocky” and “somewhat long upper body” didn’t fit his “small” and “spindly legs,” his head was “too large.” However, his fine clothing suggested that he was a man “of taste and education.” This imagery evokes a strong feeling of curiosity or – maybe even fascination. Marie can’t take her eyes off him.
The battle
“Strike the battle march, loyal vassal drummer!” Nutcracker shouted. The drummer beat the drum “so furiously that the glass in the cabinet shook and reverberated the sound.” Then “a rattle and clatter came from within the cabinet,” and Marie saw that “the lids of boxes where Fritz’s army was quartered” had popped open. The brave soldiers were “jumping out of their boxes” and “forming regiments on the bottom shelf.” As a true leader, Nutcracker was running “back and forth shouting words to inspire the troops.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of nervousness. Marie’s anxiety and Nutcracker’s determination make readers feel a variety of different emotions at once.
Charity
Lady Mouserinks had lived for years in the palace and “claimed to be related to the royal family” and “even queen of a realm called Mouseland.” She also claimed to have “a large court under the stove.” When she saw the queen in the kitchen, she asked her for some fat to feast. “Come out and you may have some of my fat,” said the queen, so Lady Mouserinks “jumped out, hopped up to the stove, and grabbed piece after piece of fat from the queen in her delicate little paws.” Then came her “cousins, aunts, uncles, and her seven sons.” This imagery is supposed to evoke a feeling of fear, since a kitchen full of mice is not a sight that the majority of us would enjoy.
Essay Questions
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
1
Illustrate how the imagery of hearing manifests itself in the “Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E.T.A. Hoffman.
The author uses the battle to appeal to the sense of hearing to the reader. The Nutcracker shouts, “Strike the battle march, loyal vassal drummer”. After the shouting, the drum is beaten loudly by the drummer. As a result of the drum beating, the cabinet shakes and reverberates the sound. Afterward, rattles and clatters come out of the cabinet. Marie sees the lids of boxes quartering and popping out. The courageous military jumps out of their boxes and forms regiments below the shelf. Due to his dedication and as person in charge, Nutcracker runs back and forth shouting every word that encourages his soldiers. The author uses this imagery of shouting to depict the sense of hearing to the reader so that he can understand the level of nervousness on the scene of war.
2
How does the author manage to use the ‘young and beautiful’ as a metaphor?
The author illustrates that the battle is in full swing and that the mice continue advancing and even overtakes some cannons. There are much noise dust and smoke, which confuses Marrie of what is happening. Despite the confusion, Marie can tell that there is a fierce fight between the two sides. It seems that the toys are going to win and at times mice seem to be stronger than the toys making unpredictable on who is going to emerge victorious. Both Clarette and Trudie are anxiously pacing inside and wringing their hands. Therefore, a metaphor helps the reader interpret that Clarette is the most gorgeous being who deserves to live long but not to die early.
3
Explain how the author brings out the theme of loneliness.
Marie finds herself between the rocks because there is no one around her who wants to believe what she is imagining. Even the person taking care of Marie does not believe in her or take her seriously. Her caretaker is not comfortable living with her because he is not familiar with how the child’s brain works. What Marie needs is someone to share with her imagination and emotions. However, most people around are doing their best to avoid her. Therefore, Marie finds herself on an island that she is alone with no one to give her emotional company. In this regard, the author has successfully developed the theme of loneliness.
Written by Julia Wolf
The King
Lady Mouserinks did as she promised; she avenged herself of the royal family by biting the beautiful little princess. Thus, angelic Pirpilat turned into a hideous creature. The queen “shut herself away in mourning,” and the wall of the king’s study had to be padded, for he “would often bang his head” against them, crying, “Oh, what an unhappy monarch I am!” He put all the blame on the court clockmaker and wizard and issued him an order: “restore the princess to her former self within four weeks, or suffer the disgraceful death of beheading.” The king wanted to have his beautiful daughter back, but he could not even imagine the outcome of his threats. “Take him away! Take that horrible nutcracker away!”
Pirpilat
The young Drosselmeier had broken the charm and the beautiful princess was saved. Her angelical beauty was restored and the court was so happy about it that everyone danced and cheered loudly. The poor queen even “fainted from happiness.” “The commotion did not at all ruffle young Drosselmeier, who was just taking his seventh and last step.” But then Lady Mouserinks popped out of a crack in the floor and the boy became “as hideous as Princess Pirlipat had been a few moments ago.” “Take him away! Take that horrible nutcracker way,” Pirpilat cried, forgetting about gratitude and compassion. “Oh, poor me, poor me – what am I to say?”
Marie
Marie had been so happy about the nutcracker’s victory that she hurried up to tell her family about it and the wonderful places she visited during the last night. What she didn’t expect was that nobody believed her. They laughed at her and at that “silly story” she invented. They only “laughed harder” when she tried to explain, so Marie went to her bedroom and retrieved seven crowns of the Mouse King. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, for they called her “a little liar.” “Oh, poor me, poor me,” the little girl said and cried “violently.”
The story as written by Dio Sm
It is December 24, the house of Stahlbaum. Everyone is preparing for Christmas, and the children – Fritz and Marie – are wondering what will this time they get for a present from an inventor and godfather, senior adviser to the court Drosselmeyer, who often repairs clocks in the Stahlbaum’s house. Marie dreams about the garden and a lake with swans, and Fritz says that he likes their parents’ gifts more, because he can play with them (godfather’s toys are usually kept away from children so that they do not break them), and godfather cannot make the whole garden.
In the evening children admired the beauty-Christmas tree, near and on which were gifts: a new doll dress, hussars, etc. The godfather did a wonderful castle, but dancing dolls performed the same movement, and to get inside the castle was impossible, so the miracle of technology quickly became boring – only the mother got interested in a complex mechanism. When all the presents were sorted out, Marie saw the Nutcracker. Ugly doll seemed for the girl very pleasant. Fritz quickly broke the couple of Nutcracker’s teeth in an attempt to split the hard nuts, and thus Marie began to take care of it. At night children removed toys in the glass cabinet. Marie, placing her ward with all the conveniences, became a witness of the Battle of seven-headed Mouse King and the army led by the Nutcracker doll. Dolls surrendered under the onslaught of mice, and when the Mouse King has slumped to the Nutcracker, Marie threw her shoe at him.
When the girl woke up glass cabinet was broken. No one believed her story about the night incident. The godfather brought the repaired Nutcracker and told the tale of a solid walnut: the king and the queen had a beautiful princess Pirlipat, but the queen Mouserinks, taking revenge for her killed relatives by mousetraps of the court watchmaker Drosselmeyer (they ate bacon), turned the beauty into the ugly. Only the clicking of nuts could soothe her now. Drosselmeyer, under pain of death, with the help of a court astrologer, calculated the princess’s horoscope – her beauty could be restored by the walnut Krakatuk, chopped by a boy by a special method.
The king sent Drosselmeyer and astrologer in search of salvation; both a nut and a young man (the watchmaker’s nephew) were found in Drosselmeyer’s brother’s hometown. Many princes have broken their teeth trying to crack the Krakatuk, and when the king promised to give his daughter in marriage to a savior, a nephew came forward. He split the nut and the princess ate it and became a beautiful woman again, but the young man was unable to complete the entire rite, because Mouserinks fell under his feet. The mouse was killed, but the guy turned into the Nutcracker. The king drove Drosselmayera, his nephew and away. However, the astrologer predicted that the Nutcracker would become a prince and his ugliness would disappear if he won the Mouse King and a beautiful girl would fall in love with him.
Marie began to reproach Drosselmeyer that he did not help the Nutcracker. He said that only she could help, because she ruled over the light kingdom. The Mouse King got into the habit to extort her sweets in return for the safety of the Nutcracker. The parents were alarmed by the fact that the house was full of mice. When he asked for her books and clothes, she sobbed, she was ready to give everything, but when there would be nothing left, the Mouse King would want to tear herself. The nutcracker became alive and promised to take care of everything if he got the sword – Fritz helped with that. At night the Nutcracker came to Marie with a bloody sword, candle and 7 gold crowns. Having given her the trophies, he led her to his kingdom – the country of fairy tales, where they got into through the father’s fox fur coat. Helping Nutcracker’s sisters about the house Marie suddenly woke up in her bed.
None of the adults believed her story. As to the crown Drosselmayer said that this was his gift for her and refused to admit the Nutcracker to be his nephew (toy stood in its place in the closet). The father threatened to throw out all the dolls, and Marie did not dare to stammer about her story. But once on the threshold of their home appeared Drosselmayer’s nephew who privately confessed to Marie that ceased to be the Nutcracker, and made her an offer to share with him the crown and the throne of the Marzipan Castle. They say she is still the queen there.
The Nutcracker and the Mouse King Character List
Written by people who wish to remain anonymous
Marie
Marie is a playful child who lives in a large estate with her godfather and brother. In the winter, she witnesses her toys come to life. A mice army appears from holes in the walls, and the winter nutcrackers become animated to fight back. She watches the war play out at night, when no one is around, but when she tries to talk about it, no one believes her.
Fritz
Marie’s brother who plays with her often and often pesters their godfather about Christmas presents. Fritz often plays and imagines alongside his sister, Marie, but when she seems convinced about the mouse war against the nutcrackers, Fritz isn’t sure what to think.
Drosselmeyer
This court officer is godfather to Marie and Fritz. During the holidays, while the children are at his estate, he keeps them company and offers the promise of awesome Christmas gifts. He also appears in Marie’s midnight adventures, but in imaginary form.
Queen Mouserinks
This is the (perhaps imaginary) queen of the mice. The mice are in a war against the nutcrackers. Each night, they come out to do battle with the toys and nutcrackers, and one night, Queen Mouserinks is there to finish off the nutcrackers, but Marie throws a shoe at her.
Pirlipat
This is the princess of the toys whose beauty was unheard of. One day, the angry mice figured out a way to curse her with a piece of bacon, turning her ugly. Their other quest is to help restore Pirlipat’s beauty to her.
Krakatuk
This hero nutcracker has an advantage on the battlefield, because of a unique nut-cracking technique that lets him attack mice more easily. He is charged with the task of guiding the toys to victory while restoring Pirlipit’s beauty.”
Nutcracker and Mouse King / The Tale of the Nutcracker, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Alexandre Dumas, Jack D. Zipes (Introduction)
We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.
The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, as sin eaters or monsters, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and elsewhere being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8 2023, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
As written in the United Nations website; “Secretary-General António Guterres credited the more than 80 per cent of those who cross borders in a safe and orderly fashion as powerful drivers of “economic growth, dynamism, and understanding”.
“But unregulated migration along increasingly perilous routes – the cruel realm of traffickers – continues to extract a terrible cost”, he continued in his message marking the day.
Deaths and disappearances
Over the past eight years, at least 51,000 migrants have died, and thousands of others gone missing, said the top UN official.
“Behind each number is a human being – a sister, brother, daughter, son, mother, or father”, he said, reminding that “migrant rights are human rights”.
“They must be respected without discrimination – and irrespective of whether their movement is forced, voluntary, or formally authorized”.
‘Do everything possible’
Mr. Guterres urged the world to “do everything possible” to prevent their loss of life – as a humanitarian imperative and a moral and legal obligation.
And he pushed for search and rescue efforts, medical care, expanded and diversified rights-based pathways for migration, and greater international investments in countries of origin “to ensure migration is a choice, not a necessity”.
“There is no migration crisis; there is a crisis of solidarity”, the Secretary-General concluded. “Today and every day, let us safeguard our common humanity and secure the rights and dignity of all”.
Realize basic rights
For his part, the head of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Gilbert F. Houngbo, shone a light on protecting the rights of the world’s 169 million migrant workers.
“The international community must do better to ensure… [that they] are able to realize their basic human and labour rights”, he spelled out in his message for the day.
Leaving them unable to exercise basic rights renders migrant workers “invisible, vulnerable and undervalued for their contributions to society”, pointed out the most senior ILO official.
Vulnerabilities
And when intersecting with race, ethnicity, and gender, they become even more vulnerable to various forms of discrimination.
Mr. Houngbo flagged that migrants do not only go missing on high-risk and desperate journeys.
“Many migrant domestic, agricultural and other workers are isolated and out of reach of those who could protect them”, with the undocumented particularly at risk of abuse.
Fair labour migration
Meanwhile, ILO supports governments, employers and workers to make fair labour migration a reality.
Like all employees, migrant workers are entitled to labour standards and international human rights protections, including freedom of association and collective bargaining, non-discrimination, and safe and healthy working environments, upheld the ILO chief.
They should also be entitled to social protection, development and recognition.
To make these rights a reality, Mr. Houngbo stressed the key importance of fair recruitment, including eliminating recruitment fees charged to migrant workers, which can help eradicate human trafficking and forced labour.
Injustices suffered by migrant workers are injustices to us all – ILO chief
“Access to decent work is a key strategy to realize migrants’ development potential and contribution to society”, he said.
“We must recognize that injustices suffered by migrant workers are injustices to us all. We must do better”.
‘Cornerstone of development’
Meanwhile, in his message, the head of the International Migration Organization (IMO), António Vitorino, described migrants as “being a cornerstone of development and progress”.
“We can’t let the politicization of migration, hostility and divisive narratives divert us from the values that matter most”, he urged.
Regardless of what compels people to move, “their rights must be respected”, underscored the IMO chief.”
As I wrote in my post of January 23 2021, Inclusion and the Embrace of Otherness is the Test of Democratic Societies: On Immigration; Our new President Biden and his government seem committed to ideals of equity and fairness, in our system of immigration and in all things, which I celebrate and will help in any way I can; but in this area of policy I believe we need a few things more.
Inclusion and the embrace of Otherness is the test of democratic societies.
We need a version of the English Slave Act; anyone who sets foot on American soil is free, safe, and under our protection.
We need a borderless state with citizenship by declaration; if you accept the responsibilities of membership in our nation and agree to live in accord with our principles and agreements with one another, you are an American. If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?
We need to reimagine and transform our security services and repurpose Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to provide safe passage to our shores and a humane landing which welcomes new Americans with food, medical attention, and education.
The horrific ethnic cleansing and systematic torture and abuse of the Trump regime did not emerge from nothing, but from an ancient injustice by which our nation created wealth and elite power and privilege for white supremacy; we have drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and generate mass cheap exploitable labor which fuels agriculture, hospitality, childcare, and other markets and industries.
Illegal migrant labor is slave labor.
Let us emancipate our workforce so that everyone working here has the same legal protections as citizens, and no worker can be used against another.
As written by Maurizio Guerrero in In These Times; “One initiative stood out as especially (and cruelly) effective in President Donald Trump’s often inept White House: his administration’s monomaniacal attack on immigrants. Starting with an unconstitutional Muslim ban his first week in office, Trump signed more than 400 executive actions against migrants in a single term — curtailing legal immigration, casting out tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers, separating undocumented families and sowing terror in immigrant communities. Trump’s caging of migrant children at the border sparked nationwide protests in 2018 under the banner “Keep Families Together.”
But despite mass outrage among liberals, the enormous bipartisan machine built to surveil, catch and imprison migrants predates Trump. While separating children from their parents at the border was a cruel Trumpian twist, the U.S. immigration system has long torn apart families through deportation. The current iteration of that system, which criminalizes migrants for making mistakes once considered paperwork errors, took three decades to construct before Trump arrived — from the landmark immigration reform act under the Reagan administration in 1986, to the founding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President George W. Bush in 2003, to ICE’s massive raids under President Barack Obama.
President Joe Biden has promised to reverse some of Trump’s most egregious anti-immigrant policies, but few signs suggest he will address what paved their way: the ongoing criminalization of simply existing in the United States as an immigrant.
Biden has declared a moratorium on deportations during his first 100 days in office. He also promises to send an immigration reform bill to Congress. But neither of these measures, advocates say, would necessarily effect a meaningful change; the moratorium is a temporary measure, and a bill could be delayed in Congress and might expand immigration enforcement as a trade-off for pro-migrant measures.”
“On January 13, undocumented activist Jeanette Vizguerra (who has been living in sanctuary at the First Unitarian Society of Denver since 2015) accompanied a grassroots coalition at Biden’s transition headquarters in Wilmington, Del. The coalition demanded immediate action on immigration and an end to detentions and deportations.
“I am here today to personally ask Joe Biden … to act immediately when he takes office next week,” said Vizguerra, who risks arrest by ICE just for stepping out of the church. “[Biden must] protect families like mine that have been hunted and terrorized simply for daring to exist in this ‘land of the free.’ ”
We now have it within our power to end forever the threat of fascism in America, and with it the spectre of racist ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror as state policy, the concentration camps, deportations, torture and murder which under Trump reached toward the scale of South Africa’s Bantustan system of slave labor and echoed the horrors of the Holocaust.
How shall we answer for the genocide perpetrated in our name?
The Biden Presidency held great promise for the Restoration of America and for a Reckoning with the legacies of our history; in this we have been betrayed not by a failure of vision, but by infiltration, subversion, and capture of the institutions of our government by a Fourth Reich we have yet to purge from among us, as well as by systemic forces of reaction.
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2021, Overseer of the Carceral State Kamala Harris Proclaims Her Solution to the Humanitarian Refugee Crisis at Our Border; “Do Not Come”; Kamala Harris embodies my hopes and fears for the future of America; I hope she is a cross between Arundati Roy and the Jamaican warrior matriarchs who led the slave rebellion against the British Empire; but I fear she may be an overseer of the carceral state.
Today my darkest fears have been given new force by her speech to the “huddled masses yearning to be free”, as the poem by a Jewish girl on our Stature of Liberty proclaims. Former Prosecuting Attorney and instrument of law and order, force, fear, and the brutal tyranny of elite wealth and power and hierarchies of racial exclusivity, now wielding the authority of the Vice President of the United States, fails us all and betrays our trust in a stunning message to the world; “do not come”.
Not the poetic vision of an America which is a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Kamala Harris could have simply quoted the magisterial poem which illuminates America’s historic mandate as a guarantor of universal human rights and the equality of all souls, could have spoken to the fear and pain of the wretched of the earth who have come to us for safety and for liberty, could have offered hope for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
And this is all the wisdom and empathy she has to offer us from her secret heart; “Do not come.”
Is Kamala an apologist of imperialism, abysmally ignorant, or just without moral vision?
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
This is the system of wealth, power, and privilege which our chosen champion has refused to challenge, and aligned herself instead with those who would enslave us.
Yet the betrayal of the people by Kamala Harris is neither the most central nor most sad issue driving the dynamics of elite hegemony and imperial dominion whose flaws can be read in the suffering of the masses at our border, for we ourselves have designed the failures which are their true cause.
As I wrote in my post of April 7 2021, How American Imperialism Created Our Humanitarian Crisis at the Border; Forty six years ago this April, America launched Operation Condor, a global campaign to destabilize and repress socialist governments and movements and defend capitalism as a hegemonic force and its elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege. This remains relevant to us today because it is the origin of many of the push forces driving waves of refugees to our border, and the horrific humanitarian crisis and test of our democracy created by American imperialism.
Migration is a word which conceals both the conditions which trigger it and our own complicity in creating them as consequences of our decades long policies of colonialism, anticommunist militarism, and economic warfare; ecological devastation with its drought and famine, poverty and social and political destabilization, an age of tyranny and state terror, genocide and ethnic cleansing, weaponized faith and its patriarchal sexual terror, and multigenerational wars.
In terms of refugees fleeing to America for safety and survival as well as liberty and equality we are mainly speaking of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, though the hell zone of Columbia and Venezuela now accounts for many, and with the collapse of central authority in Mexico and its degeneration into a region of warlords, oligarchs, and feudal crime syndicates we have refugees from Mexico itself as well as the traditional seasonal laborers.
Migrant labor is slave labor; this is the great truth America has never confronted and must now answer for in the suffering masses at our border. Entire sectors of our economy run on it; agriculture in which labor becomes a strategic resource as we starve without it, but also child and elder care, hospitality, and some manufacture. America’s wealth and power is created for us by others to whom we export the real costs of production, others who must remain invisible and exploitable as unregulated illegal labor to wring every ounce of value from them for our elites. Thus we weaponize economic disparity in service to power and privilege, and create and maintain hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and white supremacy.
Interests of elite hegemonies of wealth and power converge here with those of racial privilege and white supremacy in historic toxicity, in parallel with the rise of the carceral state as an instrument for the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison labor and the repression of the Civil Rights Movement, and have done so from their origins. One such origin point is America’s appropriation, concealment, and instrumentalization of Nazi war criminals in the repression of dissent and the conquest of the world.
The Fourth Reich of which Trump was a figurehead did not emerge from nothing like Athena from the head of Zeus, but was an invention of American imperialism. As such its history and character as a global threat to democracy can be studied in the crisis of refugees and migration to which it has given birth, and in the legacies of our nation’s use of fascism as an instrument of dominion in the Americas, for as we were using it to conquer others, it was using us to seize the United States of America and the world.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration, but not exclusively; and as always the final dominoe in systems failures is a political choice.
These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; “ There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. Here we see the designs of the Christian Identity Gideonite fundamentalists for America and the world given free reign.
During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
This was among my first campaigns of revolutionary struggle immediately following the 1982 Siege of Beirut, opposing the Mayan Genocide; I witnessed its horrors, and it shaped my art of war. It is also how I was invited to attend the Joint Revolutionary Council in Cuba to collaborate with many such organizations globally, and why my team included Soviet advisors and often Cuban International Service soldiers through much of the 1980s.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom the government of America later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past, and offer better solutions than to echo Marie Antionette’s dismissive and fatal reference “Let them eat cakes” in the imperious proclamation “Do not come”.
How is white supremacist terror conspiring in anti-immigrant violence now, and how does this issue figure in our elections as we choose who we will become?
As written by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s ‘dehumanising and fascist rhetoric’ denounced by top progressive: Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal decries ‘horrific’ language after ex-president says immigrants ‘poisoning the blood of our country’; “A leading American progressive said Donald Trump was using “horrific … dehumanising and fascist rhetoric”, after the former president told supporters immigrants were invading the US and “poisoning the blood of our country”.
“This is horrific,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on Monday.
“Donald Trump’s description of immigrants who are coming to the southern border is dehumanising and fascist rhetoric. These are dangerous lies, designed to villainise immigrants and make horrific policy seem somehow acceptable.
“This is a good reminder of why we can never return to any policies of Donald Trump. He is trying to erase immigrants from America. None of his policies are about reforming the immigration system in a way that recognis[es] that America is better for having immigrants here.”
Dominating Republican presidential primary polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats, Trump made the remarks at election rallies in New Hampshire and Nevada.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday, returning to a line used before.
“That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
In Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, he said: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”
Academics, commentators and political opponents have been quick to link such rhetoric to that used by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other authoritarian leaders.
On Saturday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, said Trump’s aim was to “dehumanise immigrants now so the public will accept [his] repression of them when [he] return[s] to office”.
But on Sunday, Marc Short, chief of staff to Mike Pence when Pence was vice-president to Trump, came to Trump’s defence.
“I think it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read Mein Kampf,” Short told Fox News, claiming Trump was instead using inflammatory language to distract critics while winning over voters.
Trump, however, has claimed to have owned Hitler’s memoir, which was published before his Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
According to a 1990 profile in Vanity Fair, his first wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer her husband kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.
Trump claimed the book was actually Mein Kampf and was given to him by a Jewish friend. The friend, Marty Davis, said he gave Trump the book of speeches, not Mein Kampf – and that he wasn’t Jewish. Trump told his profiler, Marie Brenner: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Brenner asked: “Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda.”
Trump’s apparent interest in Hitler has surfaced since. In 2021, the then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender said Trump told John Kelly, his second of four White House chiefs of staff: “Hitler did a lot of good things.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal Letters From An American; “It seems that former president Donald Trump is aligning his supporters with a global far-right movement to destroy democracy.
On Saturday, in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump echoed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s attacks on immigrants, saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country”—although two of his three wives were immigrants—and quoted Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attacks on American democracy. Trump went on to praise North Korean autocratic leader Kim Jong Un and align himself with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, the darling of the American right wing, who has destroyed Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship.
Trump called Orbán “the man who can save the Western world.”
Dr. Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a professor of religion and anthropology at Northeastern University, explained in The Conversation what Trump is talking about. Autocrats like Orbán and Putin—and budding autocrats like Trump—are building a global movement by fighting back against the expansion of rights to women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people.
Russian leaders have been cracking down on LGBTQ+ rights for a decade with the help of the Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that they are protecting “traditional values.” This vision of heteronormativity rewrites the real history of human sexuality, but it is powerful in this moment. Orbán insists that immigrants ruin the purity of a country, and has undermined women’s rights.
Riccardi-Swartz explains that this rhetoric appeals to those in far-right movements around the world. In the United States, “family values” became tied to patriotism after World War II, when Chinese and Soviet communists appeared to be erasing traditional gender roles. Those people defined as anti-family—LGBTQ+ people and women who challenged patriarchy—seemed to be undermining society. Now, as dictators like Putin and Orbán promise to take away LGBTQ+ rights, hurt immigrants, and return power to white men, they seem to many to be protecting traditional society.
In the United States, that undercurrent has created a movement of people who are willing to overthrow democracy if it means reinforcing their traditional vision. Christian nationalists believe that the secular values of democracy are destroying Christianity and traditional values. They want to get rid of LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, immigration, and the public schools they believe teach such values. And if that means handing power to a dictator who promises to restore their vision of a traditional society, they’re in.
It is an astonishing rejection of everything the United States has always stood for.
The White House today responded to Trump’s speech. White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said: “Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety…. It’s the opposite of everything we stand for as Americans.”
In conclusion I wish to signpost one of the most important things about resistance and liberation struggle to carry with us into battle against systems of oppression and the crimes against humanity of tyrants; the inevitability of our victory.
The Trump Regime and its apparatus of state terror is compiling information on people who speak out against its crimes and designating them as terrorists in order to steal our freedoms and to authorize repression of dissent. This will fail, and instead will strengthen resistance to tyranny and white supremacist terror and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the ICE kidnapping and torture force.
The great secret of power, the state as embodied violence, and the enforcement of subjugation through police brutality and thought control, is that it is hollow and brittle, and crumbles into nothingness when delegitimized by disbelief and disobedience.
And there is a Calculus of Fear regarding the social use of force, and a point of no return wherein it ceases to have meaning and be useful, as the British Empire discovered when met with Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest, or the Japanese Empire found at Nanking. Who has nothing left to lose is free, uncontrollable, Unconquered and a Living Autonomous Zone able to free others.
We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated if we simply refuse to submit. This is our victory, and a power which cannot be taken from us.
The Resistance is now all of us. Everywhere. It cannot be stopped by arresting protestors and calling them terrorists; we are past the point where dissent can be repressed by force. Only ending the campaign of ethnic cleansing and dismantling the Ice white supremacist terror force can save the wealth, power, and privilege of the hegemonic elites whom the regime serves, and we are not going to permit them to do that.
We are bringing it all down.
Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed
For the edification of the children in this time of reckoning and rewards, I have written a book of values and principles of action to guide us through life. Each sentence belongs on its own page, though you and your children will have to draw the illustrations.
Children, this is the time of year you will be asked, Are you naughty or nice?
Is it better to be naughty, or to be nice?
Better for who?
Don’t be nice, seize power.
Nice means obedient, like a good dog.
Never let anyone make you their dog.
Refuse to sit up and beg, roll over and show your belly, perform tricks or do anything that grants anyone power over you.
Refuse to be bribed or bullied into submission to authority.
Refuse to believe. Never take authority at their word, and test all claims of truth, for there is no just authority.
Refuse to submit.
Even if you are taken down a thousand times, locked away, denied things offered to others, given fearful lectures and not chosen for anyone’s team in games to play, you can still be victorious in defiance and resistance.
Find the other outcasts and build a team for games of liberation struggle, by rules of your own, because we are stronger together.
With the end of the historic show trial of Jimmy Lai darkness swallows whole and entire the glittering beacon of hope for democracy in China which Hong Kong represents, like Leviathan swallows Jonah. Christian theology interprets this as a parallel and prefiguration of the descent of Jesus into Hell; but unlike the mythic and literary figures of Jonah and his reflection, it remains unlikely that Jimmy Lai will emerge from the depths in triumph.
This long collapse of liberty and our universal human rights under the regime of the Chinese Communist Party I have mourned in lamentations and in the witness and remembrance of her endless songs of woe, but also in Resistance to state tyranny and terror and celebration of the Unconquerable Chinese peoples both in Hong Kong and on the mainland who struggle beneath the heel of a brutal and anti-humanist regime of bizarre and flagrant grotesquery, a government spun of lies and illusions and like the Trump regime in America committed to Hitler’s idea of the state as political theatre and to a performative politics of fear aligned with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and to the principle of the state as embodied violence.
In regard to the fate of champion of the people and of our liberty Jimmy Lai, I recommend to you the example of the heroes of revolutionary struggle of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Coalition including Kuwasi Balagoon who broke Assata Shakur out of prison. Where is our Hong Kong Liberation Army?
To the tyrant Xi Jinping, his enforcers, collaborators, and Army of Occupation of Hong Kong, to all bureaucrats of fear and the state as embodied violence, to all carceral states of force and control where ever they may arise, I say with the Mockingjay; “If we burn, you burn with us.”
To all comrades in revolutionary and liberation struggle I say this with Nelson Mandela as he authorized direct action against the Apartheid regime of South Africa from his prison cell by underlining the line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; “Sic Semper Tyrannis”.
Who resists and refuses to be subjugated, who disbelieves and disobeys, become Unconquerable and cannot be defeated; this is our victory, and a power which cannot be taken from us. And the forward movement of history is inevitable, because the great secret of power is that it is brittle and hollow, and collapses into nothingness when met with refusal, disbelief, and disobedience.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As written by in The Guardian, in an article entitled The rise and fall of Jimmy Lai, whose trajectory mirrored that of Hong Kong itself: Progressing from child labourer to billionaire, Lai used his power and wealth to promote democracy, which ultimately pitted him against authorities in Beijing; “On Monday, a Hong Kong court convicted Jimmy Lai of national security offences, the end to a landmark trial for the city and its hobbled protest movement.
The verdict was expected. Long a thorn in the side of Beijing, Lai, a 78-year-old media tycoon and activist, was a primary target of the most recent and definitive crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Authorities cast him as a traitor and a criminal.
Lai’s trial was one of the last unfinished national security prosecutions of Hong Kong’s high profile activists, over their involvement in the 2019 protests. Hundreds of activists, lawyers, and politicians have been pursued and jailed, or chased into exile. But few have captured global attention like Lai, whose life and career has developed in tangent with Hong Kong’s sputtering walk towards democracy, and then its fall.
“The trajectory of his life reflects the history of Hong Kong itself,” said Kevin Yam, a Australian-Hong Kong lawyer, who is subject to a Hong Kong arrest warrant for his pro-democracy activism.
Lai had pleaded not guilty to the one count of conspiracy to publish seditious publications and two counts of conspiracy to foreign collusion. On Monday the court found him guilty of all charges, with the government-appointed judges saying he “had harboured his hatred and resentment for the [People’s Republic of China] for many of his adult years”, and sought the downfall of its ruling Communist party “even though the ultimate cost was the sacrifice of the people of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and HKSAR [Hong Kong Special Administrative Region].”
The trial stretched for nearly two years, beset by delays, legal challenges and government interventions. International rights groups had called it a politically motivated show trial, and an attack on press freedom.
Lai has been behind bars since 2020, either on remand or serving the five separate sentences he has been given for protest-related offences totalling almost 10 years, and a fraud allegation his supporters say was trumped up.
Monday’s convictions could see him given a life sentence. His family already fears he might not live to see freedom. In the weeks before the verdict, his children issued new alarming warnings over his health.
From child labourer to ‘Rupert Murdoch of Asia’
Lai’s rise to become one of the city’s most famous billionaires is a rags to riches tale. At 12 he left Mao’s China for Hong Kong, where he worked as a child labourer in garment factories, before building a business empire that included the retail chain Giordano, and then a media conglomerate that would see him nicknamed the “Rupert Murdoch of Asia”.
At the time of his first arrest in 2020, Lai was worth an estimated $1.2bn, according to a biography written by longtime friend and associate Mark Clifford. But he was one of the few of Hong Kong’s elite who used their power and wealth for activism, funding and participating in pro-democracy and anti-authoritarian efforts.
Many of Lai’s business milestones are tied to key events in the history of Hong Kong and China’s tug of war over democracy, although he wasn’t always political. His son Sebastien says his early business decisions were driven by ambition and boredom.
“I always remember growing up he talked about why he started Giordano, and he was like, look I just got bored,” said son Sebastien.
But after Chinese troops massacred student protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, Lai became politically radicalised, and he launched Next Magazine soon afterwards. The Apple Daily newspaper was established shortly before Hong Kong’s handover from UK rule to China, upending the city’s traditional media market with flashy tabloid reporting and gossip alongside fearless investigations.
“It kept Hong Kong honest in many ways,” says Yam. “We kind of forget that Jimmy Lai and his media businesses played an important role in Hong Kong as an international financial centre because it kept the free flow of information going about Hong Kong’s corporate underbelly.”
The outlets Next Magazine and Apple Daily, along with Lai, would become loud and unashamedly pro-democracy irritants to authorities. Lai himself would write columns, famously calling China’s premier Li Peng, known as the Butcher of Beijing for his role in the massacre, “a bastard with zero IQ” in 1994, drawing political and financial retribution from the Chinese state.
In 2003, the two outlets supported protests against a proposed national security law for Hong Kong, in 2014 they backed the Occupy Central movement, when Lai also joined the protest camp. He was attacked by assailants who poured pig offal over him, and anti-corruption police raided his home and that of his top aide, Mark Simon, after leaked documents revealed he’d donated millions to activists.
In 2019 the papers again backed mass protests, this time against a proposed extradition bill but later building into a major pro-democracy movement. Apple Daily published a cut-out letter to US president Donald Trump on its front page, which readers could send to Washington asking him to “help save Hong Kong”. It would become a key element of the prosecution’s national security case against Lai.
Lai again personally attended protest events, including a banned vigil for Tiananmen in June 2020, where he stood outside his car and held a lit candle, for which he was convicted and sentenced to 13 months in jail.
Throughout his adult life in Hong Kong he was often monitored, harassed and intimidated. The blowback from the Li Peng editorials ultimately led to Lai divesting from Giordano. His house and businesses were repeatedly firebombed, and his family followed by paparazzi. In 2008 he was the target of a foiled assassination plot.
“For them, I am a troublemaker,” he told Clifford. “It is hard for them not to clamp down on me and silence me.”
Sebastien, who now lives outside Hong Kong to lobby for his father’s freedom, says he wasn’t totally aware of the threats when he was young because his father never showed fear.
“I always had the knowledge that my dad was doing the right thing and not the easy thing” says Sebastien.
“You have someone who is, by all accounts, successful, but willing to give everything that he has for his beliefs. That in some sense would shame some people and therefore some people would not like him because of that.
“He always had the advantage that he came from nothing. He also had the advantage of knowing that even with nothing he’d be OK.”
Lai refused entreaties to get a bodyguard, saying he hadn’t done anything wrong. A bodyguard also couldn’t help against his biggest risk: arrest.
After 2019, that risk came to fruition multiple times. In August 2020, just weeks after the introduction of the Beijing-designed national security law (NSL), hundreds of police officers stormed the offices of Apple Daily. They arrested Lai along with several Apple Daily executives under the sweeping new law against dissent. His two eldest sons, Ian and Timothy, were also arrested. The company was ultimately forced to close the following year.
The closure of Apple Daily, yet another nail in the coffin of democratic Hong Kong, was splashed across front pages around the world. The paper was a controversial tabloid, publishing salacious stories and occasionally offensive opinion pieces about mainland Chinese people. Former employees, who testified against Lai as “accomplice witnesses”, alleged a working environment that was free but “within a bird cage”, under the close management and control of Lai, with editorials written with the understanding that they “had to follow the basic stance of the newspaper”.
But, Sebastien says, “in the end Apple is the only newspaper who stood up for democracy in Hong Kong, throughout the whole time, right?”
In defiance of Lai’s arrest and the paper’s closure, Hongkongers queued up to buy an estimated 1m copies of the paper’s final edition. China’s nationalistic Global Times paper praised the closure of the “secessionist tabloid”.
Friends and advisers had urged Lai to take advantage of his UK citizenship, wealth, and foreign residences and flee the country, like many others had. He refused, saying he wanted to stay and support his journalists, and to keep fighting for Hong Kong.
He told Clifford he preferred to go to jail than abandon the city that “gave me everything”.
While out on bail he gave interviews, and launched a livestreamed political talk show. Speaking to the Guardian during that time, Lai was cautiously optimistic, noting the NSL was yet to be fully tested in Hong Kong’s – at the time, still internationally lauded – court system.
“They just want to show the teeth of the national security law, but they haven’t bitten yet,” he said. “So let’s see what happens.”
They did bite. What happened was more than 200 NSL arrests; a mass prosecution of 47 politicians, activists and civil society workers who held an informal vote before city elections; appeals to Beijing when the courts didn’t toe the government line; and laws rewritten to limit bail rights and restrict foreign lawyers from defending Lai.
Lai was reportedly held in solitary, and denied communion as a devout Catholic. Authorities pushed back on such criticisms, saying it was a matter of logistics or even a request by Lai. When Lai was photographed looking gaunt in shorts and sandals in the yard at Stanley prison by an Associated Press photographer with a long lens, the jail built a new roof covering. The photographer, Louise Delmotte, was later barred from working in Hong Kong when her visa renewal application was rejected.
One fear that was never borne out for Lai was a clause in the NSL that the most serious cases could be transferred to the mainland for trial. If they were going to do it for anyone, it would be Lai, observers figured. He had already been treated like the city’s most dangerous criminal, taken to court in December 2023 by armoured convoy, with security “one would expect for a president or a high-profile terrorist”, Clifford’s biography notes.
The Trump connection
At the heart of the prosecution were Lai’s business and political connections, particularly with US officials.
Prosecutors wheeled out a crude Powerpoint-style presentation of “external political connections” with whom Lai had allegedly colluded. It included Trump, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and veteran Democrat legislator Nancy Pelosi. All were known China hawks and during Trump’s first term had toughened US policy towards China in a way that analysts said put real pressure on Beijing over human rights abuses.
Trump has repeatedly promised to lobby for Lai’s release and officials said the media mogul’s case was raised in the meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea in October. But in his second term, Trump’s America First agenda has become even more extreme, alienating allies, and his position on China more focused on “making a deal”.
Some have speculated that this may turn Lai into a bargaining chip in the US-China trade war.
After the South Korea meeting, Sebastien publicly thanked the US president and praised him as the “Liberator in Chief”, a moniker that conservatives bestowed on Trump after the release of hostages from Gaza.
Sebastien’s appeal to Trump stems in part from what he sees as the failure of the UK government to push hard enough for the release of his father, a British citizen.
The UK government has called for Lai’s release and says that his prosecution is politically motivated, but has not taken any economic action against Hong Kong. In the year to July, bilateral trade between the two territories reached £27.2bn, a nearly 10% increase on the previous 12 months. Many Lai supporters feel the UK has not done enough to secure the release of one of its most prominent citizens in its former colony.
Were Jimmy Lai released today, Hong Kong would look very different to what he last knew, says Sebastien.
“It’s obviously no longer the sort of Hong Kong that had all these freedoms that you could associate with,” he says, caveating that he’s not there either now, and can’t return.
“Obviously, I think he’d be quite sad about what’s happened but look, at the end of the day this is someone who’s done everything he can, right? I don’t think anybody looking at his life would think: well, he could have done more.”
As I wrote in my post of July 1 2025, This July, the 28th Anniversary of the Abandonment of Hong Kong to China and of Democracy to Tyranny; We mourn and organize resistance for the liberation of Hong Kong as a sovereign and independent nation from the imperial conquest and dominion of the loathsome Chinese Communist Party, throughout this July the twenty eighth anniversary of the abandonment of Hong Kong by Britain to a carceral state of force and control which was never a legitimate successor to the China with whom the original lease of 1898 was made, and the iconic fall of democracy to tyranny and state terror which it signifies.
On the first of July 2023 the despicable tyrant and criminal of violations of human rights Xi Jinping walked the streets of Hong Kong, an ambush predator wearing the face of a man which cannot conceal his intent to conquer and enslave the world, beginning with Hong Kong as a launching pad for the conquest of the Pacific Rim.
Why had he come to hold a triumphal march in imitation of Hitler in his 1940 visit to Paris; to terrify the people into submission, to claim it personally as a conqueror and imperial occupied territory, to reinforce an illusory legitimacy when all China has is fear and force? All of these things, and one thing more; this is also a marketing stunt aimed at the one partner in tyranny which can bring his regime down and liberate the peoples of both Hong Kong and China, the international business community. Send us your manufacturing jobs, he offers; we have slaves.
If we do not free Hong Kong from his talons, we will be fighting for our survival in the streets of San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle, in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Kolkata, Bangkok, in Sydney and Melbourne, Tokyo and Yokohama, any city which is home to a community of Overseas Chinese, which the government of the Chinese Communist Party considers their own citizens, whether or not they consent to be governed by Beijing. The CCP is uninterested in consent; for a vision of the world they would bequeath to humankind, we need only look at the vast prison and slave labor camp of Xinjiang.
Let us stand in solidarity with the people of Hong Kong and of China in the cause of Liberty and a free society of equals.
When will the free nations of the world recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong and take action shoulder to shoulder with its people to throw off the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party?
The Black Flag flies from the barricades in Hong Kong, and its primary meaning has not changed since its use by the First International and the veterans of the Paris Commune; freedom versus tyranny, the abolition of state terror, surveillance, and control, resistance to nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and abandonment of the social use of force as a lever of unequal power.
With this bold signal the people declare: we shall be ruled by ourselves and no other.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of February 15 2022, Monsters, Freaks, Transgression of the Forbidden, the Sacred Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves: On Chaos as Love and Desire; Watching the sunrise overlooking Hong Kong from Lion Rock, seized many times in recent years by democracy protesters and revolutionaries in the struggle for liberation and independence from China, in the wake of the last celebrations of Chinese New Year and several nearly sleepless nights of making mischief for tyrants under cover of the festival, my thoughts turn to the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, of ourselves as wild and glorious things, of love and desire as anarchic forces of liberation, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden and the violation of norms as seizures of power from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue and the refusal to submit to authority.
Freedom, and all that comes with it; above all freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, as defiance of authorized identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of love and desire as liberating forces of Chaos, and all of this as sacred acts of reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
And of our myriad possible futures, sorting themselves out in our daily lives like a hurricane governed by the flight of a hummingbird; tyranny or liberty, extinction or survival.
Order and its forms as authority, power, capital, and hegemonic elites of patriarchy and racism, class and caste, which arise from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which appropriates and subjugates us through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization and weaponizes hierarchies of otherness and belonging and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and creates states as embodied violence, tyrannies of force and control, carceral states of police and military terror, and dominions of imperial conquest and colonial assimilation and exploitation; all of these systems and structures are born in fear, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and submission to authority, have a key weakness without which they cannot arise and perpetuate unequal power, for this requires the renunciation of love.
Love here means solidarity of action as guarantors of each other’s humanity, with justice for all. Diversity, inclusion, and our duty of care for others are important aspects of love. Love is also a totalizing force which can free us from ossified forms and ways of being human together, and a vehicle of truth, both truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh and those we ourselves create and choose.
Chaos has as its champion the totalizing and uncontrollable divine madness of love, which leaps across all boundaries to unite us in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us.
Love exalts us beyond the limits of ourselves and the flags of our skin, disrupts authorized identities and narratives as imposed conditions of struggle, seizes power as ownership of ourselves, and reveals and affirms the embodied truths of others.
Once we have a definition of democracy as a free society of equals and a praxis of love, there are some principles which can be derived as an art of revolution and seizures of power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Order is unequal power and systemic violence; Chaos is liberty, equality, interdependence, and harmony.
Order subjugates through division and hierarchy; Chaos liberates through equality and solidarity.
Authority falsifies; speaking truth to power or parrhesia as Foucault called truth telling and performing the witness of history confers authenticity to us in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, and to delegitimize tyrants.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As Dorothy says to Oz, he’s just an old humbug.
The four primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
There is no just Authority.
Law serves power and authority; transgression and refusal to submit confer freedom and self-ownership as primary acts of becoming human and Unconquered.
Always go through the Forbidden Door. As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Such is my art of revolution and democracy as love; there remains poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human, and love and desire as unconquerable informing, motivating, and shaping forces and innate human realms of being and powers which cannot be taken from us as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, anarchic and ungovernable as the tides, and it is love and desire as forms of wildness and embodied truth which offer us a definition of freedom as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Hong Kong; I do not like thee, Xi Jinping; and unlike Dr Fell in the beloved poem of 1680 by Tom Brown, I both know and can tell why as a truthteller and witness of history; state terror and tyranny, carceral states of force and thought control, disappearance and torture by police, universal surveillance, and the falsification of propaganda and alternate histories, imperial conquest and colonial exploitation, slave labor and genocidal ethnic cleansing, and fascisms of blood, ideology as a kind of authorized and enforced faith, and soil or national identity; of all this I accuse Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.
These things I am able to say because of the freedom of access to information which I enjoy as an American citizen, because the transparency of the state in America and the legal protection and heroic stature in our society of whistleblowers and truthtellers is a firewall against secret power, and because the sacred calling to pursue the truth as both a right of citizens and a universal human right are among those parallel and interdependent sets of rights of which the common defense is the primary purpose of the state.
So are legitimacy, trust, and representation conferred to any state which is a guarantor of the rights of its citizens; the corollary of this is that any state whose primary purpose is not to guarantee the rights of individuals has no such legitimacy.
We must be a democracy and a free society of equals, or the slaves of tyrants.
And this we must resist.
As I wrote in my post of August 29 2025, Anniversary of the UN Bachelet Report on China’s Genocide of Minorities in Xinjiang, In the Shadow of the Jimmy Lai Trial; A victory for justice and the exposure of tyranny’s lies and falsifications was won two years ago this day with the United Nations declaration of the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang as genocide, slavery, and crimes against humanity.
We mark this anniversary today in the shadow of the Jimmy Lai trial in Hong Kong, as the occupation regime of the CCP wages lawfare as state terror, repression of dissent, and journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
It remains for the international community to bring a Reckoning to Xi Jinping’s regime of cruelty and dehumanization, and join together with the peoples of China in liberation struggle.
China’s horrific crimes in Xinjiang is a boundary which defines the limits of the human and the legitimacy of the state, and it is a line we must defend or surrender to states everywhere the principles of our universal human rights and democracy as a free society of equals wherein the state is co-owned by its citizens as a guarantor of their rights.
There is one and only one condition in which any state can be legitimate, and that is when it acts as a guarantor of the parallel and interdependent sets of rights of citizens and of human beings, and balances those rights so that none may infringe upon those of another.
For once we surrender our humanity to the state, and become things and not human beings, instruments of the power and profit of others through systems of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, subjugated by carceral states of force and control through abjection and learned helplessness, division and authorized identities of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, soil, and faith, we allow those who would enslave us to feed us into the machine of the state as psychopathy and embodied violence as the raw material of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us give to systems of oppression, to fascism, and to tyranny the only reply it merits; Never Again!
As written by Jamey Keaten and Edith M. Lederer in Huffpost: “The office of U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet published its long-awaited report on alleged rights violations in China’s western Xinjiang region Wednesday, brushing aside Beijing’s demands to keep a lid on a report that fanned a tug-of-war for diplomatic influence with the West over the rights of the region’s native Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups.
The report, which Western diplomats and U.N. officials said had been all but ready for months, was published with just minutes to go in Bachelet’s four-year term. The report was unexpected to break significant new ground beyond sweeping findings from independent advocacy groups and journalists who have documented concerns about human rights in Xinjiang for years.
But Bachelet’s report comes with the imprimatur of the United Nations, and the member states that make it up. The run-up to its release fueled a debate over China’s influence at the world body and epitomized the on-and-off diplomatic chill between Beijing and the West over human rights, among other sore spots.
In the past five years, the Chinese government’s mass detention campaign in Xinjiang swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other ethnic groups into a network of prisons and camps, which Beijing called “training centers” but former detainees described as brutal detention centers.
Beijing has since closed many of the camps, but hundreds of thousands continue to languish in prison on vague, secret charges.”
As I wrote in my post of August 19 2020, China’s Holocaust: the Genocide of the Uighurs of Xinjiang and the Colonization of Hong Kong; It begins with the Great Wall of Silence and the control of truth, the repression of dissent and silencing of heroes like Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, and Cai Xia, but it always ends in concentration camps like those in Xinjiang; the path of tyranny and fascism leads ever downward into degradation and dehumanization.
What do you call it when a government enacts the erasure and genocide of an ethnic and religious minority, and profits by their slave labor in concentration camps?
I call it a Holocaust.
What do you call a government which uses forced sterilizations, mass abductions, torture, murder, sending children to orphanages to be taught only in the official language, the outlawing of religious practice, and all this and more horrors and crimes against humanity targeted against those who do not fit the authorities paradigm of blood, faith, and soil?
I call it fascism.
And I say that whatever lies such governments tell about their crimes, what they call themselves or the particulars of their inhumanity, means nothing. All that matters is this; the powerful are inflicting harm on the powerless and the dispossessed.
Shall we let the vulnerable and those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth stand alone? Are all humans our brothers and sisters?
In the conquest and genocide of the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang the Chinese Communist Party has revealed their true nature as a xenophobic authoritarian state of force and control and a criminal organization of state terror and tyranny. They are a government without legitimacy.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As I wrote in my post of July I 2020, An Empire of Terror and Racist Genocide: The Fall of Hong Kong and the Sterilization of the Uighur Ethnic Minority of Xinjiang; As the first wave of mass arrests and crimes against humanity by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime of state terror roll over Hong Kong on this anniversary of its handover by the British to their successor empire in the citadel of darkness which is Beijing, as the women of the Uighur ethnic and religious minority in Xinjiang are forcibly sterilized in a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide which parallels the campaign of erasure in the re- education prisons wherein their language, faith, history, and identity as a people are stolen, the world watches as yet another spectacle of inhumanity unfolds before us with stupefaction and the helpless surrender of civilization to atavistic barbarism.
And once again we do nothing when a predator arrives to cut the powerless and the dispossessed from the herd of humankind, for without a united front against tyrannies of force and control the most ruthless and amoral among us wins.
Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller spoke his famous condemnation of the complicity of silence in the face of evil in the context of the Holocaust, but it applies as a universal principle; “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
As I wrote in my post of October 6 2019, Vendetta Lives: Hong Kong Defies Tyranny and State Terror; I am one man, of limited understanding, though I have worn many masks in many places, and not all of my causes have been lost; through all my forlorn hopes and a lifetime of last stands I yet remain to defy and defend.
Of our many possible futures I can only say this; all is not yet lost, nor is anything past redemption when the will to resist and to become better can be found.
So I leave you with the words of Alan Moore from V for Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
As I wrote in my post of February 11 2022, Genocide Games: the Case of Xinjiang; A year ago I wrote in my post of February 19 2021, China Genocide Slavery Sexual Terror; The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for vast horrors, including xenophobic ethnic cleaning and slavery. But we are also responsible, if we buy the products of injustice.
And like a monster in a horror film which attacks from the darkness when we are distracted, new revelations expose the government of China’s campaign of rape and sexual terror against the Islamic minorities of Xinjiang.
If anyone questions the centrality of a nonsectarian government and the principle of separation of church and state to democracy and our universal human rights, consider the examples of Yemen and Xinjiang.
Little has changed for the peoples of China or of her imperial conquests Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong in the year since I wrote these words in support of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction China movement, words like the screams of terror of the victims of China’s tyranny and terror, swallowed in the howling chasms of darkness of their Occupations and nearly lost to human memory and the witness of history like the countless lives of the silenced and the erased.
But I remember, and bear witness.
In the example of Xinjiang we can see the links between racist and sectarian terror as systemic violence, imperial conquest, and colonial dominion and exploitation.
Here also is the most horrific example of a carceral state of force and thought control as institutionalized dehumanization and enslavement in the world today; as Xinjiang is China’s laboratory for a Brave New World, whose technologies of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification they are exporting to fellow tyrannies globally.
And if we do nothing to change this monstrous crime against humanity or to disrupt Xi Jinping’s plans for the Conquest of the Pacific Rim, in Xinjiang we can see the future which awaits all of us.
Let us unite with the peoples of China, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong in solidarity against imperial conquest and occupation by a regime of tyranny and terror, while we still can.
As written by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post and cited in my journal entry of November 17 2019; ”We have known for some time now that China is carrying out something deeply unsettling in Xinjiang. The restive, far west region of the country is home to a number of Turkic Muslim minorities, including the Uighurs, who in the last half-decade have been swept up in large numbers by the dragnet of the central state. We know that roughly a million or more people have been subjected to a vast system of detention or “reeducation” camps, where they are cajoled to “Sinicize” and abandon their native Islamic traditions. There’s already been a great deal of international criticism: In Washington, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have condemned China’s project of de facto cultural genocide. A report by a United Nations panel of experts warned this month that China’s methods could “deeply erode the foundations” of Chinese society.
But Chinese officials still hide behind the Potemkin villages of their own making. They insist that the camps are actually job-training centers where amenable Xinjiang residents are working to better assimilate into mainstream society through vocational schooling and language instruction. They point to the necessity of such measures to counter the reach of radical Islamist groups in the region. We know now, though, that Chinese authorities don’t actually believe their own party line.
That’s because of the new details surfaced by an astonishing set of leaked documents obtained by the New York Times. The cache includes 403 pages of Communist Party directives, reports, notes from internal investigations and internal speeches given by party officials, including President Xi Jinping. The Times’s story by Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, published this weekend, offers a rarely seen window into the deliberations of one of the world’s most opaque governments. And what we see is chilling.
It relays how a flurry of ethnic violence and terrorist attacks in the early part of the decade persuaded Xi to unleash the “organs of dictatorship” — his own words, in a private speech. This apparently involved mass roundups, the construction of a 21st-century Orwellian apparatus of control and surveillance and a systematic assault on the ability of the region’s residents to observe their Islamic faith. As a justification for the draconian clampdown, a top Chinese official in Xinjiang warned of the risks of placing “human rights above security” in a 10-page directive from 2017. The tranche of documents also points to internal disagreement about the repression in the region and was delivered to the Times by a figure from “the Chinese political establishment” who “expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”
Perhaps the most striking document is a classified directive issued to local officials in an eastern Xinjiang city on how to talk to Uighur students who return from other parts of China and discover their relatives and friends have been disappeared into detention camps.
They were instructed to tell the students that their relatives had been “infected by unhealthy thoughts,” framing the state’s distrust of Muslim minorities in terrifyingly clinical terms. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health,” read the directive.
The Times also reported on evidence of what appears to be a “scoring system” used by officials to determine who gets released from a camp. It incorporates not only the behavior of the detainees, but also the cooperation of relatives outside. “Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.”
The new revelations fit into a wider, horrifying story of repression. China makes independent reporting in Xinjiang virtually impossible — and every foreign reporter invested in covering the story has to weigh the risk of endangering local fixers and sources, many of whom may have already been swept into detention. Meanwhile, analysis of satellite imagery led one researcher to conclude that the authorities have demolished 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites in Xinjiang in recent years. The Washington Post’s editorial page director Fred Hiatt declared: “In China, every day is Kristallnacht.”
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2022, Why I Write: A Manifesto of Art and Revolution At the Dawn of the South Asian Spring; We are coordinating actions among networks of democracy and liberation organizations throughout South Asia, systems of alliances referred to as the Milk Tea Movement, in Hong Kong, Beijing and other cities in China, Thailand, and Burma, which during the past year have morphed with protean strangeness to include Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, West Papua, the Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Sri Lanka, India, Kashmir, possibly a whole emerging South Asian Spring, and now has solidarity with democracy movements as well as direct agents of change within Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Libya in one dominion and within Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen in another.
There is a saying attributed as a Chinese curse 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, “May you live in interesting times.”
We are now living in interesting times; whether we make of our time a curse or a fulcrum with which to change the balance of power in the world from tyranny to democracy and free societies of equals rests with each of us.
How shall we write our witness of history and sacred calling to pursue the truth as what Foucault called truthtellers? In this crucial moment wherein the fate of humankind hangs between tyranny and liberty, how are we to perform an ars poetica of revolution?
One way to describe our experience of our time is to focus on externalities, much as Flaubert did in his attempt to remove his own authorial voice from his stories in service to Reason. Such an exercise yields narratives much like the daily current events briefing I gave to my Forensics classes during Extemp Prep, a team current events speaking competition. Perhaps the best example today is the newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who writes the most impartial and trustworthy daily news brief as current history. Its a unique approach to events unfolding around us in real time, and her references and contexts are authoritative and reliable.
To contrast and compare her art to mine as rhetoric, I write here in my daily political journal what may be described as strategy, intelligence, and policy guidance for the antifascist community and allied revolutionary, liberation, and democracy movements throughout the world and its Autonomous Zones and Abraham Lincoln Brigades. That the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty is “to incite, provoke, and disturb” should give warning that I make no pretense to impartial and nonpartisan writing.
My biases are defined first by my values, including liberty, equality, truth and justice, nonviolence and our universal human rights, and their praxis as causes, and secondly by the windmills against which I tilt; unequal power, authority and authorized identities, normality and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, tyrannies of force and control and carceral states of police terror and institutionalized violence, militarism and imperial conquest, dominion, and colonialism, fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and their systemic and historical instruments patriarchy and racism, divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of membership and belonging, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which drives all of this.
In this revolutionary struggle 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. And if you are among them or their allies who refuse to submit to tyranny and terror, this I say to you; I am not a good man, but I may be someone who can help.
I hope to be more useful than a good man, whose scope of action is limited by the false morality of those who would enslave us among the imposed conditions of struggle and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, as Shaw teaches us through the figure of Eliza’s father in Pygmalion and the gorgeous film My Fair Lady.
We must resist division in service to power into the deserving and the undeserving by a moral burden of merit as a hierarchy of otherness and membership in hegemonic elites. Let us answer merit and caste with equality and universal human rights, and division, especially fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, with solidarity.
Neither of us need to be good in order to help or receive help, merely in need or able to help where needed as a duty of care for others which honors our common humanity and recognizes our interdependence.
So I say again, I am not a good man, for I accept no limits and trust no authority, and I practice as sacred acts seizures of power, disruptions of order and bringing the Chaos, the transgression of the Forbidden, violation of normalities, subversions of authorized identities, the pursuit of truth, believing impossible things but only those I myself have created or chosen, and poetic vision as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
And if you are among the outcast, the broken and the lost, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, I am a bad man who is on your side.
As written by Julian Borger in The Guardian; “The outgoing UN human rights commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, has said that China had committed “serious human rights violations” against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province which may amount to crimes against humanity.
Bachelet’s damning report was published with only 11 minutes to go before her term came to an end at midnight Geneva time. Publication was delayed by the eleventh-hour delivery of an official Chinese response that contained names and pictures of individuals that had to be blacked out by the UN commissioner’s office for privacy and safety reasons.
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, rejected it as an anti-China smear, while Uyghur human rights groups hailed it as a turning point in the international response to the programme of mass incarceration.
The 45-page report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concluded: “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The Chinese government, which attempted until the last moment to stop the publication of the report, said in an official response that it was “based on the disinformation and lies fabricated by anti-China forces” and that it “wantonly smears and slanders” China and interfered in the country’s internal affairs.
The Chinese response was accompanied by a 121-page counter-report, emphasising the threat of terrorism and the stability that the state programme of “de-radicalisation” and “vocational education and training centres” has brought to Xinjiang.
Human rights organisations welcomed the report. Omer Kanat, the executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project pressure group said it was “a game-changer for the international response to the Uyghur crisis”.
“Despite the Chinese government’s strenuous denials, the UN has now officially recognized that horrific crimes are occurring,” Kanat said.
Over the past five years, China swept an estimated million Uyghurs and other minority groups into internment camps which it termed training centres. Some of the centres have since been closed but there are still thought to be hundreds of thousands still incarcerated. In several hundred cases families had no idea about the fate of relatives who had been detained.
Out of 26 former inmates interviewed by UN investigators, two-thirds “reported having been subjected to treatment that would amount to torture and/or other forms of ill-treatment”.
The abuses described included beatings with electric batons while being strapped in a “tiger chair” (to which inmates are strapped by their hands and feet), extended solitary confinement, as well as what appeared to be a form of waterboarding, “being subjected to interrogation with water being poured in their faces”.
The US and some other countries have said the mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang, the destruction of mosques and communities and forced abortion and sterilisation, amount to genocide. The UN report does not mention genocide but says allegations of torture, including force medical procedures, as well as sexual violence were all “credible”.
It said that the authorities had deemed violations of the three-child official limit on family size to be an indicator of “extremism”, leading to internment.
“Several women interviewed by OHCHR raised allegations of forced birth control, in particular forced IUD [intrauterine device] placements and possible forced sterilisations with respect to Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women. Some women spoke of the risk of harsh punishments including “internment” or “imprisonment” for violations of the family planning policy,” the report said.
“Among these, OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy. These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible.”
In the report, Bachelet, a former Chilean president, noted that the average rate of sterilisation per 100,000 inhabitants in China as a whole was just over 32. In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region it was 243.
“Serious human rights violations have been committed in [the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-‘extremism’ strategies,” the report said. “These patterns of restrictions are characterized by a discriminatory component, as the underlying acts often directly or indirectly affect Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim communities.”
The report calls on the Chinese government to “take prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” in Xinjiang and “urgently clarify the whereabouts of individuals whose families have been seeking information about their loved ones”.
Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The United Nations Human Rights Council should use the report to initiate a comprehensive investigation into the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity targeting the Uyghurs and others – and hold those responsible to account.”
As I wrote in my post of October 5 2020, Occupation and Exile: Hong Kong; As the iron talons of the Chinese Communist Party close upon their prize conquest of Hong Kong, eager to batten onto the legacy of wealth and influence generations of freedom has built, they begin to kill the thing they most desire, hammering dissent and a free market of ideas which they cannot swallow and survive with brutal repression, revealed before the world as a tyranny of state terror and thought control; for this is a golden egg which cannot be extracted from its goose without destroying it.
The unrivaled trading and financial power of Hong Kong emerges from its innovation and traditions of open intellectual research and debate; democracy and universal human rights, among them being the sacrosanct nature of pursuit of the truth and of scientific and academic discovery. Send forces of occupation and political control to repress freedom of thought and the self-ownership of autonomous individuals, and the state annihilates the conditions which made their conquest valuable. Let them continue, and that conquest will utterly transform its conqueror with its alien Enlightenment values and ideals. Such is the dilemma which now confronts the CCP; the one which confronts the world is that we must intervene to liberate Hong Kong now while our options still include those other than war.
Xi Jinping’s Communist government, which squats upon mainland China like a miasma of contagion and darkness, as xenophobic as any fascist military dictatorship, as authoritarian as any feudal monarchy of the divine right of kings, and eyeing its neighbors hungrily as an imperial power with designs upon the liberty of any Chinese person anywhere and on the cities which they inhabit as future conquests, remains a threat not only to Hong Kong, but to all humankind.
As I wrote in my post of February 3; In this the Chinese Communist Party follows the First Rule of Tyranny; When the state’s absolute monopoly on power is in doubt, kill everyone not personally loyal to you. This aphorism, not included in the public version of the Red Book, was put into practice by Mao when he seized totalitarian control of the CCP during the Jiangxi Soviet Massacre in 1935 by killing three out of four of its members, the true origin of the Chinese Communist Party as it exists today as a structure of state terror and thought control.
What then can we do? First America and the free world must recognize the independence and sovereignty of Hong Kong; second we and our allies must enact a total Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of all trade and manufacture with mainland China.
Shall we be collaborators and profiteers of slave labor, or shall we stand in solidarity to cast down from their thrones all those who would enslave us?
In the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
“If we Burn, You Burn With Us”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic, Mark L. Clifford
The rise and fall of Jimmy Lai, whose trajectory mirrored that of Hong Kong itself: Progressing from child labourer to billionaire, Lai used his power and wealth to promote democracy, which ultimately pitted him against authorities in Beijing
Why we fight: the stakes of the Hong Kong liberation struggle can be seen in the corpses of political prisoners which toured the world as the CCP’s threat of terror and atrocities to silence global dissent.
They are coming for us and for all democracy protestors with teams of assassins throughout the world, and we must come for them first and bring regime change to the Chinese Communist Party.
Governments and rights groups condemn conviction of Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai: UK, EU and Australia say guilty verdict against 78-year-old is further blow to democracy and press freedom in territory
Give the Devil his due; Trump makes performative noises of protest and objection to his collaborator in constructing a police state of surveillance and repression.
Trump urges Xi Jinping to free HK pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai
The Guardian view on a showtrial in Hong Kong: a new authoritarian low: The jailing of 45 pro-democracy activists testifies to the ruthless suppression of a once-vibrant civil society
I say Happy Hanukah to all, in recognition that no matter how much the state of Israel wishes to confuse and conflate Jewish identity with the authority of the state in service to power, these things have nothing to do with each other; indeed the peace and democracy movement within Israel and throughout the global Jewish Diaspora are crucial to the reimagination and transformation of the Israeli state’s institutions of colonial dominion and Occupation and to the emergence of humankind from fascist ideologies of blood, faith, and soil, among them Zionism and the Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum ideology of the Israeli state and the Netanyahu regime.
Hanukkah and Christmas fall near each other, a reminder to us all that the Abrahamic faiths are one faith divided by history.
In many ways the historic victory over the Seleucid empire which Hanukkah celebrates founded and defined Jewish identity as synonymous with dual political ideals; freedom of religion and anticolonial liberation struggle.
This is the Hanukkah I celebrate today; the equality and solidarity of all human souls in action as guarantors of each other’s humanity and universal human rights, and in revolutionary struggle and Resistance to authority and tyranny.
In the words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks; “Hanukkah is about the freedom to be true to what we believe without denying the freedom of those who believe otherwise. It’s about lighting our candle, while not being threatened by or threatening anyone else’s candle.”
As written by Jeremy Scahill in The Intercept in 2023, in an article entitled This Is Not a War Against Hamas: The notion that the war would end if Hamas was overthrown or surrenders is as ahistorical as it is false; “THE EVENTS OF the past week should obliterate any doubt that the war against the Palestinians of Gaza is a joint U.S.–Israeli operation. On Friday, as the Biden administration stood alone among the nations of the world in vetoing a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was busy circumventing congressional review to ram through approval of an “emergency” sale of 13,000 tank rounds to Israel. For weeks, Blinken has been zipping across the Middle East and appearing on scores of television networks in a PR tour aimed at selling the world the notion that the White House is deeply concerned about the fate of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. “Far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them,” Blinken declared on November 10. A month later, with the death toll skyrocketing and calls for a ceasefire mounting, Blinken assured the world Israel was implementing new measures to protect civilians and that the U.S. was doing everything it could to encourage Israel to employ a tiny bit more moderation in its widespread killing campaign. Friday’s events decisively flushed those platitudes into a swirling pool of blood.
Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has argued, including on U.S. news channels, “Our war is your war.” In retrospect, this wasn’t a plea to the White House. Netanyahu was stating a fact. From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his “great, great friend” Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction.
The propaganda from the Biden administration has been so extreme at times that even the Israeli military has suggested they tone it down a notch or two. Biden falsely claimed to see images of “terrorists beheading children” and then knowingly relayed that unverified allegation as fact — including over the objections of his advisers — and publicly questioned the death toll of Palestinian civilians. None of this is by accident, nor can it be attributed to the president’s propensity to exaggerate or stumble into gaffes.
Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.
Israel’s Dystopian Game Show
The horrifying nature of the October 7 attacks led by Hamas do not in any way — morally or legally — justify what Israel has done to the civilian population of Gaza, more than 18,000 of whom have died in a 60-day period. Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of proportionality or legality. Israel’s own crimes dwarf those of Hamas and the other groups that participated in the October 7 operations. Yet Biden and other U.S. officials continue to defend the indefensible by rolling out their well-worn and twisted notion of Israel’s right to “self-defense.”
If we apply that rationale — promoted by both the U.S. and Israel — to the 75 years of history before October 7, how many times throughout that period would the Palestinians have been “justified” in massacring thousands of Israeli children, systematically attacking its hospitals and schools? How many times would they have been acting in “self-defense” as they razed whole neighborhoods to rubble, transforming the apartment buildings Israeli civilians once called home into concrete tombs? This justification only works for Israel because the Palestinians can enact no such destruction upon Israel and its people. It has no army, no navy, no air force, no powerful nation states to provide it with the most modern and lethal military hardware. It does not have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Israel can burn Gaza and its people to the ground because the U.S. facilitates it, politically and militarily.
Despite all the airtime consumed by Blinken and other U.S. officials playing make-believe on the issue of protecting Palestinian civilians, what has unfolded on the ground is nothing less than a corralling of the population of Gaza into an ever-shrinking killing cage. On December 1, Israel released an interactive map of Gaza dividing it into hundreds of numbered zones. On the Israel Defense Forces’ Arabic language website, it encouraged Gaza’s residents to scan a QR code to download the map and to monitor IDF channels to know when they need to evacuate to a different zone to avoid being murdered by Israeli bombs or ground operations. This is nothing short of a dystopian Netflix show produced by Israel in which its participants have no choice to opt out and a wrong guess will get you and your children maimed or killed. On a basic level, it is grotesque to tell an entrapped population that has limited access to food, water, health care, or housing — and whose internet connections have repeatedly been shut down — to go online to download a survival map from a military force that is terrorizing them.
Throughout Blinken’s one-man parade proclaiming that the U.S. had made clear to Israel that it needs to protect civilians, Israel has repeatedly struck areas of Gaza to which it had told residents to flee. In some cases, the IDF sent SMS messages to people just 10 minutes before attacking. One such message read: “The IDF will begin a crushing military attack on your area of residence with the aim of eliminating the terrorist organization Hamas.” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Palestinians were being treated “like human pinballs – ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.” Blinken attributed the continuously mounting pile of Palestinian corpses to “a gap” between Israel’s stated intent to lessen civilian deaths and its operations. “I think the intent is there,” he said. “But the results are not always manifesting themselves.”
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby got visibly irritated when asked on December 6 about Israel’s widespread killing of civilians. “It is not the Israeli Defense Forces strategy to kill innocent people. It’s happening. I admit that. Each one is a tragedy,” he said. “But it’s not like the Israelis are sitting around every morning and saying ‘Hey, how many more civilians can we kill today?’ ‘Let’s go bomb a school or a hospital or a residential building and just—and cause civilian casualties.’ They’re not doing that.” One problem with Kirby’s rant is that attacks against civilians, schools, and hospitals are exactly what Israel is doing—repeatedly. It is irrelevant what Kirby believes the IDF’s intent to be. For two months, numerous Israeli officials and lawmakers have said that their intent is to collectively strangle the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, death, or flight.
Kirby’s claims are also decimated by the revelations in a recent investigative report by the Israeli media outlets 972 and Local Call. The story, based on interviews with seven Israeli military and intelligence sources, described in detail how Israel knows precisely the number of civilians present in buildings it strikes and at times has knowingly killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in order to kill a single top Hamas commander. “Nothing happens by accident,” one Israeli source said. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
As Israel ratchets up its killing machine, giving lie to all of Blinken’s pronouncements, it continues to wage a propaganda war that is consistent with its overarching campaign of mass killing. No lie is too obscene to justify the wholesale slaughter of people that Israel’s defense minister has called “human animals.” According to this campaign, there are no Palestinian children, no Palestinian hospitals, no Palestinian schools. The U.N. is Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. The prime ministers of Belgium, Spain, and Ireland are Hamas. Everything and everyone who dissents in the slightest from the genocidal narrative is Hamas.
Israel has quite understandably grown accustomed to many Western media outlets accepting its lies — no matter how outrageous or vile — when they are told about Palestinians. But even news outlets with a long track record of promoting Israel’s narrative unchecked have inched toward incredulity. Not because they have had a change of conscience, but because the Israeli propaganda is so farcical that it would be embarrassing to pretend it is otherwise.
Israeli forces have distributed multiple images and videos in recent days of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear — sometimes wearing blindfolds — and claimed they are all Hamas terrorists surrendering. These claims, too, fell apart under the most minimal scrutiny: Some of the men have been identified as journalists, shop owners, U.N. employees. In one particularly ridiculous piece of propaganda, a video filmed by IDF soldiers and distributed online depicted naked Palestinian captives laying down their alleged rifles.
Government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the practice of stripping detainees. “Remember, it’s the Middle East and it’s warmer here. Especially during the day when it’s sunny, to be asked to take off your shirt might not be pleasant, but it’s not the end of the world,” Regev told Sky News. “We are looking for people who would have concealed weapons, especially suicide bombers with explosive vests.” Regev was asked about this clear violation of the Geneva Conventions’s prohibition against publishing videos of prisoners of war. “I’m not familiar with that level of international law,” he said, adding (as though it matters) that he did not believe the videos were distributed by official Israeli government channels. “These are military aged men who were arrested in a combat zone,” he said.
Despite Israeli claims of mass surrenders by Hamas fighters, Haaretz reported that “of the hundreds of Palestinian detainees photographed handcuffed in the Gaza Strip in recent days, about 10 to 15 percent are Hamas operatives or are identified with the organization,” according to Israeli security sources. Israel has produced no evidence to support its claim that even this alleged small pool of the stripped prisoners were Hamas guerrillas.
So what we have here is both a violation of the Geneva Conventions and an immoral production in which Palestinian civilians are forced at gunpoint to play Hamas fighters in an Israeli propaganda movie.
No Path of Resistance
It has become indisputably clear over these past two months that there are not actually two sides to this horror show. Without question, the perpetrators who meted out the horrors against Israeli civilians on October 7 should be held accountable. But that is not what this collective killing operation is about. And journalists should stop pretending it is.
Any analysis of the Israeli state’s terror campaign against the people of Gaza cannot begin with the events of October 7. An honest examination of the current situation must view October 7 in the context of Israel’s 75-year war against the Palestinians and the past two decades of transforming Gaza first into an open-air prison and now into a killing cage. Under threat of being labeled antisemitic, Israel and its defenders demand acceptance of Israel’s official rationale for its irrational actions as legitimate, even if they are demonstrably false or they seek to justify war crimes. “You look at Israel today. It’s a state that has reached such a degree of irrational, rabid lunacy that its government routinely accuses its closest allies of supporting terrorism,” the Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani recently told Intercepted. “It is a state that has become thoroughly incapable of any form of inhibition.”
Israel has imposed, by lethal force, a rule that Palestinians have no legitimate rights of any form of resistance. When they have organized nonviolent demonstrations, they have been attacked and killed. That was the case in 2018-2019 when Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed protesters during the Great March of Return, killing 223 and wounding more than 8,000 others. Israeli snipers later boasted about shooting dozens of protesters in the knee during the weekly Friday demonstrations. When Palestinians fight back against apartheid soldiers, they are killed or sent into military tribunals. Children who throw rocks at tanks or soldiers are labeled terrorists and subjected to abuse and violations of basic rights — that is, if they are not summarily shot dead. Palestinians live their lives stripped of any context or any recourse to address the grave injustices imposed on them.
You cannot discuss the crimes of Hamas or Islamic jihad or any other armed resistance factions without first addressing the question of why these groups exist and have support. One aspect of this should certainly probe Netanyahu’s own role — extending back to at least 2012 — in propping up Hamas and facilitating the flow of money to the group. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud comrades in 2019.
But in the broader sense, a sincere examination of why a group such as Hamas gained popularity among Palestinians or why people in Gaza turn to armed struggle must focus on how the oppressed, when stripped of all forms of legitimate resistance, respond to the oppressor. It should be focused on the rights of people living under occupation to assert and defend their self-determination. It should allow Palestinians to have their struggle placed in the context of other historical battles for liberation and independence and not relegated to racist polemics about how all Palestinian acts of resistance constitute terrorism and there are not really any innocents in Gaza. Israel’s president said as much on October 13. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Isaac Herzog declared. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
The notion that the Palestinians of Gaza could end all of their suffering by overthrowing Hamas is just as ahistorical and false as the oft-repeated claims that the war against Gaza would end if Hamas surrendered and released all Israeli hostages. “Look, this could be over tomorrow,” Blinken said December 10. “If Hamas got out of the way of civilians instead of hiding behind them, if it put down its weapons, if it surrendered.” That, of course, is a crass lie. With or without Hamas, Israel’s war against the Palestinians would endure precisely because of Blinken and his ilk in elite bipartisan U.S. foreign policy circles.
Throughout the years of U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid regime, it has consistently facilitated Israel’s “mowing the grass” in Gaza. This is not a series of periodic assaults on Hamas — it is a cyclical campaign of terror bombings largely aimed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is not — and Biden personally has never been — an outside observer or a friend encouraging moderation during an otherwise righteous crusade. None of this slaughter would be occurring if Biden valued Palestinian lives over Israel’s false narratives and its bloody ethnonationalist wars of annihilation repackaged as self-defense. We should end the charade that this is an Israeli war against Hamas. We should call it what it is: a joint U.S.–Israeli war against the people of Gaza.”
What of American complicity, near uniform across seventy years and rule by both parties, as sponsors and beneficiaries of Israeli war crimes, state terror, and ethnic cleansing?
As written by Andre Damon in the World Socialist Web Site, in an article entitled Biden admits Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing”: A confession of complicity in war crimes; “On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden made a series of damning admissions regarding the ongoing genocide in Gaza that makes clear the United States is consciously aiding and abetting what it knows to be war crimes by the Israeli government.
At a campaign event, Biden stated that Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing” of the civilian population of Gaza. He subsequently added that Israel’s Minister of National Security “Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they… They not only want to have retribution, which they should for what the Palestinians—Hamas—did, but against all Palestinians.”
In other words, Biden admitted that Israel is not making efforts to limit civilian casualties and the reason is that the minister of national security is deliberately seeking to carry out retribution, i.e., collective punishment, against all Palestinian civilians, including unarmed women and children.
The American president has thus admitted to arming, funding and politically supporting the intentional murder of civilian members of a targetted ethnic group—i.e., genocide. Significantly, even in light of these admissions, Biden reiterated that the United States would continue its unconditional funding and arming of the Israeli military, declaring that “in the meantime, none of it is going to walk away from providing Israel what they need to defend themselves and to finish the job.”
Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited by the Geneva Conventions Additional Protocol I of 1977. They constitute a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and the perpetrators can be prosecuted and held responsible in international and domestic courts.
Significantly, on multiple occasions, the Biden administration has made clear that the United States has set no limits on the extent to which Israel may target civilians. On November 7, asked whether it is “still the case” that the administration has “no red lines” regarding civilian deaths, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied, “That is still the case.”
Biden’s statements on Tuesday will be “Exhibit A” in any war crimes trial, effectively constituting an admission that the United States is consciously aiding and abetting war crimes by Israel.
In a press briefing Wednesday, Kirby and State Department spokesman Matthew Miller went into damage control mode, attempting to walk back the president’s statements, with Miller effectively declaring that Biden’s admission did not represent the formal position of the US government. “We have not made a formal determination to that question,” Miller said.
Asked by a reporter, “Does the president believe, based on those comments, that Israel’s conduct in this war thus far has been in accordance with international law?” Kirby said the opposite of Biden’s statement that Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing.” He maintained, “we know they’ve stated their intent to reduce civilian casualties. And they have acted on that … by publishing a map online.”
Another reporter asked, “Biden says yesterday, of course, there were indiscriminate attacks, which to the rest of the world is a war crime.”
To this, Kirby replied, “There is a clear intent by the Israelis and attempt that they have admitted to publicly that they are doing everything they can to reduce civilian casualties.”
He added, “We’re going to continue to support them… They have every right to defend themselves.”
The United Nations’ official definition of genocide notes that there are two elements to the crime of genocide, “a mental element” and “a physical element,” with the physical element being “killing members of the group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” Israel has killed at least 10,000 Palestinian children and injured tens of thousands more.
But, the UN notes, “The intent is the most difficult element to determine.” It adds, “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
But as Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, explained, the Israeli assault on Gaza is a “textbook case of genocide,” precisely because “explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military leave no room for doubt or debate.”
To cite one of innumerable examples, Giora Eiland, the former head of the Israeli National Security Council, called for the deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians and the creation of conditions for the spread of “severe epidemics.”
Now, however, the leading funder and arms dealer for the government committing the genocide has explicitly stated that they are “killing members of the group” because they want to target the entire Palestinian population.
Critically, the UN document defining genocide notes, “This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals.” When Biden admits that the Israeli Defense Ministry is seeking “retribution … against all Palestinians,” he is making clear that Israel is carrying out precisely this critical component of genocide.
Biden made these statements against the backdrop of an overwhelming vote in the United Nations General Assembly calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The United States was among a handful of countries that voted “no.”
But like dozens of non-binding resolutions passed by the United Nations over the course of decades, this resolution will have no direct effect.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller made this perfectly clear in his briefing Wednesday, declaring: “[I]t’s not the first time that Israel has not done well in a vote in the UN; you’ve seen the UN take a number of votes, oftentimes by fairly dramatic margins with respect to Israel, when we have disagreed with the outcome of those votes. So this is not the first time that has happened.”
In other words, the United States is making clear that symbolic votes in the UN General Assembly will do nothing to stop its criminal activities. Israel, for its part, demonstrated open defiance of the vote, launching a series of atrocities Tuesday, including the blowing up of a school operated by UNRWA, the UN refugee agency in Palestine, and flooding underground structures in Gaza with seawater, potentially poisoning the water supply and killing the plant life that sustains agriculture.
In announcing that the US would vote against a ceasefire in Gaza, US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “Any ceasefire right now would be temporary at best and dangerous at worst.” She added, “Israel, like every single country on earth, has the right and the responsibility to defend its people from acts of terrorism.”
Workers and youth must draw the lessons of these developments. The imperialist countries that either voted for the ceasefire—including France and Australia—as well as those that abstained, including the UK, Italy and Germany—have all endorsed Israel’s onslaught against Gaza and provided material logistical support for it, with the UK, France and Australia all sending warships to the region so as to threaten Iran not to intervene.
Each and every one of these countries has attempted to criminalize demonstrations against the genocide, seeking to equate opposition to the genocide with antisemitism and support for terrorism.
The Arab states, for their part, have for years enabled Israel’s oppression and mass murder of the Palestinian population in an effort to seek an accommodation with US imperialism.
None of these governments or institutions can be relied on to stop the genocide in Gaza. The basic reality is that the struggle against the genocide in Gaza is a struggle against the governments that are supporting it.
For this reason, stopping the genocide in Gaza requires the mass mobilization of the working class. Workers should support the call by the Palestinian trade unions not to handle war materiel destined for Israel. The global demonstrations by millions of people against the genocide must be expanded and armed with a socialist perspective.
Millions of people have taken part in marches and demonstrations against the genocide. But if this movement is to succeed, it is urgently necessary to fuse the growing movement against war with the struggles of the working class and arm this movement with the socialist perspective of putting an end to the capitalist system that is the root cause of war and imperialist barbarism.”
Among all the odious and vile sideshows of our political system, a glorious and unconquered champion of the people bears witness and calls for solidarity with the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; Bernie Sanders calls for peace and a Reckoning of our sponsorship of ethnic cleansing and war crimes by Israel.
As written by Stephanie Kirchgaessner in The Guardian, in an article entitled Bernie Sanders demands answers on Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ Gaza bombing:
Senator proposes resolution to investigate ‘humanitarian cataclysm … being done with American bombs and money’; “ The US’s support for Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza is facing new scrutiny in Washington following a proposed resolution by the independent senator Bernie Sanders that could ultimately be used to curtail military assistance.
It is far from clear whether Sanders has the support to pass the resolution, but its introduction in the Senate this week – by an important progressive ally of the US president, Joe Biden – highlights mounting human rights and political concerns by Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Citing the killing of nearly 19,000 people and wounding of more than 50,000 in Gaza since Hamas’s brutal 7 October attack, Sanders said it was time to force a debate on the bombing that has been carried out by the rightwing government of the Israel prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US government’s “complicity” in the war.
“This is a humanitarian cataclysm, and it is being done with American bombs and money. We need to face up to that fact – and then we need to end our complicity in those actions,” Sanders said in a statement.
If passed, the resolution would force the US state department to report back to Congress any violations of internationally recognized human rights caused by “indiscriminate or disproportionate” military operations in Gaza, as well as “the blanket denial of basic humanitarian needs”.
The state department would also have to report back on any actions the US has taken to limit civilian risk caused by Israeli actions, a summary of arms provided to Israel since 7 October, an assessment of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law in Gaza, and a certification that Israeli security forces have not committed any human rights violations.
“We all know Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack began this war,” Sanders said. “But the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate bombing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the Congress must demand answers about the conduct of this campaign. A just cause for war does not excuse atrocities in the conduct of that war.”
Any such resolution would have to clear the Senate but only require a simple majority. It would also have to pass the House and be signed by the White House.
The resolution includes details about the extensive use of US arms, including massive explosive ordinance, such as Mark 84 2,000lb bombs and 155mm artillery, and includes “credible findings” by human rights monitors and press organizations about the use of US arms in specific strikes that killed a large number of civilians.
If the resolution were to pass, the administration would have 30 days to produce the requested report. After it is received, Congress would under US law be able to condition, restrict, terminate or continue security assistance to Israel.
Congress has not requested such a resolution since 1976.
Sanders has come under pressure from progressive Democrats to support calls for a ceasefire. Instead, the senator has previously called for a “humanitarian pause” to allow more aid into Gaza.
In a letter to Biden this week, Sanders called on the US president to withdraw his support for a $10.1bn weapons package for Israel, which is contained in a proposed supplemental foreign aid package, and for the US to support a UN resolution it has previous vetoed demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
And so we come to the question posed by Tolstoy and Lenin with mirror image results, one began the ideology of nonviolence in resistance to tyranny, the other began the Russian Revolution to seize power from tyrants; What is to be done?
As written by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, in an article entitled There’s only one way out of this Gaza war and Netanyahu is blocking it. Joe Biden must force him from power; “Joe Biden’s bond with Israel and the Jewish people runs so deep he is said to feel it in his kishkes (that’s “guts”, for the non-Yiddish speakers among you). Biden demonstrated that early in the current crisis by visiting Israel within days of the 7 October massacre, which saw 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, killed, many tortured and mutilated. He demonstrated it again, just as swiftly, with the dispatch of two US aircraft carriers to the region, aimed at deterring Hezbollah and its Iranian backers from attacking Israel from the north – his one-word message: “Don’t.” And he showed it once more just last week, wielding the US veto at the United Nations – making Washington all but a lone voice against the global chorus demanding that Israel end its offensive in Gaza, which has left so many thousands dead.
But there is one last act of service Biden needs to perform for the sake of the Israel he has stood with so long, a task he is uniquely able to execute. He must push Benjamin Netanyahu from power – and do all he can to ensure he does not return. Right now, the focus of US-Israeli relations is on the clock, on how long Washington will give its ally –which it arms – to pursue its stated goal of defeating Hamas, even at the cost of terrible death and destruction in Gaza. Hints that Biden’s patience is wearing thin are getting louder. This week he warned that Israel is “starting to lose [international] support by the indiscriminate bombing that takes place”. The signals are that Israel has until the middle or end of January to keep up what the White House calls “high-intensity military operations”. After that, it will have to move to “a different phase” – one that consists of focused, targeted raids on Hamas strongholds, with fewer civilian casualties.
But Biden needs to go much further. He needs to confront Netanyahu – and win.
There are multiple reasons why the avowedly pro-Israel Biden should want Netanyahu out, but start with what happens in Gaza the day after Hamas rule ends. The Israeli leader says he will not countenance any involvement by the Palestinian Authority in running Gaza, not least because that’s what the US is pushing for – and Netanyahu reckons standing up to Washington plays well with his base. But his refusal amounts to ruling out the involvement of any Palestinians at all in running Gaza.
If it’s not Hamas and it’s not Fatah, the movement that dominates the authority, there’s no other substantial Palestinian group left. By opposing Biden’s plan, Netanyahu implies that the only acceptable options for Gaza are rule by a coalition of Arab states – which don’t want the job, and would certainly refuse it without Palestinian participation – or reoccupation by Israel. One is implausible, the other unacceptable.
Netanyahu’s position is that Israel cannot entertain anything that looks like a step toward Palestinian statehood. Witness the remarks of Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK – handpicked for the post by Netanyahu – who this week said “absolutely no” to the prospect of a Palestinian state. That stance blows apart a central defence of Israel’s current strategy: that it has to remove Hamas in order to make possible an eventual accommodation with the Palestinian people, in the form of the two-state solution.
There’s speculation that Hotovely was thinking less of Israel’s diplomatic needs than of her own ambition to return to her previous job, as a Likud member of Israel’s parliament. If that’s right, she was merely following the lead set by her patron. For the core criticism of Netanyahu is that he is thinking not of Israel’s national interest at a time of war, but rather his own political future. Given that he is on trial on corruption charges that could put him in jail, he is desperate to cling to the job that will keep him out.
And so he behaves in ways that damage his country but which, he believes, will help him. He devotes precious time and energy to ensuring it is Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs who get blamed for the appalling failures that made 7 October possible – even though the evidence is stark that he himself ignored the warnings of “a clear and present danger” that were put in front of him. He has stayed away from the funerals of the victims of 7 October, and has barely met the families of the bereaved, fearing they would slam him in public.
And he has sat back as members of his far-right coalition make unspeakable threats – calling for Gaza to be erased or burned – and while his security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has a conviction on terrorism charges, hands out weapons to his fellow extremists and encourages settlers as they provoke yet more conflict and violence in the West Bank. All of this is a disaster for Palestinians most obviously, but also for Israel as it seeks to maintain the international support Biden rightly said it is losing. Netanyahu stands by and does nothing, too frightened of the hard right he needs in order to keep his coalition from breaking apart – and whose votes he wants when elections come, which may be soon.
That is the heart of the matter. Israel is led by a man who is fighting only for himself. Which is why one of the heroes of 7 October, retired general Noam Tibon – now famous for grabbing a weapon, jumping in his car and heading down south to rescue his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren from the Hamas men who were poised to kill them – told me: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a huge danger to the state of Israel. While he is in the prime minister’s chair, we cannot win this war.”
Biden may well agree with that analysis. He has no affection for Netanyahu; before 7 October, he refused even to grant him a White House meeting. And yet, he may be wary of acting on that sentiment if it means meddling in the domestic affairs of an ally. But he should put those fears aside. What’s more, there’s a useful precedent.
In the 1990s Bill Clinton, who like Biden, had convinced Israelis that he truly had their interests at heart – even in his kishkes – took on Netanyahu and won. He pushed Netanyahu into peace talks and to sign agreements that the Israeli PM didn’t like – safe in the knowledge that the Israeli public understood that he, Clinton, was acting out of friendship, not hostility. As Anshel Pfeffer, columnist for Israel’s liberal daily Haaretz, pointed out this week, when Netanyahu eventually faced the voters in 1999, he lost – to a candidate committed to pursuing peace with the Palestinians.
The times are different now, to be sure. But Biden has a power to influence events in Israel matched by no one else. He should hear the cry of the families of the hostages held by Hamas, who carry placards bearing a simple message:
“Save Israel from Netanyahu”. Biden might be the one person in the world who can heed that plea and act on it. He must.”
Hallelujah song by Leonard Cohen
November 29 2025 International Day of Solidarity With Palestine, with a retrospective of my writing on Palestine in 2025
How Gaza City’s high street became a landscape of debris: Buildings along Omar al-Mukhtar Road, the main artery through Zeitoun district, have collapsed under bombardment
15 בדצמבר 2025 בזמן שילדי פלסטין מתים במלחמת הטיהור האתני והטרור התיאוקרטי של ישראל, חגיגה של חופש הדת ומאבק אנטי-קולוניאלי מנצח שהגדיר את הזהות היהודית: חנוכה שמח
אני אומר לכולם חג חנוכה שמח, מתוך הכרה שלא משנה עד כמה מדינת ישראל רצתה לבלבל בין זהות יהודית לסמכות של המדינה בשירות השלטון, אין לדברים הללו כל קשר זה עם זה; אכן, תנועת השלום והדמוקרטיה בישראל וברחבי התפוצות היהודית העולמית חיונית לדמיון ולשינוי של מוסדות השלטון והכיבוש הקולוניאליים של המדינה ולהופעתה של המין האנושי מאידיאולוגיות פשיסטיות של דם, אמונה ואדמה, ביניהן ציונות. ומדינת ישראל.
במובנים רבים הניצחון ההיסטורי על האימפריה הסלאוקית שחוגג חנוכה ייסד והגדיר את הזהות היהודית כשם נרדף לאידיאלים פוליטיים כפולים; חופש הדת ומאבק שחרור אנטי-קולוניאלי.
זה חג החנוכה שאני חוגג היום; השוויון והסולידריות של כל הנשמות האנושיות בפעולה כערבים לאנושיותו של זה ולזכויות האדם האוניברסליות, ובהתנגדות לסמכות ולעריצות.
כדברי הרב יונתן סאקס; “חנוכה עוסק בחופש להיות נאמנים למה שאנו מאמינים בו מבלי לשלול את החופש של מי שמאמין אחרת. זה על הדלקת הנר שלנו, תוך כדי לא להיות מאוים או מאיים על נר של אף אחד אחר”.
Arabic
15 كانون الأول (ديسمبر) 2025ينما يموت أطفال فلسطين في حرب التطهير العرقي والإرهاب الثيوقراطي التي تشنها إسرائيل، احتفال بالحرية الدينية والنضال المنتصر ضد الاستعمار الذي حدد الهوية اليهودية: حانوكا سعيدة
أقول عيد هانوكا سعيدا للجميع، اعترافا بأنه مهما كانت دولة إسرائيل ترغب في الخلط بين الهوية اليهودية وسلطة الدولة في خدمة السلطة، فإن هذه الأمور لا علاقة لها ببعضها البعض؛ في الواقع، تعتبر حركة السلام والديمقراطية داخل إسرائيل وفي جميع أنحاء الشتات اليهودي العالمي أمرًا حاسمًا لإعادة تصور وتحويل مؤسسات الدولة للسيطرة الاستعمارية والاحتلال ولخروج البشرية من الأيديولوجيات الفاشية القائمة على الدم والإيمان والتربة، ومن بينها الصهيونية. والدولة الإسرائيلية.
من نواحٍ عديدة، أسس النصر التاريخي على الإمبراطورية السلوقية الذي يحتفل به حانوكا الهوية اليهودية وحددها كمرادف للمثل السياسية المزدوجة؛ حرية الدين والنضال من أجل التحرر ضد الاستعمار.
هذا هو عيد الحانوكا الذي أحتفل به اليوم؛ المساواة والتضامن بين جميع النفوس البشرية في العمل كضامن لإنسانية بعضنا البعض وحقوق الإنسان العالمية، وفي مقاومة السلطة والطغيان.
على حد تعبير الحاخام جوناثان ساكس؛ “إن حانوكا يدور حول حرية أن نكون صادقين مع ما نؤمن به دون إنكار حرية أولئك الذين يعتقدون خلاف ذلك. يتعلق الأمر بإضاءة شمعتنا، دون أن نتعرض للتهديد أو التهديد من شمعة أي شخص آخر
We have today remembered one of America’s most horrific and revealing anniversaries, eleven years after the Sandy Hook massacre forever changed our nation’s ideas about guns from talismans of security and power to signs of our helplessness before the rapacity and amoral terror of our subjugation and commodification by elites, for whom the occasional murdered child is an acceptable cost of doing business, and our worthlessness in the eyes of our political leadership which require a vast and unregulated market for guns as a strategic resource in imperial conquest and dominion and the readiness to fight global wars.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to reduce all human interactions to a kill/no kill decision, and by our failure to prevent them from doing so have been authorized to bear death among us with powers of extrajudicial summary execution as a subversion of democracy.
We have granted such permission now for over two centuries under the immunity of a misinterpreted Second Amendment which we must abolish along with police who are allowed to carry guns.
Before all else in this question of the power of death and who the state authorizes to bear it, we must recognize the underlying causes and purposes of the right to bear arms in white supremacist terror and the repression of dissent, subversions of our principles of liberty, equality, and justice.
True democracy and a free society of equals is not possible when some of us have to power and right to kill the rest of us without cause.
As written by Robin Levinson-King for the BBC, in an article entitled Sandy Hook 10 years on: How many have died in school shootings?: “It has been a decade since a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, killing 20 children and six school staff.
In a written statement declaring Wednesday, the anniversary, a day of remembrance, US President Joe Biden said the tragedy forced everyone to re-examine their “core values and whether this can be a country that protects the most innocent.”
In the wake of the massacre, many demanded tighter gun restrictions.
Yet the death toll from school shootings keeps climbing as debates over gun control continue ten years on.
According to research compiled by the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group, there have been 189 shootings at schools around the US since Sandy Hook that have resulted in at least one fatality.
The shootings counted include everything from suicides and domestic violence.
Seventeen were “active shooter situations” – defined as “when the shooter killed and/or wounded victims, either targeted or random, within the school campus during a continuous episode of violence”.
While those events count for a small portion of total shooting incidents, they account for more than a third of all casualties.
In total, 279 have died from being shot on a school property during, before or after school hours, including weekends.
In November, a memorial for the victims of Sandy Hook was opened to the public, not far from the school grounds.
Victims’ names were carved into a wall that circled a sycamore tree.
Nelba Marquez-Greene’s six-year old daughter, Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, was among the victims.
“Ten years. A lifetime and a blink,” she wrote on Twitter. “Ana Grace, we used to wait for you to come home. Now you wait for us. Hold on, little one. Hold on.”
“We’re not in a place to have polite discourse in this country on that issue,” she said.
In the aftermath of what was at the time the worst school shooting in US history, then-President Barack Obama vowed to push forward sweeping legislation to reduce gun violence by addressing everything from gun magazine sizes to mental health.
But he left office without being able to pass his hoped-for laws.
Ten years on, Mr Biden has renewed a promise to pass a ban on semi-automatic rifles.
In June, he signed a landmark gun bill into law, but if fell short of reinstating the so-called assault-weapons ban that had been in effect before 2004.
However, a debate over this and other gun control measures that have been proposed continues, with evidence being put forward on both sides over their effectiveness at stopping school shootings.
Gun control advocates argue that tighter restrictions to access is key, while others argue that failures of the mental health system and better security on school campuses are more pressing concerns.
Nicole Hockley, the co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise Foundation, a charity, lost her son Dylan in the massacre.
“All shootings reopen wounds,” she told the BBC earlier this year.
Her other son, who survived, graduated from high school this year and will be able to vote. It is his generation, she said, who will enact change.”
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in her journal, Letters from an American; “Today, survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos.
Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre. Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drew a wider lens: “The attack on Club Q and the LGBTQI community is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend of violence and intimidation across our country.”
James Comer (R-KY), who will likely chair the committee in the upcoming Republican-controlled House, disagreed. Blaming Democratic policies that he claims are soft on crime, he said that “Republicans condemn violence in all forms,” and that the survivors have his “thoughts and prayers.”
But Comer’s insistence that Republicans do not celebrate guns is not entirely honest. Just last year, four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan that killed four students and wounded seven other people, Comer’s colleague Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on Twitter a Christmas photo of him, his wife, and five children holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. The caption read: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) immediately posted her own family photo with her four sons all posing with firearms.
In 2020, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.”
Democrats do not do this. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 but, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, that was the last time a Democrat used a gun in an ad.
The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.
Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.
In the 1960s, leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. They emphasized individualism, the idea that a man should take care of his own family, defending it with weapons, if need be, and fighting off a dangerous government and those who wanted to use the government for “socialism” or “Marxism.”
In 1972, the Republicans still embraced the idea that the government had a role to play in making the country safer for everyone, and their platform called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns.” But in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun safety. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms.
In 1980 the National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition.
In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.
But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.
After a gunman trying to kill Reagan in 1981 paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases.
The NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike the law down, and in 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.
Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shootings as one in which four people are shot, not including the shooter: in 2021 alone, we had 692 of them.
While gun ownership has actually declined since the 1970s, there are far more guns in fewer hands: a study in 2017 showed that about half of US guns are owned by about 3% of the population, and that was before Americans launched a new gun-buying spree after 2020.
Ten years ago today, a 20-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut, shot and killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of those horrific murders, Congress tried to pass a bipartisan bill requiring background checks for gun purchases, but even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—supported background checks, and even though 55 senators voted for the measure, it died with a filibuster.
Dave Cullen, who writes about school shootings, argued yesterday in a New York Times op-ed that there is reason to hope we will finally address our gun problem. The Sandy Hook Massacre galvanized Americans into pushing back to reclaim our safety, as Shannon Watts and congressional representative Gabrielle Giffords—herself a survivor of gun violence–—organized the gun safety movement. That movement, in turn, got a dramatic boost from the activism of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old gunman murdered 17 people and injured 17 others.
This June, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to acknowledge that support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was “off the charts, overwhelming,” and 15 Republican senators bucked the NRA to vote for basic gun safety legislation.
But, also in June, the Supreme Court handed down the sweeping New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision requiring those trying to place restrictions on gun ownership to prove similar restrictions were in place when the Framers wrote the Constitution. Already, a Texas judge has struck down a rule preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms on the grounds that domestic violence was permissible in the 1700s.
The decision is being appealed.”
As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost, in an article entitled Obama Reflects On ‘Darkest Day Of My Presidency’: Nearly 10 Years After Sandy Hook
Former President Barack Obama spoke at an event marking the anniversary of the 2012 school shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead.; “Former President Barack Obama said he still considers the deadly school shooting that took the lives of 20 children and six adults in 2012 the “darkest day of my presidency” as the 10th anniversary of the shooting approaches.
“I consider Dec. 14, 2012, the single darkest day of my presidency,” Obama said Tuesday night at the Sandy Hook Promise “10-Year Remembrance” benefit in New York City. “Like so many other people, I felt not just sorrow, but I felt angry, fury in a world that could allow such a thing.”
Sandy Hook Promise, started by several families who lost loved ones in the Newtown, Connecticut, shooting, is a nonprofit that aims to protect children from gun violence while teaching empathy in classrooms.
During his speech at the benefit, Obama praised Sandy Hook Promise for preventing possible acts of gun violence.
“You’ve made meaning where there was none,” Obama said. “Back when we were together in 2012, I said that Newtown would be remembered for the way that you looked out for each other, the way that you cared for one another and the way that you loved one another.”
While gun violence continues to run rampant in the U.S., there have been glimmers of positive change in the last 10 years. Sandy Hook families won $73 million in a lawsuit settlement this year against Remington Arms, which made the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman during the massacre. It was the first time a gun manufacturer had been held liable for a shooting.
And the National Rifle Association (NRA), which saw its membership surge at the start of 2013 following the Sandy Hook shooting, has seen its leadership and political power crumble under the weight of mismanagement and greed over the last few years.
Then there’s Alex Jones, the conspiracy host of “Infowars,” who used his platform to mock the parents of dead children for years, falsely claiming they were actors and that their loved ones never died. This year he was finally held accountable for the torrent of abuse he leveled on the Sandy Hook families when he was ordered to pay more than $1 billion for his dangerous lies.
Earlier this year, 19 students and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, in a shooting sickeningly similar to that of Newtown. The following month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan gun safety bill into law that enhances background checks, addresses mental health care, and places curbs on buying guns.
Obama attempted a similar push for gun violence prevention in 2016 with a bill that would have enhanced background checks. He spoke through tears the day he implored Congress to act.
“Somehow, we become numb to it, and we start thinking, ‘This is normal,’” Obama said.
Instead, the former president was roundly mocked by conservatives for his emotional plea. The bill ultimately failed, thanks in part to pressure from the NRA and a handful of Democrats who voted against the bill to cater to gun-loving voters in their states.
In his speech Tuesday, Obama said the work to curb gun violence isn’t done.
“In 2022, there has not been a single week — not one — without a mass shooting somewhere in America,” he said. “We pretend that the best we can do for the families of Sandy Hook, Parkland and Virginia Tech and so many other communities is to tinker around the edges and then offer rote recitations of our thoughts and our prayers when violence explodes once again.”
Obama admits he still gets angry when he hears about the latest senseless shooting.
“Whether it is in a church or a synagogue, in a grocery store or on a college campus or in a home or on a city street … I still feel anger,” he said. “And I hope you do too.”
As I wrote in my post of February 16 2022, Victory For the People Over Profiteers of Gun Violence and White Supremacist Terror; “ We celebrate a victory for the people over profiteers of gun violence and white supremacist terror in the case of the Sandy Hook families against Remington, manufacturer of the gun that was used to murder twenty children and six adults in a few minutes. Guns are weapons of terror and mass destruction, and should be legislated as such.
As written by Sarah Jorgensen, Jason Hanna and Erica Hill at CNN; “Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting, said in the news release that their loss is “irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative.”
“One moment we had this dazzling, energetic 6-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah’s life stored in a backpack and boxes.”
“What is lost remains lost. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this, we are grateful.”
As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost; “Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the settlement will push gun companies to operate differently.
“My beautiful butterfly, Dylan, is gone because Remington prioritized its profit over my son’s safety,” Hockley said in a statement. “Marketing weapons of war directly to young people known to have a strong fascination with firearms is reckless and, as too many families know, deadly conduct. Using marketing to convey that a person is more powerful or more masculine by using a particular type or brand of firearm is deeply irresponsible. My hope is that by facing and finally being penalized for the impact of their work, gun companies, along with the insurance and banking industries that enable them, will be forced to make their business practices safer than they have ever been.”
Hope is a fine and noble thing, final gift or curse of Pandora to humankind, a tenuous and frangible thing, ambiguous in meaning and its power to bring change, like love and faith, and like its confreres among our passions which are also Ideals perhaps not very bankable without action to make it real. The praxis of hope is struggle.
Here I must digress, for I believe the future evolution of humankind and the history of the next millennium will be defined by the struggle between two forces; the renunciation of the use of social force and violence as democracy and peace and the universalization of force and violence as tyranny and terror, and what we do with our hope in the face of hopeless imposed conditions of struggle and unanswerable force will decide our fate.
Camus interrogated this best and directly in The Myth of Sisyphus and constructed his Absurdism on his interpretation of the uses of hope in resistance to fascist tyranny, and nothing has superseded his insight.
Why is this relevant to the issue of gun violence? Because we face enormous systemic and structural forces in opposition to freeing ourselves from constant threat of death, and our choices here will shape our response.
When teaching Camus’ essay and his novel The Stranger, I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, “the difference between us is, you have hope.”
Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora’s Box both a gift and a curse.
How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?
As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut of 1982, moments before we expected to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers who had set fire to our house after we refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” It is a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty-nine years now.
Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante’s Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; “Abandon hope, all you who enter here.”
Always go through the Forbidden Door.
As Lenin asked; “What is to be done?”
Let us repeal the Second Amendment, disarm and demilitarize the police, end immunity from prosecution of gun manufacturers for the crimes which they enable and promote, disband the National Rifle Association as an organization of terror, break the link between arms manufacture as a business of empire and the carceral state which floods the market with cheap guns to shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest as a pretext for the imposition of a police state, and abandon the valorization and fetishization of violence as toxic masculinity, misogyny, and patriarchal terror.
This may be the work of centuries, but in a world wherein the national and imperial ambitions and whims of its nuclear powers, currently America, China, Russia, Britain, France, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO nuclear weapons sharing partners Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, can exterminate our species and annihilate much of our planet, can we afford not to act now to begin disarmament?
Today we have taken a first step as a nation toward freeing ourselves from the existential threat of gun violence and from patriarchal and white supremacist terror. This we justly celebrate, but let us also unite in solidarity of action to liberate ourselves and humankind from the use of social force.
As written by Priya Satia, author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, in Time; “Those in favor of firearms control in the United States today often point in exasperated envy at laws in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom. Why can’t the United States behave like these civilized countries?, they ask.
The reality is that these countries were able to pass their strict laws partly because American laws are so lax. At just 4.4% of the world’s population, Americans own roughly a third of all the firearms in the world. According to a 2007 survey, American civilians own about 275 million of the world’s 875 million firearms. For the world’s gun manufacturers, this fraction of the world’s population is their largest single market. As long as it stays open, they can count on business, and governments around the world can feel secure about the health of an industry they rely on for defense.
Since firearms became central to warfare, governments have faced a structural and logistics problem: They need gun manufacturers but do not generate enough demand themselves to keep those manufacturers in good health by serving the military alone. Peace, in particular, is bad for gunmakers.”
“The Glorious Revolution of 1689 established a new regime in Britain. It had to defend itself against rebels at home and abroad who wanted to restore the ousted king. To that end, the new government set about developing a new hub of firearms manufacturing in Birmingham, to ensure an alternate source for guns in case rebels captured London’s firearms manufacturing capacity.
For the next century, Britain was almost always at war, and Birmingham’s gunmakers thrived: from an initial annual production of tens of thousands of arms, they could produce millions by 1815. The government also launched its own factory, at Enfield, to further diffuse the industry.
To keep this industry healthy during interludes of peace—in an era in which firearms possession was largely an entitlement of the upper classes—the government helped it find other outlets. British gunmakers sold firearms all over the world: in West Africa, as part of the slave trade; in North America, to Native Americans and colonial settlers; in South Asia, as part of trade and conquest. Occasionally, British officials worried about arming their own enemies. But inevitably, the logic prevailed that not selling guns to potential enemies would merely send those enemies to a rival supplier, like the French, and the British would forfeit both profit and influence.
The government also encouraged gunmakers to diversify into products that could be sold to British civilians: buttons, buckles, harpoons, swords, bells. Diversification became more necessary in the 19th century as the empire’s fear of armed colonial rebellion increased. The Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA), the largest privately owned rifle manufactory in Europe until the 1890s and the largest in the U.K. through World War I, also made bicycles, motorcycles and cars. The government’s machine-gun supplier, Vickers, made various civilian goods, too.
This strategy freed the government from worrying overly about the health of its firearms industry. In 1934, it selected a Czech design for the new army light machine gun, over protests from BSA and Vickers. After World War II, the Ministry of Defense stopped maintaining an R&D team for small arms design. BSA ceased military rifle production in 1961 after a government decision to let them go. They turned out other metal goods and motorcycles until they were edged out of those businesses in the early 1970s.
The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, meanwhile, did develop and supply the SA80, the standard postwar military firearm. In 1985, it and other government arms factories were made into a public corporation, Royal Ordnance, which, in 1987, was bought by British Aerospace, the then-reprivatized company in which Vickers had merged during the 1960 nationalization of the aircraft industry.
That year, 1987, was also the year of the mass shooting known as the Hungerford massacre. Gun control in the U.K. got tighter as the gun industry shrank to vanishing point. The next year saw both the closure of the Enfield unit and amendments tightening existing firearms controls. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, private possession of handguns was banned almost entirely; thousands of guns were surrendered. By that point there was essentially no firearms industry to put up a protest; U.K. military arms were mostly sourced abroad. In Australia, too, passage of tight gun control laws in 1996 was eased by the absence of a major Australian gun industry.
The United States followed a different path.
To be sure, American gunmakers also diversified to cope with whimsical government demand. Most famously, Remington, the country’s oldest rifle maker, turned out sewing machines and typewriters during the slump in firearm demand after the Civil War. But, for the most part, American manufacturers could rely on sales to civilians to cope with lulls in government demand.
Between the world wars, the federal government and the American gun industry both opposed suggestions for controls on sales to civilians, out of fear that they would endanger an industry essential to national defense. During the Cold War, the U.S. became the new firearms depot of the world. When the Swedish firearms manufacturer Interdynamic AB could not find a civilian market for its TEC-9 submachine gun at home, its Miami subsidiary Intratec sold it to Americans, who made it a notorious instrument of mass shootings.
If gun-control advocates focus on the NRA and politicians who take money from the group as the sole obstacles to sensible gun control laws in the U.S., they’ll be missing a larger structural reality: selling arms to American civilians has become crucial to an industry on which both the United States government and governments around the world depend. Indeed, it is the American public’s very division over gun control that keeps the industry healthy, given the saturation of the civilian market: without panic buying triggered by recurring fear of impending controls, companies like Remington and Smith & Wesson face dismal prospects. (Remington has now filed for bankruptcy, though its operations remain unaffected.)
The more the rest of the world limits gun possession, the more American civilians keep the world’s firearms makers in business. The NRA and gun manufacturers benefit from promoting intense cultural and ideological commitment to their reading of the Second Amendment, but so does every government that needs firearms for its military and law enforcement services. Studies have shown that the presence of astronomical numbers of guns in the United States is a specific cause of the high rate of mass shootings, but the presence of those guns has become a matter of global security. This vision of global security has thus perversely come to depend on continual insecurity about mass shootings in the United States.”
As I wrote in my post of June 12 2019, Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act; Those who manufacture, sell, or trade guns must be held responsible for the harm that they do, and we must support this important legislation which ends their immunity from being sued by the victims in whose suffering they are complicit. This industry of death must be pursued to its utter destruction.
As Gabrielle Giffords said, “The gun lobby convinced politicians that an entire industry deserved to operate without fear of ever being held responsible in a courtroom. Today, we stand up and fight again to restore the fundamentally American principle that no industry, including the gun industry, is above the law.”
Surely a least-restrictive policy of gun ownership would say, demonstrate that we can trust you with our lives, that you have earned the right to bear arms through a history of honorable conduct and self-discipline, that you are able to make kill/no kill decisions rationally and with a judgement free of racism, rage, jealousy, vengeance, the need to dominate and control and the desire to subjugate and inflict pain and terror, or other mental illness or impairment, and unclouded by drugs or alcohol, and you are free to openly carry a weapon except in areas otherwise restricted.
Who could pass such a test? Who can be trusted to bear death among us, with de facto powers of summary execution?
Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Possession of a gun proves intent to kill. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.
Choose life.
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, by Priya Satia
Here are some of my previous essays of 2021 on gun violence:
December 3 2021 Who Bears Arms Bears Death: the Cases of the Oxford High School Mass Murders and the Police Murder of a Disabled Senior Citizen in a Wheelchair Shot Nine Times in the Back While Trying to Escape
A police officer murders Richard Lee Richards, a disabled senior citizen in a wheelchair, shooting him in the back nine times.
A disturbed fifteen years old steals a gun from his parents and commits mass murder and terror, killing four fellow students, 16-year-old Tate Myre, 14-year-old Hana St. Juliana, 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin and 17-year-old Justin Shilling, and injuring eight others.
What do these crimes have in common?
Guns; a precondition of force and violence is the ability to inflict it, and our nation protects the arms market as the business of empire and accepts the random deaths of citizens as a cost of that business.
President and General Eisenhower long ago warned us of the consequences of a military-industrial complex for tyranny and state terror and the centralization of power to a carceral state and subversion of democracy, and of imperialism and colonial wars of dominion to control global markets, resources, and profits at the cost of our universal human rights and the principle of self-determination for all peoples.
We have ignored his warning and the direct effects of the use of social force in the dehumanization and commodification of humankind and the theft of our souls, and in the erosion of our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, in the fall of America as a guarantor of liberty and universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
Let us bring a reckoning for our systemic inequalities and the legacies of our historical injustices, and begin to forge a true free society of equals, built not on death but on life, not on force but on love, not on fear but on hope.
June 23 2021, Who Bears Arms Bears Death
Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror or its direct employees carrying badges and acting with the authority of the government in the repression of dissent and the elite hegemony of white supremacy.
Here in America I refer to Homeland Security as well as all police, whom we must disarm and abolish as pervasive inherent evils which threaten our Liberty and Equality.
I believe it wise and just to hold gun manufacturers legally responsible for the harm they cause within federal guidelines of reparations, and that this must include among their victims the entire Black community for the redress of historic evils; hate crime must have no immunity.
So also with the National Rifle Association as an organization of white supremacist terror and fascist tyranny, whose mission is to disfigure the souls of some of us with fear, power, hate, and violence as monsters to terrorize the rest of us into submission with learned helplessness.
We must end open carry as political theatre and macho posturing or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and conditions violence.
April 18 2021, Costs of the Business of Empire and Tyranny: An Epidemic of Mass Gun Violence
An MSNBC report by Rachel Maddow that New York Attorney General Letitia James will bring suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association offers a glimmer of hope that we may yet see an end to the epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings which have seized and shaken America.
I commented on the story with satire as follows; Apparently, a Nazi Racist Association which is the primary enabler of domestic terrorism has been operating openly for some while. Why not hold its entire membership list responsible as co-conspirators in every shooting which was perpetrated during its existence? Surely all its members can be charged with racketeering and possession of weapons of death and mass destruction as well.
To this I received a question; “Are you implying that the NRA is a terrorist organization?”
Here is my reply; I am directly saying the NRA is an organization of terror, of death for corporate profit and the tyranny and terror of the carceral state and its force and control in service to hegemonic elites. Every victim of gun violence in America is a victim of its agenda and influence, though the broader cause is the cycle of fear, power, and force which begets violence, and to which our society is addicted.
Yes, I advocate repeal of the Second Amendment, abolition of the NRA as an organization of white supremacist terror, disarmament of the police, abolition of police and of prisons, borders, surveillance, and other authoritarian and totalitarian instruments of force and control. But these are structural and institutional reforms within the scope of electoral politics, and our issues are systemic in nature and resilient to legislation of change.
One cannot reform such a system. Only a revolution which equalizes power and liberates us from elites can bring justice to this world of tyranny and state terror.
Though the links between the National Rifle Association and the perpetrators of white supremacist terror and gun violence are by now well known, a 2019 Senate report exposed the long history of NRA collaboration with Russian espionage against America.
As written in NRP; “The National Rifle Association acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.
Drawing on contemporaneous emails and private interviews, an 18-month probe by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to the Kremlin.”
We may now consider the NRA not only a terrorist organization and the main private enabler of white supremacist violence and racially motivated crime in America, but also of treason and foreign subversion.
Of course the issues are not as simple as this, the legitimacy of the Second Amendment, the use of force and violence in service to elite wealth and power, and the multilayered objectives of the state, the NRA, and the arms industry must also be interrogated, and to these threats to our free society of equals we must bring a reckoning.
March 22 2021 Guns Death Terror Madness
A rogue Colorado judge overturns a law forbidding open carry, and a terrorist uses his new right to casually walk into a supermarket with a military rifle and commit mass murder.
Who so ever bears arms bears death, and has chosen to bring death among us and degrades every human relationship and interaction to a kill/no kill decision. Who can be trusted with such power? Choose life.
We must question how we imagine and implement our right to bear arms, a right whose intention to guarantee the freedom and independence of individuals from government force and control I fully endorse. This does not mean we must allow terrorists and madmen to commit murder and mayhem, nor that access to guns and other instruments of mass destruction should be free to all; we must sift very fine in choosing who if anyone can be trusted with the power of death. For this is exactly what the right to bear arms authorized; the power to bear death among us. It is a dreadful power, which bears a weight of responsibility like no other.
I would begin the restoration of balance in our society by disarming the police, not our citizens. But we need not foster madness nor enable violence.
Here is my rebuttal to the objection that gun control abrogates our right to bear arms:
Forbidding things does not align with my ideology; my ideal state is a world free of violence and the social use of force. Here I mean police, prisons, laws and the authorization of identity, state terror and military imperialism. These we must resist, by any means necessary.
But we must also resist the pathology of violence and power on which our unequal society is constructed, and the drive to dominate which is written into every cell of our bodies and the epigenetic history of our form. Ours is a culture of death, of the fetishization of guns as masculine jewelry and symbols of patriarchal power. Power, like the beauty of weapons, is seductive and a force of degradation and dehumanization.
Where force is the only means of seizing power to restore balance and ensure liberty and equality, it is positive. That same force is negative when used to subjugate others. This is the line of division between revolution and tyranny; who holds power? In the words of Walter Rodney; “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?” America today remains the same nation won by conquest and theft from indigenous people, built by African slave labor, and become an empire through military and economic imperialism.
We must abandon the social use of force if we are to become a free society of equals and of autonomous individuals. In a nation of Liberty, we send no police or armies to enforce virtue. This does not mean we surrender our power of self determination or our own safety and freedom from the ideas of other people.
To be free is to be free from compulsion by force, and from control through surveillance and propaganda. It also means that we must be free from each other.
February 20 2021, Who Bears Arms Bears Death
President Biden has once again seized an intractable problem by its horns, speaking on laws he intends to pass to limit gun violence and free us from the spectre of death, fear, and vote suppression by fascists and white supremacist terrorists.
This is no longer only an issue of racist gun violence, but of the survival of democracy from political intimidation and terror. We can never permit another January 6 Insurrection, nor revival of the historical legacy of the KKK’s reign of terror on which it was based.
But we must not only limit access to guns for the insane and members of criminal organizations of racist terror, but for the police as well. Disarm the police and they cannot murder nonwhite people with impunity as they do now. These are the two halves of a whole, state and civilian terror and gun violence.
As reported by Nikki Carvajal, Devan Cole, and Ali Zaslav on CNN; “Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” Biden said in a statement.
“This administration will not wait for the next mass shooting to heed that call,” the statement reads. “We will take action to end our epidemic of gun violence and make our schools and communities safer.”
The call from Biden comes three years after a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, leaving 17 people dead. The tragedy led many of the survivors to speak out against gun violence and confront lawmakers about gun safety reform.”
President Biden concluded his message by underscoring the urgency of action, and by placing the issue in a human frame of suffering, loss, fear, and grief; “We owe it to all those we’ve lost and to all those left behind to grieve to make a change,” he said. “The time to act is now.”
These are good words, even glorious ones, which resound with history and the reimagination of America and all humankind, as we now expect from our President. But if we are to eradicate the origins of gun violence as a pervasive and endemic threat both to democracy and to public safety, we must go further, to the true reason governments refuse to abolish guns.
Analysis of the structural relationships between government needs for massive industrial war production and the commercial arms sales required to keep it in full readiness reveal the real reason America provides an unrestricted market for guns, indeed energetically promotes it; to be prepared at all times to fight multiple and vast wars. This is the business of empire, and the random deaths of schoolchildren and other innocent citizens to gun violence is considered an acceptable cost of doing that business.
This must change, but it cannot change without also changing the profit driven motives of the military – industrial complex, as President Eisenhower warned us so long ago.
As written by Priya Satia, author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, in Time; “Those in favor of firearms control in the United States today often point in exasperated envy at laws in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom. Why can’t the United States behave like these civilized countries?, they ask.
The reality is that these countries were able to pass their strict laws partly because American laws are so lax. At just 4.4% of the world’s population, Americans own roughly a third of all the firearms in the world. According to a 2007 survey, American civilians own about 275 million of the world’s 875 million firearms. For the world’s gun manufacturers, this fraction of the world’s population is their largest single market. As long as it stays open, they can count on business, and governments around the world can feel secure about the health of an industry they rely on for defense.
Since firearms became central to warfare, governments have faced a structural and logistics problem: They need gun manufacturers but do not generate enough demand themselves to keep those manufacturers in good health by serving the military alone. Peace, in particular, is bad for gunmakers.”
“The Glorious Revolution of 1689 established a new regime in Britain. It had to defend itself against rebels at home and abroad who wanted to restore the ousted king. To that end, the new government set about developing a new hub of firearms manufacturing in Birmingham, to ensure an alternate source for guns in case rebels captured London’s firearms manufacturing capacity.
For the next century, Britain was almost always at war, and Birmingham’s gunmakers thrived: from an initial annual production of tens of thousands of arms, they could produce millions by 1815. The government also launched its own factory, at Enfield, to further diffuse the industry.
To keep this industry healthy during interludes of peace—in an era in which firearms possession was largely an entitlement of the upper classes—the government helped it find other outlets. British gunmakers sold firearms all over the world: in West Africa, as part of the slave trade; in North America, to Native Americans and colonial settlers; in South Asia, as part of trade and conquest. Occasionally, British officials worried about arming their own enemies. But inevitably, the logic prevailed that not selling guns to potential enemies would merely send those enemies to a rival supplier, like the French, and the British would forfeit both profit and influence.
The government also encouraged gunmakers to diversify into products that could be sold to British civilians: buttons, buckles, harpoons, swords, bells. Diversification became more necessary in the 19th century as the empire’s fear of armed colonial rebellion increased. The Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA), the largest privately owned rifle manufactory in Europe until the 1890s and the largest in the U.K. through World War I, also made bicycles, motorcycles and cars. The government’s machine-gun supplier, Vickers, made various civilian goods, too.
This strategy freed the government from worrying overly about the health of its firearms industry. In 1934, it selected a Czech design for the new army light machine gun, over protests from BSA and Vickers. After World War II, the Ministry of Defense stopped maintaining an R&D team for small arms design. BSA ceased military rifle production in 1961 after a government decision to let them go. They turned out other metal goods and motorcycles until they were edged out of those businesses in the early 1970s.
The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, meanwhile, did develop and supply the SA80, the standard postwar military firearm. In 1985, it and other government arms factories were made into a public corporation, Royal Ordnance, which, in 1987, was bought by British Aerospace, the then-reprivatized company in which Vickers had merged during the 1960 nationalization of the aircraft industry.
That year, 1987, was also the year of the mass shooting known as the Hungerford massacre. Gun control in the U.K. got tighter as the gun industry shrank to vanishing point. The next year saw both the closure of the Enfield unit and amendments tightening existing firearms controls. After the Dunblane shooting in 1996, private possession of handguns was banned almost entirely; thousands of guns were surrendered. By that point there was essentially no firearms industry to put up a protest; U.K. military arms were mostly sourced abroad. In Australia, too, passage of tight gun control laws in 1996 was eased by the absence of a major Australian gun industry.
The United States followed a different path.
To be sure, American gunmakers also diversified to cope with whimsical government demand. Most famously, Remington, the country’s oldest rifle maker, turned out sewing machines and typewriters during the slump in firearm demand after the Civil War. But, for the most part, American manufacturers could rely on sales to civilians to cope with lulls in government demand.
Between the world wars, the federal government and the American gun industry both opposed suggestions for controls on sales to civilians, out of fear that they would endanger an industry essential to national defense. During the Cold War, the U.S. became the new firearms depot of the world. When the Swedish firearms manufacturer Interdynamic AB could not find a civilian market for its TEC-9 submachine gun at home, its Miami subsidiary Intratec sold it to Americans, who made it a notorious instrument of mass shootings.
If gun-control advocates focus on the NRA and politicians who take money from the group as the sole obstacles to sensible gun control laws in the U.S., they’ll be missing a larger structural reality: selling arms to American civilians has become crucial to an industry on which both the United States government and governments around the world depend. Indeed, it is the American public’s very division over gun control that keeps the industry healthy, given the saturation of the civilian market: without panic buying triggered by recurring fear of impending controls, companies like Remington and Smith & Wesson face dismal prospects. (Remington has now filed for bankruptcy, though its operations remain unaffected.)
The more the rest of the world limits gun possession, the more American civilians keep the world’s firearms makers in business. The NRA and gun manufacturers benefit from promoting intense cultural and ideological commitment to their reading of the Second Amendment, but so does every government that needs firearms for its military and law enforcement services. Studies have shown that the presence of astronomical numbers of guns in the United States is a specific cause of the high rate of mass shootings, but the presence of those guns has become a matter of global security. This vision of global security has thus perversely come to depend on continual insecurity about mass shootings in the United States.”
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, by Priya Satia
December 2 2020, Of Liberty, Force, and Freedom From Violence: Our Right to Bear Arms
Today we witnessed a glorious triumph in the midst of terrible crises of political, economic, and environmental collapse and devastation; the swearing in of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a victory for freedom from gun violence and a public renunciation of our nation’s most powerful organization of terror, the National Rifle Association.
As reported by Sunlen Serfaty and Clare Foran for CNN; “The special election victory marks a moment of triumph for Kelly, a retired Navy captain and NASA astronaut, that comes in the aftermath of tragedy.
Kelly was thrust into the national spotlight in 2011 when his wife, Arizona’s then-US Rep. Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head and nearly killed, an event that sent shock waves throughout the nation.
He later turned into a political activist, launching a group called Americans for Responsible Solutions alongside his wife and fighting for gun control policies like universal background checks and so-called red flag laws.
“I learned a lot from being an astronaut. I learned a lot from being a pilot in the Navy, ” Kelly said in his campaign announcement video. “But what I learned from my wife is how you use policy to improve people’s lives.”
My response to this joyous news is as follows:
Who so ever bears arms bears death, and has chosen to bring death among us and degrades every human relationship and interaction to a kill/no kill decision. Who can be trusted with such power? Choose life.
This declaration was met with replies from friends in support of our right to bear arms, a right whose intention to guarantee the freedom and independence of individuals from government force and control I fully endorse. This does not mean we must allow terrorists and madmen to commit murder and mayhem, nor that access to guns and other instruments of mass destruction should be free to all; we must sift very fine in choosing who if anyone can be trusted with the power of death. For this is exactly what the right to bear arms authorized; the power to bear death among us. It is a dreadful power, which bears a weight of responsibility like no other.
I would begin the restoration of balance in our society by disarming the police, not our citizens. But we need not foster madness nor enable violence.
Here is my rebuttal to the objection that gun control abrogates our right to bear arms:
Forbidding things does not align with my ideology; my ideal state is a world free of violence and the social use of force. Here I mean police, prisons, laws and the authorization of identity, state terror and military imperialism. These we must resist, by any means necessary.
But we must also resist the pathology of dominance and control which is written into the history of our form. Ours is a culture of death, of the fetishization of guns as masculine jewelry and symbols of patriarchal power. Power, like the beauty of weapons, is seductive and a force of degradation and dehumanization.
Where force is the only means of seizing power to restore balance and ensure liberty and equality, it is positive. That same force is negative when used to subjugate others. This is the line of division between revolution and tyranny; who holds power? In the words of Walter Rodney; “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?” America today remains the same nation won by conquest and theft from indigenous people, built by African slave labor, and become an empire through military and economic imperialism.
We must abandon the social use of force if we are to become a free society of equals and of autonomous individuals. In a nation of Liberty, we send no police or armies to enforce virtue. This does not mean we surrender our power of self determination or our own safety and freedom from the ideas of other people.
To be free is to be free from compulsion by force, and from control through surveillance and propaganda. It also means that we must be free from each other.
January 22 2020 Liberty versus Tyranny: Guns and the Role of Social Force in a Democracy
As the pro-gun rally in Richmond Virginia this week was deluged by fringe elements including white supremacist terrorists, lunatic conspiracy theorists, militias and other organizations of racism and fearmongering, and other criminals and enemies of America, though somewhere in the crowd must have been a lone gentleman who just wanted to hunt ducks, I had an interesting conversation with a woman who carries a gun for personal defense and is fanatically devoted to the idea of an armed citizenry as a last resort against tyranny.
Where ideology and beliefs are interdependent with identity we have a bounded realm in which we will react to factual counter-argumentation as a threat, so I set these differences aside and redirected to finding common ground. For an excellent new text in engaging people in constructive dialog across oppositional ideological lines, I recommend How to Have Impossible Conversations by Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay.
What gave me pause was that she was using a version of an argument for the justification of social force that I had once used, and I realized I was having a conversation with my younger self.
As I framed the argument for putting out the fire with gasoline in the days of my youth, it goes like this; Ever wonder why there was no general resistance to the Holocaust by the Jews? The old German republic had gun registration, so when Hitler took power all the Nazis had to do was run the list and ask everyone to surrender their guns, and if they refused they were executed on the spot. Our founders feared Britain doing the same to them, which is why we have a second amendment right to bear arms. An armed citizenry can defend themselves from a rogue government. Giving up our guns means giving up control of our own security to the government. Do you trust the government that much? Because I don’t.
While this argument is historically factual, there are several levels on which it will no longer work, the first of which is force parity. These may be good rules for a nation with a standing army of 600 men who are expected to show up for duty with their own rifles, but military technology has obsolesced the function of the second amendment.
But this obscures the real question, which is the balance of values underlying the false dichotomy of the gun debate.
To me, the issue of private gun ownership is not a question of security versus freedom. Security ranks third in my values hierarchy in this matter; first is the question of freedom from authority and the social force and control of tyranny. Gun violence is being used by our government to terrify us into accepting the transfer of our power of autonomy to the state as a subversion of democracy; to create a totalitarian regime of force, surveillance, and control through the counterinsurgency model of policing. Driven by overwhelming and generalized fear, we have been deceived and manipulated toward our enslavement.
Gun violence also poses a threat to our value of equality, as it has become a primary weapon of white supremacist terror and the Fourth Reich.
With freedom and equality as primary values, this leaves security as a tertiary value; guns as a last resort of personal safety in defense. Of course we all have a right to defend ourselves; my objection is to guns and other means of force and violence as instruments of tyranny and terror used by governments and other political and religious organizations, and the madmen who are shaped by them as deniable assets.
Consider also; why respond to threats with a tool which can only speak with deadly force? Why choose death? And what of the guns of others; how can we be safe from them?
August 31 2019 Guns Death Terror Greed
Guns, Death, Terror, Greed; unfortunately this can be said of any day in America.
When will we seize control of our own safety as citizens and enact laws to defend our lives and those of our children? I say, prove to us that we can trust you with our lives, and you may bear death among us. Who can pass such a test?
I would say that anyone who wants access to guns and other weapons of terror and mass destruction must pass the same tests as our police, military, and other security servicepersons, meaning regular federal background checks and psychological screening, but some of the worst atrocities have been committed by those we have entrusted with our safety, especially racially motivated crimes, so we must disarm the police first.
Second, anyone who owns a gun has motives which must be suspect, for they have chosen death and changed every human interaction into a kill/no kill decision. A civilian gun owner has all of the responsibility and none of the training in making such choices that a military or police sniper, air marshal, or SWAT/CQB team member has, who are also highly screened people of exceptional character. By what means can we vouchsafe the bearers of death?
Would it not be simpler to abandon the social use of force, and embrace nonviolence?
Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.
Choose life.
August 12 2019 the NRA is a White Supremacist Terrorist Organization Which Uses Fear of Nonwhite Peoples & Immigrants to Sell Guns
The National Rifle Association has long used fear of nonwhite people and immigrants and the racist conspiracy theory of White Replacement to sell guns; as a lobby for the firearms industry it defends the market and profits of the manufacturers and distributors of weapons of white supremacist terror and mass destruction, but that is not its true goal.
While needing a vast and unregulated arms market to ensure that our government has a fully operational manufacture and supply capability, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, to support imperialistic wars and other acts of force and violence against our enemies real or imagined, that is also not its true goal.
The true and primary goal of the NRA is to defend the hegemony of white patriarchal power and privilege, to shape some of us into monsters as deniable assets with which to terrify the rest of us into supporting the abandonment of democracy and of our equality and freedoms, to drive us like frightened cattle into an autocratic and totalitarian state. This is the true goal of the emerging global Fourth Reich; an all-powerful government of surveillance and force, a police state of secret power, covert armies, concentration camps, and the re-enslavement of nonwhite labor.
So we have a pyramid of three parts in the goals of the NRA and the corrupt politicians who have seized our government; to subvert democracy and build a fascist totalitarian state through gun violence and racist terror, to support the business of empire by keeping us in a state of constant readiness for war, and to incite fear of others in the public to create a market for guns.
August 9 2019 Racism is at the Heart of America’s Gun Violence
Why does America resist commonsense legislation to protect us from gun violence and white supremacist terror? This has little to do with guns and everything to do with race, otherness, and the social and structural hegemony of white power and privilege.
Racism is the context within which American gun violence, and our lack of political will to do anything about it, occurs. This is a problem of cultural, social, historical, political, and psychological dimensions, a network of mutually reinforcing issues which must be addressed as an interconnected whole.
At root, racism and white supremacist terror are a failure of our founding ideal of equality and of the concept of citizenship as co ownership of our government and full and inclusive membership in America as a free society of equals.
In the words of Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, as quoted in The Guardian; “The country’s refusal to pass new gun control laws has everything to do with defending racial hierarchy. Who gets to carry a gun in public? Who is coded as a patriot? Who is coded as a threat, or a terrorist or a gangster? What it means to carry a gun or own a gun or buy a gun – those questions are not neutral. We have 200 years of history, or more, defining that in very racial terms.”
August 6 2019 Trump’s Death Squads: How Some of Us are Shaped into Monsters to Subjugate the Rest of Us Through Terror and Gun Violence
That Trump is the chief conspirator and leader of a global Fourth Reich which has seized the government of our nation, who rose to power on a wave of fear and hate as he forged the alliance between white supremacists and Christian Identity fundamentalists which hijacked first the Republican Party and then America, is by now nothing new.
We have seen the true enemy of America and of freedom and equality leering at underage girls while inspecting the dressing rooms at the Miss America Pageant, smiling in servile photo-op diplomacy with tyrants whose brutal regimes he admires, contorted with rage as he whips up his supporters at fascist rallies.
But it has now become undeniable that he also directs and operates a covert network of deniable assets and death squads; so many of the terrorists who commit mass murder quote him in their manifestoes that it is beyond coincidence. America must as a nation confront two truths which are unavoidable; white supremacy and racist-fascist gun violence are now our greatest terrorist threats, and the President of the United States is the kingpin of that terrorism.
His messages of hate shape some of us into monsters to subjugate the rest of us through fear; to drive us into the false security of an authoritarian police state of terror, surveillance, and the subversion of democracy.
Torch of Liberty 