Mass riots in the streets of Italy greet the ICE white supremacist terror force sent by our Rapist In Chief to intimidate the world as his emissary who has threatened to invade Greenland to steal her resources is met with jeers and boos at the stadium.
The Bearded Lady who renamed himself J.D. Vance to obscure his origins as a failed drag queen and the mail order bride-slave whom he keeps on a leash beside him represent the American Fourth Reich well as performative figures of lies and illusions, bearing threats of subjugation and conquest by a kleptocratic and racist regime.
This is a man who, along with all other members of the Trump regime and his co-conspirator Elon Musk, is guilty of murdering 800,000 human beings by designed starvation and illness in denial of food and medical aid. When you ride with Famine, Plague, and War, expect to be met with total Resistance.
Nothing less than a total denial of the ideas of mercy, compassion, and our duty of care for each other as guarantor’s of each other’s humanity was the meaning of the regime’s dismantling of USAID, a regime of amoral nihilism and vacuity which embraces the Dark Enlightenment theories of its plutocrat sponsors like Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel. And the world recoils in horror.
So while the Olympics offers us a glorious vision of world peace and harmony, and our athletes create beauty and hope in their heroic performances which change the boundaries of human possibilities, America sends darkness and despair.
May we all dream better futures than we have our moment now and the legacies of our past.
Ass written by Bryan Armen Graham in The Guardian, in an article entitled
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US: The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden; “The modern Olympics sell themselves on a simple premise: the whole world, watching the same moment, at the same time. On Friday night in Milan, that illusion fractured in real time.
When Team USA entered the San Siro during the parade of nations, the speed skater Erin Jackson led the delegation into a wall of cheers. Moments later, when cameras cut to US vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance, large sections of the crowd responded with boos. Not subtle ones, but audible and sustained ones. Canadian viewers heard them. Journalists seated in the press tribunes in the upper deck, myself included, clearly heard them. But as I quickly realized from a groupchat with friends back home, American viewers watching NBC did not.
On its own, the situation might once have passed unnoticed. But the defining feature of the modern sports media landscape is that no single broadcaster controls the moment any more. CBC carried it. The BBC liveblogged it. Fans clipped it. Within minutes, multiple versions of the same happening were circulating online – some with boos, some without – turning what might once have been a routine production call into a case study in information asymmetry.
For its part, NBC has denied editing the crowd audio, although it is difficult to resolve why the boos so audible in the stadium and on other broadcasts were absent for US viewers. But in a broader sense, it is becoming harder, not easier, to curate reality when the rest of the world is holding up its own camera angles. And that raises an uncomfortable question as the United States moves toward hosting two of the largest sporting events on the planet: the 2026 men’s World Cup and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
If a US administration figure is booed at the Olympics in Los Angeles, or a World Cup match in New Jersey or Dallas, will American domestic broadcasts simply mute or avoid mentioning the crowd audio? If so, what happens when the world feed, or a foreign broadcaster, shows something else entirely? What happens when 40,000 phones in the stadium upload their own version in real time?
The risk is not just that viewers will see through it. It is that attempts to manage the narrative will make American broadcasters look less credible, not more. Because the audience now assumes there is always another angle. Every time a broadcaster makes that trade – credibility for insulation – it is a trade audiences eventually notice.
There is also a deeper structural pressure behind decisions like this. The Trump era has been defined in part by sustained hostility toward media institutions. Broadcasters do not operate in a vacuum; they operate inside regulatory environments, political climates and corporate risk calculations. When presidents and their allies openly threaten or target networks, it is naive to pretend that has no downstream effect on editorial choices – especially in high-stakes live broadcasts tied to billion-dollar rights deals.
But there is a difference between contextual pressure and visible reality distortion. When global audiences can compare feeds in real time, the latter begins to resemble something else entirely: not editorial judgment, but narrative management. Which is why comparisons to Soviet-style state-controlled broadcasting models – once breathless rhetorical exaggerations – are starting to feel less hyperbolic.
The irony is that the Olympics themselves are built around the idea that sport can exist alongside political tension without pretending it does not exist. The International Olympic Committee’s own language – athletes should not be punished for governments’ actions – implicitly acknowledges that governments are part of the Olympic theater whether organizers like it or not.
Friday night illustrated that perfectly. American athletes were cheered, their enormous contingent given one of the most full-throated receptions of the night. The political emissaries were not universally welcomed. Both things can be true at once. Crowd dissent is not a failure of the Olympic ideal. In open societies, it is part of how public sentiment is expressed. Attempting to erase one side of that equation risks flattening reality into something audiences no longer trust. And if Milan was a warning shot, Los Angeles is the main event.
Since Donald Trump’s first term, American political coverage around sport has fixated on the micro-moments: Was the president booed or cheered? Did the broadcast show it? Did he attend or skip events likely to produce hostile crowds? The discourse has often felt like a Rorschach test, filtered through partisan interpretation and selective clips.
The LA Olympics will be something else entirely. There is no hiding from an opening ceremony for Trump. No ducking a stadium when the Olympic Charter requires the host country’s head of state to officially declare the Games open. No controlling how 200 international broadcasters carry the moment.
If Trump is still in the White House on 14 July 2028, one month after his 82nd birthday and in the thick of another heated US presidential campaign, he will stand in front of a global television audience as a key part of the opening ceremony. He will do so in California, in a political environment far less friendly than many domestic sporting venues he has appeared in over the past decade. And he will do it in a city synonymous with the political opposition, potentially in the back yard of the Democratic presidential candidate.
There will be some cheers. There will almost certainly be boos. There will be everything in between. And there will be no way to make them disappear. The real risk for American broadcasters is not that dissent will be visible. It is that audiences will start assuming anything they do not show is being hidden. In an era when trust in institutions is already fragile, that is a dangerous place to operate from.
The Olympics have always been political, whether through boycotts, protests, symbolic gestures or crowd reactions. What has changed is not the politics. It is the impossibility of containing the optics.
Milan may ultimately be remembered as a small moment – a few seconds of crowd noise during a long ceremony. But it also felt like a preview of the next phase of global sport broadcasting: one where narrative control is shared, contested and instantly verifiable. The world is watching. And this time, it is also recording.”
As I wrote in my post of February 6 2025, We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich; We rejoice in the glorious Resistance which arose yesterday in mass actions and protests throughout America, against Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and shuttering of US Aid, and against Musk the Troll King’s monkeywrenching and sabotage of our nation’s social security, medicare, tax, and other financial records, a federal bank heist, espionage, and information warfare performed by his troupe of fascist child soldiers.
In the space of a few days we organized marches on every state capital in America as well as key federal sites in Washington DC, a broad spectrum of alliances and interests which united in solidarity of action to challenge and confront the criminal seizure of our government by the Republican Party, front organization of the Fourth Reich, a liberation movement which parallels legislative and legal actions and theatres of war.
For war is precisely the word for what is now upon us.
America now faces her “fight them on the beaches” moment; though we have been a theatre of the Third World War since the Stolen Election of 2016. But we have never before fought a war of survival against our own captured state.
In this great cause of liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all, of the American Way as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state, I offer us all the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and terror; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He wrote it in Paris 1940 for the new Resistance, rephrased from the oath of the French Foreign Legion he took in 1928; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole. And we now find ourselves in a parallel situation to that of Vichy France, and must engage the imposed conditions of struggle by the same means and strategies as then; hopefully we have learned a few new tricks since then. But Solidarity is the keystone, with Disbelief and Disobedience on either side.
This, this, this.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
As written in The Guardian in an article entitled What is USAid and why does Trump dislike it so much?: The US agency distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid every year and is a key tool to promote soft power around the world; “Donald Trump’s administration has confirmed plans to merge the US international aid agency USAid into the state department in a major revamp that would shrink its workforce and align its spending with Trump’s priorities.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared himself the acting administrator of the agency and employees have been locked out of its Washington DC headquarters, while others have been suspended.
Trump has entrusted Elon Musk, the billionaire heading his drive to shrink the federal government, to oversee the project. On Sunday, Trump said USAid had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”, while Musk called it “a criminal organization” without providing any evidence and said it was “time for it to die”.
What is USAid and how is it funded?
USAid was established in 1961 by Democratic president John F Kennedy at the height of the cold war with the aim of better coordinating foreign assistance, already a key platform of US foreign policy in countering Soviet influence.
It now administers about 60% of US foreign assistance and disbursed $43.79bn in the 2023 fiscal year. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report this month, its workforce of 10,000, about two-thirds of whom serve overseas, assisted about 130 countries. USAid is funded by Congress, based on administration requests.
The CRS said USAid helps “strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads US efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists US commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade”.
Its top aid recipients in 2023 were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.
How much does the US spend on aid and how does it compare with other countries?
While the US gives more official government aid than any other country, its contribution as a percentage of national income is at the bottom of the list for wealthy countries in 2020, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In 2023, Norway topped the list at 1.09% of gross national income, while the US lagged at 0.24%, along with Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Spain.
In recent years, according to a Brookings Institution report from September, US aid spending has been about 0.33% of gross domestic product. It peaked at 3% of GDP in the 1950s with the Marshall plan program to rebuild Europe after the second world war. During the cold war, it ranged from 1% to a little less than 0.5%.
Nevertheless, in the 2023 fiscal year, the US as a whole disbursed a total of $72bn in assistance worldwide, and about 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024. The funds covered everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work.
Why does Trump oppose the agency’s work?
In an executive order on 20 January, Trump announced a 90-day pause in most of foreign aid, saying the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.
“They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” it said.
In a memo, the administration urged USAid workers to join the effort to transform how Washington allocates aid in line with Trump’s “America First” policy and threatened disciplinary action for ignoring the orders. The actions rang alarm bells from refugee camps in Thailand to Ukraine war zones with humanitarian organizations and UN agencies saying they could face drastic curbs on their ability to distribute food, shelter and healthcare.
A source with knowledge of USAid’s workings said folding it into the state department would be a big departure. USAid has in the past been able to provide humanitarian assistance to countries with which Washington has no diplomatic relations, including Iran and North Korea. This has sometimes helped build bridges, the source said, and the benefit could be lost if its operations were purely tied to political objectives.
Is support for foreign aid bipartisan?
According to Brookings, Democratic administrations and lawmakers have historically been more supportive than Republicans, but every postwar president, whether Democrat or Republican, has been a strong proponent of foreign aid – apart from Trump.
It noted that proposals by the first Trump administration to cut the US international affairs budget by a third were rejected, as were attempts to delay congressional consideration of supplemental foreign aid legislation in 2024. And in a bipartisan vote in June, 80% of the members of the Republican-led House of Representatives rejected an amendment to eliminate foreign assistance from the fiscal 2025 budget.”
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled Doge v USAid: how Elon Musk helped his acolytes infiltrate world’s biggest aid agency; “USAid security personnel were defending a secure room holding sensitive and classified data in a standoff with “department of government efficiency” employees when a message came directly from Elon Musk: give the Doge kids whatever they want.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, a posse of cocksure young engineers answering to Musk have stormed through Washington DC, gaining access to government computer systems as part of what Senator Chuck Schumer has called “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government”.
The young men, who are all under the age of 26 and have almost no government experience, have tapped into the treasury department’s federal payment system and vacuumed up employment histories at the office of personnel management (OPM). Roughly 20 Doge employees are now working out of the Department of Education, the Washington Post has reported, and have gained access to sensitive internal systems there too. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported they had infiltrated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and accessed key systems as well.
The young engineers, whose identities have been confirmed to the Guardian, wanted the same at USAid. One of them, Gavin Kliger, was a 25-year-old techie who has defended the failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz as a victim of the “deep state” and claimed he had left behind a seven-figure salary to join Doge and “save America”. Another, Luke Farritor, 23, was a former SpaceX intern who had been given top-level clearances to USAid systems and had requested similar to Medicare and Medicaid. A third, Jeremy Lewin, was an AI specialist also reportedly assigned to the General Services Administration. A superior planned to lobby the CIA for a clearance for him after he failed to gain access to a secure area.
Some US officials had begun calling the young engineers the “Muskovites” for their aggressive loyalty to the SpaceX owner. But some USAid staff used another word: the “incels”.
The Guardian has identified three calls by Musk to USAid’s political leadership and security officers in which he demanded the suspensions of dozens of the agency’s leading officials, and cajoled and threatened senior USAid officials to give his acolytes private data and access to restricted areas. At one point, he threatened to call in the US Marshals Service.
One USAid employee said that the calls by Musk, two of which have not been previously reported, showed he had effectively usurped power at the agency even from the Trump administration’s political leadership. “Who is in control of our government?” the person said. “[Doge] basically showed up and took over.”
In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, USAid had been presented as a pilot test for a large-scale overhaul of the federal government that would downsize agencies and arbitrarily move federal employees to looser contracts that made them easier to fire.
“If the Trump administration is successful here, they’re going to try this everywhere else,” said Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, a former USAid employee who came to protest alongside fired and furloughed workers outside the agency’s headquarters on Monday. “This is just the beginning.”
But it has also been a primer on how Doge operatives have inserted themselves into federal agencies and cajoled and bullied their way to access their most sensitive systems. This account of Doge’s infiltration of USAid is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former USAid, state department and other officials briefed on the events of the last week.
Security staff initially rebuffed the engineers’ efforts to talk their way into the secure rooms, called sensitive compartmented information facilities (Scifs), because they didn’t have the necessary security clearances. But that evening, Musk phoned a senior official at USAid to demand access for his subordinates, the first of numerous calls to officials and employees of Doge at USAid that have continued into this week.
Inside the building, chaos reigned. Areas that were once declared restricted, with limitations on electronics such as phones and watches, suddenly loosened their security protocols to allow in uncredentialed outsiders. Doge employees were said to obscure their identities to prevent online harassment, a tactic that was repeated at other agencies. And Peter Marocco, the controversial new director of foreign assistance at the state department, was stalking the halls and meeting in private with the Doge employees.
By Friday, things had gone further downhill. After a tense all-hands meeting with senior staff, and outsiders in the sixth-floor conference room, the young engineers rushed around the offices with their laptops, plugging cords into computers and other electronics as they gathered data from the agency.
After the meeting, Matt Hopson, a Trump appointee for USAid chief of staff, abruptly resigned. Jason Gray, the acting administrator, was removed from his position. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was soon to announce that he was the new administrator of USAid and appoint Marocco as his deputy. Musk was closing in on his goal.
The Doge employees had open access to rooms throughout the sixth floor, including the offices of the administrator’s suite. But the Scifs were still off limits.
At USAid, a newly installed leadership was formally in charge. But the real power lay with Marocco and Doge, which was plotting how to wind down the agency, a plan that Trump endorsed on Tuesday afternoon as he confirmed that teams were backed by the White House. That evening, USAid announced it would put all its direct-hire personnel around the world on administrative leave, a decision that would affect thousands of employees and their families.
Inside of USAid, the operation to shut down the decades-old operation was being run by Marocco, four engineers in their early 20s and the Doge leadership that contacted them by phone.
“It’s all being driven through Doge right now,” said a current USAid official, adding that Doge engineers in USAid headquarters continued to field calls from Musk and Marocco on Monday. “The folks in the building are turning the system off for [USAid employees], they’ve kept a small number of people from the different bureaus to help understand what programs will be kept and not kept, what the footprint will look like.”
The tension at USAid headquarters came to a head on Saturday evening, when Doge employees demanded access to the Scif on the agency’s sixth floor. They were stopped by the agency’s top security officer, John Voorhees.
Among those present was Steve Davis, according to one current and one former USAid official. Davis, a Musk deputy, has worked with the billionaire for more than 20 years at SpaceX and the Boring Company. He reportedly sometimes slept in the Twitter offices to help Musk slash costs there after he acquired it in 2022.
The argument over access to the Scif had grown verbally heated and senior Doge staff threatened to call in US marshals to gain access to it. During that standoff, according to one account made to the Guardian, a call was again made to Musk, who, as Bloomberg first reported, repeated the threat to involve the US Marshals Service.
Shortly after, Voorhees was placed on administrative leave and the Doge staffers entered the Scif. They took over the access control system and employee records. Within hours, the USAid website went down. Hundreds of employees were locked out of the system that weekend, and many still don’t know their status. (The Guardian has seen emails in which USAid administrators admit they do not know the employment states of current USAid officials.)
“I’ve been furloughed, I guess?” said one contractor with 15 years of experience for the bureau for humanitarian assistance, where she had helped coordinate urgent responses in Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia and Latin America. “I don’t know what my status is but I don’t think I work here right now.”
By Monday, Kliger wrote an email to all staff at 12.42am to tell them not to bother coming into the building that day.
The incident has illustrated how Doge employees with Musk’s backing were able to override USAid leadership and bypass government procedures for accessing restricted areas with classified materials, fueling criticism that his agency is a national security risk.
“Did Secretary Rubio allow this kind of access by Musk’s employees?” asked Kim. “It worries me about USAid but if it’s happening here, I’m guessing it’s probably happening at all these other national security agencies.”
Formally, Rubio has delegated responsibility to Marocco, who has been pressed by congressional staffers to give details of the changes affecting USAid and the $40bn in foreign aid it manages each year.
“The question at hand is: who’s in charge of the state department?” Senator Brian Schatz told the Guardian. “So far the answer has been Pete Marocco.”
Doge did not respond to questions about what security clearances, if any, the engineers held. “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” wrote Katie Miller, a Doge spokesperson, on social media.
But Scifs are regulated by a strict protocol and it is unclear who could have verified the Doge employees’ credentials and filed the necessary paperwork to allow them to enter.
Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.”
As written by Glenn David in reference to the podcast Lights On With Jessica Denson; “Dear Congressman, I am so disappointed in you and the rest of your colleagues for not speaking up doing the right thing on January 6 and making sure that the worst domestic terrorist in the history of our country would not occupy our White House. I hope you know by now that it is clear that the election was a fraud. I hope you know by now that Kamala Harris actually won the election. I’m not sure why you continue to attempt to think that we have a democracy at this point. Our democracy ended on January 6, 2021. The coup attempt on that day came to a successful completion on January 6, 2025. You had a hand in that successful coup. Everything that has happened since the phony inauguration day for an illegally occupying president was so predictable and so avoidable had you done the right thing. Now we are looking at a complete fascist takeover and a complete dissolution of our constitution. There have been so many impeachable offenses in the last two weeks and still no action from you or your colleagues to the point where it makes a difference. Talk is cheap and actions speak volumes. What has to happen before you actually do something of value for this country? Please listen to the attached video as I hope that you have heeded all of the information I have sent you previously. The people of this country do not want an insurrectionist, malignant narcissist, pathological lying dictator who wants to take everything from the bottom 98% and give it to the already sickeningly wealthy. We are doing our part to resist fascism and defend our constitution, I think it is time our elected officials do so as well.”
Milan Versus the American Fourth Reich at the Olympic Village
“What, no kiss-kiss?”
The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in the US
Lights on! Americans answered the call for a 50-state 50-protest (50501), and are flooding the streets to demand action against the hostile takeover by illegitimate president Trump and his foreign national controller Elon Musk. Jessica Denson, who spearheaded the #14thNOW movement to block Trump’s illegal presidency, is joined by friends and activists across the country, as well as former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter to discuss the criminal and civil actions that must be taken now. Jessica reports, LIVE.
An image from the propaganda mill of the Confederacy was sent to America by the multigenerational KKK white supremacist terrorist who squats in the White House and sends forth ICE stormtroopers to brutalize, abduct, torture, and murder us in a criminal and savage campaign of ethnic cleansing, one among myriads of spurious diversionary ploys in a futile and increasingly unhinged attempt to misdirect attention from the central fact of who he is, a child predator and kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate who is also a Russian agent and whose mission is to sabotage and dismantle democracy and enact the Fall of America into tyranny and state terror.
What has happened?
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s toxic, racist video surpasses previous levels of debasement: Video deleted by White House breaks through numbness barrier and raises further questions about fitness for office; “It is a singular if highly dubious distinction of Donald Trump’s pungent contribution to the political discourse to have essentially bankrupted the English language’s capacity for outrage.
So unremitting and extreme have been the avalanche of affronts since Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to declare his presidential candidacy that even his most ardent critics have become desensitized, leading to a level of shock fatigue.
Yet Trump’s highly racist and offensive late-night Truth Social post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes broke through the numbness barrier to register on the political Richter scale at a level few of his many previous insults ever achieved.
That Trump succeeded in surpassing his own previous levels of debased standards was only emphasized by the decision, taken under fire, to delete the post hours after the White House had initially defended it.
That rare climbdown and the attempts to pin the blame on an anonymous White House staffer are unlikely to prevent the episode from illuminating a topic that much of the media has seemed reluctant to confront head on; that Trump’s behavior, online and in public, has been growing more reckless and raises serious questions about his mental acuity and his fitness for office.
On social media, whisperings that Trump is displaying signs of cognitive decline have increased in recent weeks.
Such chatter has been fed, rather than silenced, by the president’s frequent invocations of multiple cognitive examinations that he claims to have “aced” – boasts that have merely triggered questions as to why he is undergoing such tests in the first place.
Providing further grist have been the increasing volume of nocturnal social media posts from a president who appears frequently unrestrained and frantic, even if falling short of the racist toxicity of the Obama video.
On several nights in the past two months, Trump has fired off scores of social media posts in the night hours, including vitriolic attacks on his opponents. On one night in December, he fired off more than 150 posts in a few hours.
At the same time, the president has been observed apparently falling asleep in cabinet meetings and other public forums.
Against that backdrop, Friday’s initial rebuke from the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, to reporters to “stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public” missed the point by a wide margin – as the later reversal only confirmed.
Critics may feel entitled to respond that such advice might be better directed to Trump, as polls show rising disapproval over his administration’s performance on affordability issues and the violent actions of ICE agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
More sentient – and ominous for Trump – was the response of the South Carolina Republican senator, Tim Scott, who is Black, and usually one of the president’s most reliable allies. Calling the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House”, Scott wrote: “The president should remove it.”
Given Trump’s known trait for doubling down – a lesson absorbed from his pugilistic mentor, Roy Cohn – the fact that he did just that represents an unlikely display of weakness, if not exactly contrition.
Yet it is unlikely to be a template for future conduct.
More probable are further indiscretions that could lead to increased calls for invoking the 25th amendment, a constitutional device with provisions for removing a president from office if he is deemed unable to perform his duties.
Indeed, the Obama post may have already crossed that threshold, given the US’s painful history of racism and the human costs borne in trying to overcome them.
Invoking the amendment’s section 4 – needed to remove a president – would be complicated and seems a far-fetched possibility.
It would need the vice-president, JD Vance, and a majority of the cabinet to declare Trump unfit, a hard-to-imagine scenario considering the obsequious displays of fealty the president demands of cabinet members. Even if that hurdle were to be overcome, support from two-thirds of both the houses of Congress would be required if Trump were to contest an effort to remove him – as seems likely.
And to Democrats, comparisons with Joe Biden may be jarring.
Speculation about Biden’s supposed cognitive decline increased during the last year of his presidency, although evidence was limited as his White House handlers sought to cocoon him and restrict his public appearances.
It was only after the president’s disastrous televised debate with Trump in Atlanta in June 2024, when he seemed lost and unable to complete cogent thoughts, that doubts about his ability to serve as president for another four years reached boiling point – ultimately forcing him to withdraw his candidacy in favor of Kamala Harris.
But at no point did Biden issue racist or insulting social media posts, or appear to threaten Nato allies, as Trump has done over Greenland. Nor did he demonize entire ethnic groups, something Trump has done repeatedly in calling the Somali community in Minnesota “garbage”.
He did not assail female journalists in press briefings in nakedly vindictive and misogynistic tones, as Trump has done several times lately.
Racially abusing his Democratic predecessor on Truth Social may be an insufficient catalyst to trigger Republicans into immediate thoughts of removing a president they have bent over backwards to submit to and accommodate.
But some may be beginning to wonder how much longer they can trust what Lyndon Johnson called “the awesome duties” of being president to a man who spends his twilight hours posting memes that threaten to reopen wounds which the country spent generations and much treasure trying to heal.”
As written by Robert Reich in his Substack newletter, in an essay entitled Is it unkind to describe our president as a racist pig?; “Friends,
I try to ignore Trump’s posts because every one of them is filled with his noxious bloviation.
But sometimes his posts are so revolting that I can’t just let them pass. The loathsome sociopath in the Oval Office has to be held accountable.
Late last night — which happened to be the fifth day of Black History Month — at exactly 11:44 pm, Trump posted a video that included a depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
Now, we all know Trump is a loathsome human being. His insults have become an odious staple of his presidency. You may remember his AI-generated video of himself as a fighter pilot dumping excrement on No Kings Day protesters. Or his AI-generated video of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries as mariachi performers.
This morning, the White House press secretary hurried into the White House press room with her usual pooper-scooper to clean up from last night’s racist post — calling it nothing but “an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” and adding, for good measure: “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Well, it turns out that plenty of Republican members of Congress were outraged, too — and they didn’t fake it. “The most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” posted South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate. “A reasonable person sees the racist context in this,” posted Nebraska Republican Senator Pete Ricketts. “Totally unacceptable,” posted Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker. “Wrong and incredibly offensive,” posted New York Republican congressman Mike Lawler. “Offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable,” posted Ohio Republican congressman Mike Turner.
What happened then? Just before noon today, Eastern Time — some 12 hours after Trump posted his piece of sh*t — the White House said the post had been deleted.
No apology offered, of course. The White House blamed an unnamed “White House staffer” for it.
But you and I and anyone who has paid attention to Trump’s outbursts of bigoted offal over the past months knows it came from him.
Four observations.
First, you know Trump is going to unload his vitriol whenever he feels upstaged by Obama (or Biden) or any other prominent critic. Last weekend, at the same time “Melania” was released, Netflix views of Michelle Obama’s 2020 documentary “Becoming” surged by more than 13,000 percent.
Second, even Republican senators and representatives are now unafraid to publicly accuse Trump of being a bigot. That’s progress.
Third, when congressional Republicans make a ruckus, Trump backs down.
Fourth, this incident adds to the accumulating evidence that Trump is losing his mind.”
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such very different consequences?
Herein Trump reminds us all who the enemy is and his regime’s goal of dehumanization, the re-enslavement of Black people, and turning citizens Into subjects in a totalitarian white ethnostate, as Black History Month begins.
This we must Resist, By Any Means Necessary.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.
Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness.
A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
Trump’s toxic, racist video surpasses previous levels of debasement
Celebrate with me today the works of a pivotal figure of my youth and that of many others who found in him a figure of transgression of the Forbidden, the ownership of ourselves in struggle against authorized identities and systems of oppression, and the freedom to explore and perform those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh as well as those we ourselves create, the glorious William S. Burroughs.
Who was he to me? One of my father’s Beatnik friends who among the writers, artists, musicians, and film and theatre people he collected was all of those as well as a magician and scholar of the occult, and a wise and kindly mentor. He taught me storytelling by telling stories, by the fireplace after dinner at our home, and magic by witness of rituals he and my father wrote and staged together as theatrical performances. I was between ten and twelve during this time; young enough to internalize and imagine myself into his fireside versions of Grimm’s fairytales as family history and origin stories, and find wonder and beauty in his reimaginations of Lovecraft, Crowley, traditional medieval ceremonial magic, and his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche, Acephale; and too young to be aware of or understand his homosexuality or its crucial role as a driving force of his identity as an Outsider and outlaw of sex and gender in his struggle through writing to free himself from Authority which he allegorized as possession. I was in high school before I read his books, by which time he was no longer a figure in our family, though his strange fairytales, ideas regarding Nietzsche whose Thus Spake Zarathustra became a counter text to the Bible for me in eighth grade, and practice of writing and magic as poetic vision remained with me.
What does William S. Burroughs teach us about the value of transgression in bringing change to authorized identities and systems of oppression, the violation of normalities, the role of vision in the reimagination and transformation of imposed orders of being and meaning, and revolutionary struggle to seize ownership of ourselves from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue?
An encyclopedic and phantasmagorical body of work, full of dark satire, science fiction tropes, chaos, magic, songs of anarchy and freedom, and a beautiful unbounded transgression, William S. Burroughs wove revolutionary socio-political insights together with the glorious madness of Dionysian ecstatic vision and psychedelic trance.
Combining in his person Existentialism and Surrealism, his work is driven by two great themes; rebellion against Authority and the dreamquest of a magician to become a god.
The first of these themes being Sartrean Authenticity and a Promethean rebellion versus Control, a personification of all forms of thought control and normalcy, referential to Camus, Genet, Nietzsche, the English Romantics, de Sade, and most of all Georges Bataille, whose post-Freudian analysis of sociocultural forces and institutions, developed within the theoretical framework of Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology, indict Authority as a means of dehumanizing and shaping us into the tools of our own governmental, religious, and economic enslavement. The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated, and he remains a bridge to Foucault.
His second major theme is ecstatic vision and transcendence as a path of liberation from the material world, a sublimity achieved through the derangement of the senses; sex, drugs, violence, all things aberrant and the pursuit of the extreme and the bizarre. As in the early novels of his direct model Jean Genet, a major theme in this is the seizure of power and authenticity through transgression of the Forbidden.
This includes the many magical subterfuges and arcane disciplines he practiced and codified as Chaos Magic, first among them being the cut-up method of randomization to reveal hidden truths invented with Brion Gysin and intended as a ritual of prophecy derived from the I Ching, the inspiration for which Burroughs once told me was Leibniz’s famous claim to have invented binary mathematics when reading the I Ching in his hunting lodge in Bavaria when he had the primary insight that the whole universe can be constructed of combinations of one and zero.
The works of William S. Burroughs may first be read as an interrogation of the four principles of Leibniz, Non-Contradiction, the Identity of Indiscernibles, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the Principle of Bivalence, as illuminated in the conversations of Aristotle, al Farabi, Avicenna, Aquinas, Kant, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carroll, and Korzybski, and playing the other side of the board Heraclitus, Nagarjuna, al Ghazali, and Hui Shi.
Second is the technique of juxtaposition developed from Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Monet’s principle; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, and the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world that we see.”
Herein juxtaposition is a praxis of his values in the second dimension of Burrough’s thought, his context within the lineage of Romantic Idealism; Prometheus and Milton’s rebel angel, Shakespeare in The Tempest, Byron and his sources Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich von Schiller, then Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Keats, Blake, and Coleridge, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Third we must recognize that William S. Burroughs is primarily a mystic and Surrealist, obsessed with experiments with telepathy, precognition, shapeshifting, out of body travel to other dimensions and times, curses and psychic conflicts with malign and alien forces which reflect those of H.P. Lovecraft, and a unique and personal spiritism akin to that of voodoo which I would call Jungian shadow work. In this aspect he resembles Philip K Dick, prophet of the transhuman, Carl Gustave Jung, Vladimir Nabokov in Ada, and all of his fellow Surrealists.
Of direct influences among Surrealists we must count Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue, Ionesco’s Rhinoceroses, Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, Reverdy’s The Thief of Talant, Michel Leiris‘ Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
As to his language and style we must trace his origins in the Surrealist poets and their influences and references; Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, de Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Phillip Lamantia.
All of William S. Burroughs’ works may be read as conceptual art representing surrealist films in the tradition of Cocteau, Artaud, Dali, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Tim Burton, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Guillermo del Toro.
He began along this path as a child when he became the avatar of a chthonic being conjured by his Welsh nanny in the rite of Calling the Toad; and thereafter sought transformation and transcendence in forms ever more strange. This he claimed was the toad that Nietzsche feared he must swallow, whom he addressed using the name Tsathoggua invented by Clark Ashton Smith and used by Lovecraft in The Whisperer in Darkness and other stories, which was transferred to him as a spirit guardian and oracle of wisdom, a succession of bearership as a mystery initiation into which he inducted me through storytelling and ritual. Upon conclusion of such performances we would recite together Prospero’s line in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare ’s The Tempest; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. Thus did he make me his successor and Nietzsche’s as was he.
This canon of stories, possibly invented on the spot and told over some time intermixed with fabulous and strange versions of Grimm’s Fairytales, now seems to me similar in intent to Ted Hughes’ reimaginations of mythology attempting to construct and reawaken a lost faith. He never wrote them down, unfortunate as unlike his books they were suitable for young adults if not children and coherent in a way his novels, constructed of theatrical episodes he called turns as in vaudeville acts, are not. One day I may do so for him, and the same with his system of magic.
I wrote my first story, Dream of the Toad, when I was twelve and immersed in Frazier’s Golden Bough and other myths, folklore, and fairytales, inspired by the wonderful stories he told of growing up stepping back and forth between our world and a parallel, magical one, filled with living figures from fairytales and myths in delightfully bent and off-center versions of their stories, as he and my father played chess of an evening and the coals of the fire burned low, enveloping us in the gathering darkness.
To me, William S. Burroughs will always be a kindly and urbane but tormented gentleman, a Trickster figure and Guide of the Soul, bearer of hidden signs and wounds, a charming rascal and unofficial uncle steeped in classical literature he could recite from memory, full of mischief and secrets and whom you could trust with your own.
Years after his time as a figure in our home, I first read his books as a teenager immersed in the grimoires of medieval magic, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as guides to universal principles of creating ourselves through language, when I discovered the stunning vistas of his transgression and disruption of gender, as he had never said or signaled anything of the kind within my sight or hearing as a child. So also with his anarchism and reimagination of Marx in fiction as the Algebra of Need.
He always liked my Dream Labyrinth wall, a floor to ceiling collage of Hieronymus Bosch and other strange images opposite my bed which I changed and elaborated constantly throughout my teenage years. Bizarre drawings like cinematic storyboards would be found added after his mysterious arrivals and departures. He loved illusions, grand entrances and ghostly exits, and above all humor, by which to keep the world off balance and step nimbly by its obstacles.
His books are also a Dream Labyrinth, which together form maps of the unknown and of possibilities of human meaning and being, as well as topologies of transformation as an anarchist Hall of Mirrors in a surreal and Absurd universe; one which is the reverse face of C.I.A. Director of Counter-Intelligence Angleton’s controlling metaphor of intelligence work as falsification and thought control as a Wilderness of Mirrors. This chiaroscuro was intentional on the part of Burroughs, who cast himself as a nemesis of Authority; liberation to counter balance tyranny. And all of this laden with dense symbolism and multilayered historical references, especially from suppressed paradigms and antique systems of myth.
William S. Burroughs remains an important vehicle of transmission of the whole western mystery tradition, indebted as he is to Philippe Soupault for his interpretation of William Blake and to Georges Bataille for his interpretation of Nietzsche and Freud.
One can also speak of Burroughs the magician of poetic vision and ecstatic trance in terms of Dionysius and Orpheus, and the literature of ceremonial magic as was Jung, immersed in Gnosticism, Theosophy, Rosicrucian occultism, Egyptian mythology, shamanism, tarot as he gave me my first deck of cards which I have to this day and taught me their use, I Ching, Kabbalah, alchemy, and all of this through Aleister Crowley whom he claimed as a source of discipleship and interpreted through his direct model, H.P. Lovecraft, of whom he once said; ”I wish Lovecraft wrote fiction. Some truths are too terrible to invoke by their names.”
He and Lovecraft were alike as authors trying to write their way out of madness; he from possession, Lovecraft from the trauma of childhood abuse and the madness which killed both his parents and which he feared would claim him. This places them both in the literary genre of journals of madness, with Akutagawa, Philip K. Dick, and Leonora Carrington.
Burroughs’ conspiracy of Venusian insects to conquer humankind through drug addiction as a metaphor of capitalism, summarized in his formulation of Marxism as The Algebra of Need, is an appropriation of Lovecraft. The master and his disciple were also both serious scholars of the occult obsessed with dark magic, who saw in mysticism a tradition of counterculture and dissent, as with the martyrdom of the Templars and the heroic Jacques DeMolay, and of seizure of power against unanswerable forces of oppression.
As the character of John Constantine says in Legends of Tomorrow, season 6 episode 10 Bad Blood; “You know, where I’m from, being normal is being crushed by the boot of capitalism and then blaming it on anyone with brown skin. It’s being told that only degenerates can fancy men and women. It’s your old man coming home drunk every night and beating you to a pulp because that’s what his old man done to him. But magic, Spooner, the ability to break the rules, to stick it to the rich and the powerful, that’s who I am. And I’m nothing without it, Spooner. I’m nothing. Magic lets you break the rules.”
Naked Lunch is a masterpiece and classic of literature; Junky and Queer are among his other autobiographical novels modeled on those of Jean Genet. Like those of Genet, his stories are parodies and subversions of sacred rituals intended to liberate us from authority and free the creative imagination to forge an authentic humankind.
The Nova Trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express, further explores addiction as a metaphor of social control and the destructive nature of capitalism. His idea of the Ugly American as a malign intrusive alien entity and force which must be exorcised parallels and is referenced by Malcolm X’s personification of heroin addiction as a possessing White Man who must be cast out.
One of the most accessible of his works is his book on the gangster Dutch Schultz, a dialectical journal in the classical form of a Jesuit report recording the actual last words of the gangster in one column and Burroughs’s commentary in the other- complete with cinematography notes.
America, a trilogy including Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands which reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a triumph of Surrealism in epic form and a masterpiece, has a clarity of prose and the imprint of a master artist at the summit of his powers. As a prank I once switched them for the actual American History textbooks in a high school class; strangely no one objected and I had to go right on teaching through the semester with it as myths of national identity. I think we had more fun with this subject than is usual.
The Revised Boy Scout Manual is a brilliant parody and a manual of anarchist revolt and the overthrowing of governments. Along with T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom it is among the finest classics of direct action and guerrilla warfare one might consult. The actual Boy Scouts, of which I was a member as a youth, were founded in battle when the British defenders during the Siege of Mafeking in the Boer War, 1899-1900 South Africa, ran out of men and sent twelve year olds into the bush versus ferocious Dutch commandos. In reimagining the Boy Scouts as a revolutionary cadre for asymmetrical warfare against systems of oppression and tyrannies, Burroughs was restoring its original purpose. Certainly my teenage enthusiasms for martial arts, survivalism, and various forms of making mischief found inspiration in the idea of the scout-sniper and saboteur who can live off the land and operate independently; and later became my usual role in conflicts which pulled me into the maelstrom.
The Cat Inside is a delightful and precious allegory of freedom and rebellion, a meditation on values which extends Nietzsche’s analysis of master- slave psychology to a philosophy of anarchist liberation, which references Nietzsche’s interpreters Karl Jaspers, Nikos Kazantzakis, Maurice Blanchot, C.G. Jung, and Gilles Deleuze.
The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil. As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from my father’s ideas and the claim of our family history that we are not human but werewolves, and had been driven out of Europe for that reason; Martin Luther referred to my ancestors as Brides of the Dragon, and we were driven out of Bavaria in 1586 at the beginning of a forty-four year period of witchcraft persecutions. He began writing it during the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which may be a more direct context as a fictionalization of the witness of history. It is also filled with episodes from the glory days of his youth and set in Mexico and Morocco as imaginal realms he named Interzone, boundaries and interfaces between our world and those stranger still, places and states of being one may reach only through the Gates of Dreams.
When I asked him, at the age of ten or thereabouts, if I was in his book and what he was writing about, he said; “Freedom, nature as truth and civilization as addiction to wealth and power and theft of the soul, and how our pasts get mixed up with our futures.”
The Wild Boys reimagines The Egyptian Book of the Dead, of which fellow Surrealist and poet Philip Lamantia was a scholar, also the subject of his final novel The Western Lands as is H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, references Octave Mirbeau, Bataille, Genet, and extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as restraint of our nature. David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine.
The Black Rider: the casting of the magic bullets, a theatrical collaboration with director Robert Wilson & the magnificent Tom Waits, is a can’t miss.
Exterminators collects thirty short stories, the Collected Interviews 1960-1997 edited by Lotringer are fascinating, as is The Adding Machine: essays.
Interzone is a travel journal, but only on the surface to the Marrakesh of Beatnik glory, as it also recounts the Lovecraftian plot to enslave humanity through heroin by fascist insects from Venus.
All the works of William S. Burroughs are masterpieces of Anarchist liberation and transgression, Surrealism and occult mysticism, even if difficult because they are told in collages of random and nonlinear episodes, with an iconography that is bizarre and obscene. In spite and possibly because of this, they remain among the great classics of world literature, revealing endless chasms of darkness and infinite possibilities of rapture and illumination.
All true art defiles and exalts.
Go ahead; swallow the toad.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, 1972-3 UK tour
William S. Burroughs: 100 Years film with Barry Miles
John Giorno Interview: Inside William S. Burroughs’ Bunker
Kathy Acker interviews William S. Burrough (three parts)
William S. Burroughs, the Life Thereof
William S. Burroughs: The Possessed
“The Cat Inside” film narrated by WSB
WSB Lecture on Writing and the paranormal at Naropa University June 1986
WSB lecture July 20,1976
William S. Burroughs, a reading list
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, Ted Morgan, William S. Burroughs
The central question of any inquiry into the story and figure of Melania Trump must be; How did a whore rise through the ranks of a global sex trafficking syndicate to become the trophy wife and agent handler for Putin of its kingpin, a Nazi monster, idiot, and lunatic who became our President, and how did she help him to seize power?
Amazon’s despicable fascist stooge and now propagandist Jeff Bezos has bankrolled a wretched vanity film which trails Melania through gilded palaces as she declaims “Let them eat tear gas” when passing a window beyond which can be seen the glorious and heroic mass protests which have now become a national revolt against the white supremacist terror force ICE and Trump’s criminal campaign of ethnic cleansing and the federal occupation of our sanctuary cities.
Who is Melania, how did she become a monster, and what use was and is she to Trump’s Fourth Reich?
Herein I offer an alternate version of the film Melania, no less fictive than the trappings of royalty she wears like a twenty first century Marie Antoinette.
Opening shot is a miserable village in Slovenia, in the black and white of a time and place which are liminal in the sense of a fairytale, followed by a series of images of its humans and beasts who mirror and reflect each other in their filthy and grotesque degeneracy.
We hear the chop, chop, chopping before Melania makes her entrance, carrying an empty bucket of slops for the hogs we see in the yard behind her through the door she has thrown open to enter the darkness of the butchery, straw pasted to her wild hair and her face smeared with pigshit.
A fierce bearded man grimaces in semblance of a smile though we know he has long forgotten how, scooping entrails from the table into her bucket as she holds it up, a human hand included, in a gradually illuminated hovel littered with human cadavers.
“Good eating tonight, Melania, for us and the pigs. Police raided a poetry reading of dissidents.” Camera moves to a close up of his face as he says; “Very wicked, I’m sure. But there is no good or evil, only power, who eats and who is eaten, and we are all meat.”
As the camera withdraws to take them both in, Melania repeats the mantra which is the controlling metaphor of her world; “Yes, father, we are all meat.”
In Scene Two we move from her historical origins in a family of butchers who served both the Tito regime and the Nazis before him, and back into the mists of history; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoleon, the Republic of Venice, Hapsburgs again, the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolinians, Bavaria, and before the migrations from which Slovenes emerged the Roman Empire. All states are embodied violence, and all require enforcers and those who disappear their victims.
Always there are scavengers like Melania, who loot the corpses and live from the misery of others; the scuttling dark things whose survival is in service to power, finding tasty morsels among the offal after the inquisitions and the crusades.
Though before Melania herself became a kind of remora riding sharks through abyssal depths, she was a simple though stupid and cruel village girl caught up in the system of human trafficking because of the leverage offered by a crime to predators operating with the authority of the state, a crime ambiguous in its intention but catastrophic and unforgiveable in its consequences, by which she gained the name she was known by before coming to America, Pigshit Princess.
In sepia tones like a hand colored postcard from long ago Scene Two opens, to two girls squabbling in the pigsty.
“Give me!” demands Melania, grabbing the glittery plastic tiara on the other girl’s head.
“No! I’m the princess! You’re the Pigshit Princess!”
Moments from the fight are intercut with black and white scenes and images of her childhood of brutality, squalor, and exclusion as the daughter of man who makes inconvenient truths disappear for the state. Herein she is not a champion of other untouchables or a class warrior of any kind, but a feral and malign predator who terrorizes here own, studying their weaknesses for leverage with brooding menace and trapping fellow children in horrific games of power. This is the backstory and origins of all overseers of the carceral state and its slaves, unchanged from the dawn of history and the rise of priest-kings and empires from the wealth of mass slave labor of agriculture, for this requires enforcers and informers from within slave populations, as Melania was to become.
They thrash about, tumble, and Melania pushes her rival’s face into the pigshit until she is dead. Then she takes the tiara and crowns herself with it. So begins the legend of the Pigshit Princess.
In full color Scene Three opens, marking the transition to historical time and a shared world we all live in; Melania, now a teenage girl or young adult, and a man in a dark suit are facing each other across a table in a cell, she in chains and without a trace of concern, remote and fearless.
“You’re a lot of trouble for a little thing,” he says. “I’m told it takes three men to get you into those chains.”
“Come closer and find out.”
He moves ever so slightly into range, and she unleashes a furious attack which finds its limits in the length of her chains, snarling like a savage animal; and when he withdraws laughing she resumes her motionless calm.
Her inquisitor speaks next, disturbing the silence; “I’m here to offer you a way out of here, as our eyes and ears in places we can’t go. Someone who can kill without mercy, and looks like you do, maybe even will be a great beauty one day, our enemies won’t see you coming. And one day you can live like a real princess, with beautiful things, if you choose to help us. For now, if you agree I will unlock your chains and have food brought, and later you will be brought from this place to a very special school in a castle, where you will want for nothing, and be under the protection of the state which includes immunity from prosecution for any crimes in your past or your future. And you will be well paid. Would you like that, Melania? Or would you rather remain the Pigshit Princess for the rest of your life, ruling a four by six cell in solitary confinement?”
“Show me this food. And I’ll take the first month’s pay now, and three days free on my own to decide.”
And so Melania became a spy and whore for the secret police under the cover of her modeling and escort career, working her way up to being the elite KGB/FSB influence agent she remains, now directly under Putin’s command, as she was maneuvered into Trump’s orbit after his 1987 visit to the Kremlin, and became his handler and his trophy wife.
In terms of her service to the regime from Trump’s perspective, she provides cover for his predation of children and as the kingpin of a human trafficking syndicate launched by his modeling and beauty pageant monopoly and interdependent with his partner Epstein’s blackmail empire also built on sex trafficking. Melania provides the illusion of normal sexual desires and identity to the most prolific serial sex predator in all of history.
And in service to both Trump’s puppetmaster and hers, Vladimir Putin, she provides an intimate source of intelligence, influence, and control of America to Russia as Trump’s control agent. Putin’s initial goal in putting Trump in the White House was simply to take America off the board to give him a free hand in the conquest of Ukraine, and though this goal has expanded horrifically he has clearly been successful beyond any imaginable dreams in isolating Ukraine from NATO support and in the capture of the American state as a vichy government of the Russian Empire and of the Fourth Reich.
Melania’s story and that of many girls like her has been told in the film and telenovela series La Femme Nikita, which I watched with rapt attention for its documentary-like realism in the portrayal of actual intelligence operations, and the historical film Red Sparrow; but never of a sparrow who becomes the First Lady of the United States as she did.
We must remember always that in so doing she also enabled unspeakable and countless crimes against humanity of whom Trump and Epstein’s victims were girls exactly like herself, who she betrayed to ruin and horrors.
This is how Melania became the person who once visited a concentration camp for migrants on our border wearing a trenchcoat with the words “I really don’t care; do you?” hand painted on the back like a living billboard for amoral nihilist Dark Enlightenment theorists and partisans of Apartheid like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance who believe that mercy is a weakness that should be abandoned on the trash heap of history along with democracy and universal human rights.
Our final scene in my conceptual film includes documentary newsreel footage of that day, June 21 2020, when Melania wore the infamous jacket to gloat over the misery of the fifty five stolen nonwhite children huddled into animal pens at the New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Texas, victims of her husband’s Theatre of Cruelty and campaign of ethnic cleansing. These are the steps history must remember, not the prancing high heels whose clicks on the marble floors of gilded palaces signal the death of democracy like a metronome.
She never truly left the pigsty, nor shed her identity as the Pigshit Princess.
This year’s Black History Month in America will be different from all that have come before, and I hope from all those yet to come, for it has been erased from our federal holidays by the Fourth Reich regime of Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump, white supremacist terrorist clown and degenerate monster and freak, who wishes to erase Black and other nonwhite people with their history. This I cannot abide, to quote the magnificent Lt Aldo Raine from Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
And Lt Aldo Raine shows us precisely how to deal with Nazis like Trump and all his witless and amoral minions who would enslave or annihilate us and all who are different from themselves.
Let us remember always the great principle of Malcolm X; “By any means necessary”. For all Resistance is War to the Knife, and those who respect no limits and no laws may hide behind none.
Now we must demonstrate our solidarity with each other, disbelieve and disobey all authorities who seek to divide and subjugate us, and celebrate Black History Month each and every day in open and public defiance and liberation struggle on the stage of the world and history. Perform an Act of Refusal to Submit to state terror, ethnic cleansing, silence and erasure, and dehumanization each and every day, and do so with joy in our diversity and infinite uniqueness, in our guarantorship of each other’s parallel and interdependent universal human rights and rights as citizens, and in our transgression of boundaries of the Forbidden.
We all have a common problem to solve as we grow up and become human; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. To tell the stories of others who are silenced by systems of oppression and the legacies of our history is an act of genocide or of liberation struggle, depending on whether or not one is amplifying the voices of the oppressed in solidarity and allyship.
The first question to ask of any story is, Whose story is this?
We come now to the question of the Canon; Whose stories are we to teach? And this is a question embedded in another like a set of puzzle boxes; Who decides?
A reading list is nothing less than a set of authorized identities; herein I hope to offer figures in which we can all find reflections of ourselves, and imaginal spaces to grow into. I choose them first on the basis of being voices of the community which they represent, interrogate, and offer models of possible identities for, second for quality, cultural significance, and relevance.
In celebration of Black History Month, I offer my updated reading list which I used in teaching high school American Literature and History classes since 1982:
Jay’s Revised Modern Canon
Modern American Literature 2026 Edition
African-American History
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Nikole Hannah-Jones
How We Fight White Supremacy, Akiba Solomon & Kenrya Rankin (Editors)
Stamped from the Beginning, How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi
Creating Black America: African-American History and Its Meanings 1619 to the Present, Nell Irvin Painter
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith
On Juneteenth, Annette Gordon-Reed
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley
Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, David Zucchino
Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Bloom & Martin
The Dead Are Arising, Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008, The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (Gates & Cornel West), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Africana (Gates & Kwame Anthony Appiah), Harlem Renaissance Lives: From the African American National Biography (Gates & Higgenbotham eds), The Annotated African American Folktales (Gates & Tatar eds), Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The African Diaspora, Toyin Falola
Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63, Pillar of Fire: 1963-65, At Canaan’s Edge: 1965-68, Taylor Branch
His Truth Is Marching on: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, Jon Meacham, John Lewis (Afterword)
Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, Robert Farris Thompson
This was Harlem, Charles Anderson
The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Richard Williams
The History of Jazz, Ted Gioia
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, Andrea Elliott
African-American Literature
Dreams Of My Father, Barak Obama
Between the World and Me, We Were Eight Years In Power, The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates
When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Patrisse Khan-Cullors & Asha Bandele, Angela Y. Davis (Foreword)
A Testament of Hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, James Washington editor
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, Clayborne Carson ed
Black Feminist Thought, Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins
Malcolm X: a life of reinvention, Speaking Truth to Power: essays on race, resistance, & radicalism, Manning Marable
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, Les Payne, Tamara Payne
Roots, The Autobiography of Malcom X, Alex Haley
The Black Panthers Speak, Foner ed
Black Power: the Politics of Liberation, Stokely Carmichael
Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirth, Henry Louis Gates Jr
The Angela Davis Reader
The Cornel West Reader, Black Prophetic Fire, Hope on a Tightrope: words and wisdom, Cornel West
I Am Not Your Negro (Peck ed), Go Tell It On The Mountain, Just Above My Head, Jimmy’s Blues and other poems, The Price of the Ticket: collected nonfiction 1948-1985, James Baldwin: The Last Interview and other conversations, James Baldwin
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919, David Levering Lewis
Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, and Then Again: a Zora Neal Hurston Reader, Alice Walker ed, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks On A Road, Collected Plays, Zora Neal Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past And Present (Amistad Literary Series) Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kwame Anthony Appiah
Native Son, The Long Dream, Black Boy, American Hunger, Pagan Spain, The Richard Wright Reader, Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Critical Prespectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds
Cane, Jean Toomer
The Free-Lance Pallbearers, The Plays, New & Collected Poems 1964-2006, Going Too Far: essays, Mixing It Up: essays, Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto, Ishmael Reed
The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
All Night Visitors, Clarence Major
Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia E. Butler
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Harold Bloom ed
The Color Purple, Living by the Word, The Temple of My Familiar, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems, The World Will Follow Joy: Turning Madness into Flowers , The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, Alice Walker
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom ed
A Langston Hughes Reader
Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past And Present, Gates & Appiah eds
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Complete Stories, Maya Angelou
The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader, The Fiction of LeRoi Jones, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, S.O.S. : Poems 1961-2013, Amiri Baraka
Beloved , Song of Soloman, The Bluest Eye, A Mercy, Jazz, Desdemona, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (the Harvard Lectures), Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Kwame Anthony Appiah eds
Bedouin Hornbook, Djibot Baghostus’s Run, Atet A. D., Bass Cathedral, School of Udhra, Whatsaid Serif, Splay Anthem, Nod House, Blue Fasa, Nathaniel Mackey
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, The Collected Poems, The Collected Plays, ZAMI: a new spelling of my name, Audre Lorde
John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Devil in Silver, Lucretia and the Kroons, Big Machine, The Ballad of Black Tom, The Changeling, Victor Lavalle
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: an American Lyric, Citizen: an American Lyric, Just Us, Claudia Rankine
The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, Jean-Michel Basquiat
The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste
The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, Amanda Gorman
The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr.
Palmares, Gayl Jones
Sho, Douglas Kearney
Living Weapon: Poems, Rowan Ricardo Phillip
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement, Tarana Burke
We long to reach beyond ourselves and the flags of our skin, to find connection, inhabit the lives of others as possible selves in becoming human, to find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world in the redemptive power of love, hope to balance the terror of our nothingness, and the vision to bring reimagination and transformative change to our limitless futures.
Of such strategies of processing trauma and disruptive events, James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein offer us allegories of rebirth and self-creation in the quest for a universal language, a hidden order and implicit structure in grammar as rules for constructing meaning, and transpersonal human consciousness which underlies all being.
Rules for constructing meaning; and possibilities of becoming human among a vast treasure house of languages, numberless as the stars, each illuminating a uniqueness in chiaroscuro with unknown chasms of darkness. And all of them equally true, for language is a Rashomon Gate of identities both authorized and transgressive relative to one’s origins and angle of view.
Truths which propagate exponentially from the palette of vocabularies, negotiated informing, motivating, and shaping forces of identity controlled by word origins and history as they move through time and memory.
Mimesis, self-construal and personae, and the doors of perception which are also funhouse mirror images of imaginal realms of being. Filters which distort, grotesque or compelling, possess us as the legacies of history or are possessed by us as seizures of power, echoes and reflections unmoored in time as conflicted pasts and futures, and signs of the ongoing struggle to become wherein falsification and authenticity play for the unknown spaces between ourselves and others; boundaries which may become interfaces.
Our original language, like our source identity, is an imposed condition of struggle; but it is also a boundary which may become on interface through which we can shape ourselves and each other.
What is important here in the subject of languages as possible selves is that learning the languages of others builds bridges instead of walls, and offers us a free space of creative play into which we may grow, a process of seizing control of our own evolution by intentionally changing how we think. Who do we want to become, we humans?
Language, then, embodies both order and chaos, authority and autonomy, histories which we cherish and despise, belonging and otherness, conserving and revolutionary forces, those we must keep to remain who we are and those we must escape to become who we wish to be.
And if we are very lucky, they are not always the same.
As I wrote in celebration of his birthday in my post of James Joyce, on his birthday February 2; “Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!” so wrote James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
Wonderful, hilarious, illuminating writing, still beyond the leading edge after nearly a century. A visionary and masterful wordsmith, James Joyce’s stories are compelling, intriguing verbal puzzles. New ideas unfold every time you read them.
His reinvention of language and the methods of storytelling birthed the modern world. In partnership with Gertrude Stein and drawing on a vast well of other resources, influences, and references, his unique creative genius and vision unified and transformed all that had come before in literature.
He lived with his wife in Trieste from 1905 to 1915, where he taught English at the Berlitz school and where their children were born, and again in 1919-20, his most famous pupil being the author Italo Svevo who was the model for the character of Leopold Bloom, and Triestino Italian remained the Joyce family language at home. Moreover he was a classicist with a Jesuit education who had grown up reading Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, and Shakespeare among others; James Joyce was well suited to his great work of reinventing language and humankind when he took it up in the writing of Ulysses.
A reimagination of Homer’s Odyssey in which he forged his stream of consciousness and interior monologue methods, it is also his response to the great catastrophe of his age, the fall of western civilization in World War One.
In this he reflects his mirror image T.S. Eliot, who played the opposing side of the board as the conservative to James Joyce’s revolutionary. Both wanted to renew humanity and rebuild civilization, one by reclaiming the past which has allowed us to survive millennia of unforeseen threats and cataclysms, the other by adaptive change and imagining a new path to the future and the limitless possibilities of becoming human; both are necessary to the survival of civilization and humanity itself.
Ulysses may be reduced as a text from its 700 page length by reading only the last chapter, one of the world’s most celebrated bits of writing. Episode 14, a superb parody of the great English authors, can stand alone as a subject of study.
And then there is Finnegan’s Wake, designed as a labyrinth of transformation to forge a new humankind.
As a high school student I discovered Ludwig Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, and claimed their project of re-invention of the human as my own. Where Wittgenstein provided us with a tool kit for constructing meaning in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Joyce attempted to use it to create a universal human language in his great novel Finnegans Wake, a work which he began in 1922 with the German publication of the TLP and which occupied the rest of his life, as a response like that of Yeats in The Second Coming and of T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland to the collapse of civilization in three successive waves of mechanical failures of civilization as systems of order and power from their internal contradictions, the First World War, the Easter Rising of 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
He envisioned a united humankind wherein war is no longer possible, a world without emperors and kings or the carceral states and colonialist empires they rule with their silly little flags and terrible divisions of exclusionary 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 Jung and through NeoPlatonism itself to the philosophy of Iris Murdoch, and was in the process of forming Surrealism as an art of ecstatic trance and poetic vision, 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 is 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.
Traditional Chinese was my second language from the age of nine, in the context of a decade of formal study of martial arts which included Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines, inkbrush calligraphy, bamboo flute, the strategy game of Go, and conversation with my great mentor whom I called Dragon Teacher or Long Sifu, a mischievous and wily old rascal who spoke, in addition to superb English, the Wu dialect of Shanghai and the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, as well as the official Mandarin, having served in the Chinese military from 1923 through the Second World War., of which he told wonderful stories.
As my third language I studied French in school rather than English from seventh grade through high school, as I was sent not to seventh grade English class but to French class at the high school. Brazilian Portuguese was my fourth language, though a brief study 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 universal principles of creating meaning and 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.
Curious and curiouser; it is also a recursive and nonlinear Surrealist dream journal, a Dadaist compilation of notes which disdains all narrative conventions, and displays a growing obsession with the arcane and the obscure.
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.
Yet enter here, and abandon not hope.
Of Finnegans Wake: forget that it’s a Great Book, that scholars find it intimidating; that’s only if you try to parse meaning from every sentence like it’s an operating manual for becoming human. Yes, that’s exactly what he intended to write, but don’t let that make work out of your joy. Just read it for the sheer exhilarating fun, and let his timeless Irish magic set you free.
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.
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 reimagined 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 of high school 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 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. Drachensbrute, 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 for three days without saying anything, then whipped out a shotgun 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 to which it belongs nor the origin of the pointed hat as a witch symbol.
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; “We are all bearers of those who must be kept and those from 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 makes it possible that under Jewish law we are Jews, and she was raised as a member of the Jewish community, 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 count as my fourth 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 at Padaung, 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, to dehumanize or exalt.
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
Warning: If you live or have family in Myanmar, do not open, share, or hit the like icon; the junta has executed people for liking a Facebook post. To be identified as a critic of the junta is to be targeted for assassination and torture, your family murdered and your village burned.
Resist, and remain anonymous and invisible; offer the enemies of liberty no target to repress, silence, and erase.
Offer no target, give no warning, leave no trace.
Let us be silent shadows, bearing liberation from tyranny and the rebirth of humankind.
James Shwe, in an article in Asia Times, offers a prescription of resistance unity in liberation struggle; “Fragmentation is the resistance’s greatest strategic vulnerability. It allows the international community to hedge its bets, treating the junta as the de facto state because the opposition appears to be a chaotic array of armies.
To win credibility as an oppositional force and legitimacy as the true national government in the eyes of the world and thereby the crucial material and diplomatic support we must have if we are to survive and overcome, the resistance must move beyond loose coordination to a hybrid federal structure: a system in which the National Unity Government (NUG) and ethnic authorities agree on a shared federal executive for foreign affairs and defense, while respecting the autonomy of local administrations in education, health and policing.
We do not need a centralized ‘super-government’ – that fearsome model has failed Myanmar for 70 years.We need a functional federal democratic union where coordination is institutionalized, not ad hoc.”
A Day of Silence and national General Strike made silent the cities of Myanmar today, the fifth such anniversary, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for four years now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Myanmar in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Once the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a human rights protest movement robbed of its force as revolutionary struggle because it was yoked to a parallel and interdependent democracy movement which under the leadership of its fallen heroine accepted co-optation by the military-oligarchic system which remains its enemy, a once shining hope and path of liberation tarnished by silence in the face of the genocide of the Rohingya and ethnic minorities, and reduced by appeasement and a millennia old kleptocratic state to limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled their nation since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain here in 1948; but with the seizure of direct power by the military as a tyranny of force and control and the birth of a new Resistance as its counterforce, those who would enslave the peoples of Burma awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Myanmar.
Democracy fell five years ago in Myanmar, the junta’s name and one I use to disambiguate between their regime as a state and Burma as a historical nation, to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
In chiaroscuro with this abyssal darkness of tyranny and state terror is the gathering light of liberation struggle, democracy, and human rights, for we are winning this war; the tribal armies and rebel forces united under the democracy movement before Chinese and Russian intervention in the civil war controlled half to three quarters of all territory within Myanmar.
We have lost ground, but not resolve. The Revolution is in the Heart of the People. Such is an inherent condition of being human, and it cannot be taken from us.
“The Revolution was effected before the war was commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people” as John Adams said, referencing the January 30, 1750 sermon pf pastor Jonathan Mayhew which he credited with igniting the American Revolution and established the principle of common law which supersedes that of the state, this being of two parts, first, Do all you have agreed to do, and second, Do not encroach on other persons or their property, with the line; “There can be nothing great and good where tyranny’s influence reaches. For which reason it becomes every friend to truth and humankind to bear a part in opposing this hateful monster.”
The capture of Myanmar by the junta is paralleled by its seizure by a Buddhist theocracy of xenophobic nationalism which unites tyranny with faith weaponized in service to power as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; a shadow state transnational theocracy which controls both the nations of Sri Lanka and Myanmar in mobilization against Islamic and other minorities as ethnic cleansing. Here an organization of faith has formed these twin Buddhist states as an exoskeleton through which to exert social power; in exchange the state receives ideological and organizational services, much as Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, and the Gideonite-Pentecostal fundamentalists served Ronald Reagan or the Inquisition served the Spanish Empire.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation these past years, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by former President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma’s People’s Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police in the first two years since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Myanmar during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify actions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement allying with similar networks in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced years ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; “We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity.”
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
In Myanmar on this fifth anniversary of the Revolution versus the junta, the people are marching toward victory in a unified front of tribal armies, the Brotherhood Alliance, and the urban democracy movement, the People’s Defense Forces allied with the National Unity Government. It has become the model for a new kind of revolutionary struggle, which now propagates outward throughout the world. And those who would enslave us now fear us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
The military marches and staged legitimation of the junta today follows two days after the show elections. As written in The Guardian of last weekend’s election, in an article entitled Junta-backed party secures sweeping victory in Myanmar’s ‘sham’ election; “Myanmar’s military-backed party has completed a sweeping victory in the country’s three-phase general election, state media said, cementing an outcome long expected after a tightly controlled political process held during civil war and widespread repression.
The Union and Solidarity Party (USDP) dominated all phases of the vote, winning an overwhelming majority in the two legislative chambers in Myanmar. It secured 232 of the 263 seats up for grabs in the lower Pyithu Hluttaw house and 109 of the 157 seats announced so far in the Amyotha Hluttaw upper chamber, according to results released on Thursday and Friday.
Myanmar’s parliament is expected to convene in March to elect a president, with a new government set to take over in April, pro-military Eleven Media Group reported earlier this month, citing junta spokesman Zaw Min Tun.
Myanmar electoral officials count ballots after closing the third phase of the general election at a polling station in Yangon, Myanmar, 25 January 2026.
The final round of voting in late January brought an end to an election that began on 28 December, more than four years after the military seized power in a coup that overturned the elected government of Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Myanmar has been in political turmoil since the coup, with the crushing of pro-democracy protests sparking a nationwide rebellion. Around 3.6 million people have been displaced, according to United Nations.
The 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations has said it would not endorse the process, and human rights groups and some western countries have also denounced the election as a sham.
Myanmar’s military government insists the polls were free and fair, and supported by the public.
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party was dissolved along with dozens of other parties, and some others declined to take part, drawing condemnation from critics who say the process was designed to entrench military rule.
Under Myanmar’s political system, the military is also guaranteed 25% of parliamentary seats, ensuring continued control even after power is formally transferred to a civilian-led administration.
The USDP was founded in 2010 after decades of military-led rule in the southeast Asian country, with the aim of serving as a proxy for the armed frces.
The party is chaired by a retired brigadier general and packed with other former high-ranking officers. It contested the poll with 1,018 candidates, a fifth of the total registered.
Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is also expected to play a central role in the next administration. He has defended the polls as a step toward stability, rejecting criticism from opponents and foreign governments and affirming that state responsibilities will be transferred to the elected government.
Turnout reached around 55% over all three phases, lower than the figure of around 70% in previous elections, including a 2015 vote that brought Suu Kyi to power, as well as the ill-fated 2020 poll, the results of which were cancelled by the junta before staging the coup.
Voting took place in 263 of Myanmar’s 330 townships, some of which are not under the complete control of the junta.
It was cancelled in many areas due to ongoing fighting between the military and armed ethnic groups, as well as local resistance forces that emerged after the 2021 coup.”
What is the situation in Myanmar now?
As written in the website of Human Rights Watch, in an article entitled Myanmar: Junta Atrocities Surge 5 Years since Coup; “Myanmar’s military junta has committed widespread repression and abuse in every facet of life in the country since seizing power on February 1, 2021, Amnesty International, Fortify Rights, and Human Rights Watch said today. The military’s atrocities since the coup, which include war crimes and crimes against humanity, escalated over the past year as the junta sought to entrench its rule through abusive military operations and stage-managed elections.
United Nations Security Council members, governments in the region, and other concerned states should better support Myanmar’s people and act to hold the junta accountable for its crimes. The heavily controlled elections, held in three phases between December 28, 2025, and January 25, 2026, have been widely dismissed as fraudulent and organized to ensure the military-backed party’s electoral victory.
“It’s no accident that this election has been made possible through increased human rights abuses, from arbitrary detention to unlawful attacks on civilians, which has been the military’s modus operandi for decades,” said Ejaz Min Khant, human rights specialist at Fortify Rights. “As this crisis stretches into its sixth year, governments should focus on accountability and justice efforts for the many crimes committed by Myanmar’s military, without which the country cannot move forward.”
Since the coup, the junta has systematically banned dozens of political parties and detained more than 30,000 political prisoners. In January, the junta reported that it had taken legal action against more than 400 people under an “election protection” law passed in July criminalizing criticism of the election by banning speech, organizing, or protest that disrupts any part of the electoral process.
The elections have served as a centerpiece for the junta’s attempts to crush all political opposition, derail efforts to restore civilian rule, and entrench the military-controlled state. As expected, and by design, preliminary election results indicate a landslide victory for the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party.
China and Russia, the junta’s primary suppliers of aircraft and arms, both sent election observers to the polls. The two countries have long supported the junta while blocking international action on military atrocities at the UN Security Council. Malaysia, last year’s chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said the bloc has not sent observers to certify the polls.
In expanded military operations ahead of the elections, the junta in 2025 ramped up its use of airstrikes, including deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure in violation of international humanitarian law. Airstrikes have hit schools, hospitals, religious sites, and camps for displaced people, killing thousands over the past year.
The military has also increasingly used armed drones, paramotors, and gyrocopters in unlawful attacks, creating new threats to civilians. On October 6, a military paramotor attack on a Buddhist festival in Sagaing Region killed at least 24 people, including three children. More than 135 paramotor attacks have been reported since December 2024. Myanmar is one of very few countries that continue to use internationally banned cluster munitions and antipersonnel landmines.
“The past five years are a bleak illustration of the Myanmar military’s failed strategy to assert control by killing and terrorizing civilians,” said Joe Freeman, Myanmar researcher at Amnesty International. “Military air and drone strikes reached new highs in 2025 as the junta intensified its already brutal campaign against opposition areas, leaving more and more people living in fear of bombs falling from the sky.”
Since enacting a conscription law in February 2024, the junta has used abusive tactics such as abducting young men and boys and detaining family members of missing conscripts as hostages. The military’s recruitment and use of child soldiers has surged since the coup.
Since the coup, more than 2,200 people have reportedly died in junta custody, although the actual figure is likely higher. Torture, sexual violence, and other ill-treatment are rampant in prisons, interrogation centers, military bases, and other detention sites, with reports of rape, beatings, prolonged stress positions, electric shock and burning, denial of medical care, and deprivation of food, water, and sleep. In July, Ma Wutt Yee Aung, a 26-year-old activist, died in Insein prison due to reported lack of medical treatment for long-term head injuries from torture.
Following the March 2025 earthquake that struck central Myanmar, the junta obstructed access to lifesaving services in opposition-held areas. The junta’s years of unlawful attacks on healthcare facilities and health workers severely hampered the emergency response. Despite announcing a ceasefire, the military carried out more than 550 attacks in the two months following the quake.
Military abuses and spiraling fighting have internally displaced at least 3.6 million people. Foreign aid cuts, skyrocketing prices, and restrictions on medical care and humanitarian supplies have exacerbated malnutrition, waterborne illness, and preventable deaths. Over 15 million people are facing acute food insecurity, with Rakhine State especially impacted.
Millions who have fled the country face increasing threats and risk of forced returns.
Since late 2023, Rohingya civilians have been caught amid fighting between the junta and ethnic Arakan Army forces. The Arakan Army has imposed oppressive measures against Rohingya in northern Rakhine State, including forced labor and arbitrary detention.
Since the coup, trafficking, scam centers, unregulated resource extraction, drug production, and other illicit operations have proliferated. Online scam centers along Myanmar’s border with Thailand—run by global criminal syndicates led by Chinese nationals—largely rely on human trafficking, forced labor, and torture to run their scams, which are part of a multibillion-dollar industry across the region.
The military’s widespread and systematic abuses have been fueled by decades of impunity and insufficient international efforts to end its violations.
Accountability measures underway at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court (ICC) are vital but remain limited to atrocities prior to the coup. In November 2024, the ICC prosecutor requested an arrest warrant for commander-in-chief Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing for alleged crimes against humanity committed in 2017; the judges have yet to issue a public decision on the request.
The UN Security Council has been largely deadlocked, failing to follow up on its December 2022 resolution, which denounced the military’s post-coup abuses, with tangible measures due to opposition from China and Russia.
Security Council members should outline targeted accountability measures to be taken against the junta for its refusal to comply with the council resolution and numerous other international calls. Holding regular open meetings on Myanmar can help build momentum for a follow-up resolution referring the whole country situation to the ICC and instituting a global embargo on arms and jet fuel.
“Five years after the coup, Myanmar’s human rights and humanitarian catastrophe faces dwindling foreign assistance and attention,” said Shayna Bauchner, Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Ending this crisis requires sustained international pressure, meaningful accountability, and concrete humanitarian, political, and technical support for those in Myanmar and the millions forced to flee.”
As written by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian, in an article entitled in an article entitled Four years after the coup, chaos reigns as Myanmar’s military struggles; “The streets of Lashio, a once bustling city in north-eastern Myanmar, are quieter than usual. Schools are shut, except for those run by volunteers from the pro-democracy resistance in the community. Months of airstrikes have left destruction. Even though the fighting has stopped, electricity is still not running properly. Instead, residents rely on solar power to charge their phones, and firewood and charcoal to cook.
“We saw a lot of civilians who died during the battle [in those days]. We saw them on the streets, on the lanes, some of the bodies were decayed and some of them were freshly dead. Some died in their homes,” said Leo*, a 40-year-old driver, whose family spent months living with constant bombardments by the military, running to hide in the darkness of a homemade bunker each time jet fighters came.
When Leo and his family were able to finally go outside again, the country’s widely loathed junta was, at least, gone. The city was at the centre of one of the military’s most humiliating defeats when it fell to an ethnic armed group, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in August. Despite months of airstrikes, the military failed to retake the city. Together with a series of other losses across the country, it gave a major morale boost to the wider movement to overthrow the military.
It marked the first loss of one of its 14 regional military commands, as well as the loss of a strategically important city on the border with China. In the aftermath, there was such anger among pro-military figures, demands grew for the resignation of junta chief Min Aung Hlaing.
‘People will resist’
The military, which seized power in a coup in 2021, provoking an armed resistance, has now lost control of swathes of the country. And as the conflict enters its fifth year, it is on the brink of further losses, despite neighbouring China lending it greater support in an apparent attempt to stave off its ultimate collapse.
The military faces opposition from a patchwork of groups: people’s defence forces, which formed after the coup to fight for the return of democracy, and ethnic armed organisations, which have long fought for independence. The size of these groups, their specific goals and the extent to which they are coordinated varies.
Across the country, 95 towns have now fallen to the various opposition groups, according to Myanmar Peace Monitor. Last year, in northern Kachin state, more than 200 military bases and 14 towns were lost, including the rare-earth mining hubs of Chipwi and Pangwa town. In the west, almost all of Rakhine state, including the western regional command, fell. In the central Sagaing region, people’s defence forces captured Kawlin and Pinlebu, crucial towns needed to transport supplies to frontline areas.
Estimates, including a study commissioned by the BBC, suggest the military controls only 21% of the country’s territory, though it still holds the key, densely populated cities.
Jason Tower, country director for the Burma program at United States Institute of Peace, said that while the Myanmar military was trying to maintain its power using airstrikes and other types of abuses, it was likely the next year would see “the continued weakening and collapse of the military”, with the junta losing more territory and its opponents coordinating more effectively.
The military has promised elections this year, something its ally China is endorsing. But it is unclear how it will implement these given how much of the country is controlled by rival groups. “The regime will have to use significant violence to secure areas where it wants polling to take place, and we know that many people will resist including violently,” said Richard Horsey, Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group.
China’s shifting response
When Lashio fell last year, there was speculation opposition groups might move down towards the centre of the country and threaten the major city Mandalay, a potential stepping stone towards the capital Naypyidaw.
It was this that prompted a shift in China’s response to Myanmar. China, which has deep ties with both northern armed groups as well as being an ally of the military, had earlier approved of the MNDAA’s offensives, after growing tired of the junta’s failure to stop criminal scam compounds from growing on its border. But the MNDAA appeared to be pushing much further than China had anticipated, say analysts. Beijing responded by closing its border crossing and stopping the flow of resources to ethnic armed groups in northern Shan State.
“While [China] had no love for the military regime, it was even more cautious about a disorderly collapse of power in Naypyidaw because it didn’t know what would come next,” said Horsey. The possibility of greater chaos, or of a pro-western government taking control, could pose a threat to China’s vast investments in the country.
Yet even under such pressure, Lashio remains under the control of the MNDAA. China has demanded the group hand the territory back to the military, and this month announced a ceasefire between the two sides. The details of the agreement are unclear.
In Lashio, people are returning to the city. A military curfew has been removed, and residents say they no longer live in fear of night-time visits by soldiers, who would demand to know of any visitors staying overnight at their property. But there are other concerns, including the fear of forced conscription by the MNDAA, something it has denied. There are also concerns over due process, as the MNDAA is ruling under martial law. It has carried out executions in another city it controls, Laukkai, also in northern Shan, following a public trial.
The struggle to survive
Voicing criticism of the MNDAA is sensitive. “I don’t like the rule of MNDAA that much,” says Khin Lay*, 24. “But I do not dare to say that I don’t like.”
All she wants is peace, she says. The fighting last year began on 2 July, the day she gave birth. “I remember the date exactly,” she says. “I gave birth in the morning around 10.30 and, then I heard the fighting at night at 9.30. The hospital building reverberated with the sound of artillery fire.”
She fled with her seven day-old baby, and 20-month-old girl, crammed on to a Toyota Alphard van with 14 others. The traffic was so intense as residents fled that what should have been a two and a half hour journey took 30 hours. By the evening they had run out of drinking water.
“My baby is so lucky that he did not die on the way,” she said. A three-month-old baby died while his mother was carrying him on a motorbike.
She returned to Lashio in January because vaccines for her babies had run out at the hospital in the nearby town of Muse.
She is focused on staying strong for her children, and trying to earn enough money so that she can afford to protect them from the worst of the conflict, but the local economy has been severely affected. “If I were lucky enough to earn a lot of income and if my business were doing well, I would get passports, go abroad, and settle there,” she said. “I would return after our country gains independence and becomes peaceful. This is just my imagination, and I’m not sure whether it’s possible or not.”
The border with China has now been partly reopened, but for months supplies of anything from household goods and medicines to construction material, and fuel were completely cut off, causing the cost of living to soar to twice that of the major cities, Yangon and Mandalay. A litre of petrol is 7,500 kyats ($3.60), and a bag of rice is 290,000 kyats ($138).
People have turned to money lending, or selling valuables to survive. “My nephew sells dry groceries and I buy from him on credit. I have borrowed some money from my sister. I sold my husband’s ring a few days ago,” says Daw Thein*, 47. Her husband had been working as a caddie at a golf club in the city, until they were forced to flee the fighting in Lashio last July.
Across Myanmar, the conflict has caused poverty rates to soar, with half of the population living below the poverty line and a further one third barely above it. The UN has warned of imminent risk of famine in western Rakhine state, as fierce conflict and trade blockades have led to total economic collapse. Health and education systems have been put under severe strain, and the introduction of mandatory conscription by the military has caused an exodus of young people from the cities. Research by the United Nations Development Programme shows the country is falling into darkness, with less than half the population having access to electricity.
In Lashio, a pause in military airstrikes, and the clout of the MNDAA has allowed the administration to recover services such as electricity, at least partly. In other areas of the country, especially towns in central Myanmar that are now run by newer groups or subject to prolonged bombardments, setting up new administrations has been slower.
The independent outlet Myanmar Now reported the MNDAA had agreed to give Lashio back to the military by June. The MNDAA has denied this, however, and with the military facing pressure on frontlines across the country, it appears a distant prospect.
The military is now facing the possibility of more losses in Rakhine and Kachin state. Support offered by China has proved useful, but it has not saved the military and Beijing will expect concessions in return, say analysts.
Even after months spent under bombardment Leo said he is determined the military’s opponents should continue. “I don’t want [the struggle] to stop just because of the pressures from powerful foreign countries,” he said. After overthrowing the Myanmar military, all groups will “unite as one with the people and work together to bring development of our country”.
As written by Khu Samand and Aidan Jones in MyNews, in an article entitled In Asia’s forgotten war, a generation sacrifices its youth defying Myanmar’s brutal junta: For thousands of guerilla fighters, the dream of a free Myanmar still burns bright – even after four years of ruinous civil war; “For Myanmar’s people, year four under military junta rule has only brought more death, displacement and despair, as their troubled homeland is torn further apart by a seemingly intractable civil war.
In the capital Naypyidaw, the military – or Tatmadaw – calls all the shots, but after a series of chastening battlefield defeats, the generals increasingly find themselves boxed-in to the country’s central heartlands. Still, few among the anti-junta resistance forces harbour any illusions about an imminent collapse of Min Aung Hlaing’s brutal regime.
“The Tatmadaw is still very strong, it is an old institution, they have money … they hold the power,” said Maung Saungkha, a 32-year-old rebel commander in Kayin state. “But I believe we will win. I just can’t say when.”
Hope persists among those fighting for a freer Myanmar. The conflict, sparked by the military’s coup on February 1, 2021, has pitted the junta against a mosaic of armed ethnic groups and young pro-democracy fighters. Many of those fighters – students, clerks and factory workers – have been thrust into a war they never sought but now cannot abandon.
Outside of Asia, however, Myanmar has the feeling of a forgotten crisis, with the world’s attention diverted by Russia’s war in Europe, the carnage in the Middle East and the return of Donald Trump as one of the most powerful people on Earth.
But in the dense forests of the Irrawaddy River basin, Maung Saungkha leads around 1,000 fighters under the banner of the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine guns and M16 rifles seized from Tatmadaw bases.
Nestled atop hilltops, their camps are concealed beneath a high bamboo canopy. Between their rotations to the front lines, the rebel fighters fill their time with chess and foraging for food in the forest that sustains them.
“I didn’t want to be a soldier,” Maung Saungkha told This Week in Asia. “But we have to sacrifice for the next generation … We can’t betray the people who have died. We have to keep our dream alive.”
A broken state
The junta does not have effective control over much of Myanmar, ceding between 50 and 70 per cent of the country’s territory to rebel groups and losing key areas along its borders after suffering serious defeats in Rakhine and Shan states last year.
Yet Min Aung Hlaing clings to power, planning elections in a bid to add a veneer of legitimacy to his besieged government. Critics dismiss the prospect of credible elections as absurd in a nation where the junta’s reach no longer extends across vast regions – and where the rebels are in no mood to negotiate after years of savage conflict.
For Maung Saungkha, once a poet and human rights activist, the transformation from civilian life to guerilla warfare has been stark. Before the war, he was a chemical engineering graduate known for his verses that mocked Myanmar’s political elite, including a lewd poem about then-president Thein Sein that landed him in jail for six months in 2016.
Back then, he wrote about freedom and defiance. Now, from forest hideouts, his words carry the weight of conflict. “Revolutions are about love,” he told This Week in Asia. “Love and war.”
Recruiting, training and arming fighters remains a daily challenge for the BPLA, which works alongside larger, better-equipped ethnic armed organisations like the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army.
The fighters are mostly young, idealistic – and driven by a shared dream of freedom.
Death from above
Despite losing ground, the military retains key advantages. Armed with weapons from Russia, China, North Korea and Israel, and funded by revenues from plundered jade, rubies, teak – as well as a slice of illicit enterprises, from drugs to scams – the Tatmadaw is far from defeated. It wields air power ruthlessly, escalating air strikes on rebel camps and civilian areas even as its soldiers retreat from the front lines.
Last Saturday, a junta air strike killed 28 people – including children – at a detention camp in Rakhine state, where the fighting has been most intense. The attack was yet another example of the military’s reliance on air superiority to compensate for its dwindling control on the ground.
Myanmar’s descent into chaos has forced millions to flee their homes. The United Nations estimates 3.5 million people have been displaced by conflict, an increase of 1.5 million last year alone. More than 5,350 civilians have been killed.
Many young people have faced a harsh choice: join the rebels or risk a perilous escape across the border Thailand or Malaysia to evade mandatory conscription into the army’s depleted ranks.
Those fleeing illegally are easy prey for human traffickers or corrupt immigration officials, and are often forced to live in the shadows abroad. Yet they remain vital lifelines for families back home, sending remittances to a nation ravaged by war and poverty.
“A whole generation has been affected, many have left legally or illegally,” said Sai Arkar of human rights advocacy group Fortify Rights. “It’s a huge brain drain for the country and every household with a young person in it is affected.”
A dream deferred
Myanmar’s current turmoil stands in sharp contrast to the brief optimism that followed the election of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in 2015. Under her watch, the economy opened up, free speech began to flourish and foreign investment flowed in through companies staffed by a generation ready to claim a freer, wealthier future that their parents were denied.
It appeared that the country might be finally transitioning towards democracy after the decades of corrosive military rule that followed hard on the heels of Myanmar’s independence from Britain in 1948. But the military never really relinquished its grip – and the 2021 coup shattered any illusions of lasting progress.
Now, Suu Kyi, 79, is back in jail, her influence diminished. Meanwhile, the junta’s propaganda machine continues to churn out a distorted narrative of progress and stability. State media such as the English-language Global New Light of Myanmar touts record harvests, rebuilding efforts against “terrorist forces” and the Southeast Asian nation’s tourism potential, even as the economy contracts and criminal enterprises flourish.
Strict internet controls are back and, in the junta-controlled big cities, paranoia and suspicion abounds. Rolling blackouts and electricity rationing in the commercial capital, Yangon, serves as a daily reminder of an economy stuck in reverse
“People inside Myanmar now don’t really have any freedoms at all,” Sai Arkar told This Week in Asia. “They have no freedom of expression, they cannot express their views … If you post anything online, you will be arrested. Their very basic rights have been violated.”
While the economy stagnates – the World Bank estimates it will shrink by 1 per cent this year, after clipping along at 6.6 per cent pre-pandemic – corruption and crime thrive. Drug trafficking, arms smuggling and scam operations have turned Myanmar into a hub for illicit activity, further enriching the junta while ordinary citizens struggle to survive.
Freedom flickers
Diplomatically isolated, Myanmar’s generals remain cloistered in Naypyidaw, the capital built to embody military dominance.
Once a staunch ally, even China’s previously rock-solid support appears to be wavering as the junta loses control of border areas that are critical to Beijing’s interests.
And within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Myanmar faces unprecedented rebukes, with its generals barred from high-level meetings – a prohibition that was upheld at the Asean foreign ministers’ retreat last weekend.
Malaysia, which holds the rotating Asean chair for 2025, has urged the junta to prioritise a ceasefire over elections. But Min Aung Hlaing has shown no appetite for compromise, his political – and perhaps personal – survival intertwined with the junta’s fate.
The embattled generals did appear to extend an olive branch in September, seeking peace talks with rebel groups in what was widely seen as rare acknowledgement of weakness. But this offer was swiftly rejected by a suspicious armed opposition that remains wary of the junta’s true intentions.
For Maung Saungkha and the fighters he leads, there is no turning back.
“I am a poet,” he told This Week in Asia. “But now I need to be at war.”
As the state of the Revolution was described one year ago by anonymous sources reported by Reuters, in an article entitled Insight: Rebel fire and China’s ire: Inside Myanmar’s anti-junta offensive; “Generals from Myanmar’s junta held peace talks in June near the border with China with representatives of three powerful ethnic armies. They sat across a wide table covered with blue cloth and decorated with elaborate bouquets.
But the rebels were playing a double-game.
Secretly, the ethnic armies – collectively called the Three Brotherhood Alliance – had already laid the groundwork for Operation 1027, a major offensive launched in October that has become the most significant threat to the regime since it seized power in a 2021 coup.
“We were already preparing for the operation when we met them,” said Kyaw Naing, a spokesman for the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), a largely ethnic-Chinese group that is part of the rebel coalition.
Reuters interviewed a dozen resistance officials with knowledge of the operation, as well as analysts and other people familiar with the matter. Some spoke on condition of anonymity because the offensive is ongoing.
They disclosed previously unreported elements of the planning, including details of the formation of a unified battlefield brigade and the extent of China’s impatience toward the junta, which some analysts believe emboldened the militias.
Operation 1027, named after the date it began in late October, has delivered nationwide victories for the alliance and other groups fighting the military, which unseated Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian-led government in February 2021.
The junta cracked down on protests after the coup, sparking a grassroots rebellion and re-igniting conflict with some ethnic armies. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, has ruled Myanmar for five of the past six decades, and its soldiers are feared for their brutality and scorched earth tactics. The army says tough measures are required to fight groups it considers “terrorists.”
Two members of the Three Brotherhood Alliance together with five other armed groups formed the new Brigade 611 in early 2022, four rebel officials told Reuters. The formation’s strength numbers in the “thousands”, one of them said.
It was a display of unprecedented cooperation among outfits that come from different parts of Myanmar, speak different languages and traditionally have had different priorities, according to a November report from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), a Washington-based think-tank focused on conflict prevention and resolution.
The operation came amid rising anger in Beijing with the junta over rampant crime on the border, which created conditions that supported the blitzkrieg, according to two analysts.
China, a key junta ally that also has close relations with some ethnic Chinese militias in the borderlands, has been riled by Myanmar’s inability to shut down online scam centres along the frontier that have become a scourge across Southeast Asia.
As of October, more than 20,000 people, mainly Chinese, were being held in over 100 compounds in northern Myanmar, where the workers – many of them trafficked – defraud strangers over the internet, according to a USIP estimate.
The centres have become a major public security challenge for China and Chinese officials delivered an ultimatum in Beijing this September to their Myanmar counterparts: eliminate the compounds or China would do so, according to a person briefed on their meeting.
Numerous scam centres were caught up in the recent fighting, allowing many foreign nationals who had been trapped to flee.
Myanmar’s junta, as well as China’s Ministry of Public Security, did not return requests for comment.
In a Nov. 29 speech, junta leader Gen. Min Aung Hlaing said the fighting near the border originated from long-standing issues and the military was focused on combating insurgents “for peace and stability in the region.”
The regime has since held China-facilitated talks with the Three Brotherhood Alliance, a junta spokesman said on Dec. 11 without providing further details. Beijing said it supports such talks, while the alliance said on Wednesday it remains determined to defeat the “dictatorship”.
A senior Chinese diplomat said in November that Beijing doesn’t interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, but urged Myanmar to protect Chinese residents and personnel, and to cooperate in ensuring stability along the border.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in response to questions that it has deepened its cooperation with Myanmar on targeting telecoms fraud and that the campaign has been successful, with many suspects sent back to China.
“China will continue to severely crack down on transnational criminal activities such as cyberscams with relevant parties, and uphold order and tranquility in both countries’ border regions,” it added.
BRIGADE 611
Operation 1027 began in northern Shan State, abutting the border with China, where troops led by the Three Brotherhood Alliance – which comprises MNDAA, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army (AA) – said they captured around 150 military outposts, five towns and four border gates within a month.
Independent analysts consider those figures reliable and the junta, which has not addressed specifics about battlefield defeats, has acknowledged some loss of control.
Among the rebel forces was the multi-ethnic Brigade 611, said MNDAA’s Kyaw Naing.
The formation includes troops from entities supported by the parallel civilian government as well as fighters from the AA, one of Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic armed forces, and the Bamar People’s Liberation Army (BPLA), a newer militia drawn mostly from the country’s majority Bamar people, officials from those groups confirmed.
Photos of Brigade 611 posted by an MNDAA-affiliated outlet in January show hundreds of troops in battle fatigues gathering for a graduation ceremony. Officials watched from a marquee, under a red banner with Burmese script and Chinese characters.
Some Brigade 611 troops drilled in using drones ahead of the operation, said BPLA spokesperson Lin Lin.
Rebel ground troops often launch attacks following drone strikes, a tactic that has “become a game changer” for them, said Khun Bedu, leader of Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF), which now controls parts of the frontier with Thailand and also contributed to Brigade 611.
The closer coordination means the rebels have risen “up everywhere and the junta doesn’t have enough military forces to handle them,” said Zhu Jiangming, a security consultant who writes regularly about the border situation for Chinese state media.
Rebels aided by “foreign drone experts” used over 25,000 drone-dropped bombs during the offensive, forcing some military posts to be abandoned due to “excessive strength” of resistance fighters, Min Aung Hlaing said in November.
The Three Brotherhood Alliance did not respond to a request for comment on whether they used foreign experts.
Despite these setbacks, the Myanmar military – one of the largest in Southeast Asia – has sizeable resources and a “determination to prevail at all costs,” said Richard Horsey, a senior adviser at the non-profit International Crisis Group.
Anti-junta operations have since rapidly expanded to other parts of Myanmar, with battles in the central region of Sagaing as well as in states near India and Bangladesh.
In several areas, rebel groups are supported by the People’s Defence Forces (PDF), a movement backed by the civilian National Unity Government (NUG) that includes representatives of Suu Kyi’s administration.
The NUG claims control over parts of the country and has worked on diplomatically isolating the junta. Suu Kyi remains in detention in the capital, Naypyidaw.
In Mandalay, a major city that is the gateway to the northern territories, the local PDF is tasked with stalling military reinforcements to the frontline, its spokesman said.
The NUG supports over 300 PDF units under its command using money raised by taxation, bond sales and other methods, Finance Minister Tin Tun Naing told Reuters.”
As written by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian, in an article entitled Myanmar at standstill as silent strike marks third anniversary of coup: Towns and cities empty during protest on anniversary of military takeover and arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi; “Cities and towns across Myanmar have come to a standstill as people took part in a silent strike to signal defiance against the military junta on the anniversary of the 2021 coup.
Three years since the military detained political leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi, its grip on power is more uncertain than at any point in the last six decades, according to analysts. The UN says two-thirds of the country is experiencing conflict.
Images taken by independent media on Thursday morning in Yangon showed normally busy intersections empty. Similar scenes were shared on social media from Mandalay, Mawlamyine and Monywa.
“Myanmar people don’t accept the military’s participation in politics, or their human rights violations,” said Nann Linn, a pro-democracy activist currently hiding in Myanmar. “That’s why there is no way other than the complete surrender of the military. We will accelerate our movement more.” The military coup had failed because the junta has been unable to govern, she added.
On the eve of the coup anniversary, the junta extended a state of emergency by six months, while the US announced further sanctions.
The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, called for “sustained international and regional attention and coherent collective action to support the people of Myanmar”.
The coup, which has been strongly opposed by the public, provoked huge street rallies in 2021 that were brutally suppressed. Many people subsequently joined civilian defence forces to fight back against military oppression, fleeing to the jungle to train to fight, and receiving support from and fighting alongside older, ethnic armed groups seeking independence. Myanmar has since been gripped by spiralling conflict, leaving more than 2.6 million people internally displaced.
In October, an alliance of ethnic armed groups launched a new operation to seize junta territory, which resulted in humiliating defeats for the already overstretched military.
It has lost swathes of territory along the border with China, as well as on the other side of the country, in Chin and Rakhine states, and thousands of soldiers have surrendered. Progress by anti-junta groups elsewhere has been mixed.
“Three years on from the Myanmar coup, the military’s hold on power is more uncertain than at any time in the last 60 years,” said Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser to Crisis Group. But, he added, the military seemed determined to fight on “and retains an enormous capacity for violence, attacking civilian populations and infrastructure in areas it has lost, using air power and long-range artillery”.
Rights experts have previously accused the military of committing war crimes, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians from aerial bombing, mass executions and the large-scale and intentional burning of homes.
On Wednesday, the junta head, Min Aung Hlaing, said the military would do “whatever it takes” to crush opposition. It has denied abuses against civilians, saying its operations were designed to tackle terrorists and in the interests of security.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was detained in the early hours of 1 February 2021, is serving a 33-year sentence over charges that have been widely dismissed as politically motivated. She has not been seen in public since, other than in images taken in a courtroom in Naypyidaw.
Her son Kim Aris, who lives in the UK, told Sky News he had received a letter from his mother in prison, the first communication he has had from her in three years. It said she was generally well but suffering from dental problems and spondylitis, a condition that inflames the joints of the backbone. The letter, which would have been read by the military, contained little detail.
Almost 20,000 political prisoners are detained across Myanmar, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), a local monitoring group.
Ko Tayzar Sann, an activist in central Myanmar, said: “The main message that we would like to deliver is that the Myanmar people will never be cowed by the terrorising, power-stealing junta. We rang our bell to the whole world – including the military.”
He recalled the confusion on 1 February 2021, as news of the coup emerged. “We didn’t have phone line and internet, but we could confirm the news in the afternoon,” he said. “Everyone was sad and angry. No one accepted this action.”
Since then, lives have been turned upside down. “We have experienced the terrorist killings, torture and devastation carried out by the military,” he said. At the same time he had also seen the dedication and determination of the public to overthrow the military.
Many people were taking part in the silent strike, despite the military’s intimidation, Ko Tayzar Sann said. “What we have understood from these three years past, is that it is impossible for the military to rule or control the country. “The revolution side must prove that with action.”
As written by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian, in an article entitled Three years on from Myanmar’s military coup, the junta is struggling to assert control: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing facing criticism after months of battlefield losses, with an estimated two-thirds of the country gripped by conflict; “Three years after seizing power, Myanmar’s junta is struggling to assert control, with humiliating losses in recent months and growing criticism of its leader, Min Aung Hlaing, by pro-military figures.
Images shared across social media show hauls of weapons seized from overrun military outposts in the north, exhausted soldiers surrendering en masse and even a military jet plunging from the sky after it was shot down. In one unprecedented image, brigadier general commanders are pictured raising a glass – apparently with their former enemies – after they were forced to concede defeat in the key town of Laukkai in northern Shan state, along with almost 2,400 men.
The UN says about two-thirds of the country remains gripped by conflict.
The junta has lost key territory in the north along the border with China, and in the west, near the Indian border. Elsewhere, where progress by anti-coup groups has been slower, the military remains stuck in fierce battles, unable to quash a persistent resistance movement.
On social media, pro-military commentators have voiced dissatisfaction at the leadership.
Earlier this month, an ultranationalist monk, Pauk Sayardaw, called for Min Aung Hlaing to resign at a protest in Pyin Oo Lwin, a town in Mandalay region that has a large military presence and is home to the elite Defence Services Academy, BBC Burmese reported.
Myanmar has been gripped by protracted conflict since 2021, when the military seized power in a coup, ousting the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. The coup, which enraged the public, prompted huge street protests calling for the return of democracy. When junta violence meant rallies were no longer safe, people took up arms to fight against military oppression, often equipped with little more than homemade weapons.
There are a multitude of different groups fighting against the junta – including newer, civilian pro-democracy groups that took up arms after the coup, which are known as people’s defence forces (PDFs). Many of these are aligned with the National Unity Government (NUG), which was set up to oppose the junta.
Some older, ethnic armed groups, which have long fought against the military for independence, are also fighting against the junta. While they all oppose the military, their specific goals, and the extent to which these groups are coordinated varies.
For a long time the conflict has been stuck in stalemate – with the military unable to control its opponents, and relying on airstrikes and scorched earth tactics to push back, with devastating consequences for civilians.
The conflict shifted on 27 October, however, with the launch of operations by several groups of experienced ethnic armed groups, known as the Brotherhood Alliance. The operation in coordination with newer anti-coup groups, aimed to seize territory from the junta in the north of the country.
The rapid success of the Brotherhood Alliance campaign prompted renewed offensives elsewhere in the country and gave a major morale boost to the pro-democracy resistance. Progress in other areas, including the south of the country, has been slower, and hopes that a domino effect could deliver a decisive blow to the military have since been tempered.
Analysts also caution that while the groups involved in the Brotherhood Alliance have identified as part of the wider pro-democracy movement, they have their own territorial ambitions.
Yun Sun, senior fellow and co-director of the east Asia Program at the Stimson Center, said China – frustrated with the junta over its failure to clamp down on booming scam operations that target Chinese nationals – had given tacit approval for the Brotherhood Alliance operation.
“China was intending to punish the junta,” says Sun. But it has since made it clear to such groups that it wants a return to stability, she adds.
The NUG says 60% of the country is now controlled by opponents of the junta. But measuring who controls which areas of the country is difficult, due to the highly complex and fluid nature of the conflict.
“In many areas where PDFs or groups linked to the NUG are operating, they may be the main service providers … but they can’t prevent military incursions. Is that control?” says Morgan Michaels, research fellow for south-east Asian politics and foreign policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “In many cases it’s mixed control and contestation, and that is fluid and changing over time.”
Ye Myo Hein, executive director of the Tagaung Institute of Political Studies (TIPS), and a global fellow with the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, says that, regardless, the military faces unprecedented battlefield challenges.
“For the first time in history, the military now faces simultaneous attacks from armed resistance of various types, ranging from conventional warfare to guerrilla tactics and from overt to covert operations, in 12 out of Myanmar’s 14 states and regions,” he says.
There are reports that at senior levels there is growing frustration at the military leadership.
Despite this, Ye Myo Hein says it is highly unlikely that Min Aung Hlaing could be ousted as junta chief. “The military’s institutional culture, nurtured over seven decades, has established a feudal system with its top leader in the most powerful position,” he added.
Even if there were to be a change of leadership, some fear the alternative could be even more violent.
The troops fighting the junta’s war are demoralised and exhausted and the brutal campaigns it has launched across the country, in Bamar-majority heartland areas, have left it unable to recruit.
“Everyone wants to leave,” one recent defector told the Guardian. “Maybe soldiers would still love the military. But they don’t love the leaders any more.”
As written at the beginning of the great struggle now unfolding in Myanmar by Myra Dahgaypaw in Common Dreams; “On the morning of August 25, 2021, I woke up on the floor with my lungs gasping for breath. My heart was racing, my hands and legs were shaking from adrenaline, and I was sweating from running. It took me about a minute to realize it was just a nightmare, one where I had to jump off a six-step ladder to run away from Burmese soldiers. Except it wasn’t a nightmare.
It was January 28, 1995—the day I was forced to leave my beautiful village and never see it again. It’s just a nightmare for me now, but it’s a reality for so many people back home.
Since February 1, 2021, I have heard the words “February coup,” “attempted coup,” “civil disobedience movement,” “People’s Defense Force,” and “National Unity Government” countless times. Every time these words are used, I only hear the sounds of war. Most importantly, I hear the screams of civilians, whether they are fleeing for their lives or crying for the loss of their loved ones. I feel as though the international community does not hear the desperate cries for help from Burma’s civilians.
When I saw the picture of the Karen civilians carrying their belongings and their children while crossing the Moi River, I saw myself being carried on my mother’s back when we fled in the late 1970s. When I saw the picture of the Karenni civilians that were notoriously burned to death on December 24, I saw my aunt hanging upside down and my uncle’s skin was flayed and covered with salt and chilli after he was tortured to death. When I watched the news about Thangtlang burning as a result of bombings in Chin state, I saw my village and church burned to the ground when the Burmese military dropped bombs in late January 1995.
I did foresee a day like the February 1 coup. I felt hopeless at one point as I watched world leaders, including the United States, lift economic sanctions, the only leverage we had to bring Burma a step closer to a stable and inclusive democracy. Now, after a decade, we are back to square one. Our people are indiscriminately killed and used as human shields. Their homes are burned and landmines are planted in and around villages. The intense armed conflict forced civilians to flee for their lives, increasing the numbers of displaced people.
It’s been almost a year since the Burmese military coup. We have greater than 320,000 displaced civilians in addition to 340,000 people already displaced due to conflicts prior to 2021. More than a million refugees are seeking refuge in neighboring countries. The most powerful international body, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), still condemns the Burmese military for its actions. However, condemnations only embolden the Burmese military to continue committing crimes with impunity. There is no accountability let alone justice for the victims and their surviving families. The junta is using all possible methods to wipe out anyone who fights back against its rule.
It’s time for the international community to act decisively.
We ask that the international community stop selling weapons to the Burmese military. We implore the UNSC to refer the junta to the International Criminal Court and impose a global arms embargo and targeted sanctions, including gas revenue that brings in billions of dollars that the junta uses to buy weapons. And we ask that other nations follow the example of Argentina and bring forward universal jurisdiction cases against the junta.
Now the people of Burma, including all ethnic groups across the country, are fighting back to regain their rights. It is time for the international community to stand with us in our struggle instead of standing by. The people of Burma are not asking too much, only to hold the Burmese military accountable for the unspeakable crimes they have been committing. We ask the international community to help stop selling weapons to the Burmese military and to stop funding them.”
As I wrote in my post of February 2 2021, The Myanmar Coup: a Legacy of State Terror and Tyranny; When last I was in Burma, I was fleeing for my life from a special death squad of the Burmese Army with a small band of companions, across the Kumon Range to India by trails used by Stillwell and Merrill’s Marauders in World War Two, possibly the first outsider to do so since, and guided by Kachin headhunters as were they.
I suppose we must call it Myanmar now, as the junta renamed the nation in the wake of the 1989 seizure of power from the democracy movement that cast Ne Win down from his throne; but as with changing the actors in the same roles as we have with the armies of the Japanese conquest and those of the Chinese Communist Party’s client state of tyranny in Myanmar, changing what we call a thing does not change what it is.
A military junta has once again seized power in Myanmar in a coup against the democratic government and imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, who once gave the nation a fig leaf of legitimacy before her implication in the army’s genocide of the Muslim Rohingya.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar’s current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.
Here is how I came by accident to be fighting more than three decades ago with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions. I was yelling “Run away!” when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear and shouted in S’gaw; “The American is attacking the enemy! Take the mortars! Charge!” and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.
After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Burmese Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding, brigandage, and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes, exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy’s rear area of operations is a special joy not to be wasted.
The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the fall of the British Raj in 1948, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.
Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has long been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; “Government is about force; only force.”
Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant, and all states embodied violence.
But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, and neither a sign of the innate depravity of man or its form as the doctrine of original sin, and absolutely not a personal evil for which individuals must be held solely responsible under the law or dehumanized as monsters to be driven out, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.
Our addiction to power is systemic and historical, birthing systems of oppression as imposed conditions of struggle, but we may escape its legacies through seizures of power from authorized identities and through those truths written in our flesh as the powers of love, hope, and faith which define what is human, and like refusal to submit cannot be taken from us.
As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love and hope can redeem and heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.
As I wrote in my post of March 9 2021, Tyranny and Resistance in Myanmar; It has been a month of fire and of fear in the streets of Myanmar’s cities, of state terror and the repression of dissent which has escalated from rubber to live bullets and from protests of thousands to tens of thousands against the military coup and the fall of democracy, thin though its veneer was over the fascism and brutality of xenophobic nationalism and the dominion of oligarchic elites, an illusion of liberty and equality which has been exposed as a lie before the stage of the world in the genocide of the Rohingya.
Open street fighting between democracy resistance fighters and military and police units engulf the major cities of Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, Monywa, and in the Shan States capitol of Taunggyi and the township of Lashio, which still proclaim their independence as they did decades ago when I fought with Shan and Karen Free Forces.
The true seat of power is not in the capitol of Yangon but in the temple city of Bagan, key to control of the Buddhist organizations which can authorize or delegitimate a government and have themselves become a ground of struggle since the capture and realignment of the state under Myanmar’s Buddhist social welfare network Ma Ba Ta, the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion, which advocates genocidal violence against the Rohingya, and led by Myanmar’s Pat Robertson or Osama bin Ladin, the monk Ashin Wirathu who has provided the ideology of blood, faith, and soil and the base of mass action for junta leader and army chief Min Aung Hlaing’s campaign against the Rohingya and coup against the government of the oft-imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Rohingya Genocide campaign of 2017 created 750,000 refugees who escaped to Bangladesh and left 600,000 to the terror directed by Min Aung Hlaing; mass organized rape, arson, and murder. The purpose of Hlaing’s coup is primarily to protect the perpetrators of the genocide from criminal prosecution and create a Buddhist-ethnic Burmese state under a return to the military rule which it had for fifty years, and secondarily to protect the vast wealth of Hlaing and his plutocratic-oligarchic junta and cabal. Myanmar is now truly in the lion’s mouth, to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, captured by a regime which meets all major conditions of fascism; authoritarian state terror and tyranny coupled with plutocratic and oligarchic capitalism, and built on a national identity of ethnic and religious purity.
Hlaing’s Buddhist-Burmese fascism parallel’s Modi’s Hindu-Indian fascism, with one important difference; India is still a democracy. Both Myanmar and India use anti-Islamic hysteria and violence as an instrument of state power, and the situations of Kashmir and the Rohingya are comparable. An alliance between the two nations in the centralization of wealth and power to authorized elites and the ethnic cleansing of minorities is a terrifying possibility, and one which would make the Restoration of democracy to the region far more difficult. Such an alliance as now exists between the two nations operated as fronts for Buddhist Nationalism, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The international community must act now, while there is still time.
There can be but one reply to fascism; Never Again.
The historical rise of Buddhist Nationalism in Myanmar is described by Randy Rosenthal writing of 2018 in Lions Roar, What’s the connection between Buddhism and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar?; “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”– Aung San Suu Kyi
The scriptures of Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam condone, justify, and even sometimes encourage the use of violence. In Buddhist texts, it’s just the opposite. Chapter ten of the Dhammapada, an anthology of verses attributed to the Buddha, reads: “All tremble before violence. All fear death. Having done the same yourself, you should neither harm nor kill.” Another verse reads: “In this world hostilities are never appeased by hostility. But by the absence of hostility are they appeased. This is an interminable truth.” A line from the Metta Sutta reads: “Toward the whole world one should develop loving-kindness, a state of mind without boundaries—above, below, and across—unconfined, without enmity, without adversaries.” This principle of non-violence, consistent throughout the Pali Canon — the collection of early Buddhist teachings — is partly why many Buddhists are deeply troubled by the current situation in Myanmar — a majority-Buddhist country — where, particularly in Rakhine State, massive human rights violations are systematically being committed against the Muslim Rohingya people.
Hugging the Bay of Bengal on Myanmar’s western coast, and separated from central Myanmar by the Arakan Mountains, Rakhine State is home to over a million Muslims, most belonging to the Rohingya ethnic group, and over two million Buddhists of the Rakhine ethnic group, who are ethnically distinct from the country’s Bamar majority. The state’s capital is Sittwe, where communal violence erupted in 2012, and relations between Rakhine and Muslims were severed. Things have gotten exponentially worse since then; recent articles published in The New York Times and Al Jazeera exposed mass graves of Rohingya massacred by Burmese troops in September 2017, with acid apparently used to disfigure the bodies beyond recognition. In December 2017, Doctors Without Borders estimated that over 10,000 Rohingya had been killed in the most recent upsurge of violence, and that about 700,000 are living in exile in neighboring Bangladesh and India, causing the UN Human Rights chief to state the situation was “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
There is not enough evidence to declare genocide is occurring, but there is evidence of systematic rape, forced labor, restrictions of movement, restrictions on marriage and reproduction, and prevention from access to medicine and food rations. International observers say the situation will soon come to genocide if the international community does not immediately intervene. As the Holocaust demonstrated, ethnic cleansing can swiftly become genocide. Prior to 1941, the Nazi effort to expel all Jews from the Reich qualified as ethnic cleansing. The subsequent concentrating and then exterminating of Jews that began in earnest after the US entered the war was clearly genocide. As Penny Green, Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at London’s Queen Mary University, states, “Genocide can begin many years before actual extermination.” In April 2018, Green and the ISCI released a report arguing that the Myanmar government is “guilty of genocidal intent toward the Rohingya.”
Whether ethnic cleansing or genocide, it is clear that human rights violations against the Rohingya are occurring in Myanmar, which is enough to invoke the Responsibility to Protect principle, in accordance with Chapters VI, VII, and VIII of the United Nations Charter, authorizing the international community to intervene in Myanmar’s national sovereignty. For those of us observing from afar, the crisis forces us to ask questions about the role of Buddhism in world politics.
In The New York Times article “Why Are We Surprised When Buddhists Are Violent?,” Dan Arnold and Alicia Turner write, “How, many wonder, could a Buddhist society—especially Buddhist monks!—have anything to do with something so monstrously violent as the ethnic cleansing now being perpetrated on Myanmar’s long-beleaguered Rohingya minority? Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be compassionate and pacifist?”
To understand the issue more fully, we must first start with the narrative of Buddhist nationalism — the driving ideological force behind the Islamophobia fueling the violence against the Rohingya. From the perspective of a Buddhist nationalist, the story goes like this: Over the course of decades, Muslim Rohingya slipped over the border from Bangladesh at the point where it meets Rakhine State, and settled on Rakhine land. They grew in number and diluted the Buddhist population, forming the vanguard of a crusade to turn Myanmar into a Muslim country. Therefore, unlike other Muslims in Myanmar, such as the Kaman people, the Rohingya have never been Burmese citizens and do not deserve citizenship status.
This narrative is known as “the Muslim problem.” To cement the view that the Rohingya are not Burmese citizens, the Rohingya are referred to as “Chittagong Bengalis.”
From the nation’s start, Burma was a Buddhist and Bamar-ethnic majority.
There’s no escaping the fact that men wearing the robes of Buddhist monks are promoting this narrative. The most infamous of these is Ashin Wirathu, the 49-year-old Burmese monk who was on the cover of TIME magazine in 2013 and was the subject of the 2017 documentary film The Venerable W. by French filmmaker Barbet Schroder. As the film shows, Wirathu has led hundreds of thousands of followers in a hate-fueled, violent campaign of ethnic cleansing by claiming that the Rohingya are “a Saudi-backed Bangladeshi insurgency whose purpose is to infiltrate the country, destroy Myanmar’s traditional Buddhism and establish a caliphate.” Wirathu is a leader of the Organization for the Protection of Race and Religion, commonly known by its Burmese acronym, Ma Ba Tha. This group was founded in June 2013, and quickly found the support of millions. Ma Ba Tha and other Buddhist nationalist groups—not only Myanmar but also in Sri Lanka—describe their purpose as the protection and promotion of Buddhism through preaching about the importance of Buddhist values, history, education, sacred sites, and ceremonies. Yet accompanying this benign rhetoric is their insistence on neutralizing threats to Buddhism, which they claim come from Muslims.
In the 2016 book Myanmar’s Enemy Within, author Francis Wade talks with a lay member of this group, who shares the narrative fueling the group’s thinking. “If the Buddhist cultures vanish,” the member said, “Yangon will become like Saudi and Mecca … It can be the fall of Yangon. It can be the fall of Buddhism. And our race will be eliminated.” Though Buddhism is not a race, Ma Ba Tha often conflates race and religion, demonstrating that the group’s deeper concern is one of ethnicity.
Those who believe this narrative see verification of it in the history of other formerly Buddhist nations — like Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — having been “overrun” by Muslims. Myanmar remains 90% Buddhist, with no evidence of that changing. So where did the idea that Buddhism will vanish originate?
The Rise of Burmese Nationalism
Buddhism has been used to consolidate the national identity in Burma for centuries. In the twelfth century, King Anawratha used Buddhist scriptures to unite the disparate people of the Ayeyarwady Valley and form the Bagan Empire. From the nation’s start, Burma was a Buddhist and Bamar-ethnic majority. From then on, kings would support the order of monks—the sangha—and in return the monks endowed the monarchy with legitimacy. The monks encouraged loyalty to the nation, but they also served as the conscience of the government, making sure that it ruled in accordance with Buddhist ethical principles. When it did not, the monks revolted.
An example of this was seen in the Saffron Revolution of September 2007. When the government allowed gas subsidies to expire, the price of goods rose 500%, and citizens protested. When the protesters were violently suppressed, the monks joined the protest by overturning their begging bowls on their alms round, disallowing government officials from earning merit by giving alms. The protest was a seriously embarrassing gesture, and the military government violently cracked down on the protests, beating and arresting thousands of monks.
The narrative that the Burmese people need to protect Buddhism from enemy foreign invaders has persisted for over a century, though the perceived enemy has changed from British to Muslim.
The 800-year connection between the monarchy and the sangha was severed in 1885, when the British invaded Upper Burma and incorporated it into its Indian colony. Dissolving the border between the countries, Indian Hindus and Muslims moved en masse — voluntarily or forcefully — into Burma, permanently altering the demographics of Rangoon in particular, where many found success in trade. With the loss of a Buddhist king and the loss of favor of the Buddhist education system, due to the British promotion of Christianity, 1885 saw the emergence of the first Buddhist nationalist movements.
The modern movement of Vipassana meditation arose out of this anti-colonial movement, with monk Ledi Sayadaw spreading the idea that it was the duty of every Buddhist to protect and preserve Buddhism by meditating and studying Buddhist scripture, both of which were previously only practiced by a small portion of monastics. Ledi Sayadaw’s movement was pacifist, but monks also led armed rebels to attack British troops in upper Myanmar during the British invasion. Nationalistic independence movements rose over the following decades, and in the 1920s and 30s a popular anti-colonial rallying cry was “Amyo, Batha, Thathana!” — which roughly translates to “Race, language, and religion!” The Ma Ba Tha organization derived its name from this slogan, of which it is an acronym.
This narrative — that the Burmese people need to protect Buddhism from enemy foreign invaders — has persisted for over a century, though the perceived enemy has changed from British to Muslim. The first instance of this shift can be seen in a rally of 10,000 Burmese at Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, in 1938, to protest the writing of Muslim intellectuals who were accused of insulting Buddhism. The protests resulted in attacks on Muslim communities across the city. In addition to anti-Muslim movements, the 1930s and 1940s also saw the rise of anti-Christian and anti-Hindu sentiments, the latter culminating in a series of anti-Indian riots. All of these incidences arose as part of anti-colonial movements and strengthened the idea that one must be Buddhist in order to be truly Burmese.
An important contributing factor to the current crisis in Rakhine occurred during WWII. Under Japanese occupation, Buddhists in Rakhine (then called Arakan) were recruited to fight as proxies for the Japanese. Local Muslims, in contrast, were armed and mobilized by the British as independent militias who performed guerilla-attacks on Japanese forces. This meant that Buddhists and Muslims were fighting against each other, which resulted in the groups becoming geographically separated and “ghettoized,” with Muslims fleeing north to avoid the anti-Muslim violence of the Japanese offensives, and Buddhists fleeing south to avoid the anti-Buddhist violence of the guerilla counter-offensives. After the war, waves of government violence against Rohingya occurred in 1954, 1962 (during the military takeover), 1977-78 (when the military forced the Rohingya to carry Foreign Registration Cards, and over 200,000 were driven into Bangladesh), 1992, 2001 (in response to the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist statues in Bamiyan), and 2003.
We can trace the history of the current crisis in Rakhine State to the military takeover of the country in 1962. Burma achieved independence in 1948, but after fourteen years of constitutional rule, the military junta took over in 1962. The junta systematically stoked fears of the demise of Buddhism and the break-up of the nation to cultivate loyalty among a resentful population. But they also held a monopoly on violence and prevented citizens and monks like Wirathu from encouraging social disturbance. (In 2003, Wirathu was arrested along with forty-four other monks for using hate-speech to promote attacks on Muslims and a mosque, and spent eight years in prison.) Ironically, it was only with the ostensible transition to democracy that began in 2011 that public religious tension between Buddhists and Muslims surfaced again. As Francis Wade writes, the idea was that “the stirrings of democratic change in Myanmar might level the playing field, allowing communities who felt long disenfranchised by the military to assert great claims to the nation.” It was feared that Muslims in particular would take advantage of democratic freedom, and if they did, Buddhists would suffer.
A crucial moment came in 1982 with the Citizenship Law, when the government issued an official list of 135 ethnic groups, or “national races” that held Myanmar citizenship. The list excluded the Rohingya, cementing their stateless status. A census in 2014 was then designed to exclude “alien” minorities from voting, and the 2015 elections resulted in Aung San Suu Kyi becoming State Councilor, with great gains for her National League for Democracy (NLD) — and also in the total absence of Muslims from Myanmar’s parliament for the first time since independence.
With the internet, Islamaphobic fanatics can connect the old Burmese narratives about Islam with the contemporary narrative of global jihad.
Suu Kyi has received widespread criticism for her silence on the Rohingya issue — especially in light of her earlier writing and speeches. In a 1989 open letter to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, for example, Suu Kyi wrote, “The chief aim of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and other organizations working for the establishment of a democratic government in Burma is to bring about social and political changes which will guarantee a peaceful, stable and progressive society where human rights, as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are protected by rule of law.” Then, in a speech she gave in Kachin State on April 27, 1989, Suu Kyi declared, “If we divide ourselves ethnically, we shall not achieve democracy for a long time.” Despite the apparent achievement of democracy in Myanmar, violent ethnic divisions continue to occur under Suu Kyi and the NLD’s leadership.
The latest upsurges of violence are also aided by globalization. With the internet, Islamaphobic fanatics can connect the old Burmese narratives about Islam with the contemporary narrative of global jihad. In The Venerable W. —shot before the 2016 election — Wirathu says, “In the USA, if the people want to maintain peace and security, they have to choose Donald Trump.” Through such comments, and his aggressive use of social media and DVD propaganda, Wirathu demonstrates his awareness of rising xenophobic nationalism around the world. He’s aware of 9/11; the attacks in Paris, Berlin, Nice, and Brussels; Brexit; Marine Le Penn in France; neo-Nazis in Germany; and the right-wing nationalist governments ruling in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe. He knows he is tapping into a larger global vilification of Islam — a world vs. Muslim jihadist narrative. This framing is made possible by the internet, which only became widely available in Myanmar in 2011. Wirathu seems to be committed to connecting his regional crusade to a broader global movement. In 2014, he traveled to Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, to sign a memorandum of understanding between Sri Lanka’s own Islamophobic monk group, Bodu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power), and 969 (the precursor to Ma Ba Tha).
All of these conditions — the colonial history, the emergence of the internet, the global anti-Islamic narrative — provide a ripe ground for violence and persecution. The question that remains: are the crimes against humanity in Myanmar a tragic byproduct of random circumstances unabated by the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism, or is the violence part of some concerted effort by an as-of-yet unnamed actor, Buddhist or otherwise?
Behind the Current Crisis
The current crisis started in 2012. Here’s a brief timeline of events:
May 28, 2012: Twenty-six-year-old Rakhine woman Ma Thida Htwe was gang-raped and murdered by three men the state media identified as “Bengali Muslim” or “Islam Followers.” These men were promptly arrested.
June 3, 2012: A few days later, three hundred Rakhine men attacked a bus carrying Muslims in the town of Taungup, beating ten passengers to death. These Muslims were not Rohingya, but missionaries from northern areas not in Rakhine State.
June 9, 2012: Mobs of Rohingya retaliated by attacking Rakhine properties in Maungdaw, torching houses. Mobs of Rakhine in turn burned Sittwe’s Muslim quarter of Nasi to the ground, chasing tens of thousands of the Rohingya inhabitants out of Rakhine and into camps or exile in Bangladesh (some estimate up to 120,000). These mobs were reportedly bussed in from elsewhere in Rakhine State. They were reported to be drunk and/or high on drugs.
October 2012: A second wave of violence occurred, with apparently organized mob attacks on Muslim communities in nine townships across Rakhine State.
There were close-quarter machete attacks and torching of houses on both sides, but only Rohingya violence was “constructed as terrorism,” and ascribed to “jihad.” In this way, these small, local disturbances—of inter-community slaughter, not uncommon in South Asia—suddenly became part of a global crisis.
Wirathu and other monks from his 969 group organized a complete Muslim boycott, prohibiting Buddhists from having any interaction with Muslims whatsoever. Any Muslim “sympathizer” would also be persecuted, and one Buddhist who continued to do business with Muslims was beaten to death. The monks’ ban of Muslims set the precedent for an Islamophobia that went beyond the Rohingya to include officially recognized citizens of Myanmar.
March 2013: Extreme violence erupted in the central Myanmar town of Meikhtila—where both Muslim and Buddhist communities are largely Bamar—after a Buddhist couple claimed a Muslim jewelry store owner sold them a fake golden hairpin and a brawl started between them. While police watched, Muslim-owned shops were burned and Muslims were attacked; later, a group of Muslims knocked a Buddhist monk off of his bike, beating him as he lay on the ground, and then set his body on fire. This led to outright carnage, with outside groups again bused in to lead a full pogrom against Muslims in the town, resulting in a death toll of forty-three people, mostly killed by sticks and knives, and 830 buildings destroyed. (Again, the men making up the mobs were reported to be drunk and/or high on drugs.)
June 2013: After the report of a rape of a Buddhist woman by Kaman Muslim men in Thandwe, violence erupted again, not just against Kaman but also against Rohingya far away from the incident.
August 2017: Armed Rohingya rebels—of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)—launched a coordinated attack on thirty border police posts, killing a dozen security forces. This caused the Burmese army to retaliate against the Rohingya throughout Rakhine State with a “scorched earth campaign.”
March 2018: By March, more than 6,000 Rohingya had been killed and more than 655,000 had fled to Bangladesh. Over fifty-five villages had been completely bulldozed, removing traces of buildings, wells, and even vegetation. Here we can see the Myanmar army has learned from the Israeli Army, which many Myanmar officials admire; when asked how to respond to the Rohingya, Dr. Aye Maung, head of Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, said, “We need to be like Israel.”
Today 2018: Amnesty International says those Rohingya who remain in their villages and camps are being systematically starved, to force them to flee the country. It is a situation ripe for genocide.
In all cases of violence against Muslims, reports of police participation in the attacks raised suspicions of a link between the mobs and the government. In Azeem Ibrahim’s 2016 book The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide, Ibrahim says that the violence in Myanmar is closely related to inter-ethnic tension in Sri Lanka and Thailand. The key difference in Myanmar, he writes, is that several prominent Buddhist groups are actively driving the anti-Muslim violence, such as Ma Ba Tha. Then Ibrahim makes the shocking assertion that “there is growing evidence that the Ma Ba Tha Buddhist extremist organization was set up by the military as an alternative power base.” He suggests the group is a “front organization” for the military. He continues, “In effect, the military is directly backing two different groups in contemporary Myanmar,” the USDP (their political party) and “its own organization of Buddhist extremists who both offer the means to channel electoral support to the USDP and to create violence that can later be used to justify a military intervention.”
Ibrahim explores the origin of the connection between the government and the Ma Ba Tha. The organization did not exist before the opening up of the country in 2011. Ibrahim writes that the monks who were arrested during the Saffron Revolution in 2007 were later offered money and state patronage to join the Ma Ba Tha and promote its core message of hatred of all Muslims. These revelatory claims are based on an article by Emanuel Stoakes, “Monks, Powerpoint Presentations and Ethnic Cleanings,” published in Foreign Policy on October 26, 2015.
Based on the evidence presented, it appears that the eruptions of violence against the Rohingya and other Muslim groups across Myanmar were organized and planned.
In his article, Stoakes interviews an anonymous monk who claims that after his release from prison, he had a meeting with three government officials and was offered money to join Ma Ba Tha and preach anti-Muslim rhetoric. He is one of four monk leaders of the Saffron Revolution who claim the government made similar offers to them. Stoakes also produced an investigative documentary with Al Jazeera, “Genocide Agenda,” which aired in October 2015. In the film, one anonymous monk leader explains the situation bluntly: “Gradually, monks from the Saffron Revolution ended up in Ma Ba Tha.” He further clarifies exactly what anyone trying to understand the situation needs to know: “Ma Ba Tha is controlled by the military. When it wants to start a problem at any time, it’s like turning on a tap. They will turn it on or turn it off when they want.”
The Al Jazeera documentary presents other monk leaders of the Saffron Revolution who claim Wirathu works for the government. These monks specify that Wirathu called them at their monasteries after they were released from prison in 2011, and invited them to come see him. When they went, they say he attempted to recruit them to join his anti-Muslim crusade with the offer of an office, complete with an Internet-connected laptop, a telephone, and a payment of $1,000 (in a country with a per capita income of $1,195). The film also shows a secretly taped mobile phone recording of a meeting between government officials and Ma Ba Tha clerics. Then, an anonymous acquaintance of Wirathu claims that Yangon’s Special Branch agency (undercover police) works closely with Wirathu, saying he has seen its members at Wirathu’s monastery in Mandalay. Further evidence is seen in a Powerpoint presentation used by members of the military at a training session in 2012 in the capital city of Naypyidaw, titled “Fear of Losing One’s Race,” a presentation in which the very same anti-Muslim language used by Ma Ba Tha is found, including the conspiracy of a Muslim plot to make Buddhism and Buddhists extinct. Other documents circulated among government officials and obtained by Al Jazeera warn of Muslim plots to rape Buddhist women, start riots, and carry out terrorist acts, including intentions to “cut off the heads of departmental staff members.”
The main point of the documentary is that, despite the apparent movement toward democracy, ethnic violence is engineered by the government in an attempt to keep its grip on power. Based on the evidence presented, it appears that the eruptions of violence against the Rohingya and other Muslim groups across Myanmar were organized and planned, not spontaneous, communal, or unintended consequences of democratization. While the government has dismissed any allegations of its links to the violence as “nonsense,” Stoakes writes, “Evidence obtained by Al Jazeera shows conclusively that the recent surge of anti-Muslim hatred has been anything but random. In fact, it’s the product of a concerted government campaign clearly aimed at promoting instability and undermining the opposition by stirring up the forces of militant nationalism.”
Stoakes responsibly notes that none of this evidence is clear proof of the connection between the government and Ma Ba Tha, but it is nevertheless illuminating. If the government has been corrupting men wearing the robes of a monk, then Buddhism is not being used as a rallying cry of hatred and exclusion, but merely as a veil for it.
In this crisis, the term “Buddhist” is used to designate cultural identity, not a religious belief or practice. Someone who identifies as a Buddhist doesn’t necessarily follow the teachings of the Buddha. Even back in the Buddha’s time, there were “bogus monks” who tried to join the sangha. These were not true monks but merely “men in yellow robes,” and were ejected from sangha gatherings. We should understand the situation in Myanmar as a cultural conflict rather than a religious conflict. As Azeem Ibrahim wrote, it is the exclusive nature of the Theravada tradition that often leads to “violent inter-ethnic tension in Sri Lanka and Thailand, as well as Myanmar,” not Buddhism itself.
The military government of Myanmar is cynically using Buddhism to manipulate people to behave with violence and hatred, rather than compassion and generosity. In my experience, conversations about Myanmar tends to get mired in debate about whether Buddhism is a non-violent religion. Perhaps we should leave Buddhism out of the conversation. In order to focus on addressing the actual situation more effectively and responsibly, it’s important to understand the complex political and ethnic issues more deeply. With a deeper understanding, we might be able to engage with the situation more effectively.“
What happens next? It depends on the international response to fascist tyranny and terror. As written by Vasuki Shastry in The Guardian; “Four weeks after he deposed Myanmar’s democratically elected government, General Min Aung Hlaing must be getting that sinking feeling. His carefully orchestrated retirement plan (he was due to retire in July this year, before leading the coup on 1 February) has faced sustained protests from the street and international condemnation, even from vocal members of the normally staid Association of South-east Asian Nations (Asean). The general has also over-played the army’s tried-and-tested strategy of deploying brutal firepower. The protesters are not backing down, and the time has come for the international community to call the general’s bluff and insist on the restoration of the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) rightful claim to power.
Achieving this will require an unusual degree of global cooperation and consensus, both in short supply at the moment. However, this may prove to be just the kind of global leadership that presidents Biden and Xi may wish to exercise, with the support of regional players Japan, India, Singapore and Indonesia.
During Myanmar’s previous periods of military rule, the country’s neighbours have either looked the other way (Asean, which held on to its stated policy of non-interference until some members decided to break ranks after the 1 February coup) or tacitly supported the generals (China notably) as they stripped a once rich country of mining resources and set back economic and political progress by decades. The army’s architecture of terror was built on the brazen belief that they could carry on their repression because the street could be easily silenced, and the impact of the international community’s outrage and sanctions was largely borne by ordinary people. By turning the clock back during successive decades of repression, the generals succeeded in making Myanmar one of the poorest countries in Asia.
Min Aung Hlaing’s calculus may have been something similar when he assumed charge in early February, but he and his fellow generals have made a major miscalculation. They underestimated the positive impact that a decade of democracy and economic liberalisation has had on the country’s 54 million citizens. Democracy, however flawed and tarnished it may be in Myanmar, has the notion of checks and balances, and the NLD’s historic election victory last year was a rude wake-up call for Min Aung Hlaing and his cohort, fearful that their power and privileges would only reduce over a period of time.
This historical context is useful because restoring democracy in Myanmar is very different from previous (and futile) international efforts to do the same elsewhere. For a start, international sanctions led by the Biden administration, however targeted they might be, will simply not work in the Myanmar context. Reducing the international travel and banking access of a small group of generals will embolden them further to shun the world and take the country back to the dark times of the 1960s and 1970s. There is another approach possible, which will require the US to work closely with China and prominent Asean members. The fact that leading lights of Asean, such as Indonesia and Singapore, have shunned contact with the new regime and are openly calling for dialogue and restoration of civilian rule should be a sign for Min Aung Hlaing that the game is up. Beijing could play a hugely constructive role by recognising that its long-term strategic interests are aligned with having a stable Myanmar on its borders.
How would such an international alliance work in practice? A possible model is the original six-party talks to negotiate and resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. Myanmar does not possess nuclear weapons and is not a geopolitical threat to its neighbours, as Kim Jong-un’s murderous regime surely is. This fact alone should reduce the potential for regional rivalries and jockeying, which have plagued the North Korean process from the start. As strategic competitors, the US and China should regard Myanmar as an early test of their ability to collaborate on areas of common global interest, while competing fiercely on issues such as trade and security. The involvement of other countries in the process would send a powerful signal of resolve by the international community.
Min Aung Hlaing and his minions should face consequences for the coup and the killings of peaceful protesters, a legal process that should be led by the democratic government. At the same time, any international intervention should include a settlement for the return of the estimated 1 million Rohingya refugees and for a fair process to resolve longstanding disputes with other ethnic minorities in the country, many of whom have taken to the jungle in the last few decades.
What about Aung San Suu Kyi herself? It is clear she enjoys broad public support and is regarded by many in Myanmar as the guardian of newfound democracy and economic freedoms. During her last stint as a guest of the army, Daw Suu, as she is known, become an icon of democracy through her stubborn resistance and refusal to bend to the will of the generals. Democracy has exposed a different side to the leader, who is revered at home and reviled in many parts of the world. She has proven to be a calculating politician and has doubled down on a strategy to diminish the suffocating influence of the generals in all aspects of Myanmar society. This is a worthy cause for which she received much initial international support, until she sacrificed Rohingya rights to prove her credentials as a Bamar nationalist. Should the international community come to Myanmar’s rescue, it will be interesting to see which Daw Suu will show up – the nationalist since 2011 or the defender of freedoms from an earlier phase.”
As I wrote in my post of May 24 2021, Tyranny and Terror in Myanmar; The mass democracy movement in Myanmar against the junta’s coup and brutal repression of dissent has been joined by a coalition of minority separatist forces from states which never recognized the claims of Myanmar to dominion over them, and have been in a state of war of liberation and independence since 1949. It has been called a civil war, but it is also a war of survival between indigenous tribal peoples, most especially former British allies the Karen, Shan, Kachin, and Chin, versus Myanmar, successor state to the British Empire unified by the ideology of Buddhist Nationalism and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The task before us now is to unite the democracy movement with the forces of the indigenous tribes in solidarity to liberate Myanmar from the tyranny and error of its racist and sectarian regime.
Some of my American Buddhist friends object that the Buddhist Nationalists in Burma are not Buddhists and should not be referred to as such, because the First Principle of Buddhism is do not kill.
To this I say; Yes, but it is what they call themselves, and it is a consequence of their unique history of anticolonial struggle, in which the British Empire used division against the people of Burma by hiring Islamic minorities as forces of state repression much as in India under the Raj. I say again; like nationalist tyranny as a transitional stage of revolution, fascist constructions of national identity are caused by the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle, and this is the primary ground of struggle on which fascism and tyranny must be fought. The Nationalist violence in Myanmar is paralleled in Sri Lanka, which shares with it sectarian narratives of victimization leveraged by a common Buddhist organization which uses these two governments as fronts in a mission of dominion.
Herein I criticize not faith as a direct personal relationship with the Infinite, but organizations of faith as authoritarian structures. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
At the top of pyramids of elite hegemonies of wealth and power are the apex predators; priests and tyrants of faith whose job is to legitimize elites and authorize secondary authorities; to anoint brutal thugs as kings or tyrants to keep the slaves at their work.
To claim that Buddhist nationalists who kill Muslims are not Buddhists is like claiming the Nazis were not Christians despite the crosses they painted on their tanks and the key role Christian Identity ideology played in their subjugation of Germany, and it misses the point; sectarian division and fanaticism is a primary instrument of authoritarian tyranny and elite power. It operates much the same regardless of when or where, in what language or by whom it is perpetrated.
From the Crusades and the Inquisition to the Holocaust and the sectarian wars of today, there is always someone in a gold robe who weaponizes faith in the subjugation of others who are consigned to the hard and dirty work.
To achieve a free society of equals requires a nonsectarian secular state, and the principle of separation of Church and State. In much of the world which does not share Europe’s history and the ideals of the Enlightenment which emerged from it, the idea that the state and organizations of faith should have nothing to do with each other seems inexplicable and dangerous as well as wrong; but it is a principle which has proven itself in America and bears possibilities of healing, transformational change, and hope for many peoples under the hammer of sectarian conflict.
The Hunger Games Salute of the Revolution
The Venerable full film
Myanmar marks bitter 5-year anniversary of 2021 coup
‘This is a fake election’: Polls close in Myanmar but voters have little doubt junta proxy will prevail
After arresting political opponents, banning the most popular party and using violence to crush dissent, the military’s proxy is on course to win by a landslide
The dangerous rise of Buddhist extremism: ‘Attaining nirvana can wait’ – podcast: Still largely viewed as a peaceful philosophy, across much of south-east Asia, the religion has been weaponised to serve nationalist goals
First, Why We Fight; we fight to avenge our sacred dead and in witness and remembrance of our martyrs of Liberty, Equality, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, we fight to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness of fascist tyranny and terror, we fight for the Restoration of America as a free society of equals who are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings, we fight to place our lives in the balance with our brothers, sisters, and all others regardless of our differences in a diverse and inclusive society and in liberation struggle with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, we fight to choose the manner of our deaths and the meaning of our lives regardless of hope or victory or survival; we fight to remain citizens and not subjects, we fight for an America which is a beacon of hope to the world and a guarantor of democracy and the right of self-determination for all humankind, we fight to win a future in which all of these things remain true for each and every one of us throughout the world and for all time.
In the Minneapolis Revolt we hold up a mirror to America and ask; who do we want to become, we Americans, we human beings; masters and slaves, or a Band of Brothers? This weekend the mass protests against the criminal and un-American Trump regime which began nearly a year ago on February 5, reached the levels of the historic Black Lives Matter protests last summer in over fifty cities in sustained actions ongoing now for some seven months, and metastasized from protest into revolutionary struggle with the ICE white supremacist terror force murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during their campaign of ethnic cleansing, have won signal and historic victories with the purge of ICE leader Bovino and the “drawdown” of ICE thugs, a term chosen by the regime from the language of the Fall of Saigon and the mealy-mouthing of the catastrophic defeat of America by the people of a united Vietnam as we abandoned an Occupation very like that of our own cities by ICE and other federal troops.
Much remains to be done, until ICE is dismantled and abolished and its members brought a Reckoning as we did at Nuremberg to their predecessors, and until the Fourth Reich of the Trump Regime in all its grotesque and aberrant kleptocratic perversity is brought down and purged from among us.
Today we celebrate the re-Awakening of America, and one day I hope her Restoration, won in the streets against the racist death and terror of our captured state.
We dance in joy, in the glory of refusal to submit, and in the beauty of solidarity and the dream of a diverse and inclusive society in which we are all truly brothers, sisters, and others, versus the fascisms and divisions of blood, faith, and soil and the hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness by which those who would enslave us seek to falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us.
Come dance with us, America, and be free.
As written by Melissa Hellmann in The Guardian, in an article entitled Eight people have died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026. These are their stories: The high-profile killings of Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good are only two among many; “The killings of the 37-year-old Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents have sparked protests and outrage throughout the nation. Pretti and Good are just two people out of at least eight who have either been killed by federal agents or who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2026 so far.
The high-profile fatal shootings follow the deaths of at least 32 people in ICE custody in 2025 – the highest number since 2004. One of the people killed was Keith Porter Jr, a 43-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE agent outside of his Los Angeles apartment complex on the evening of 31 December 2025. The father of two was firing a gun into the air, a Los Angeles police department spokesperson said, before the off-duty ICE agent, Brian Palacios, went to investigate. Porter was pronounced dead at the scene when police officers responded.
These are the stories of the eight people who died this year.
Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres
On 5 January, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, a 42-year-old immigrant from Honduras, died in ICE custody at HCA Houston Healthcare in Conroe, Texas. He had been admitted into the Houston-area hospital for a heart-related condition, according to an ICE statement. Núñez was first arrested by ICE agents during an operation in Houston on 17 November and was eventually transferred to the Joe Corley processing center in Conroe. On New Year’s Eve, ICE said, “he suffered multiple life-threatening medical emergencies, and HCA medical personnel moved him to the intensive care unit, where he remained until his death”. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement to the Guardian: “We have maintained higher standard of care than most prisons that hold US citizens – including providing access to proper medical care.” For many immigrants, the DHS said, “this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives”.
“My brother was a person full of life and hope, always fighting for his wellbeing and that of our family,” Núñez’s brother wrote in Spanish on a GoFundMe page requesting assistance in bringing his brother’s body home. “Sadly, his life was cut short due to the lack of adequate medical care while he was in ICE custody.”
Geraldo Lunas Campos
On 3 January, while in ICE custody, a Cuban immigrant died of homicide, according to a recent autopsy report. Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old father of four, died at the ICE facility Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas. In a 9 January statement, ICE said, “Lunas became disruptive while in line for medication and refused to return to his assigned dorm. He was subsequently placed in segregation.” Medical personnel were called for assistance when they noticed him in distress, ICE claimed. The federal government later claimed that staff had been trying to save Lunas as he attempted suicide.
However, a witness told the Associated Press that Lunas Campos was handcuffed and that he was put into a chokehold until he became unconscious.
The El Paso county medical examiner’s office autopsy report said that his body showed signs of damaged vessels on his neck and injury on his knees and chest, according to PBS.
Lunas Campos was originally arrested by immigration enforcement agents in Rochester, New York, in July, ICE said, and that he had been in the US for 30 years.
Víctor Manuel Díaz
A 36-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant, Víctor Manuel Díaz, also died at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, on 14 January. In a statement following his death, ICE said that security staff found him “unconscious and unresponsive in his room”. ICE said that Díaz’s death was a “presumed suicide” but that his death remained under investigation.
“I don’t believe he took his life,” Díaz’s brother Yorlan Díaz told ABC News. “He was not a criminal. He was looking for a better life and he wanted to help our mother.”
Parady La
A Pennsylvania man, Parady La, died while in ICE custody at the Thomas Jefferson University hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 9 January. The 46-year-old Cambodian immigrant was picked up near his Upper Darby home a few days before his death, his family told 6 ABC Action News. In a statement, ICE said that La was found unresponsive in the federal detention center in Philadelphia, where he was receiving treatment for drug withdrawal.
He was given Narcan and then taken to the hospital and diagnosed with organ failures, among other conditions. His family was notified on 8 January and visited him at the hospital, after they had spent days searching for him.
His daughter, Jazmine La, said that her father “was a real person and people loved him”.
Renee Nicole Good
Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by a federal agent in her car on 7 January. The 37-year-old mother of three was a poet and writer who had moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri, last year.
The DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, said that the law enforcement agent who killed Good had responded to an “act of domestic terrorism”.
Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia, where she won an Academy of American Poets prize in 2020.
Donna Ganger, her mother, told the Minnesota Star Tribune: “Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.”
Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz
On 6 January, Honduran immigrant Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz died at the John F Kennedy memorial hospital in Indio, California, from heart-related issues, according to an ICE statement following his death. The father of three initially entered the US in 1993, according to ICE, was removed from the country, and re-entered at least 20 years ago. ICE arrested him in Newark, New Jersey, in November 2025.
According to ICE, Yáñez-Cruz was detained at Imperial regional detention facility in Calexico and was later transferred to the hospital for chest pain, where he died.
His daughter, Josselyn Yanez, told News Channel 3 that his heart-related issues began after he was detained. “My soul was destroyed,” she said, “because I really hoped that my father would leave that place, but not in this way.”
Heber Sánchez Domínguez
Heber Sánchez Domínguez, a 34-year-old from Mexico, died at the Robert A Deyton detention center in Lovejoy, Georgia, on 14 January. In a statement, ICE said that he was found unresponsive and that his death was under investigation. After being arrested in Georgia on 7 January for driving without a license, he was transferred to the Lovejoy detention center as he awaited removal proceedings. ICE said that the detention center staff found him hanging by his neck and transferred him to the Piedmont Henry medical center, where he was pronounced dead.
The Mexican consulate in Atlanta told CBS News that Mexican officials have asked that “the circumstances of the incident be clarified”.
Alex Pretti
Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse for a veterans affairs hospital, was fatally shot by federal agents during an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis on 24 January. The 37-year-old Minneapolis resident was trying to help a woman who had been pushed to the ground by ICE agents when he was tackled, beaten, restrained and shot to death.
Following his death, the senior White House official Stephen Miller wrote on X: “A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement …” Video evidence showed that Pretti, who was carrying a firearm around his waist, was holding only his phone in his hand and that he was disarmed before being shot.”
As I wrote of the first mass protests of the Second Trump Regime in my post of February 6 2025, We Rise and Resist: We Seize the Streets In Mass Actions and Protests Throughout America Against Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and Closure of US Aid, Against Musk the Troll King’s Information Warfare, and Against Capture and Dismantling of the State By the Fourth Reich; We rejoice in the glorious Resistance which arose yesterday in mass actions and protests throughout America, against Traitor Trump’s Theatre of Cruelty and shuttering of US Aid, and against Musk the Troll King’s monkeywrenching and sabotage of our nation’s social security, medicare, tax, and other financial records, a federal bank heist, espionage, and information warfare performed by his troupe of fascist child soldiers.
In the space of a few days we organized marches on every state capital in America as well as key federal sites in Washington DC, a broad spectrum of alliances and interests which united in solidarity of action to challenge and confront the criminal seizure of our government by the Republican Party, front organization of the Fourth Reich, a liberation movement which parallels legislative and legal actions and theatres of war.
For war is precisely the word for what is now upon us.
America now faces her “fight them on the beaches” moment; though we have been a theatre of the Third World War since the Stolen Election of 2016. But we have never before fought a war of survival against our own captured state.
In this great cause of liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all, of the American Way as a free society of equals wherein we are guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens who are co-owners of the state, I offer us all the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of darkness and terror; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to Resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
He wrote it in Paris 1940 for the new Resistance, rephrased from the oath of the French Foreign Legion he took in 1928; he said it was the finest thing he ever stole. And we now find ourselves in a parallel situation to that of Vichy France, and must engage the imposed conditions of struggle by the same means and strategies as then; hopefully we have learned a few new tricks since then. But Solidarity is the keystone, with Disbelief and Disobedience on either side.
This, this, this.
When they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us.
As written by AP in NBC News in an article entitled Protesters across the U.S. decry Trump administration policies; “Demonstrators gathered in cities across the U.S. on Wednesday to protest the Trump administration’s early actions, decrying everything from the president’s immigration crackdown to his rollback of transgender rights and a proposal to forcibly transfer Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Protesters in Philadelphia and at state capitols in California, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, Indiana and beyond waved signs denouncing President Donald Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025, a hard-right playbook for American government and society.
“I’m appalled by democracy’s changes in the last, well, specifically two weeks — but it started a long time ago,” Margaret Wilmeth said at a protest outside the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. “So I’m just trying to put a presence into resistance.”
The protests were a result of a movement that has organized online under the hashtags #buildtheresistance and #50501, which stands for 50 protests, 50 states, one day. Websites and accounts across social media issued calls for action, with messages such as “reject fascism” and “defend our democracy.”
Outside the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, a crowd of hundreds gathered in freezing temperatures.
Catie Miglietti, from the Ann Arbor area, said Musk’s access to Treasury Department data was especially concerning. She painted a sign depicting Musk puppeteering Trump from his outraised arm — evoking Musk’s straight-arm gesture during a January speech that some have interpreted as a Nazi salute.
“If we don’t stop it and get Congress to do something, it’s an attack on democracy,” Miglietti said.
Demonstrations in several cities piled criticism on Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency.
“DOGE is not legit,” read one poster on the state Capitol steps in Jefferson City, Missouri, where dozens of protesters gathered. “Why does Elon have your Social Security info???”
Members of Congress have expressed concern that DOGE’s involvement with the U.S. government payment system could lead to security risks or missed payments for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A Treasury Department official says a tech executive working with DOGE will have “read-only access.”
Trump has signed a series of executive orders in the first couple of weeks of his new term on everything from trade and immigration to climate change. As Democrats begin to raise their voice in opposition to Trump’s agenda, protests have multiplied.
Demonstrators strode through downtown Austin, Texas. They assembled in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park for a march to Georgia’s state Capitol and gathered outside California’s Democratic-dominated Legislature in Sacramento. In Denver, protests coincided with nearby operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and an unspecified number of people detained. Protesters in Phoenix chanted “deport Elon” and “no hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here.”
“We need to show strength,” said Laura Wilde, a former public school occupational therapist in Austin. “I think we’re in a state of shock.”
Thousands protested in St. Paul, Minnesota, where 28-year-old Hallie Parten carried a Democratic presidential campaign sign, revised to read “Harris Walz Were Right.” The Minneapolis resident says she was motivated by fear.
“Fear for what is going to happen to our country if we don’t all just do something about it,” Parten said.
At Iowa’s Capitol in Des Moines, protesters who joined the anti-Trump movement went inside to counter a registered event by the conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty. The anti-Trump protesters shouted over the speakers in the rotunda for about 15 minutes before law enforcement pushed them outside, removing four demonstrators in handcuffs.
In Alabama, several hundred people gathered outside the Statehouse to protest actions targeting LGBTQ+ people.
On Tuesday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey promised to sign legislation declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female — echoing Trump’s recent executive order for the federal government to define sex as only male or female.
“The president thinks he has a lot of power,” the Rev. Julie Conrady, a Unitarian Universalist minister, told the crowd. “He does not have the power to determine your gender. He does not have the power to define your identity.”
As written in The Guardian in an article entitled What is USAid and why does Trump dislike it so much?: The US agency distributes tens of billions of dollars’ worth of aid every year and is a key tool to promote soft power around the world; “Donald Trump’s administration has confirmed plans to merge the US international aid agency USAid into the state department in a major revamp that would shrink its workforce and align its spending with Trump’s priorities.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared himself the acting administrator of the agency and employees have been locked out of its Washington DC headquarters, while others have been suspended.
Trump has entrusted Elon Musk, the billionaire heading his drive to shrink the federal government, to oversee the project. On Sunday, Trump said USAid had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”, while Musk called it “a criminal organization” without providing any evidence and said it was “time for it to die”.
What is USAid and how is it funded?
USAid was established in 1961 by Democratic president John F Kennedy at the height of the cold war with the aim of better coordinating foreign assistance, already a key platform of US foreign policy in countering Soviet influence.
It now administers about 60% of US foreign assistance and disbursed $43.79bn in the 2023 fiscal year. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report this month, its workforce of 10,000, about two-thirds of whom serve overseas, assisted about 130 countries. USAid is funded by Congress, based on administration requests.
The CRS said USAid helps “strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads US efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists US commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade”.
Its top aid recipients in 2023 were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.
How much does the US spend on aid and how does it compare with other countries?
While the US gives more official government aid than any other country, its contribution as a percentage of national income is at the bottom of the list for wealthy countries in 2020, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In 2023, Norway topped the list at 1.09% of gross national income, while the US lagged at 0.24%, along with Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Spain.
In recent years, according to a Brookings Institution report from September, US aid spending has been about 0.33% of gross domestic product. It peaked at 3% of GDP in the 1950s with the Marshall plan program to rebuild Europe after the second world war. During the cold war, it ranged from 1% to a little less than 0.5%.
Nevertheless, in the 2023 fiscal year, the US as a whole disbursed a total of $72bn in assistance worldwide, and about 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024. The funds covered everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work.
Why does Trump oppose the agency’s work?
In an executive order on 20 January, Trump announced a 90-day pause in most of foreign aid, saying the “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.
“They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” it said.
In a memo, the administration urged USAid workers to join the effort to transform how Washington allocates aid in line with Trump’s “America First” policy and threatened disciplinary action for ignoring the orders. The actions rang alarm bells from refugee camps in Thailand to Ukraine war zones with humanitarian organizations and UN agencies saying they could face drastic curbs on their ability to distribute food, shelter and healthcare.
A source with knowledge of USAid’s workings said folding it into the state department would be a big departure. USAid has in the past been able to provide humanitarian assistance to countries with which Washington has no diplomatic relations, including Iran and North Korea. This has sometimes helped build bridges, the source said, and the benefit could be lost if its operations were purely tied to political objectives.
Is support for foreign aid bipartisan?
According to Brookings, Democratic administrations and lawmakers have historically been more supportive than Republicans, but every postwar president, whether Democrat or Republican, has been a strong proponent of foreign aid – apart from Trump.
It noted that proposals by the first Trump administration to cut the US international affairs budget by a third were rejected, as were attempts to delay congressional consideration of supplemental foreign aid legislation in 2024. And in a bipartisan vote in June, 80% of the members of the Republican-led House of Representatives rejected an amendment to eliminate foreign assistance from the fiscal 2025 budget.”
As written by Andrew Roth in The Guardian, in an article entitled Doge v USAid: how Elon Musk helped his acolytes infiltrate world’s biggest aid agency; “USAid security personnel were defending a secure room holding sensitive and classified data in a standoff with “department of government efficiency” employees when a message came directly from Elon Musk: give the Doge kids whatever they want.
Since Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, a posse of cocksure young engineers answering to Musk have stormed through Washington DC, gaining access to government computer systems as part of what Senator Chuck Schumer has called “an unelected shadow government … conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government”.
The young men, who are all under the age of 26 and have almost no government experience, have tapped into the treasury department’s federal payment system and vacuumed up employment histories at the office of personnel management (OPM). Roughly 20 Doge employees are now working out of the Department of Education, the Washington Post has reported, and have gained access to sensitive internal systems there too. On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported they had infiltrated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and accessed key systems as well.
The young engineers, whose identities have been confirmed to the Guardian, wanted the same at USAid. One of them, Gavin Kliger, was a 25-year-old techie who has defended the failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz as a victim of the “deep state” and claimed he had left behind a seven-figure salary to join Doge and “save America”. Another, Luke Farritor, 23, was a former SpaceX intern who had been given top-level clearances to USAid systems and had requested similar to Medicare and Medicaid. A third, Jeremy Lewin, was an AI specialist also reportedly assigned to the General Services Administration. A superior planned to lobby the CIA for a clearance for him after he failed to gain access to a secure area.
Some US officials had begun calling the young engineers the “Muskovites” for their aggressive loyalty to the SpaceX owner. But some USAid staff used another word: the “incels”.
The Guardian has identified three calls by Musk to USAid’s political leadership and security officers in which he demanded the suspensions of dozens of the agency’s leading officials, and cajoled and threatened senior USAid officials to give his acolytes private data and access to restricted areas. At one point, he threatened to call in the US Marshals Service.
One USAid employee said that the calls by Musk, two of which have not been previously reported, showed he had effectively usurped power at the agency even from the Trump administration’s political leadership. “Who is in control of our government?” the person said. “[Doge] basically showed up and took over.”
In the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, USAid had been presented as a pilot test for a large-scale overhaul of the federal government that would downsize agencies and arbitrarily move federal employees to looser contracts that made them easier to fire.
“If the Trump administration is successful here, they’re going to try this everywhere else,” said Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, a former USAid employee who came to protest alongside fired and furloughed workers outside the agency’s headquarters on Monday. “This is just the beginning.”
But it has also been a primer on how Doge operatives have inserted themselves into federal agencies and cajoled and bullied their way to access their most sensitive systems. This account of Doge’s infiltration of USAid is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former USAid, state department and other officials briefed on the events of the last week.
Security staff initially rebuffed the engineers’ efforts to talk their way into the secure rooms, called sensitive compartmented information facilities (Scifs), because they didn’t have the necessary security clearances. But that evening, Musk phoned a senior official at USAid to demand access for his subordinates, the first of numerous calls to officials and employees of Doge at USAid that have continued into this week.
Inside the building, chaos reigned. Areas that were once declared restricted, with limitations on electronics such as phones and watches, suddenly loosened their security protocols to allow in uncredentialed outsiders. Doge employees were said to obscure their identities to prevent online harassment, a tactic that was repeated at other agencies. And Peter Marocco, the controversial new director of foreign assistance at the state department, was stalking the halls and meeting in private with the Doge employees.
By Friday, things had gone further downhill. After a tense all-hands meeting with senior staff, and outsiders in the sixth-floor conference room, the young engineers rushed around the offices with their laptops, plugging cords into computers and other electronics as they gathered data from the agency.
After the meeting, Matt Hopson, a Trump appointee for USAid chief of staff, abruptly resigned. Jason Gray, the acting administrator, was removed from his position. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was soon to announce that he was the new administrator of USAid and appoint Marocco as his deputy. Musk was closing in on his goal.
The Doge employees had open access to rooms throughout the sixth floor, including the offices of the administrator’s suite. But the Scifs were still off limits.
At USAid, a newly installed leadership was formally in charge. But the real power lay with Marocco and Doge, which was plotting how to wind down the agency, a plan that Trump endorsed on Tuesday afternoon as he confirmed that teams were backed by the White House. That evening, USAid announced it would put all its direct-hire personnel around the world on administrative leave, a decision that would affect thousands of employees and their families.
Inside of USAid, the operation to shut down the decades-old operation was being run by Marocco, four engineers in their early 20s and the Doge leadership that contacted them by phone.
“It’s all being driven through Doge right now,” said a current USAid official, adding that Doge engineers in USAid headquarters continued to field calls from Musk and Marocco on Monday. “The folks in the building are turning the system off for [USAid employees], they’ve kept a small number of people from the different bureaus to help understand what programs will be kept and not kept, what the footprint will look like.”
The tension at USAid headquarters came to a head on Saturday evening, when Doge employees demanded access to the Scif on the agency’s sixth floor. They were stopped by the agency’s top security officer, John Voorhees.
Among those present was Steve Davis, according to one current and one former USAid official. Davis, a Musk deputy, has worked with the billionaire for more than 20 years at SpaceX and the Boring Company. He reportedly sometimes slept in the Twitter offices to help Musk slash costs there after he acquired it in 2022.
The argument over access to the Scif had grown verbally heated and senior Doge staff threatened to call in US marshals to gain access to it. During that standoff, according to one account made to the Guardian, a call was again made to Musk, who, as Bloomberg first reported, repeated the threat to involve the US Marshals Service.
Shortly after, Voorhees was placed on administrative leave and the Doge staffers entered the Scif. They took over the access control system and employee records. Within hours, the USAid website went down. Hundreds of employees were locked out of the system that weekend, and many still don’t know their status. (The Guardian has seen emails in which USAid administrators admit they do not know the employment states of current USAid officials.)
“I’ve been furloughed, I guess?” said one contractor with 15 years of experience for the bureau for humanitarian assistance, where she had helped coordinate urgent responses in Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia and Latin America. “I don’t know what my status is but I don’t think I work here right now.”
By Monday, Kliger wrote an email to all staff at 12.42am to tell them not to bother coming into the building that day.
The incident has illustrated how Doge employees with Musk’s backing were able to override USAid leadership and bypass government procedures for accessing restricted areas with classified materials, fueling criticism that his agency is a national security risk.
“Did Secretary Rubio allow this kind of access by Musk’s employees?” asked Kim. “It worries me about USAid but if it’s happening here, I’m guessing it’s probably happening at all these other national security agencies.”
Formally, Rubio has delegated responsibility to Marocco, who has been pressed by congressional staffers to give details of the changes affecting USAid and the $40bn in foreign aid it manages each year.
“The question at hand is: who’s in charge of the state department?” Senator Brian Schatz told the Guardian. “So far the answer has been Pete Marocco.”
Doge did not respond to questions about what security clearances, if any, the engineers held. “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” wrote Katie Miller, a Doge spokesperson, on social media.
But Scifs are regulated by a strict protocol and it is unclear who could have verified the Doge employees’ credentials and filed the necessary paperwork to allow them to enter.
Inside the building, staffers said that Doge cultivated a culture of fear.
“It’s an extreme version of ‘who do you trust, when and how?’” said Kristina Drye, a speechwriter at the agency, who watched dozens of senior colleagues escorted out of the building by security. “It felt like the Soviet stories that one day someone is beside you and the next day they’re not.”
People started meeting for coffee blocks away because “they didn’t feel safe in the coffee shops here to even talk about what’s going on”, she added.
“I was in the elevator one morning and there was an older lady standing beside me and she had glasses on and I could see tears coming down under her glasses and before she got off her elevator she took her glasses off, wiped her eyes, and walked out,” she said. “Because if they see you crying, they know where you stand.”
As written by Glenn David in reference to the podcast Lights On With Jessica Denson; “Dear Congressman, I am so disappointed in you and the rest of your colleagues for not speaking up doing the right thing on January 6 and making sure that the worst domestic terrorist in the history of our country would not occupy our White House. I hope you know by now that it is clear that the election was a fraud. I hope you know by now that Kamala Harris actually won the election. I’m not sure why you continue to attempt to think that we have a democracy at this point. Our democracy ended on January 6, 2021. The coup attempt on that day came to a successful completion on January 6, 2025. You had a hand in that successful coup. Everything that has happened since the phony inauguration day for an illegally occupying president was so predictable and so avoidable had you done the right thing. Now we are looking at a complete fascist takeover and a complete dissolution of our constitution. There have been so many impeachable offenses in the last two weeks and still no action from you or your colleagues to the point where it makes a difference. Talk is cheap and actions speak volumes. What has to happen before you actually do something of value for this country? Please listen to the attached video as I hope that you have heeded all of the information I have sent you previously. The people of this country do not want an insurrectionist, malignant narcissist, pathological lying dictator who wants to take everything from the bottom 98% and give it to the already sickeningly wealthy. We are doing our part to resist fascism and defend our constitution, I think it is time our elected officials do so as well.”
What is to be done, as Lenin asked in the essay that began the Russian Revolution? As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Amy Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened,, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my post of September 3 2024, Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others; On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, four years ago of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who has in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.
To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? 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 such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.
I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have a right to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and other people’s ideas of virtue or idealizations of beauty, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence.
As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the four primary duties of a citizen in the face of unjust authority to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and the inviolable principle of solidarity which means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, 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 precedes violence.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision.
Choose life.
But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.
War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.
What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?
Let us remember always that the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce, and remember the warning of Nietzsche; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; Antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.
One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.
For myself, to be an Antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.
Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny
We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.
During the summer before my undergraduate senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Georges Bataille, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with a very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”
So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s humanity, in which we can abandon the social use of force.
Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals.
Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those which must be kept, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Protests against ICE violence in Minneapolis – in pictures
Eight people have died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026. These are their stories: The high-profile killings of Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good are only two among many
January 23 2026 Liberty Versus the ICE White Supremacist Terror Force of the Fourth Reich In the Battle of Minneapolis: the Case of Liam Ramos and the Three Thousand Eight Hundred Stolen Children
Lights on! Americans answered the call for a 50-state 50-protest (50501), and are flooding the streets to demand action against the hostile takeover by illegitimate president Trump and his foreign national controller Elon Musk. Jessica Denson, who spearheaded the #14thNOW movement to block Trump’s illegal presidency, is joined by friends and activists across the country, as well as former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter to discuss the criminal and civil actions that must be taken now. Jessica reports, LIVE.
There are some things beyond the limits of the human; things which defy being named, taxonomized, reasoned through. Things which seize us with nameless shuddering, primal terror, abjection in Julia Kristeva’s terms or the Uncanny Valley effect, things which seen beyond our understanding or control; this is their purpose when deployed as shock and awe tactics, which Donald Trump, madman of perversions, violations of normalities, values, and ideals of America and democracy, and the psychopathy of power that he is, has used with intent to render us helpless in terror and awe in choosing to begin his Presidential campaign in our shameful 2024 elections on the anniversary of Hitler’s seizure of power as Chancellor of German in 1932.
As with his model and hero, it doesn’t get better from here.
I, however, am not afraid, and no pain or use of force can compel my obedience, nor am I alone in this.
With enough wealth, unchecked propaganda, and the collusion of hegemonic elites with Russia, a foreign enemy regime which has unleashed World War Three upon humankind, in the infiltration and subversion of our institutions and values as a free society of equals, democracy remains vulnerable to capture through its own electoral process.
The soft underbelly of democracy is the influence of hegemonic elites, and this has always been true; when Plato attempted to test his theories of democracy in the mightiest nation of his age, the Empire of Syracuse, it collapsed into utter ruin within a few years for the same reasons ours is collapsing now. So also did the Roman Republic fall and become the Roman Empire under the same social divisions as divides us now, in the contest between Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus for the fate of civilization. And with the origin of political parties in the fans of the Blue and Green chariot racing teams in Byzantium, this polarization became institutionalized as ours is today.
This is the ground of struggle to which the enemy has taken us, and here we must resist, disbelieve, disobey, and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
America needs a more fair and equal system of checks and balances to prevent any future tyrant from seizing power from the top and politicizing our justice and security services, depoliticize our justice system and reorganize the Supreme Court with limited terms, abolish the electoral college and change the method of choosing our leaders to a one citizen one vote ranked choice system wherein all citizens have equal power regardless of where they may live and the monopoly on political power by two parties who conspire together to speak and act for us is broken, abolish Citizens United and purge big money from our elections, limiting political messages by impartial fact checking and deplatforming of liars and deceivers, reinstate and universalize to all media the Fairness Doctrine abandoned by the loathsome war criminal Reagan nearly forty years ago which opened the door to the fascist capture of America through propaganda, and ruthlessly liberate our right of free speech from its parasite of hate speech.
I’m sure we can all think of more changes we must enact to protect our common future; these come to mind immediately.
Truth, equal citizenship and the power of the vote, and limiting and deauthorizing the power of the Imperial Presidency; these are the main lines of attack of fascism and tyranny against our nation, and the grounds of struggle we must win in the Restoration of Democracy.
As I wrote on this day tree years ago, in the shadows of the national protests for racial justice in the wake of the horrific police murder of Tyre Nichols, with whose images of brutal death Trump simultaneously announced his intention to recapture the state and institute a regime of white supremacist and Gideonite patriarchal terror.
This he has now done, and generalized the case of Tyre Nichols to us all. Here I must signpost that when the state has the immunity to kill its citizens at will, no one is safe; as proof I offer the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Trump’s 2024 campaign for the Presidency opened with the offices of our legislative oversight of elections become a stacked deck of Big Lie Biden election deniers courtesy of a Republican Party still controlled by its fascist faction.
This was and now remains a balance point of democracy and tyranny, and a moment of extreme peril, for without America as a guarantor of democracy the lights of civilization will begin to go out, one by one, until nothing but fascist tyranny remains, and humankind is consumed by centuries of wars of imperial dominion between totalitarian regimes.
As I’ve been saying since the vision of our possible futures which seized me when I was momentarily dead at the age of nine from the force wave of a police grenade during the most terrible incident of state terror in America since the Civil War, when then- Governor Reagan ordered the police to open fire on the students on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley, we face a future of six to eight hundred years of tyranny and total global war, with vanishingly remote chances of human survival as civilization collapses in nuclear annihilation, hideous bioweapons, and genocides.
We have a brief moment of history in which to change that fate, as our nations devise terrifying new forms of war and social control with which to enslave us, now exported globally by China from its vast slave labor camp and laboratory of state terror Xinjiang, as well as Russia and Israel, and if we cannot find the political will to purge our destroyers from among us and seize our power to determine our own lives, we doom ourselves.
The American Fourth Reich and Putin’s Imperial Russia declared in thius day two years ago their intention to capture our nation yet again, and in Trump’s election campaign weaponized the murder of Tyre Nichols and other nonwhite citizens as a rallying point for their Nazi-Confederate-Fundamentalist voting and fundraising base. They have shown us the future they want to condemn us all to, dying alone under the boots of the police.
In the streets of America in 2026 they are doing exactly this, with the ICE white supremacist terror force and its mission of ethnic cleansing leading the way. I regret to inform you, what follows will be unimaginably more terrible still.
How if we refuse to let others die alone, and stand together in solidarity and resistance?
Trump slept with a copy of Mein Kampf in place of a Bible on his nightstand for many years, dreaming of the return of Hitler’s Reich, and was among the cultists of Charles Manson who share his vision of a race war which will consume America in division and terror. He has shown us who he is; now we must show history who we are, we Americans, we Band of Brothers, sisters, and others.
We need only answer hate with love, division with solidarity, fear with hope, and we will be victorious. For the great secret of power is that it is hollow and brittle without the legitimacy of its authority, and force finds its limit in disobedience and disbelief.
Who refuses to submit becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us, this defining act of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans? Masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Such are the stakes of our elections, now become a political total war to escape a literal one, as the echoes and reflections of the Third World War now being fought in Ukraine, Africa, the Middle East, and most especially in Russia and America begin to destabilize the global economy and political order.
We fight here and now, with electoral and legislative action, we write, speak, teach, and organize democracy, and we fight in a War to the Knife of Resistance against tyranny and fascism, under occupation by an amoral enemy who does not believe we are fellow human beings, and for whom no atrocity is forbidden.
I have seen that future at Mariupol and Gaza; just as the world has seen it again in the murder of Tyre Nichols.
So I offer all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, revised in Paris 1940 from his oath as a member of the French Foreign Legion.
And I swear to you that if we do this, all of us together, resist beyond hope of victory or even survival and unite in solidarity, abandon none, everybody in and no human an outsider, cede nothing to the enemy, we will become Unconquered and be victorious over those who would enslave us.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of March 23 2021, The Government of America Declares Proof of Russian Sabotage of Our Elections; A new repost confirms what we have known since the Stolen Election of 2016; that Russia sabotaged our elections to put its agent Trump at the apex of power in America to violate our ideals and values, monkeywrench our institutions, and subvert our democracy to create a puppet state tyranny, a conquest designed to give Russia a free hand in its conquest of the Ukraine, Syria, and Libya and in its conflict with Turkey for dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. This comes as no surprise and is no news to any astute observer; but knowing a thing is true and having the government of the United States officially announce and authorize it as true are very different.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Both the stakes and the terms of the game between America and our former conqueror Russia have changed with this announcement, and so must our scenarios, plans, and intentions.
This opens possibilities in Libya and Syria, and throughout Africa and the Middle East, but also in Russia itself where Navalny leads the opposition to Putin in heroic defiance, and in Belarus and other nations where democracy challenges tyranny. A restored and revitalized America under Biden may once again champion the cause of Liberty throughout the world, and reclaim our historic role as a guarantor of democracy and the Rights of Man.
I of course will wait for no one, and trust no promises to champion our humanity by any authority, Biden very much included; while our mighty dither, appease, prevaricate, and seek advantage in our shared public trauma and pain, I will act to bring a Reckoning to fascist tyranny and terror, and to bring a Restoration of America and democracy throughout the world By Any Means Necessary, to use the phrase coined by Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands in reference to Trotsky’s essay Our Morals and Thiers, and made immortal by the magnificent Malcolm X.
Join us.
As written by Zachary Cohen for CNN, US intelligence report says Russia attempted to interfere in 2020 election with goal of ‘denigrating’ Biden and helping Trump; “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its declassified report on foreign threats to 2020 US elections Tuesday, which concludes that foreign adversaries — including Russia — did attempt to interfere.
Russia’s efforts were aimed at “denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US,” it says. “Unlike in 2016, we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure,” the report notes.
The report also stated that there are “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
That conclusion echoes what the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber arm said the day after the 2020 presidential election. “Over the last four years, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been a part of a whole-of-nation effort to ensure American voters decide American elections. Importantly, after millions of Americans voted, we have no evidence any foreign adversary was capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies,” CISA said at the time.
The report also describes efforts by Iran and China to interfere in the elections. “We assess that Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects-though without directly promoting his rivals-undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US,” it says. “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election,” it adds.
“Foreign malign influence is an enduring challenge facing our country,” said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. “These efforts by U.S. adversaries seek to exacerbate divisions and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions. Addressing this ongoing challenge requires a whole-of-government approach grounded in an accurate understanding of the problem, which the Intelligence Community, through assessments such as this one, endeavors to provide.”
As I have said many times of what the Trump era reveals about us; Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
And now we are once more swallowed whole like Jonah and the whale, and with the capture of the state and the and the dismantling of its institutions as planned in Project 2025 including the test case of Trump’s executive order to defund the federal government entirely which shut it all down this week, the imposed conditions of struggle have changed catastrophically and driven us far nearer to the Civil War the fascists intend.
To this I say; all Resistance is War to the Knife, for an enemy which does not regard us as human cannot be negotiated with, and who so ever respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
Let us give to fascist tyranny and terror the only reply it merits; Never Again!
God Bless America; we’re going to need it.
Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva
For those who wish to study Our Clown of Terror as an example of the failure of humanity and the subversion of democracy, how monsters are shaped by the depravities and moral collapse of racism and patriarchy as illnesses of power and how our inner and outer worlds inform, motivate, and shape one another, here is my reading list:
Trump, a Study In Psychopathy and the Theatre of Cruelty, a reading list
Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (this Is Not a Joke), by Keith Olbermann
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Rick Wilson
Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump, by Michael Cohen
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John R. Bolton
Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, by Omarosa Manigault Newman
It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, by Stuart Stevens
The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story,
by Joy-Ann Reid
Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, by Joshua Green
The Plot to Commit Treason: How Donald Trump Pulled Off the Greatest Act of Treachery in US History, by Malcolm Nance
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michael Isikoff, David Corn
House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, by Craig Unger
The Apprentice, by Greg Miller
Collusion, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia’s Attack on the West, by Luke Harding
The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, by Malcolm W. Nance
The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency, by Sarah Blaskey
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, by David Enrich
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, by Michiko Kakutani
Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,
by Brian Stelter
Audience of One: Television, Donald Trump, and the Fracturing of America, by James Poniewozik
While what we wear and why is an interesting subject because it is pervasive throughout all human activity, it is also a curious one because it lies at an intersection of semiotics, history, social anthropology, and the psychology of identity.
Herein I intend to provide an example from my personal life of how all four disciplines interrelate and ways in which their critical methods and analytical and interpretive tools compound and illuminate how we choose to become human in the construction and presentation of identity, membership, and self-construal in the context of a new science of vestments, of wardrobe and clothing, which I invent with this essay, in Latin Scientia Vestiaria.
Meanings are fluid and context-dependent; this is the First Principle of the semiotics of clothes and wardrobe as a system of signs.
The Second Principle is that clothing evolves from, expresses, and reflects history, both the conditions of material culture and the social matrix in which it is embedded.
And the Third Principle is that clothes signal membership and other claims of identity, and also signal, create, and reinforce authority, both within social hierarchies of class systems.
In this I apply the schema which I use to interrogate current events and politics in terms of meanings, origins, and consequences as probable futures as I have for over forty years now, using methods from my disciplines of scholarship literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, inspired by a book I read as a senior in high school working through the trauma of a near death experience in 1974 Sao Paulo, my near execution by a police death squad very like those of Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czar’s secret police in 1849 and Maurice Blanchot by the Nazis in 1944, the book being The Psychopathic God, the foundational study of Hitler from his speeches by Robert G.L. Waite which launched me on my academic career in four part harmony.
Here follows an experiment drawn from my personal history of discovering and creating a wardrobe to wear both while attending classes at university and later while teaching high school and coaching the debate team, and can also be worn at leisure, built around Odd Jackets.
What is an Odd Jacket?
Any jacket worn with trousers of a different fabric is an Odd Jacket, and one step down in social hierarchy and formality from a two or three piece business suit of identical cloth.
Our goal with this organizational principle of curating a wardrobe around Odd Jackets that can pivot between Casual and Business Casual levels of formality is to build ensembles around a versatile and unifying master element of which very few are needed, which minimizes initial cost, and can be worn throughout the day at work and play, to the office or at dinner. You can in fact begin with two jackets; a navy and grey flannel, and build out from there.
Resplendent Wardrobe, my Pinterest board for ideas and inspiration
These first two resources make a reasonable introduction to Ivy Style, which originates in university wear and now permeates a broad swath of our culture as a signal of elite class membership and privilege. It’s a claim to authority just below that of a business suit of identical cloth; you only need an actual suit if you work in one of the Four Noble Professions; doctor, lawyer including politician, financier, business management, or require one for Cocktail Dress events. I have owned only one three piece suit in my life, a charcoal pinstripe Brooks Brothers bought in graduate school.
The Ivy Style Primer (orientation essay) note: all the links that failed to transfer are from Gentlemen’s Gazette, just search there by the keywors of the article. its the finest menswear resource for historical origins available. https://www.gentlemansgazette.com/
To disambiguate, its also the difference between what I wore to my own classes as a student at university and to teach high school on the casual side and Speech Tournament Dress for both students and coaches which is what you’d wear as a lawyer to appear in court.
What is important here is that what we wear claims, assigns, and expresses our level of authority in our society; what value our word and our judgement carries in the eyes of others, some of whom are gatekeepers of the wealth, power, and privilege we are trying to seize for ourselves, especially when young and finding our place in the world.
This is about storming success filter institutions and seizures of power as revolutionary struggle. Always there remains the ground of struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight as we grow up and become human, the ownership of ourselves.
As I entered university I needed a wardrobe to live in which would make my professors notice and hear me as gatekeepers of success, and in order to find my tribe and build useful relationships I needed my peers as arbiters of membership to judge me on their terms to be within the boundaries of belonging and not beyond as an Other.
So I began to study the culture of the Ivy League, which sits at the pinnacle of power in America as apex predators, myself being already something of a character and a very odd thing indeed, and in no way a member of that gilded class who went to private schools like St Georges at Newport and now staked their territory as future owners and rulers of the nation at Harvard and Yale. I thought of this as a pit fight with hidden rules I must understand to survive, filled with people who could destroy or elevate me at their whim. I needed a wolfskin, to run with the pack.
Years later a friend, impresario and producer-director of the infamous Berkeley live cast Indecent Exposure of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with whom I performed now and again, John Liddle whose stage name as Riff Raff was Dr John, dubbed me with the show name of Gatsby, and in retrospect he was exactly right.
A strange and strangely wise man, Dr John; long gone now, like the beautiful illusion he created of a world where everyone belongs, no matter how different.
Those who have shared our stories and our lives bear parts of us with them into the Unknown, like “the last gold of expired stars” as Georg Trakl put it.
He lives now as a character in a novel I wrote half a lifetime ago, set at the RHPS as it was and peopled with fellow cast members, in a bizarro world not our own. It’s about why utopias fail, as America and democracies throughout the world are doing under the hammer of fascist tyranny and terror; but that is a story for another time.
When I exhort the practice of performing your identity upon the stage of the world, the violation of normalities, transgression of the Forbidden, and subversion of other people’s ideas of virtue as sacred acts of chaos and as seizures of power, I am being quite literal.
We are made of stories, and identity is a kind of theatre.
In the assembly of a wardrobe for the character I was about to play in the theatre of my life at university I had two starting advantages; familiarity with the target and a skilled guide.
First, I had been on my high school Forensics or speech and debate team all four years at high school, taught and coached by my father, and spending Saturdays at tournaments where all the boys wore a jacket and tie, dressed to storm the ramparts of privilege or to defend it as future doctors, financiers, lawyers, business kingpins. This was actually a level of formality above my own target of university wear, but I was already enculturated to wear a tie when in public.
Second, my debate partner from high school and fellow fencing team member Scott MacDonald, son of the math and science teacher, and staying with us while doing his masters in finance, was putting himself through university managing a men’s clothing store like I was doing teaching martial arts, and he set me up with a starting ensemble to show up to classes in.
This included a fine trench coat for foggy San Francisco with four fall and one spring jacket; a navy blazer with khakis and light grey flannel slacks, a grey cashmere jacket with charcoal trousers of Italian superfine 180’s wool and cords in a similar dark tone, a camelhair jacket with cream flannel cricket trousers and pinstriped slacks in midnight blue, a brown herringbone tweed jacket to be worn with the same grey flannel or khakis as the navy blazer which is the sailing counterpart to hunting tweeds, and a gorgeous and utterly unique summer silk and linen jacket in contrasting bundled weaves of mermaid blue and ivory paired with tropical wool and linen pants in sea grass green and Vermeer’s signature cornflower blue. With several spread collar shirts and ties and pairs of shoes and belts in cordovan and cognac, it would still today make a great starter wardrobe for a young fellow.
From my first day of class for the next decade, I was also managing my own business teaching martial arts as Lale’s Kung Fu Academy of Sonoma, an hour’s drive from my undergrad university in San Francisco or grad school at UC Berkeley, and in this role I also changed my presentation of self to acquire greater authority and trust.
As I wrote in my post of December 13 2025, Dressing the Part: On Wardrobe as a System of Signs In the Performance of Identity; Our fate unfolds with great sensitivity to initial conditions, and I created the person I wished to become for the roles of teacher and scholar beginning with an event which shaped my perception of such tasks of identity construction and self-construal and my tactical and strategic approach to this primary mission; being a businessman mistaken for a thief.
I had opened a bank account when I purchased a business license as a martial arts teacher to put myself through university at San Francisco State an hour’s drive from our family home in Sonoma; we had just moved as my mother got a job teaching English there after my father retired from teaching in Ripon in the central valley south of Stockton with its warrens of old canals surrounding the deepwater port in the heart of the farmlands.
I had about fifty dollars and wanted to study English Literature because I believed that it would help me to think better in general, as our use of language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have and people write exactly as they think, a notion I got from my teenage enthusiasms for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logicus Philosophicus and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.
So I had no money but a skill I might sell, after ten years of studying martial arts. I figured I could buy a pizza or a business license, but with the license I might pay my own way and have enough left over for a pizza every week. It turned out to be a bit better than that.
I walked into my bank in my black Gurkha pants and field shirt wearing a very beautiful double breasted black leather World War Two tank commander’s jacket in glove leather that moved with me like a second skin, and a teller hit the police call button. We quickly sorted out the confusion as I had been depositing to my account, but I never wore my fighting clothes on the street again. Especially if actually en route to a fight, as calling attention to myself was the very last thing I needed when making mischief.
When I began teaching high school three years later, still a Junior undergraduate myself as my sister was just entering high school and we had started a Forensics class for her as Sonoma Valley HS didn’t have a speech and debate program, and on the first day of class our mother was in surgery and no one else on staff knew the subject but I had four very successful years of it on my father’s debate team, I re-evaluated my role and its requirements and came up with one problem that needed to be solved; I looked like and was often mistaken for one of the students and needed to be regarded as an authority figure worth listening to by them.
I knew exactly what was de rigeur as a Forensics coach and teacher from my four years of high school tournaments on Saturdays, and could build out from there to achieve an ever changing wardrobe for everyday wear as a teacher using multiple combinations from a few core pieces, but upon reflection not what won immediate attention, respect, and obedience to orders by unruly teenagers, and there were nuances. So once again I began studying how authority is cued by the semiotics of what we wear, and carefully curated my wardrobe to convey the image I wished.
In the curation of wardrobe as an intentional construction of identity and presentation of self, I find it useful to first write a brief statement of the character I wish to play organized around the values I wish to express, then assign elements which convey these ideas.
For example; I am a precise man, of surfaces like the edge of a knife, intentional and deliberative in my actions and in the undisturbed and wrinkleless serenity, dramatic creases, and regimental alignment of myself and my attire, and always with an element of staged unpredictability or intentional chaos called sprezzatura in Italian, a word coined by Baldassare Castiglione in his 1528 The Book of the Courtier meaning “to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”, all designed to put you off balance, and my gaze draws blood. In this I refer to the Medusa’s appropriation of the Male Gaze as an art of true seeing and a transformative power which affirms and frees the true selves of others. The goal of all revolutionary struggle is Take Their Power, in this context through appropriation of its symbols.
In this there is a corollary and counterforce as in all things, for I am also a disciplined man, careful with my words and actions as a surgeon with his scalpel, which I have described as Hannibal Lecter Polite. I call it this to remind myself of four truths regarding the nature of power and the use of social force; first, that all use of force and violence obeys Newtons Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce and resistance, important to remember strategically when one is an avenger, second, that all our interventions in the lives of others for good or ill are uses of power even when we think we have none and all that matters in the end is what we do with our fear and how we use our power, third, that good and evil do not exist as objective principles of nature, for these are human words and require human acts to make them real, and four, that all truths are relative, conditional, and changing, and if my truth is different from yours this does not mean that one of us is wrong.
I practice the embrace of my monstrosity as a prescription for healing our fear of otherness which is the source of diseases of the soul as violence, I practice love as a redemptive power which can free us from the recursive Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force from which violence arises and most especially the state as embodied violence, I practice revolutionary politics as the Art of Fear tempered with solidarity according to the Oath of the Resistance “abandon not our fellows”, which references our duty of care for others as guarantors of each other’s humanity, and my personal life mission is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world by placing my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all whom Franz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth. This means that unless you are an enemy of the people, a fascist or criminal who disfigures the human soul and falsifies, commodifies, and dehumanizes others, you have nothing to fear from me, and I will stand with you and help as I can.
I am not a good man; I can be far more useful than that, if you need allies against systems of oppression and unequal power, for I am a bad man who is on your side. This persona I imagine as Hannibal Lecter the Liberator and not the Tyrant, like Milton’s rebel angel, Prometheus, or Victor Frankenstein. As the Matadors who rescued me from execution by a police death squad in Brazil 1974 said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Here note that both of these example paragraphs begin with a one word values statement in the thesis. Following sentences articulate a praxis of the value, how it works through action. This is the first step in creating an identity of ones own, a mask like those which actors spoke through in classical Greek drama called persona.
Step Two in my process of identity and character creation is to imagine a figure you wish to play; I like listing six characters from literature or film I would like to become or assimilate to myself, then throw a six sided dice to choose who I will live as this day. Herein I must caution with Kurt Vonnegut in Mother Night; “We are who we pretend to be”, so choose wisely, and no matter what the dice say you will have five other identities in reserve. Over time you may develop a palette of internalized voices which can be deployed at need; mine include Captain Picard when I must command and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes when I must investigate and solve problems.
Step Three is to define how you will present and perform these roles, in terms of the elements of a curated wardrobe which reinforces the character, but also in how one moves, gestures, uses space, and speaks. I find it useful to name ensembles. This is exactly how spies, undercover, and infiltration agents create false identities, with additional steps of creating a backstory and establishing the cover identity. It’s a game anyone can play, but here I am interested in how such techniques illuminate self-construal and identity creation as ongoing processes in all of our lives.
My purpose in this essay is to found a new science, which has practical relevance to everyone.
This has nothing to do with fashion, except for the historical references embedded in the adaptations of our material culture; why things were worn and when, and the echoes and reflections of society in how they come to be and fall into disuse. Our clothes are about our values, histories, membership and belonging, the class hierarchies and structure of society, who can acquire or holds power and why.
I studied men’s clothes as a system of signs which cue authority, trustworthiness, and membership, because if you want to be the last guy in a crowd any police will question or to have your word judged with value in avowals as in giving witness, or you need people to follow your orders, this is crucial. Here follows some things I have learned in this mission.
Casual and sports wear
Because casual and sports wear is what you will be wearing most of the time, we begin here. Here I signpost that casual wear derives from hunting, riding, and sailing sports, sportwear from tennis, polo, cricket, and golf.
Any casual to Business Casual wardrobe must include the classic Oxford Cotton Button Down shirt, always worn with a casual tie which is why the collar must roll in an S shape; if the collar is straight to the button without space of a tie, its not an OCBD. The OCBD is also a useful place to begin, as your choice of colors and patterns will shape what else can be worn with it and it’s a large canvas framing your face. This is a year long staple wardrobe item and should be chosen with care, for quality, and for a pop of seasonal color.
The OCBD is a sport shirt, not a dress shirt; it is the core of the Odd Jacket ensemble which defines it as Casual and not formally Business wear along with the lack of trousers which match the jacket in exactly the same cloth. Its worn with an Odd Jacket, for winter in tweed, flannel, camelhair, and worsted wool of elegant silky surfaces, or for summer in breathable tropical wool, raw silk, linen or combinations thereof.
The exception for wearing a jacket at all is for sport, when at home, or if an academic when a cardigan can serve this role with more nonchalance as it did for Einstein. Odd Jacket ensembles in the Casual level of formality are worn with cords or khakis seasonally. Many Americans will see this or any jacket and tie ensemble as a suit which it is not; Europeans will see it as something to wear fly fishing, hunting, riding, or puttering around one’s estate.
A casual tie is silk with little emblems on it signifying ones chosen sport; ducks, foxes, fishes, sailboats or yacht club burgees, or wool knit or challis for winter and for summer cotton in spring pastels, and here think sipping a mint julep in your tropical whites.
Yes, striped ties, tartans, and those adorned with heraldic, academic, or club insignia can always be worn, providing you are a member of the group it represents, and team colors may be worn by anyone.
For field sports you will want a tattersall pattern shirt, thin lines like the crosshairs of a scope defining mid size checks on a yellow-tan background. Its worn with tweeds, where for summer a field shirt, which is not an OCBD and lacks a rolled collar as one wears an ascot and not a tie with it, is worn with a safari jacket.
As to color, many traditionalists will see four and four only solid colors as belonging to the OCBD; white, pink, blue, and buttercream yellow, and no stripes, checks, or so forth. I have a roll collar shirt with a herringbone weave in blue and pink vertical stripes which is very fine, and I gladly violate norms if the result brings me Beauty and joy.
In general, winter colors for coordinating elements including shirts, pants, ties, pocket squares, and socks are deep and rich jewel tones like burgundy, scarlet, and magenta in reds, midnight, navy, and royal blue, purples of all kinds, bright riding vest yellow, hunter and emerald green.
Summer colors in soft pastels include pink, French blue, Robin’s Egg blue, periwinkle, buttercream yellow, sea grass green, and mint.
Socks like Argyle or the more formal shadow stripe can match a minor color to the base color of the tie or shirt exactly like a pocket square. Do let your pocket square flounce in saucy grandeur.
One step down in formality for summer is the cotton pique polo or tennis shirt, worn when you would wear a t shirt when at home, or when actually playing sports. I have a quiver of these chosen specifically for yard work in my private park, and two kinds chosen for wear when others might see me; a few gorgeous Pebble Beach specimens in technical fabric with exquisite shell buttons, and some regular cotton ones with coded patterns and colors for deploying as targeted signs of membership including a mint and a pink with nautical Go To Hell embroidered figures, a white with navy stripes to signify my love of sailing, and a scarlet and navy, any two colors of equal width being academic or team stripes.
The rugby shirt, long sleeved with team stripes and a white collar, is the fall equivalent of the polo and can be worn with an Odd Jacket after playing, though this is where the belted camelhair polo coat has its moment, worn like a boxer’s robe. Polo is beautiful and elegant, but remains the closest you can come to a cavalry melee without killing anyone.
Polo Shirts: Your Guide to Buying, Styling, History & More
In the same level of formality for winter is the flannel shirt, which seldom have rolled collars so you cannot wear a tie with it even if the collar buttons down; it is usually worn with a turtleneck or a Henley underneath. Often these are plaid or tartan, which opens a door of possibilities as a single item of tartan can make a superb accent element in an ensemble.
If you wear a lot of tartan in season as I do, minimize other patterns and never wear two different tartans together. Like estate tweeds, all tartans convey a rich historical heritage and signal identification, and sometimes declare political or religious affiliation, so do research what you wear.
My partner Dolly’s family are Scots of Clan MacKay, but very American as we are an ahistorical people who generally care nothing for anyone we don’t personally know including our own ancestors, and I’ll never forget a fight her father nearly started with a Scottish heritage shop owner with an innocent question about his grandmother who was a Dalrymple; “What about the Dalrymples?” because he didn’t know the history. For many Scots, a centuries old grievance is exactly as if it had happened yesterday, just like there are people in Afghanistan who talk about Genghis Khan’s invasion eight hundred years ago like he was just over the next hill and riding on their village, as they will doubtless speak of the American Occupation eight centuries from now.
This is one aspect of my character in which I am more European than American, for I live in deep time surrounded and interpenetrated with history, just as my love of languages and willingness to look at things from the point of view of people other than myself, and to take people as they are, is unusual for an American.
Much of what makes our clothes important as a system of coded signs is the history they bear. Are we not made of stories?
One can still wear an OCBD with jacket and tie in coldest winter by layering it with a suitable vest like a tweed for field sports or a light cashmere v-neck sweater, which can also be worn with a Business Casual ensemble which keeps the Odd Jacket but trades out shirt, pants, and shoes for the office.
If its truly cold, forget the Odd Jacket and just wear a turtleneck and winter sweater; you will probably be wearing it under a Barbour waterproof coat when outside, or a longer and more formal Loden coat.
In summer when wearing a safari jacket or Tropical Dress Whites, a vest in cream color woven Irish linen is a versatile mid layer at sunset.
Men’s Waistcoats & Vests – What They Are & How to Wear Them
With sporting whites for tennis, cricket, or golf, ensembles built around the signature polo shirt, one wears the Cable Knit Tennis Sweater, with club colors in two solid stripes at the front v neck. Yes, the v neck means it is intended to be worn with shirt and tie at the club house which extends its utility; if still too warm it is thrown over the shoulders with the arms wound together in the front.
If you wear the iconic tennis sweater, you’ll want cream flannel cricket pants called ducks to match.
The Safari Jacket ensemble for warm weather field sports
The summer equivalent to hunting tweeds is the Safari Jacket ensemble, built around the iconic jacket and hat. Safari jackets are based on British military number four warm weather walking out dress, in crisp Egyptian cotton or cavalry twill, with horn buttons and unlined, worn with field shirt and khaki trousers or Gurkha self belted pants which I preferred for martial arts as they are easy to move in. I bought my first one at the Banana Republic store en route from Sonoma to San Francisco, once specialists in British Raj era sartorial antiquities and had it tailored with side vents and the belt box stitched down at the sides. I wore it with an ascot of silk gauze in French Blue for a splash of color, and sometimes with a custom ascot of chocolate and gold antique kimono silk.
If you are riding, wear the fabulous jodhpurs with ankle high chukka boots and knee socks; if cold you can wrap wool horse legwarmers spiraling over your socks to the knee. Leather items such as shoes, belts, and gloves look best with khaki in cognac or French tan.
Then we crown the ensemble with a safari hat, which is a fedora. I currently wear the Akubra Tablelands rabbit fur hat, adorned with peacock feathers.
The technical gear exception: performance over classic style
On the subject of wardrobe for sport and adventure travel, you will of course want technical gear of the finest kind, and here my advice is simple; research and buy the best you can for your purpose. You might never need it, but it can save your life if you do.
I have trekked across unmapped jungles and trackless deserts, sailed seas among nameless islands, and wandered the Himalayas, all of this mainly alone and living by subsistence hunting or with tribal peoples, and I do not exaggerate the perils of being unprepared.
Every sport and outdoor activity has an enormous range of gear designed for specific purposes, and its folly not to optimize your chances. Many sports are also largely defined by the technology they are played with; try sailing without a spinnaker or climbing without the right shoes if you wish to test my claim.
For example, I am taking our nightly walks this winter through the rocky hills in shoes designed to handle the snow and ice, Salomon X Ultra Snowpilot Waterproofs, and garbed in a 32 Degree Heat sweat wicking underlayer, fleece lined waterproof trousers, a merino wool sweater, fleece jacket and neck wrap, and Dolly and I have matching Eddie Bauer down jackets in navy, wearing gloves and with a pocket warmer to hold, crowned with the Tyrolean hat my mother brough back from a trip to Austria for me. Its not what I’d choose apres ski at the lodge, but over rough frozen terrain with grades over seven percent in the near total darkness of night its just right.
For summer walks and yardwork Dolly and I both wear Sun Protection Zone hats, with four and a half inch brims, downcurved and nearly the dimensions of British pith helmets of which I am irrationally fond, and which weigh almost nothing, and we buy long pants and longsleeved shirts of SPF 50 material.
Yes, I have shorts, t shirts in spring colors, and a collection of around fifty tiki bar shirts worn unbuttoned and untucked, but these are for public events together because Dolly thinks it makes me look more fun. For sunglasses with my tiki bar shirts I wear Ray Ban Clubmasters in blue tortoise shell with custom mirror lenses in jazz club blue.
For summer rucking, trail running, and other outdoor training, Salomon XA PRO 3D V9 is a comparable model to Snowpilots, and my alternates are vented Merrill Moab Speed 2s.
When intending to do things which might include minor cuts, scrapes, and abrasions from crawling, climbing, or moving through dense brush, I wear 511 Tactical gear in their ABR Pro line, superb hunting and fighting wear, like light armor versus the environment and designed for freedom of movement, with lots of handy places for your toys, and best of all doesn’t look military. The absolute last thing you want in most of the world is to be mistaken for an enemy soldier or other high value target.
My field boots are Salomon 4D Forces 2 ENs in earth brown.
Dolly and I go to our gym together three or more times a week when in town, and we wear Puma sweats and their Hyrox line; superb stitching, gorgeous piping and detailing, and design for movement, and the downy soft fabric never gets hard or worn even after years of also wearing them around the house like pajamas. Yes, I sleep in them during the winter, and my thanks to German design.
When its warm I wear Ten Thousand Interval or the sunproof Tactical line if training outdoors, and the 511 Tactical PT-R Havok line, all of which will move with you like living silk.
I buy gym shoes designed for CrossFit, HIIT, Hyrox, and martial arts training; ultralight, versatile, responsive, stable enough for lifting and designed for explosive movements rather than endurance running; my current favorite is the 8.2 ounce Hoka Solimar, and you won’t go wrong with the original CrossFit shoe, Nike Metcons.
Finally, one must have socks designed for your activities; anything with seamless toes works for me. I wear Darn Tough Run COOLMAX Quarter Ultralight Cushion Socks in summer and the Run Quarter Ultralightweight Cushion Socks which are half merino wool in the winter.
Now for the pants; as to casual wear we must begin with the usual khakis to cords for summer and fall. I want full cut ones with front pleats so I can put my hands in the pockets, of thick and soft wide wale corduroy like a near-velvet to snuggle into.
I do not wear them form fitting to encourage strangers to slap my ass. I do wear them for comfort when leaving the house, when I would be wearing sweats or jeans when at home gardening, cooking, or putting things to order.
For khakis I look for the same full pleated cut in crisp Egyptian cotton or cavalry twill, and I used Gurkha pants with the twin side buckled self belt, designed to be worn under a regimental or gun belt, to teach martial arts in as it has room for movement and stays glued to your waist when upside down. These can be worn with a safari jacket for summer field sports; I wore mine whenever it wasn’t cool enough for tweed.
For fall, the next kind of pants I would buy after cords are Donegal tweed and/or flannels; for summer, tropical whites in a linen-raw silk- Egyptian cotton- tropical wool blend of some kind, tropical wool being a semi open weave to let breezes through but opaque to the eye.
After the cords to khakis, it is possible to play up the casual and whimsical aspect with Nantucket Reds, mine being Izod Saltwaters, GTH pants, or a single Madras element, especially if your intention is to invite conversation and signal willingness to play.
One deploys such dominating elements with intent, and in contrast to the rest of the ensemble; its like a red Chinese pavilion in a garden in that it will control your perception of all the rest.
While the Loden and Polo coats can be worn both for sport and at university with the Oxford Button Down Shirt, the Barbour waxed cotton jacket is for hunting, horse riding, and other field sports. I adore the Barbour 1936 International designed for submarine crews and worn by Steve McQueen in a collaboration with Triumph motorcycles; it’s a belted four pocket and essentially a winter safari jacket. Trench coats, Peacoats and Great Coats can veer formal to casual, depending, due to their military origins, and would be among my first choices due to versatility.
Hats are a collectible hobby of mine. I have the new Akubra Tablelands in khaki, the Snowy River in pale grey which is in a drover style so you can dip your head to block the sun when riding, the Filson & Stetson fur felt Wolf Canyon gun club hat, the Optimo Panama hat with round top designed to be folded and slipped into a pocket when indoors with my Tropical Dress Whites, tweed flat caps with Odd Jackets, a Tyrolean hat of black loden for outdoors in winter, and a cream raw silk flat cap rounded on the sides like a cricket baggy with sporting whites.
Our last step in curating a casual to business casual wardrobe is choosing Odd Jackets, the unifying element which hinges between both work and play. You are coordinating jackets to the colors, patterns, and textures of the shirts and other elements you have chosen, and not the reverse.
Usually and to begin this means tweeds, a navy wool flannel, and a camelhair for winter, and for summer a tropical jacket in open-weave or breathable wool, raw silk, linen or combinations thereof, half lined and minimally structured. Most of mine are Harris tweed, which I collect.
All of these must be notch lapel simple two or three button jackets that look good when unbuttoned, without a lot of interlining, padded shoulders, or stiffening; and as I am slender and in reasonable condition for an old fossil I prefer mid to narrow lapels and rounded shoulders for movement; in other words, they are sports jackets and not the remnants of old suits.
This is where you spend your money on custom bespoke clothes, if such is within your limits and you have reached the point of sartorial splendor and tailoring expertise where you cannot find the exquisite details you want off the rack. More’s the pity, you’ll doubtless reach that point quickly enough.
Choose jackets that look good on you with both casual and more formal business elements; the point is to begin with three or four that can be worn with everything else and in all imaginable social contexts and roles you will commonly be performing your identity in. I always tested the cut by throwing some punches to see if movement is free, and that any instruments of mischief I might carry do not print or are visible in outline under my jackets.
My original purpose in choosing Odd Jackets as the keystone of a curated wardrobe was to wear something versatile at university, at work teaching high school, or at play boulevardiering in the city where my main attractions were bookstores and cafes with an evening dinner at an intriguing restaurant, and wandering in the woods.
Suit Jackets, Sport Coats, And Blazers: What’s The Difference?
Casual shoes include Clarks, which I have worn teaching school and trekking across deserts and jungles without issue, with natural unpolished leather like the Newford Mid Chukka boot in beeswax leather or the iconic suede Desert boots, and shoes which are sport coded like Sperry Topsiders for sailing, or leisure coded like kiltie fringed tassel loafers. I bought Clarks Nature Veldts for twenty years; they had air cushioned soles that didn’t transmit heat or cold, and the nearest item they sell now is the Un Briley Pace. I originally bought these to teach school in, and good teachers never sit down, so you’re on your feet on concrete for eight hours a day just like a laborer in a warehouse.
I currently have the Nunn Bush direct replacements for the Nature Veldts, Cameron Moc Toe Oxfords in Brown Tumbled and the Cam Moc Toe Slip Ons in Cognac Tumbled, both of which have gorgeous pebbled surfaces, as well as their version of Kilties which are polished shiny surfaced and so perfect for lounging at the club or in Cocktail Attire after work, the Keaton Moc Toe Tassel Slip Ons in Burgundy. Rockport has the Men’s Southport Boat Shoe as a Sperry Topsider alternative, and Nature Veldt comparables Ridgefield Eureka Lace Ups and Eureka Slip Ons, very like Nunn Bush Cam Moc Toes.
Trade the OCBD shirts for spread collar shirts in the same colors or dress white if maximum formality is required; I buy Van Heusen Lux Sateen. Go to the white collar Winchester shirt for the most formal business wear.
Winchester Shirts (Contrast Collar) & How to Wear Them
Ties anchor the ensemble are must be chosen with care; they are also the most densely coded and layered bits of signage you will wear. Your pocket square will coordinate with your tie but not be an identical match, and the major color of the tie should be picked up as a minor color in the square, and both complementing the color of the shirt. Ties become Ancient Madder Silk, wool challis, linen, Macclesfield neats, paisleys, or striped Rep ties. For myself there is only one indispensable tie, the Lipton Dot navy with tiny polka dots tie worn by Churchill. Fight them on the beaches, friends.
If you insist on leaving the house without a tie when wearing a collared shirt other than polos or rugbys, wear an ascot under the open collar as if you were at home in your dressing gown and had to dash off without finishing getting dressed; ascots can also replace ties when at the club in your velvet smoking jacket.
There are many beautiful ties, but again research the history and meaning of what you wear as one must never under any circumstances wear a tie which declares membership in anything you are not actually a member of; many are military if striped, or with crests of actual clubs or schools, specifically worn to identify oneself to other such members for comradery, and they will have very little humor about it if you are just wearing it because its lovely. Think of this as a crime of Stolen Valor, wearing militaria of services in which you did not actually serve. By all means wear ties you are entitled to; just be aware that it’s a magnet for other such members to strike up conversations with you, this being its purpose.
Be aware that meanings can change with where you are, and with whom; my navy and scarlet items chosen because they are the original colors of the cockade of the French revolution when the Bastille was seized in what was intended as the jailbreak of the Marquis de Sade and only later became the famous tricolor when Lafayette added the white stripe of the Bourbon monarchy as a gesture of compromise. The red and blue cockade originated in the colors of the City of Paris, also the university colors of the Sorbonne. I chose these as my own personal signature colors because I am a revolutionary and identify with the Jacobins.
In Spokane this identifies me to others as a Gonzaga supporter, a Jesuit university with a popular basketball team, where my partner Dolly studied engineering and law, and her father founded the engineering advisory group when she was a youth and he had eighty engineers working for him, so a legitimate family connection. She is entitled to wear the Harvard Business School colors where she later studied Business Intelligence and the Phi Kappa Phi honor society pin, but never does; Gonzaga colors she wears.
But wait, there’s more; red and blue are also the colors of the yachting and rowing teams at Annapolis, members of the English Royal Family because of their Guards regiment, and of FC Barcelona; of these I don’t mind being mistaken for a FCB fan as Barcelona remains a center of the European Left since the Spanish Civil War. I’ve named two companies of military volunteers I founded after the famous Americans of the International Brigades in that conflict, the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and of Palestine.
Few things about humans are unambiguous and bear a single unchanging meaning, and this is a truth which must be fully realized when you gather signs of membership to hang on yourself.
Meanings are fluid and context-dependent; this is the First Principle of the semiotics of clothes and wardrobe as a system of signs. The Second Principle is that clothing evolves from history, both the conditions of material culture and the social matrix in which it is embedded. And the Third Principle is that clothes signal membership and other forms of identity.
This is why American Rep ties reverse the direction of the slanted stripes from the British, to avoid misidentification. Yes, the differences between American and British culture comes down to this; where the originals convey information regarding class including school and university, military service, clubs and other identifiers, the American copies are decontextualized and robbed of meaning in the pretense of a classless society of equals that never was.
Bow ties are wonderful but are both more formal and will stand out, so deploy them as sartorial force majeure. Bow ties code conservative to many people which makes them great camouflage, and are read as often academic or professorial; when I was at university in my twenties, the San Francisco financial district still had a rule that only senior management can wear bow ties, and it still marks out a doctor in a crowd as one cannot have a long tie getting into the mix when your hands are in someone’s entrails. As JFK advisor and Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr famously said; “It is impossible, or at least, it requires more agility, to spill anything on a bow tie.”
Here we trade our cords and khakis for worsted wool dress slacks of one color, in navy, steel grey, and tan to begin.
Wear tan or grey with a navy jacket, and white if you are wearing the double breasted jacket with six ship’s brass or gold buttons originally designed for naval mess dress to dinner or other grand events short of Black Tie. This last ensemble I call Captain’s Table Dress, a kind of Cocktail Dress level of formality like a military ball or dress uniform event, on which I lavish the most exacting care and attention to details.
Shoes
As your class membership and sometimes character will often be judged by others in a single glance at how shiny your shoes are, for any business wear you want glossy hard surfaces in oxblood or cognac seasonally, with belts to match; I currently have Nunn-Bush Nelson Wingtip Oxfords in Cognac, Rockport Keegan Dress Wingtip Oxfords in medium natural, and Clarks Aldwin Limit in both navy and mid tan.
These must be simple with clean lines, by preference Oxfords which are defined by a closed lacing system where open lacing Derbys code casual, or the less formal brogued wingtips which are originally for hunting, brogues being little holes that let out the water when bushwhacking, though this is often mere ornamentation now and they will pass as office wear in most places. White buckskin wingtip brogued Oxfords are the classic shoe for Tropical Dress Whites, which are casual resort and summer travel wear. Black is for a three piece business suit or formal wear, outside of our consideration here.
When ramping up the level of formality, you want nothing in your presentation of self to distract from the content of your work. Simple and clean lines and solid unpatterned colors are best.
Coats are necessary in winter, and I think you only need two for work to begin; a double breasted topcoat in charcoal or black, and a trenchcoat for rain or transitional weather- I have a splendid one in steel grey wool and the original cotton one my high school debate partner Scott MacDonald chose for me. I thought it hilarious that he chose Humphrey Bogart’s trenchcoat in Casablanca as ideal for me; now I find it prescient.
Around ones neck under a coat is worn a winter scarf; hold at the half point, drape around your neck, pull the loose ends through the center loop, tighten to taste. I have one in navy and red and one in black and white houndstooth.
I wore the formed Ascot billed oval cap as one step up from flat caps for anything work related, when not wearing a refined fedora. And there are so many beautiful fedoras.
Traditionally one wears fedoras with business suits in fall and boaters in spring; a rule I would amend by switching out the boater with a Panama hat. A fedora is versatile and can be worn anywhere, but the boater is now highly unusual and idiosyncratic, a relic of elite academia and worn with rowing team blazers and at summer lawn parties, and has been replaced for summer wear by Panama hats. You can wear a Panama hat to ride horses, to the office, or to after hours activities in the roughest or the most elegant clubs, just like a fedora.
When launching acts of provocation in a boater, wear your club bow tie, rowing team blazer in university colors with pocket crest, OCBD shirt, GTH pants or Nantucket Reds, and Sperry Topsiders without socks. I call this ensemble Gatsby’s Yacht Party.
Last we’ll work out the possible ensembles from combinations of elements with our Odd Jackets as anchor pieces. Try them all on, every which way, photograph and record your outfits with each element listed on a computer as a reference for quick morning dressing, then edit out or add things as needed.
This way you can just set up ensembles and work your way through them in rotational sequence; automating this saves time in the morning, and you never forget when you last wore an outfit. Like Poirot, I trust Le Method, one of my own invention which I call the Endless Wardrobe, like a walk-in version of Mary Poppins’ bag.
So we come to an end of this particular interrogation of identity as a performance and a form of revolutionary struggle inherent to all human lives and societies in the context of how we choose to adorn ourselves and why.
Herein I offer you the science of vestments, Scientia Vestiaria, as a lever with which to change the balance of power in the world.
At this juncture I am struck by the allegory of technical clothing as in sport, for sport is defined both by the rules we agree upon and by the material basis in which it is played as performance technology, as are our identities and the ways we choose to be human together.
Ludwig Wittgenstein proved that all rules are arbitrary in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and this means that seizures of power in self construal and identity need not be limited to revolutionary struggle as appropriation of elite symbols of membership for purposes of infiltration, subversion, and concealment, though this remains a greatly powerful strategy of slipping through success filters like university and access to wealth, power, and privilege as a fulcrum of change versus systems of oppression; it can also represent a free space of creative play.
As Cary Grant said; “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.”
Beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the limits of normality, and the paradigms of other people’s ideas of Virtue, Beauty, and Truth lies the limitless possibilities of becoming human of the Unknown, the blank spaces on our maps of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons.
I have lived among the dragons my entire life since Jean Genet demonstrated to me that the world is a lie, mirages and illusions, a fiction of propaganda, rewritten histories, falsifications, alternate realities designed to ensnare and subjugate us by hegemonic elites and their enforcers, which Atherton, CIA Director of Counter-Intelligence, long ago named the Wilderness of Mirrors. And I would not trade a moment of that life for the illusion of security as a slave of the state.
Never play someone else’s game, as my father taught me; and there are so many ways to do this, among them performing one’s identity on the stage of history and the world. For silence is not only complicity; silence is death.
There remains one other motive in my quest to explore and instrumentalize the semiotics of belonging and otherness as a system of oppression in the context of what we wear as lived truths; the Quest for Beauty.
In my sixth decade of life, and in struggle against the capture of our nation by the American Fourth Reich, I find myself like Schopenhauer increasingly needing Beauty to balance the horrors of a civilization in collapse which has abandoned our principles of universal human rights, our mercy, empathy, and duty of care for one another as guarantors of each other’s humanity, and democracy as a free society of equals.
There is one simple thing we can all do to combat the dark tide of fascism and authorized identities of blood, faith, and soil; simply be who we are, and embrace the uniqueness of others as well as our own, fearlessly, Unconquered and free, and become a Living Autonomous Zone which transmits liberty by existing beyond control.
“Fire is catching” as the iconic line in Mockingjay goes; become the fire.
If we burn, you burn with us/ Mockingjay
Prologue to this post:
December 13 2025 Dressing the Part: On Wardrobe as a System of Signs In the Performance of Identity
Torch of Liberty 