On this day of tragedy and woe, the anniversary of the Twin Towers terror attack and the deaths of thousands who worked in them and of the heroic emergency services responders, our police, fire, and medical personnel who risked themselves to save others, a national day of mourning, rage, and remembrance, and of the dawn of the Third Imperial Period of American History after the early colonialism of Manifest Destiny which founded our global empire in the genocidal conquest of the Native Americans and seizure of the remnants of the Spanish Empire under Teddy Roosevelt, the second in the Red Scare begun by McCarthy and Nixon and ending with the Fall of the Soviet Union, and the third which transformed the theocratic seizure of the Republican Party in 1980 and the terror of the Reagan regime into a Fourth Reich of totalitarian state terror and tyranny which emerged in the wake of 9-11 with the Patriot Act, the Counter-Insurgency Model of policing and militarization of police, the globalization of our secret political prisons, pervasive surveillance, and the kleptocratic imperial conquest and dominion of Iraq to seize control of oil as a strategic resource which confers global supremacy and of Afghanistan to seize the limitless wealth of her opium fields.
I find it terribly convenient for our elites to have a national trauma and disruptive event to seize upon for the purpose of transforming America from a democracy to a carceral state of force and control through the interdependence of military foreign imperialism and domestic tyranny with the counterinsurgency model of policing which harnessed and instrumentalized a racist justice system designed to enforce white supremacist and patriarchal wealth, power, and privilege.
This has created the preconditions of weaponized fear, learned helplessness, despair, dehumanization, and submission to absolute state authority for the Fall of America as a primary guarantor of liberty and a beacon of hope to the world, and with the Trump regime delivered us into the tyranny and madness of the Fourth Reich and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
That Trump and his Republican conspirators in treason are now again and were for four terrible years able to use our government as an instrument of white supremacist terror and Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchal sexual terror is due entirely to the collapse of American values of freedom, equality, truth, and justice in the wake of Nine Eleven, manipulation and subversion by our enemies, and the capture of the narrative of our response by what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex, abetted by plutocratic interest in oil as a strategic resource of the American Imperial hegemony of power and privilege.
But before all else is the precondition of unequal power and divisions of exclusionary otherness.
The Imperial era of American history in the wake of 9-11 saw the invasion of Iraq, planned at Haliburton and not the Pentagon with the purpose of seizing her oil as a strategic asset under President Bush, whose family fortune was made by a grandfather who was the exclusive New York banker for Thyssen-Krupp and personally handed Hitler the cash to fund his coup in Germany, and the conquest and twenty years of colonial occupation of Afghanistan, whose purpose was to control the opium fields and global heroin market, but equally the seizure of our democracy by a carceral state of prisons, concentration camps at our borders, pervasive surveillance, and the use of Fox News as an organization of fascist propaganda; the subversion and subjugation of America.
Our withdrawal from Afghanistan is now long final; their future belongs to the Afghans to choose. So also with the collapse of any meaningful American influence as a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights globally, most especially in Palestine and in the rights of women here in America, courtesy of the Party of Treason and the Trump regime. This I mourn, though not the end of American imperial dominion; what the Fourth Reich capture of the Republican Party and their capture of the state means in Hegelian world-historical terms is that the enemy of a free and equal society has derailed the normal processes of change to link the fall of our empire from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions to the fall of democracy and human rights for all humankind as capital frees itself from its host political system. So the Age of Tyrants begins.
How will such an age end? As I have said from the age of nine when I was cast out of my body by the force wave of a police grenade on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969 in People’s Park Berkeley and for a moment stood outside of time and beheld myriads of possible futures, we face six to eight hundred years of tyranny and wars ending with the extinction of our species. During the First Trump Regime I calculated this probability at between 92 and 98 futures out of every one hundred, and now at less than 1 percent unless we act as a United Humankind to change our fate. Here I wish to signpost that I capitalize the phrase United Humankind because it remains a real possibility as a future civilization very like the one Ray Bradbury envisioned in Star Trek.
Where do we go from here? Liberty or tyranny; this is the choice we must decide, not in our elections for this window of opportunity has passed, but in battle in the streets and nothing less.
What else could change our fate, if by some miracle?
Let us now repeal the Patriot Act and abandon the failed counterinsurgency model of policing as an instrument of white supremacist terror, disarm and demilitarize the police and purge our security services of the white supremacist terrorists who now dominate and control them, purge our destroyers from among us with torch and ax, and restore America to its citizens.
As written by Michael Moore in an article entitled In The End, Bin Laden Won; “ I decided to go and meet the Taliban in the spring of 1999, two years before the 9/11 attacks. Most of us, including me, didn’t know much about the Taliban back then, nor did we want to. A decade earlier, the CIA funded and trained Muslim rebels to kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan after ten years of occupation. That made America happy — the Soviet Union defeated! Humiliated! Our pundits called it “their Vietnam!“ like we had actually learned a single damn lesson from Vietnam. As for what was left of Afghanistan, well, who friggin’ cared?
So in 1999, the Taliban landed on my radar. They had banned kite flying and made it illegal to watch TV, two of my favorite pastimes. What was wrong with these people? I decided to go and ask them.
I couldn’t figure out how to get over there without four plane changes and a couple of rented mules, so I settled for a meeting with one of their top leaders, Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, their ambassador to the United Nations.
At that time, the UN hadn’t officially recognized the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan, so Ambassador Mujahid couldn’t take his seat in the UN Assembly.
Undeterred, the ambassador and the Taliban set up their own UN consulate — in Queens. Next to a nail salon and an endoscopy clinic. So I headed out to the borough that gave us Donald Trump and Archie Bunker to hold a one-on-one meeting with the Taliban leader.
When I walked into their consulate, Ambassador Mujahid and his staff of all male secretaries were overjoyed to see me. My first thought: I think I am the first American to stop by and pay them a visit. I was their one-man Welcome Wagon, but without the banana bread. I did, though, bring other gifts: a parakeet, a kite, some Queens swag, a Mets t-shirt, a terminal map of LaGuardia and JFK (if you tell a joke before the tragedy occurs, is that too too soon?), and a portable television set. He accepted it all in good humor (though he wouldn’t touch the TV).
We sat down to discuss U.S.-Afghan relations. He was grateful for American weapons used back in the liberation of Afghanistan from the Soviets, and he mentioned that a Taliban delegation had visited Texas at the invitation of Governor George W. Bush’s oil baron buddies to discuss energy and a “pipeline deal.” They also served me some tasty almonds and a very, very sweet cup of tea. To their credit, they allowed me to film our historic meeting for my TV series, “The Awful Truth”. (You can watch the 7-minute Taliban segment below).
My diplomatic mission with the Taliban ultimately failed. Afghanistan would soon turn on us by giving safe haven to the multimillionaire son of one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia, a man by the name of Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden. From Afghanistan he would build his al-Qaeda movement and plan (with his Saudi cohorts) his attacks on the United States. Attacks? Yes, attacks, because bin Laden knew one attack would not be enough to wake up the American infidels. So he blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But that killed mostly Kenyans and Tanzanians (224 dead, 4,500 injured) — so, like, no biggie. (If you think I’m being flip, tell me how many people died two and a half weeks ago in Hurricane Grace. Don’t sweat it if you don’t know. They were only Mexicans. All 14 of them.)
A couple years later, bin Laden tried to get our attention again with a kamikaze attack on the USS Cole — but that too would not be enough. Bin Laden knew he was dealing with a country that was clueless about the outside world and slow AF to respond. Ultimately he figured out that only a grand, cinematic Hollywood gesture would grab us by our tub of popcorn and make us spill our Goobers everywhere. His idea was simple, symbolic and deadly: Just take aim at the two things Americans and their leaders lusted for the most — money and military power — and then send your flying bombs at high speed right into them. Blow up their Pentagon and their Wall Street, watch their towers of power come crashing to the ground, watch Humpty Dumpty take a great fall.
It worked. But why? Why did he do it? We were told it was for religious reasons. We were told it was revenge for something. We were told he wanted our Army bases off Saudi and Muslim lands.
Here’s what I think. I think it was a guy thing. Men. Angry men. He and the other rebels had already done the impossible by bringing one of the world’s two superpowers to its knees — the Soviet Union. It was a fatal blow to the Ruskies, and just nine months later, the Berlin Wall came down and that was that for the Kremlin. Bin Laden was so pumped, so inspired — so why not be the ultimate baller and totally extinguish the remaining superpower — the U.S. of A.!
This is not to say he didn’t have a bonkers fundamentalist belief system with a well-designed political strategy. It was just a strategy we weren’t used to. It didn’t involve invading other countries the normal way. There was no plan to plunder and steal our natural resources. He simply sought to bankrupt us — financially, politically, spiritually. And to kill more of us. And get us to wipe out our American Dream.
He also wanted to neuter our military and show the world that we could be defeated by men in caves who possessed nary a single fighter jet, or a Blackhawk helicopter or a can of napalm to their name. He knew it would be easy to make us impotent, that we were all hat, all “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow ya all down!”
He knew that unlike his own deep religious beliefs, ours were all talk, all show. He knew that our sect of Christianity is often just a big con — “love your neighbor” as long as they’re white like you; “the last in line (40 million in poverty)” shall be “first” and the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs “will be last.“ Ha! Never. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” as long they‘re not Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden; “feed the hungry” (no raise in food stamps from 1962 until last week. Last week!).
The majority of Americans no longer attend church. So, score one for us. We do have our own fundamentalists and true believers, but no one here any longer is going to bow down and wash the feet of the bishop or blow Pastor Maloney. It was different for bin Laden—he wasn’t faking it. He knew the strength of his fundamentalism and knew that he could find some schmucks to sign up to fly planes into buildings in exchange for the promise of eternal glory. Bin Laden understood the way we used our Good Book — to ban abortion or police homosexuality — because bin Laden was doing the same thing, only even more capably and at an even more destructive scale.
Bin Laden and his gang were mad geniuses. He knew that those towers would collapse, in part because he was an architectural and civil engineer. And in part because he knew those buildings were probably built like crap — I mean, OBL was a friggin’ contractor! His family were the biggest builders of big buildings in the Middle East. And eight of his hijackers on 9/11 all had engineering degrees! The pilots, I’m guessing, had at one time flown for the Saudi Air Force. They didn’t learn to do what they did with such precision on a video game simulator in Arizona in between stops at the strip club. (President Biden has just announced he’s releasing the classified Saudi documents. We’ll see.)
But here’s the real tell of bin Laden’s prescience: How did he know we would start and stay in a 20-year war, offering up our young sons and daughters to him on the altar of our military-industrial complex?
Bush used to say dumbshit stuff like “better to fight ‘em over there than over here!” It turned out to be the other way around — bin Laden suckered us into fighting over there — so he could kill us over there.
How did he know we’d spend trillions fighting a frail man on dialysis who had split from Afghanistan before the bulk of our troops got there? A terrorist threat so large that it did not exist! BOO!
How did he know we’d pass legislation giving up our sacred constitutional rights — and call it a Patriot Act? How did he know we’d put a spy camera on every corner from Butte, Montana to Fort Myers, Florida — but not one on the main drag in Abbottabad, Pakistan where he lived “in hiding?”
How did he know we’d burn trillions on something we ironically called “Homeland Security” — the “Homeland,” where a half-million were homeless, and millions more with homes foreclosed on, their families evicted; and “Security,” where the majority of Americans lived from paycheck to paycheck, 40% of them with not more than $400 to their name.
Bin Laden wanted to blow up the idea of America, not the Mall of America. He did not have visions of empire. He never thought of invading the United States and taking over our NFL stadiums or burning down our Piggly Wigglys or outlawing the Girl Scouts. He hates women and girls, but I’ll bet he’d love those Thin Mints.
How did he know we would be so obsessed with him — to such an extent where we would massively, cruelly neglect the needs of our own people, denying them help like free health care — and instead, take their homes from them to pay off the hospital bills.
Was it really about the 3,000 dead that made us occupy Afghanistan for 20 years? I mean, c’mon, we’ve lost 3,000 on many days during this pandemic and no one is going to read their names every year at some memorial. And, no, we’re not invading the bat market in Wuhan. Hopefully not.
No, my friends, it’s something else. Bin Laden had our number. Killing him, disbanding al-Qaeda, may have made it look like we won. But in death, he is able to see the fruits of his labor. We, his mortal enemy, are in disarray, seriously at war with ourselves. Violence looms with us every day. Men, angry men, violent men, have now won the right to force the majority gender into giving birth against their will — birth slaves, who will now have no say of their own. SHUT UP AND PUSH! PUSH!! And speaking of slaves, the owners of America are freaking out because they don’t have enough slave laborers in 2021 because workers are refusing to come back to work for shitty wages and in Covid conditions that might get them killed. The end game? The eventual forcing of essential workers to show up and do their goddamned job — or else. So much for that parade we gave them. Yay heroes!
Osama, are you happy now? We were never “great” as the MAGA hats proclaimed, but we were good, we were, at least, most of us, trying. Of course the Black and Brown people know that’s not entirely true. They know that they may just have to save themselves and deal with us in the way we’ve dealt with them. Don’t worry white people — we’ve got 340 million+ guns in our homes! That’ll hold us for a while.
The sad truth is that we never bothered to fight our two true terrorist threats — 1) Capitalism, an economic system that is built on greed and thievery and kills people who must live in flooded basement apartments, and 2) what we call “climate” — but the window to reverse that has now closed, and our only chance to stop the climate catastrophe, an historic extermination event, from getting worse is now the decision we face. It is the first time that a species has decided to eliminate itself. That’s real terrorism, and while we may not be able to turn back now, we can at least get a grip on ourselves, halt the deluge, stop the greed, close the income inequality gap, reduce our glutinous consumption and eliminate the profit motive.
If we do that, bin Laden will have lost. And we may then learn to love and share the wealth and live in peace with each other. That would be the best way to commemorate 9/11.
Blessings to all whom we’ve lost.”
Thus the great Michael Moore; only one area of his analysis do I question, for I question whether responsibility for the terror of 9 11 lies only with the CIA’s former agent bin Laden and the organization he created in al Qaeda to return us to a Dark Age in a rebellion against modern Humanist civilization and its forms as democracy and human rights, and their network within Saudi Arabia, or if the Fourth Reich whose figurehead remains Traitor Trump, with his Russian puppetmasters waging the first phase of the conquest of Europe in Ukraine and a fiendish Israeli proxy state bent on genocide and a Riviera of casinos built on the bones of a people, designed this as a disruptive event in the subversion of democracy.
We may never know the true motives and causes of 9 11; but we may infer them from the results and consequences we do know. Like a missing piece of a puzzle, it is defined by the shapes of the pieces we have, and how they fit together.
As we are taught by John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We celebrate a victory in the sacred cause of Antifascism and Liberty and Justice For All today, the assassination of Fascist propagandist Charlie Kirk, may devils eat his soul.
Charlie Kirk was an apologist of theocratic patriarchal sexual terror who weaponized faith in service to power as Christian Identity Nationalism, valorised and authorized political violence and murder, and ironically was an apologist of gun violence to whom the random murders of schoolchildren were a necessary price of the right to bear arms.
And now our right to bear arms has killed him.
That 200 yard shot was a pretty good shot for someone not a professional. And beautifully timed. If ever assassinations are things of beauty, assassinations of fascists are the most beautiful of all.
“Charlie Kirks last words…
Student: “Do you know how many mass shooters there’s been over the last ten years?”
Charlie Kirk: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”
*gunshot*”
Since Republicans think humans are things to be bought and sold, commodities whose lives are raw material for the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites, I am bidding on the Morgue Market for Charlie Kirk’s skin. I am going to skin him, and mount his white skin on my wall. Its the only value a Nazi propagandist has, as parts.
I require the parts for purposes of necromancy; I want demons to torment him for all eternity.
Celebrating and hoping the heroic shooter escapes and that all the other Nazis are taken down like rabid dogs.
Who’s next? I have lots of room on my walls.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled Charlie Kirk: influential rightwing activist and trusted ally of Trump: Author, activist and host co-founded Turning Point USA and used huge social media reach to push rightwing causes; “Anyone who wants to understand the rise of Donald Trump among young voters has to understand Charlie Kirk, dubbed a “youth whisperer” of the right, who was shot on Wednesday at an event at Utah Valley University and died afterwards.
Kirk was only 31 and had never held elected office but, as a natural showman with a flair for patriotism, populism and Christian nationalism, was rich in the political currency of the era.
In 2012 he co-founded Turning Point USA to drive conservative, anti-woke viewpoints among young people, turning himself into the go-to spokesman on TV networks and at conferences for young rightwingers.
The activist, author and radio host had used his huge audiences on Instagram and YouTube to build support for anti-immigration policies, confrontational Christianity and viral takedowns of hecklers at his many campus events.
An important gravitational tug on the modern Republican party, his career had also been marked by the promotion of misinformation, divisive rhetoric and conspiracy theories, including 2020 election-fraud claims and falsehoods around the Covid pandemic and the vaccine.
Kirk expressed openly bigoted views and was an unabashed homophobe and Islamophobe. As recently as Tuesday of this week he tweeted: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
His evangelical Christian beliefs were intertwined with his politics. He argued that there is no true separation of church and state and warned of a “spiritual battle” pitting the west against wokeism, Marxism and Islam.
During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he claimed that Democrats “stand for everything God hates”, adding: “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”
He also referenced the Seven Mountain Mandate, which specifies seven areas where Christians are to lead: politics, religion, media, business, family, education and the arts, and entertainment.
On Wednesday Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator for North Dakota, posted on the X social media platform: “Charlie Kirk made it cool to be young and faithful.”
Kirk was raised in a politically moderate household in the affluent Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights, Illinois. His father was an architect and his mother worked as a mental health counsellor.
Kirk went to a school where, during the course of his childhood, white students went from the majority to the minority. His conservative awakening came during Barack Obama’s presidency, amid the 2008 financial crisis and policies such as bank bailouts, which he later cited as fuelling his resentment toward liberal economics.
He was involved in the Boy Scouts of America, earning the rank of Eagle Scout, and in high school he emerged as a vocal conservative. He volunteered for Mark Kirk’s successful 2010 Senate campaign and led a student protest against a proposed price increase for school cafeteria cookies, framing it as government overreach.
Reportedly described by classmates as “rude” and “arrogant”, Kirk clashed with teachers he accused of “neo-Marxist” bias, drawing on influences that included Ronald Reagan’s economics, Milton Friedman’s free-market ideas and second amendment rights.
He wrote an op-ed for Breitbart News alleging liberal indoctrination in US textbooks, which led to his first media appearance on the Fox Business channel at the age of 17.
Kirk briefly attended Harper College, a community college in Palatine, Illinois, but dropped out after one semester in 2012 to pursue full-time political activism. His rejection from the US military academy at West Point, New York, that same year reportedly deepened his turn toward rightwing causes.
At the age of 18 Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA with Bill Montgomery, a 71-year-old Tea Party activist he met at a local event. The organisation aimed to counter liberal higher education campus groups such as MoveOn.org by empowering conservative students through debates, events and activism.
By his own account, Kirk had “no money, no connections and no idea what I was doing”, but TPUSA grew rapidly, establishing chapters on more than 3,000 campuses and raising millions annually. Kirk expanded his empire by launching Turning Point Action, a non-profit for political advocacy, and Turning Point Faith to mobilise evangelical Christian voters by blending worship with conservative politics.
At 23, he was the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in 2016. He assisted with Donald Trump Jr’s travel and media during the campaign. In 2019, he became chairman of Students for Trump, launching a youth mobilisation effort for Trump’s failed 2020 presidential re-election attempt.
Kirk organised but did not attend the so-called “Stop the Steal” protests after Trump lost the 2020 election and helped coordinate buses for the 6 January 2021 rally led by Trump near the White House, where the outgoing Republican president urged the crowd to “fight, fight, fight” to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.
This event quickly progressed into a violent insurrection by thousands of Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol. Kirk invoked the fifth amendment during testimony to a congressional January 6 committee.
For Trump’s 2024 campaign, Kirk’s You’re Being Brainwashed tour visited 25 college campuses to boost gen Z turnout, while Turning Point Faith’s Courage tour partnered with evangelical leaders to frame the election as a spiritual battle.
After the election, Kirk conducted loyalty tests for Trump’s administration hires and advised on cabinet picks. In March, Trump appointed him to the US Air Force Academy board of visitors, a role overseeing curriculum and instruction. He was also an early investor in 1789 Capital, a venture firm backed by allies of the president, such as his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Kirk hosted The Charlie Kirk Show, a three-hour daily radio programme syndicated since October 2020; ran Turning Point Live, a streaming show for young audiences; and joined TikTok in April 2024, amassing millions of views on campus confrontation videos. He wrote several books promoting far-right ideology.
His views had consistently baited and provoked the left. During the pandemic he decried mask mandates and called vaccine requirements “medical apartheid”. TPUSA’s “Professor Watchlist”, targeting liberal academics, has been denounced as a form of harassment comparable to a McCarthyite witch-hunt.
Kirk denied the climate crisis, supported fossil fuels and opposed DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programmes. He had also called white privilege a “myth”, labelled the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake” and criticised Martin Luther King as overrated.”
Charlie Kirk: influential rightwing activist and trusted ally of Trump
We celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month in America beginning on this day each year, when schoolchildren will be taught fetishized and deracinated versions of what it means to be Hispanic Americans as a kind of Orientalism as described by Edward Said; exotic foods from Taco Bell and representations from modern Carmen Mirandas, while the real Hispanic Americans whose labor creates our wealth in service to elite hegemonies of power and privilege as a slave caste or who languish in the concentration camps at our border as demonized outsiders and political pawns remain silenced and erased from view, a voiceless and terrible thunder of agony which will one day seize and shake us to the heart of our humanity and the foundation of our nation.
Let us celebrate this and all such holidays which memorialize precariats and marginalized populations of politically designed disparity, unequal power, and exclusionary otherness including constructions of ethnicity by listening to their voices rather than valorizing authorized icons of disempowered figures and images.
To create an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
Children, your culture is what you actually do; you, yourself, and not anyone else. No one but you gets a vote on who you are, or may become. It is for you to tell us who you are, not the other way round.
Among the most important truths to understand about culture, especially those you claim and which claim you in turn as opposes to those legacies of history from which we must emerge to claim our freedom and create ourselves as chosen identities and most importantly versus systems of oppression and narratives of falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, is that we change our culture by what we ourselves do. Constantly, for culture like identity is a process of adaptation and change, ephemeral and protean, at worst illusory and at best both a realization of our truths, those we create and those written in our flesh, and an instrument of seizure of power, and always a form of power which cannot be taken from us for it is a praxis or action of our values, meanings, and being.
What do I mean by this? Who we are is a theatrical performance, and it is possible to improvise new identities in liberation struggle with our histories.
Identity is constructed as a system of stories, and a canon of literature is nothing less than an authorized set of identities. This is why the reimagination and transformation of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, must be constant and ongoing. The first question we must ask of our stories is this; whose story is this?
As Wednesday says to authority in the telenovela; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
We are lost in a wilderness of mirrors, cameras, surfaces which abstract us into images owned by others, which capture us in narratives we ourselves do not create and reflect us infinitely in theft of our uniqueness and our souls.
This is the true horror of colonialism, and of the line in the sand we have drawn at our border, now made a Wall of white supremacist state terror and institutional cruelty, to weaponize disparity and create a vast pool of exploitable labor on which the wealth, power, and privilege of America’s hegemonic white elites is built.
To this I say; tear down the Walls, just as we did the Berlin Wall, all the Walls, everywhere, our own most especially, where ever men hunger to be equal and free, until divisions of race, faith, nationality, language, or any other taxonomies of identity yet undreamed cease to have meaning except as curiousities or as identities we claim without claims of superiority and exclusionary otherness, until we are all simply human beings and guarantors of each other’s humanity.
Such is the vision of becoming human I have struggled for since I first realized its possibility among the myriads of futures from which we must choose.
There is a poem my father taught me to memorize and recite as a young boy, which I still hear in my thoughts whenever I wonder about our future possibilities of becoming human, and the choices we make about how to be human together, The Man With a Hoe by Edward Markham, Written after seeing Millet’s World-Famous Painting;
“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul—
More fraught with danger to the universe.
What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time’s tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Judges of the World,
A protest that is also prophecy.
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched ?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidious wrongs, immedicable woes?
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the Future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—
With those who shaped him to the thing he is—
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world
After the silence of the centuries?”
Man With a Hoe, Jean-Francois Millet
I wish all of us a joyful Hispanic Heritage Month; and remember to run amok and be ungovernable. Let us bring the Chaos, and a Reckoning.
As I wrote in my post of July 24 2022, In a Free Society of Equals, Who Confers Citizenship? Abolish Borders and Enact Citizenship By Declaration; Along our border with Mexico, concentration camps for nonwhite refugees instead of sanctuary, and a brutal army of slavecatchers and overseers of prison bond labor instead of humanitarian aid and safe conduct.
We will not begin to become human until we build bridges, not walls.
Let us enact diversity and inclusion rather than divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Let us abolish borders and enact citizenship by declaration.
If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, you are one of us; who are we to say no? This is the only test for citizenship we need.
Whenever I think of this issue of citizenship and immigration, I remember the famous scene in the film Freaks, in which the Loving Cup is offered to the prospective bride with the ritual chant of inclusion and membership; “One of Us! One of Us! You are now one of us!” Here is the ceremony we need for welcoming new Americans to our free society of equals; a ritual feast of belonging. The film is also a superb allegory of why democracy fails, and the limits of diversity and inclusion in fear and hierarchies of belonging and otherness.
Some of us, like myself, are truly other, and define the limits of the human, which like all limits I transgress as sacred acts of liberation. This is why I am interested in the idea of monsters, freaks, and outcasts which codify humanity, and advocate the embrace of our monstrosity as a prescription for freeing ourselves of racism and other forms of hierarchies of belonging and otherness which are crucial and determinative in the construction of identity, and are legacies of history and systems of oppression from which we must win free. I am a freak offering the Loving Cup to those who would enslave us, drive us out, hunt us to extinction.
I read Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in part as a critique of colonialism, slavery, and the British Empire, and I identify with the Monster, especially Dean Koontz’s version of him as Deucalion in his Frankenstein series, which tells the story as a war against humankind by Victor as the creator of a race of supermen, like the Nazis thought of themselves. Here Deucalion, hideously deformed and scarred by his battles like myself though mine are not visible, and immensely powerful and brilliant, plays the role of Spartacus against his tyrant creator who would stop at nothing to enforce his idea of virtue. But Victor is also a figure of Prometheus who dares to steal the fire of the gods and seize power against their unjust authority, in this sense a liberator but one who becomes a tyrant in his turn as did so many in our history; Washington, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, a predictable phase of revolutionary struggle due to the imposed conditions of struggle, especially anticolonial ones, and also to the internal contradictions of Idealism which in action is subversive of its own values once power has been seized.
This is why Israel, last bastion of a people nearly become extinct, is now a nightmare of state tyranny and terror, having reproduced the Auschwitz which they survived and are perpetrating the genocide of the Palestinians; one people divided by history.
And its why America, the Land of the Free whose Statue of Liberty proclaims to the world; “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”, now hunts, abducts, imprisons, and tortures without cause or trial nonwhite others with a white supremacist terror force called ICE.
All such things we must Resist, like Deucalion, or Lt Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds. By Any Means Necessary, to quote Malcolm X and Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands.
My point here is that we are all of us both Victor and his Monster, locked in titanic struggle to become human together, and this history has consequences for how we choose to be human together and for our possibilities of becoming human.
America has drawn a line in the sand to weaponize economic disparity in service to imperial dominion through labor exploitation of peoples with no legal status, for profit requires slavery as an invisible caste with whom one may do anything at all with impunity as if they do not exist. Here in our border with Mexico, its walls and cages, and in the omnipresent bodies of those who pick and serve our food, clean our living spaces, care for our children and elders, like the black clad stage handlers of a kabuki theatre of capitalism, or the Black Gang who stoke the engines of our system with the fuel of their lives as in Eugene O’Neil’s play The Hairy Ape, we find an immediate example of our own complicity in the dehumanization and commodification of those whose labor creates our wealth and services our elite privilege.
For we have made of our world a global prison and slave labor system, an imperial dominion of borders and carceral states of force and control, and of our fellow human beings the parts of a vast machine of wealth and power through theft of public resources.
We are all Nikolai Gogol’s hero in Diary of a Madman, caught in the wheels of a great machine he services, like Charlie Chaplin in his film Modern Times. But we know that we are trapped and enslaved, and we know how and why; we know the secrets of our condition which our masters would keep silent, and in refusing to be silent we can free ourselves and our fellows. This Michel Foucault called truth telling; a poetic vision of reimagination and sacred calling to pursue the truth which bears transformative power.
So here I offer all of you words of hope for moments of despair, the horror of meaninglessness, the grief of loss, and the guilt of survivorship.
Your voice has defied our nothingness, and resounds throughout the chasms of a hostile and dehumanizing world; gathering force and transformative power as it finds a thousand echoes, and begins to awaken refusal to submit to authority and to heal the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
The voice of even one human being who bears a wound of humanity which opens him to the pain of others and who places his life in the balance with those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, who in resistance to tyranny and terror, force and control, becomes unconquered and free, such a voice of liberation is unstoppable as the tides, an agent of reimagination and transformation which seizes the gates of our prisons and frees the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Despair not and be joyful, for we who are Living Autonomous Zones help others break the chains of their enslavement simply by condition of being as well as action; for we violate norms, transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, expose the lies and illusions of authority, and render the forces of repression powerless to compel obedience.
This is the primary revolutionary struggle which precedes and underlies all else; the seizure of ownership of ourselves from those who would enslave us.
In this all who resist subjugation by authority are alike as Living Autonomous Zones, bearing seeds of change; we can say with the figure of Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
Such is the hope of humankind.
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2021, The Carceral State and its Borders, Police, and Prisons are Institutional White Supremacist Terror: Case of the Haitian Refugees:
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
So reads the inscription on our Statue of Liberty, the dream of America as a beacon of hope to the world written by a young Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, who like her namesake has become immortal as a figure of America herself, of the better angels of our nature and the ideals toward which we reach, regardless of our failures to seize and live our truths.
In the revolutionary struggle for the soul of America and the freedom of the world, these words inscribed on our hearts illuminate the darkest of times and like the gift of Pandora inspire us to fight on, beyond hope of victory or even survival, for the chance of Liberty.
To resist tyranny, divisions of exclusionary otherness, and hierarchies of elite membership, and to refuse subjugation by those who would enslave us.
But the promise of sanctuary in a free society of equals wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth does not apply to all equally; not if you are nonwhite.
In the case of the Haitian refugees beaten by horse-riding police with whips and abandoned to die in squalid camps at our border, we have a vivid and horrific example of an inconvenient truth; America is not yet free. The carceral state and its borders, police, and prisons are institutional white supremacist terror, and in the crisis at our border we see an extreme case of a general condition.
The time has come to abolish the institutions of centralized power and tyranny as force and control, and to dismantle systemic and structural racism. What we need now is a version of England’s Shanley v Harvey judgement of 1763; anyone whose foot touches American soil is free, and may remain here under our protection.
Let us enact citizenship by declaration; claiming membership in our society would make it so in law. To say “I am an American” is to be an American; envision that this declaration may be made before any notary or embassy anywhere on earth, and from that moment America is a guarantor of your rights, with the responsibility of safe passage to our shores if those rights cannot be guaranteed should our new citizens remain in place, or liberation from tyranny where ever they may be, anywhere on earth, if escape is not the best solution or seizure of power from the regimes of those who would enslave us is possible.
Yes, this makes the whole world a borderless state and a United Humankind.
But there is an enormous difference between becoming one of us and an equal co owner of our government, and claiming right of sanctuary among us. Citizenship is about the franchise and rights which derive from our laws and the powers we have seized, but also about specific responsibilities. Sanctuary is about universal human rights which derive from no government but from our human condition, and which no government may justly deny.
Politics is the art of balancing and negotiating these interdependent and parallel sets of rights, the legal rights of citizens and the inherent rights of human beings, that no one’s freedoms may deny those of any other.
Estonia has an interesting solution to the discontiguous nature of a dual set of rights; offer virtual citizenship or e-residency and a borderless state. The idea of nationality itself becomes transformed when a nation is embodied in the rights of its citizens, rather than defined by its boundaries.
Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers becomes a song not of the horrors of universalized forever wars, but of liberation from the social use of force by abandoning the hills on which we fly our flags, including the flags of our skins.
As I wrote in my post of March 16 2020, Walls of Hate, Tyranny, and Empire: America’s Global Borders: As we are inundated with the global awakening to fear of the coronavirus pandemic, it becomes clear that this is a natural triggering stressor which parallels a manufactured one, that of borders and refugee crises, in its behaviors and effects in our social and political environment as leverage for nationalist and fascist tyrannies of force and control in the subversion of democracy and the transformation of our world into a vast prison.
Overwhelming and generalized fear is a necessary precondition of authoritarian regimes, and of violence and the use of social force generally, which together with submission to authority may be regarded as a First Cause of the disease of power in the sense that Thomas Aquinas argued causality and being; ” If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.”
Authority and fear also alienate us from ourselves, dehumanize and commodify us as does capitalism as its outer form; for this is about the theft of our identity and power by those who would enslave us.
The first consequence of the emergence of authority and the disempowerment of its subjects is the modern pathology of disconnectedness; and this is the link which binds authority and tyranny together, and its weak point. Here is where resistance and revolution must act to shatter the knot of interdependent and mutually reinforcing systems which rob us of our humanity and our freedom.
We must build bridges not walls, togetherness not isolation, unity not division, and forge a borderless world and a free society of equals.
An Allegory of the Migrant Dilemma and of Racism and Capitalism as Interdependent Systems of Oppression: Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo Del Toro
Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from the Colonial Period to the Present Era, Zaragosa Vargas
El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson
The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, Miriam Pawel
The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, John Storm Roberts
My Art, My Life: An Autobiography, Diego Rivera
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, Carlos Fuentes intro
Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story, Luis Alberto Urrea
The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, Dolores Tierney, Deborah Shaw, & Ann Davies, Editors
Hispanic-American Literature
Bless Me Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, The Sum of Our Days, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna, The Infinite Plan, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, Island Beneath the Sea, Ines of My Soul, Maya’s Notebook, The Japanese Lover, The Sum of Our Days, Conversations With Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabele Allende
Isabel Allende: A Literary Companion, Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Latin Moon in Manhattan, Our Lives Are the Rivers: A Novel,
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yo!, In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salome, The Woman I Kept to Myself, Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA, Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez: A Critical Companion, Silvio Sirias
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Moths and other stories, Under the Feet of Jesus, Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena Viramontes
Hummingbird’s Daughter, Queen of America, Into the Beautiful North, The Water Museum, The House of Broken Angels, Tijuana Book of the Dead, Luis Alberto Urrea
So Far From God, Peel My Love Like an Onion, The Guardians, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma, Watercolor Women / Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, I Ask the Impossible, Ana Castillo
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien, Oscar Hijuelos
The House on Mango Street, Woman Hollaring Creek and other stories, Caramelo, My Wicked Wicked Ways: Poems, A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Harold Bloom
House of the Impossible Beauties, Joseph Cassara
Dreaming in Cuban, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, Christina Garcia
Spanish
10 de septiembre de 2025. En celebración del Mes de la Herencia Hispana: Liberación, Memoria, Historia y Ser Humano; una Teoría Narrativa de la Identidad.
Celebramos el Mes de la Herencia Hispana en Estados Unidos a partir de este día cada año, cuando a los escolares se les enseñará versiones fetichizadas y desarraigadas de lo que significa ser hispanoamericano, como una especie de orientalismo, según la descripción de Edward Said; comidas exóticas de Taco Bell y representaciones de las modernas Carmen Mirandas. Mientras tanto, los verdaderos hispanoamericanos, cuyo trabajo crea nuestra riqueza al servicio de las hegemonías de poder y privilegio de las élites como casta esclava, o que languidecen en los campos de concentración de nuestra frontera como forasteros demonizados y peones políticos, permanecen silenciados y borrados de la vista, un trueno de agonía mudo y terrible que un día nos conmoverá hasta el corazón de nuestra humanidad y los cimientos de nuestra nación. Celebremos esta y todas las festividades que conmemoran a las personas precarias y marginadas, caracterizadas por la disparidad políticamente diseñada, la desigualdad de poder y la otredad excluyente, incluyendo las construcciones de etnicidad, escuchando sus voces en lugar de valorizar iconos autorizados de figuras e imágenes desempoderadas.
Crear una idea sobre un tipo de pueblo es un acto de violencia.
Niños, su cultura es lo que realmente hacen; ustedes, ustedes mismos, y nadie más. Nadie más que ustedes tiene derecho a votar sobre quiénes son o en quiénes pueden llegar a ser. Les corresponde a ustedes decirnos quiénes son, no al revés.
Una de las verdades más importantes que debemos comprender sobre la cultura, especialmente aquellas que reivindican y que a su vez los reivindican, en oposición a los legados de la historia de los que debemos emerger para reclamar nuestra libertad y crearnos como identidades elegidas y, lo que es más importante, contra los sistemas de opresión y las narrativas de falsificación, mercantilización y deshumanización, es que cambiamos nuestra cultura con lo que nosotros mismos hacemos. Constantemente, para la cultura, la identidad es un proceso de adaptación y cambio, efímero y cambiante, en el peor de los casos ilusorio y, en el mejor, una realización de nuestras verdades, las que creamos y las que llevamos escritas, y un instrumento para apoderarnos del poder, y siempre una forma de poder que no nos puede ser arrebatada, pues es una praxis o acción de nuestros valores, significados y ser.
¿Qué quiero decir con esto? Quiénes somos es una representación teatral, y es posible improvisar nuevas identidades en la lucha por la liberación con nuestras historias.
La identidad se construye como un sistema de relatos, y un canon literario es nada menos que un conjunto autorizado de identidades. Por eso, la reimaginación y transformación de las historias que nos contamos sobre nosotros mismos, a nosotros mismos y a los demás, debe ser constante y continua. La primera pregunta que debemos hacernos sobre nuestras historias es esta: ¿de quién es esta historia?
Como dice Wednesday a la autoridad en la telenovela: «Si no contamos nuestras historias, ellas lo harán». Estamos perdidos en un desierto de espejos, cámaras y superficies que nos abstraen en imágenes ajenas, que nos capturan en narrativas que no creamos y nos reflejan infinitamente, robándonos nuestra singularidad y nuestras almas.
Este es el verdadero horror del colonialismo y de la línea que hemos trazado en nuestra frontera, ahora convertida en un muro de terror estatal supremacista blanco y crueldad institucional, para instrumentalizar la disparidad y crear una vasta reserva de mano de obra explotable sobre la que se construye la riqueza, el poder y los privilegios de las élites blancas hegemónicas de Estados Unidos.
A esto digo: derriben los muros, como hicimos con el Muro de Berlín, todos los muros, en todas partes, especialmente el nuestro, dondequiera que los hombres anhelen ser iguales y libres, hasta que las divisiones de raza, fe, nacionalidad, idioma o cualquier otra taxonomía de identidad aún no soñada dejen de tener significado, excepto como curiosidades o como identidades que reivindicamos sin pretensiones de superioridad ni otredad excluyente, hasta que todos seamos simplemente seres humanos y garantes de la humanidad de los demás. Tal es la visión de convertirme en humano por la que he luchado desde que comprendí por primera vez su posibilidad entre la multitud de futuros entre los que debemos elegir.
Hay un poema que mi padre me enseñó a memorizar y recitar de niño, que aún resuena en mis pensamientos cada vez que me pregunto sobre nuestras futuras posibilidades de convertirnos en humanos y las decisiones que tomamos sobre cómo ser humanos juntos: El hombre con la azada, de Edward Markham, escrito tras ver la famosa pintura de Millet. Doblado por el peso de los siglos, se apoya
en su azada y contempla el suelo,
el vacío de las eras en su rostro,
y sobre su espalda el peso del mundo.
¿Quién lo hizo morir al éxtasis y la desesperación,
algo que no se aflige y que nunca espera,
impasible y aturdido, hermano del buey?
¿Quién aflojó y bajó esta mandíbula brutal?
¿De quién fue la mano que inclinó esta frente hacia atrás?
¿De quién fue el aliento que apagó la luz de este cerebro?
¿Es esto lo que el Señor Dios creó y dio
para dominar el mar y la tierra;
para trazar las estrellas y quemar
¿Acaso los cielos buscan poder?
¿Para sentir la pasión de la Eternidad?
¿Es este el Sueño que soñó quien moldeó los soles
y marcó sus caminos en las antiguas profundidades?
A lo largo del Infierno hasta su último abismo
No hay forma más terrible que esta,
Más cargada de censura por la ciega codicia del mundo,
Más llena de señales y portentos para el alma,
Más cargada de peligro para el universo.
¡Qué abismos entre él y los serafines!
Esclavo de la rueda del trabajo, ¿qué son para él
Platón y el vaivén de las Pléyades?
¿Qué son las largas extensiones de las cimas del canto,
la grieta del amanecer, el enrojecimiento de la rosa?
A través de esta terrible forma miran las épocas sufrientes;
La tragedia del tiempo está en esa dolorosa curva; A través de esta terrible forma, la humanidad traicionada, saqueada, profanada y desheredada,
clama protesta a los Jueces del Mundo,
una protesta que también es profecía.
Oh, amos, señores y gobernantes de todas las tierras,
¿es esta la obra que entregan a Dios,
esta cosa monstruosa distorsionada y apagada?
¿Cómo podrán enderezar esta forma?
Tocarla de nuevo con la inmortalidad;
Devolverle la mirada hacia arriba y la luz;
Reconstruir en ella la música y el sueño;
Corregir las infamias inmemoriales,
los pérfidos males, las aflicciones incurables?
Oh, amos, señores y gobernantes de todas las tierras,
¿Cómo se las arreglará el Futuro con este Hombre?
¿Cómo responderá a su brutal pregunta en esa hora
Cuando torbellinos de rebelión sacudan el mundo? ¿Cómo será con los reinos y con los reyes,
con aquellos que lo moldearon hasta convertirlo en lo que es,
cuando este mudo Terror se levante para juzgar al mundo
tras el silencio de los siglos?
Les deseo a todos un feliz Mes de la Herencia Hispana; y recuerden descontrolarse y ser ingobernables. Provoquemos el Caos y un Ajuste de Cuentas.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 24 de julio de 2022: «En una sociedad libre de iguales, ¿quién otorga la ciudadanía? Abolir las fronteras y promulgar la ciudadanía por declaración». A lo largo de nuestra frontera con México, campos de concentración para refugiados no blancos en lugar de santuario, y un ejército brutal de cazadores de esclavos y supervisores de trabajos forzados en prisión en lugar de ayuda humanitaria y salvoconductos.
No comenzaremos a ser humanos hasta que construyamos puentes, no muros.
Promulguemos la diversidad y la inclusión en lugar de divisiones de otredad excluyente, jerarquías de pertenencia y hegemonías de élite de riqueza, poder y privilegio.
Abolimos las fronteras y promulgamos la ciudadanía por declaración.
Si estás tan loco como para querer ser uno de nosotros, eres uno de nosotros; ¿quiénes somos nosotros para decir que no? Esta es la única prueba de ciudadanía que necesitamos. Siempre que pienso en el tema de la ciudadanía y la inmigración, recuerdo la famosa escena de la película Freaks, en la que se ofrece la Copa del Amor a la futura novia con el cántico ritual de inclusión y pertenencia: “¡Uno de nosotros! ¡Uno de nosotros! ¡Ahora eres uno de nosotros!”. Esta es la ceremonia que necesitamos para dar la bienvenida a los nuevos estadounidenses a nuestra sociedad libre de iguales; un festín ritual de pertenencia. La película es también una magnífica alegoría de por qué fracasa la democracia y de los límites de la diversidad y la inclusión en el miedo y las jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad.
Algunos de nosotros, como yo, somos verdaderamente otros y definimos los límites de lo humano, que, como todos los límites, transgredo como actos sagrados de liberación. Por eso me interesa la idea de monstruos, fenómenos y marginados que codifican la humanidad y abogan por aceptar nuestra monstruosidad como una receta para liberarnos del racismo y otras formas de jerarquías de pertenencia y alteridad, cruciales y determinantes en la construcción de la identidad, legados de la historia y sistemas de opresión de los que debemos liberarnos. Soy un fenómeno que ofrece la Copa del Amor a quienes nos esclavizan, nos expulsan y nos persiguen hasta la extinción.
Leo Frankenstein de Mary Shelley en parte como una crítica al colonialismo, la esclavitud y el Imperio Británico, y me identifico con el Monstruo, especialmente con la versión que Dean Koontz hace de él como Deucalión en su serie Frankenstein, que narra la historia como una guerra contra la humanidad protagonizada por Víctor como el creador de una raza de superhombres, como se consideraban los nazis. Aquí, Deucalión, horriblemente deformado y marcado por sus batallas, como yo, aunque las mías no sean visibles, e inmensamente poderoso y brillante, desempeña el papel de Espartaco contra su tirano creador, quien no se detendría ante nada para imponer su idea de virtud. Pero Víctor es también una figura de Prometeo que se atreve a robar el fuego de los dioses y tomar el poder contra su injusta autoridad; en este sentido, un liberador, pero que a su vez se convierte en tirano, como tantos otros en nuestra historia: Washington, Napoleón, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe. Una fase predecible de la lucha revolucionaria debido a las condiciones impuestas, especialmente las anticoloniales, y también a las contradicciones internas del idealismo, que en acción subvierte sus propios valores una vez tomado el poder.
Por eso, Israel, último bastión de un pueblo casi extinto, es ahora una pesadilla de tiranía y terror estatal, habiendo reproducido el Auschwitz del que sobrevivieron y perpetrando el genocidio de los palestinos; un pueblo dividido por la historia. Y es por eso que Estados Unidos, la Tierra de la Libertad, cuya Estatua de la Libertad proclama al mundo: «Dadme a vuestros cansados, a vuestros pobres, a vuestras masas apiñadas que anhelan respirar en libertad, a los miserables desechos de vuestras playas rebosantes. Enviadme a estos, los sin hogar, azotados por la tempestad, ¡elevo mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada!», ahora caza, secuestra, encarcela y tortura sin causa ni juicio a personas no blancas con una fuerza terrorista supremacista blanca llamada ICE.
Debemos resistir a todas estas cosas, como Deucalión o el teniente Aldo Raine en «Malditos Bastardos. Por cualquier medio necesario», citando a Malcolm X y Sartre en su obra de 1948 «Manos Sucias».
Mi punto aquí es que todos somos, a la vez, Víctor y su Monstruo, enfrascados en una lucha titánica por convertirnos en humanos juntos, y esta historia tiene consecuencias en cómo elegimos ser humanos juntos y en nuestras posibilidades de convertirnos en humanos. Estados Unidos ha trazado una línea divisoria para instrumentalizar la disparidad económica al servicio del dominio imperial mediante la explotación laboral de pueblos sin estatus legal, pues el lucro exige la esclavitud como una casta invisible con la que se puede hacer cualquier cosa con impunidad, como si no existiera. Aquí, en nuestra frontera con México, sus muros y jaulas, y en los cuerpos omnipresentes de quienes recogen y sirven nuestra comida, limpian nuestros espacios vitales, cuidan de nuestros niños y ancianos, como los escenógrafos vestidos de negro de un teatro kabuki del capitalismo, o la pandilla negra que alimenta el motor.
Al alimentar nuestro sistema con el combustible de sus vidas, como en la obra de Eugene O’Neil, El Mono Peludo, encontramos un ejemplo inmediato de nuestra propia complicidad en la deshumanización y mercantilización de quienes, con su trabajo, crean nuestra riqueza y sirven a nuestros privilegios de élite.
Porque hemos convertido nuestro mundo en una prisión global y un sistema de trabajo esclavo, un dominio imperial de fronteras y estados carcelarios de fuerza y control, y a nuestros semejantes en piezas de una vasta maquinaria de riqueza y poder mediante el robo de recursos públicos.
Todos somos el héroe de Nikolai Gogol en el Diario de un Loco, atrapados en las ruedas de una gran máquina a la que sirve, como Charlie Chaplin en su película Tiempos Modernos. Pero sabemos que estamos atrapados y esclavizados, y sabemos cómo y por qué; conocemos los secretos de nuestra condición que nuestros amos callarían, y al negarnos a callar podemos liberarnos a nosotros mismos y a nuestros semejantes. A esto Michel Foucault lo llamó decir la verdad; una visión poética de la reimaginación y una vocación sagrada a buscar la verdad que encierra un poder transformador. Así que aquí les ofrezco a todos palabras de esperanza para los momentos de desesperación, el horror de la falta de sentido, el dolor de la pérdida y la culpa de la supervivencia.
Su voz ha desafiado nuestra nada y resuena en los abismos de un mundo hostil y deshumanizante; cobra fuerza y poder transformador al encontrar mil ecos y comenzar a despertar la negativa a someterse a la autoridad y a sanar las patologías de nuestra falsificación y desconexión. La voz de un solo ser humano que porta una herida de humanidad que lo abre al dolor ajeno y que pone su vida en la balanza con aquellos a quienes Frantz Fanon llamó Los Condenados de la Tierra, los impotentes y los desposeídos, los silenciados y los borrados, quienes, resistiendo a la tiranía y el terror, la fuerza y el control, se vuelven invictos y libres; esa voz de liberación es imparable como las mareas, un agente de reimaginación y transformación que se apodera de las puertas de nuestras prisiones y libera las ilimitadas posibilidades de convertirse en humanos.
No desesperen y sean alegres, porque quienes somos Zonas Autónomas Vivas ayudamos a otros a romper las cadenas de su esclavitud simplemente por su condición de ser y de actuar; porque violamos normas, transgredimos los límites de lo Prohibido, exponemos las mentiras e ilusiones de la autoridad y dejamos a las fuerzas de la represión impotentes para imponer la obediencia.
Esta es la principal lucha revolucionaria que precede y subyace a todo lo demás; La apropiación de nosotros mismos de quienes nos esclavizan.
En esto, todos los que se resisten a la subyugación de la autoridad se asemejan a Zonas Autónomas Vivas, portadoras de semillas de cambio; podemos decir con la figura de Loki: “Llevo la carga de un propósito glorioso”.
Tal es la esperanza de la humanidad.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 21 de septiembre de 2021, El Estado Carcelario y sus Fronteras, Policía y Prisiones son Terror Institucional de la Supremacía Blanca: Caso de los Refugiados Haitianos:
“No como el gigante de bronce de la fama griega,
con extremidades conquistadoras a horcajadas de tierra en tierra;
aquí, a nuestras puertas bañadas por el mar y al atardecer, se alzará
una poderosa mujer con una antorcha, cuya llama
es el relámpago aprisionado, y su nombre
Madre de los Exiliados. Desde su mano-faro
brilla con una bienvenida mundial; sus ojos apacibles dominan
el puerto con puentes aéreos que enmarcan las ciudades gemelas.
“¡Conserven, tierras antiguas, su pompa legendaria!” —grita ella
con labios silenciosos—. Dadme a vuestros cansados, a vuestros pobres,
a vuestras masas apiñadas que anhelan respirar en libertad,
a los miserables desechos de vuestras riberas rebosantes.
Enviadme a estos, los sin hogar, azotados por la tempestad,
¡Levanto mi lámpara junto a la puerta dorada! Así reza la inscripción en nuestra Estatua de la Libertad: el sueño de Estados Unidos como un faro de esperanza para el mundo, escrita por una joven judía, Emma Lazarus, quien, al igual que su homónima, se ha vuelto inmortal como figura de la propia América, de los mejores ángeles de nuestra naturaleza y de los ideales que perseguimos, a pesar de nuestros fracasos en aferrarnos y vivir nuestras verdades.
En la lucha revolucionaria por el alma de Estados Unidos y la libertad del mundo, estas palabras grabadas en nuestros corazones iluminan los tiempos más oscuros y, como el regalo de Pandora, nos inspiran a seguir luchando, más allá de la esperanza de victoria o incluso de supervivencia, por la oportunidad de la Libertad.
Para resistir la tiranía, las divisiones de la otredad excluyente y las jerarquías de la élite, y para rechazar la subyugación de quienes pretenden esclavizarnos.
Pero la promesa de refugio en una sociedad libre de iguales donde nadie es mejor que otro por razón de nacimiento no se aplica a todos por igual; no si no eres blanco.
En el caso de los refugiados haitianos golpeados a caballo Policías con látigos y abandonados a su suerte en campamentos precarios en nuestra frontera, tenemos un ejemplo vívido y horroroso de una verdad incómoda: Estados Unidos aún no es libre. El estado carcelario y sus fronteras, policía y prisiones son el terror institucional de la supremacía blanca, y en la crisis en nuestra frontera vemos un caso extremo de una condición general.
Ha venido a abolir las instituciones del poder centralizado y la tiranía como fuerza y control, y a desmantelar el racismo sistémico y estructural. Lo que necesitamos ahora es una versión de la sentencia inglesa de 1763 en el caso Shanley contra Harvey; cualquiera que pise suelo estadounidense es libre y puede permanecer aquí bajo nuestra protección.
Promulguemos la ciudadanía por declaración; reclamar la pertenencia a nuestra sociedad la convertiría en tal por ley. Decir “Soy estadounidense” es ser estadounidense; imaginen que esta declaración puede hacerse ante cualquier notario o embajada en cualquier lugar del mundo, y desde ese momento Estados Unidos es garante de sus derechos, con la responsabilidad de un tránsito seguro a nuestras costas si esos derechos no pueden garantizarse si nuestros nuevos ciudadanos permanecen en el país, o de la liberación de la tiranía dondequiera que se encuentren, en cualquier lugar del mundo, si escapar no es la mejor solución o si es posible tomar el poder de los regímenes de quienes nos esclavizan.
Sí, esto convierte al mundo entero en un estado sin fronteras y en una Humanidad Unida. Pero existe una enorme diferencia entre convertirse en uno de nosotros y copropietario igualitario de nuestro gobierno, y reclamar el derecho de santuario entre nosotros. La ciudadanía se refiere al derecho al voto y los derechos que se derivan de nuestras leyes y los poderes que hemos asumido, pero también a responsabilidades específicas. El santuario se refiere a los derechos humanos universales que no provienen de ningún gobierno, sino de nuestra condición humana, y que ningún gobierno puede negar con justicia.
La política es el arte de equilibrar y negociar estos conjuntos de derechos interdependientes y paralelos: los derechos legales de los ciudadanos y los derechos inherentes de los seres humanos, de modo que las libertades de nadie puedan negar las de ningún otro.
Estonia ofrece una solución interesante a la naturaleza discontinua de un conjunto dual de derechos: ofrecer ciudadanía virtual o residencia electrónica y un Estado sin fronteras. La idea misma de nacionalidad se transforma cuando una nación se encarna en los derechos de sus ciudadanos, en lugar de definirse por sus fronteras. Juegos sin Fronteras de Peter Gabriel se convierte en un canto no a los horrores de las guerras eternas universalizadas, sino a la liberación del uso social de la fuerza al abandonar las colinas donde ondeamos nuestras banderas, incluidas las banderas de nuestra piel.
Como escribí en mi publicación del 16 de marzo de 2020, Muros de Odio, Tiranía e Imperio: Las Fronteras Globales de Estados Unidos: Ante la creciente conciencia global del miedo a la pandemia del coronavirus, se hace evidente que este es un factor desencadenante natural de estrés, paralelo a uno artificial, el de las fronteras y las crisis de refugiados, en sus comportamientos y efectos en nuestro entorno social y político, como palanca para las tiranías nacionalistas y fascistas de fuerza y control en la subversión de la democracia y la transformación de nuestro mundo en una vasta prisión. El miedo abrumador y generalizado es una condición necesaria de los regímenes autoritarios, así como de la violencia y el uso de la fuerza social en general. Este miedo, junto con la sumisión a la autoridad, puede considerarse una causa fundamental de la enfermedad del poder, en el sentido en que Tomás de Aquino argumentó la causalidad y el ser: «Si no hay una causa fundamental, entonces el universo es como una gran cadena con muchos eslabones; cada eslabón se sostiene por el eslabón superior, pero la cadena entera no se sostiene por nada».
La autoridad y el miedo también nos alienan de nosotros mismos, nos deshumanizan y nos mercantilizan, como lo hace el capitalismo en su forma externa; pues se trata del robo de nuestra identidad y poder por parte de quienes pretenden esclavizarnos.
La primera consecuencia del surgimiento de la autoridad y el desempoderamiento de sus sujetos es la patología moderna de la desconexión; y este es el vínculo que une a la autoridad y la tiranía, y su punto débil. Aquí es donde la resistencia y la revolución deben actuar para romper el nudo de sistemas interdependientes que se refuerzan mutuamente y que nos roban nuestra humanidad y nuestra libertad. Debemos construir puentes y no muros, unión y no aislamiento, unidad y no división, y forjar un mundo sin fronteras y una sociedad libre de iguales.
On this day fifty four years ago the prisoners of Attica rebelled against the dehumanizing and horrific conditions in which they were held, and against the authority of the carceral state to subjugate its citizens as an instrument of white supremacist terror.
The Rebellion was swiftly and with great brutality repressed by the government, but it will never be forgotten nor its spirit erased by the people of America for whom it remains a glorious symbol of liberty and the unconquered will to resist tyranny and terror.
What has changed in over fifty years of resistance to the systems and structures of racism and unequal power, our police and prisons? Only this; the methods of surveillance and thought control are now pervasive and endemic, and have achieved a level of sophistication which obviates the need for lynching and arson to enforce hegemonic monopolies of wealth, power, and privilege held by racial and patriarchal elites.
We live now within Jeremy Benthem’s Panopticon, the state as a prison and system of control through total surveillance, originally designed as a model for Czarist Russia and realized by big data, propaganda disguised as news, and the profit scheme of social media to commodify and influence its users.
Who stood with Trump during his inauguration, backing his play to subvert democracy? Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and the Troll King himself, Twitter’s Elon Musk, whose platform created Trump and whose wealth purchased him the Presidency.
America has become an Attica of invisible cells, and we are all its captives.
What them may we learn from the Attica Rebellion?
The Attica Rebellion was an iconic moment of triumph over tyranny, and recalls its historical parallels in the three principal Jewish revolts in death camps during the Second World War; the Sonderkommando Revolt of 7 October 1944 at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Sobibor Revolt of 14 October 1943, and the Treblinka Revolt of 2 August 1943; but Attica was not an affirmation of our universal humanity and those rights which proceed from it by prisoners of war or genocide held by a monstrous enemy, but by our fellow citizens held by the unjust authority of our own government. The true historical parallels of Attica are the 250 American slave revolts including Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1836, the 1811 Revolt led by Charles Deslondes, the Amistad Rebellion, and Gabriel Prosser’s Rebellion of 1800. In terms of causes, scale, and the brutality of repression and number of deaths the American parallel among prison revolts is the New Mexico State Penitentiary Revolt of February 2 1980.
Prison revolts are slave revolts.
The Attica Rebellion exposes the lie at the heart of our Justice system and America; the claim to equality and impartial justice blind to race, gender, and other divisions and categories of exclusionary otherness. It is a system which originates in the collapse of Reconstruction and the political subversion of Abolitionist values as a strategy of racist and capitalist elites to re-enslave Black people as prison bond labor and has instrumentalized the American state as a machine for turning people into a resource for the profit of others; an engine of capitalist and racist dehumanization and commodification.
And today the carceral state reaches its apotheosis of depravity as a tyranny of totalitarian force and control, as absolute as any historical monarchy, empire, or dictatorship, having transformed itself through alignment and interdependence with the imperial militarism and counterinsurgency model of policing which seized America in its talons in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, a national trauma and disruptive event which has challenged all our values.
The carceral state enforces an unjust system, and we are all its captives.
We have learned the wrong lessons from our enemies, from the Confederacy which was a human trafficking syndicate that declared itself a nation and from the Nazis whose atrocities define the limits of the human.
America has embraced policies of force and control which have shaped us to the purposes of terror and achieved for our enemies in the ambiguity of our victories the goals and objectives they have no power to force us to; the Fall of America as the primary guarantor of universal human rights and democracy, and a beacon of hope to the world.
The Torch of Liberty is shadowed by the fascist tyranny which seized us in the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024 and now threatens to do so again under the figurehead of Traitor Trump, and we must resist the darkness and its atavisms of fear and hate, rekindle and propagate the wildfires of freedom, and carry onward into the future our hope for a better humankind.
Shawn Gude offers a precis of the Attica Rebellion in Jacobin; “On the eve of what would become the US’s most famous prison uprising, the inmates of Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York endured deplorable conditions. Their infections went untreated, their teeth fell out due to negligible dental care — they even lacked adequate access to soap and toilet paper.
On September 9, 1971, these pent-up grievances simmered over when roughly 1,300 inmates took over the prison. For four days they were effectively in charge. They made demands on the state (better medical care, fewer limits on their freedom of expression, immunity from prosecution for rebelling), negotiated with mediators brought in at their behest (including, briefly, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale), and generally asserted their worth as human beings.
But whatever the prisoners gained in those few days was quickly pulverized by the brute force of the state. Seeking dignity, they instead unleashed the wrath of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.
On the morning of September 13, state law enforcement streamed into the prison by the hundreds, and killed by the dozens. When they were finished, thirty-nine men (twenty-nine prisoners and ten state employees) lay dead. And for the inmates who survived (especially rebellion leaders like Frank “Big Black” Smith), ghastly torture and severe intimidation soon followed.
Top officials never faced legal reprisals for the atrocities at Attica. They shielded themselves from prosecution, and did their best to squirrel away evidence about what happened on that autumn morning.
Yet Attica lives. It’s still on the lips of anti-prison activists and striking inmates, still in the panicked nightmares of law-and-order types. The American carceral state, built up feverishly in the rebellion’s wake, rests in its shadow.”
The retaking of the prison ordered by New York Governor Rockefeller is described by University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson in her interview; “So he unleashes nearly six hundred men, troopers and corrections officers who are armed to the teeth with their own personal weapons, and weapons that are being passed out at the supply truck without regard for serial numbers or identification of the specific officers. Then these guys rip off their identification badges, so that they can do whatever they want once they get inside.
And it is one of the most horrific assaults in US history. The doctors that go in later liken it to My Lai, to a Civil War painting, to Vietnam writ large, because it is nothing but carnage. And, by the way, this is after they had already doused the yard in CS gas (which is a powder that clings to your nasal passages). People were sick, they were retching, they were already disabled when the shooting began.”
Attica Prison Uprising Aftermath/ Richard Kaplan CBS & The History Channel
The Tragedy At Attica: Prison Riot/ CBS 1991 special report
In our current moment of book burnings and bans, rewritten histories and authorized identities, silencing and erasure of the witness of history and the repression of dissent, thought control and the electoral infiltration, subversion, and capture of public institutions crucial to the mission of democracy and the manufacture of an informed electorate able to question authority as co-owners of the state, our interdependent public schools and libraries have become a frontline in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.
What is a library for?
Libraries share with public schools the purpose of creating citizens, of education in its original Greek meaning to bring out the truth of ourselves, together with two other primary and crucial functions in a democracy; to provide free access to learning as both rights of information and a free press, which also parallel equality as annihilation of class and access to opportunity as a seizure of power, and to provide inclusive and diverse representations of self as revolutionary struggle against authorized identities, divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of race, gender, faith, and nationality.
At the heart of this process of identity construction lies the curation of reading lists and a personal library which represents and defines us in ways we have chosen for ourselves.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
Memory, history, identity; the selves we choose among the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Here is a central problem of both libraries and the construction of ourselves as assemblages of stories; how shall we taxonomize, structure, and assign relative value to the texts we gather, in our personae and in our libraries as memory palaces? And in a realm of ideas and their consequences which is chaotic, shifting, ephemeral, impermanent, and full of dyadic opposites, relative truths, mutual interdependence and change?
Before all else, who decides? Public libraries and schools confront us with all of the issues about how to be human together which create, inform, motivate, and shape human societies, and democracies most especially as negotiated meaning and value.
This is why the curation of personal libraries and unauthorized reading lists are revolutionary acts, and a praxis of the values of democracy.
In aid of this process of decolonization and becoming autonomous I share with you now some ideas from writing in Aeon on How to Nurture and Grow a Personal Library, and a link to the wonderful community of librarians at LibraryThing.
As I wrote in preface to my reading lists, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others. Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, or submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the ideas of other people and from the force and control of the state.
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2022, On Libraries and Identity as a Ground of Struggle; “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” So Heinrich Heine has taught us, in his lyric drama of 1823, Almansor: A Tragedy. As described by Professor Shlomo Avineri in a lecture at CEU; “Almansor” is a tragic love story between an Arab man and Donna Clara, a Moroccan woman who’s forced to convert from Islam to Christianity. Taking place in Granada in 1492, the tragedy depicts the burning of the Qu’ran, the act that prompts the sentence now engraved in the ground of Berlin’s Opernplatz commemorating the horrifying book burning of 1933.
Heine’s lyrical poetry was well-loved in Germany, his most famous poem “Lorelei” even appeared in a collection of German folk songs, although the poet’s name was given as Anonymous. His books, together with the works of Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kastner, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann and many other “un-German” authors, were also burned on May 10, 1933.”
Why was this early work of German Romanticism silenced and erased from the canon of literature for over a century? As a wiki article describes; “The performance turned into a fiasco and had to be canceled after tumultuous scenes in the auditorium. Since there are no immediate newspaper reports of the event, the trigger is not entirely clear and leaves room for speculation ranging from personal intrigue to anti-Semitism. According to Manfred Windfuhr, editor of the Düsseldorf Heine edition, the most likely explanation is the anecdote that the actor of Almansor Eduard Schütz later reported. According to this, a viewer asked about the author of the play during the last transformation towards the end of the performance and was whispered “Der Jude Heine” in response. In the erroneous assumption that an Israelite money changer of the same name from Braunschweig wrote the tragedy, he then exclaimed: “What? shall we listen to the silly Jew’s nonsense? We don’t want to tolerate that any longer! Let’s knock out the piece! ”And thus triggered the protests. simple confusion of names.”
Heine’s personal friends and influences included Goethe, Schlegel, Dumas, Hegel, and Marx, and his direct models were the world’s first historical novel Las Guerras de Granada by Ginés Pérez de Hita, which awaits translation into English, The Magic Ring by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and the beautiful Arabic and Persian romance Layla and Majnoun which has been reimagined in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by the Afghan author Khaled Hosseini.
In Almansor, Heine writes in reference to the book burning of 1499 by the future Grand Inquisitor in the wake of the fall of Al-Andalus and the betrayal by the Catholic monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragón of the treaty which guaranteed freedom of religion for all, during which thousands of books were destroyed, including the Qu’ran and other works of Islamic, Jewish, and classical Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, history, and science, excepting only medical works from the flames. It seems they weren’t quite as crazy as our own science deniers and anti-vaccine Luddites, but nearly so, and the parallels do not end there.
And so, we come to this; the Republican Party, in public declaration of their origins and traditions in the Inquisition and the Nazis, have chosen to launch a national campaign of book burnings and bans and are waging a combined electoral and media campaign to monopolize public school and library boards to authorize identities and repress dissent. And only our public solidarity and will to resist subjugation stands between us and the year 2022 being remembered in history with those of 1499 and 1933.
As I wrote in my post of December 14 2021, Subversion of Democracy: Case of the Texas Book Ban;
Remaining on the Texas Public School Required Reading List:
Lynchings and Other Family Gatherings: the Joy of Community
Keep Your Pimp Hand Strong: Negotiating Gender Roles
Only Our Kind Are Truly Human: Why Values and Morals Only Apply To Us
Texas bans books from public schools and libraries in subversion of democracy and our values of freedom and equality of all humankind in an attempt to enforce imperiled hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege historically and systemically constructed along divisions of race and gender and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The multifront assault on freedom of information and expression is about patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror under the fig leaves of Gideonite fundamentalist Christian Identity sectarianism and jingoistic nationalism, as it has always been.
The last time the state had the right to control its slave populations through access to learning civilization collapsed and was lost for a thousand years while the Church burned books which threated elite power, and we must be vigilant lest we give those who would enslave us the right and power to do so yet again, and cast the world into a Dark Age from which we may never recover.
As written by Ryan Cooper in The Week, in an article entitled The forgotten history of Republican book banning; “A conservative stock character is making a comeback: the book banner. For the past few years, Republicans have pretended they’re defending free speech and free inquiry in schools against censorious liberals with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. In reality, conservatives have a mile-long history of trying to suppress the teaching of books they find uncomfortable.
That record has resurfaced in the Virginia gubernatorial race, where Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin recently ran an ad in which a woman named Laura Murphy complained about not being able to dictate what was taught at her local high school. Murphy describes the issue as explicit material being shown to children without parental sign-off, but there’s much more to the story than the ad let on: Back in 2013, Murphy told The Washington Post that her son Blake (now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee) had night terrors after being required to read Toni Morrison’s book Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Beloved.
Murphy isn’t the only Republican with this censorious impulse. The American Library Association maintains an incomplete list of attempted book-banning events in recent history, and in the large majority of cases for which a motivation is explained, it is conservative: Right-wing parents in Columbus, Ohio, tried to ban Catcher in the Rye in schools in 1963 because it was “anti-white.” Other parents challenged The Grapes of Wrath in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1991 because it invoked God and Jesus in a “vain and profane manner.” Slaughterhouse-Five was suppressed in Oakland County, Michigan, in 1972, in a case in which a circuit judge called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” Those are just three of dozens of examples.
Now, liberals have done the same thing on occasion, typically targeting books which contain racial slurs, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the bulk of book banning incidents — parents complaining about sexual content, violence, skepticism of Christianity, cursing, or the history of racism and slavery — are straight out of the Moral Majority politics of the 1980s and 1990s. That habit seemed to vanish for awhile when Republicans nominated a thrice-divorced, credibly accused rapist for president. Now it’s coming back.
In recent months, Republican legislatures have passed de facto prohibitions of teaching the history of racism across the country. As a result, a Tennessee teacher was fired for assigning Ta-Nehisi Coates, while a Texas school board recently apologized for instructing teachers to present “opposing” views on the Holocaust while trying to obey a Republican law on curriculum content. Don’t let the brief reprieve fool you: They were always like this.”
As written by Amy Brady in Lithub, The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America: On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas; “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.
One way ABFE fights book banning is to partner with other organizations in the publishing industry (including their parent organization, the American Booksellers Association) to host Banned Books Week, a seven-day celebration that takes place in bookstores and libraries all over the United States. This year, the event runs from September 25th to October 1st with a focus on “diversity,” a factor behind many book challenges. “There were over 300 book challenges in 2015,” said Chris Finan, Director of ABFE, in an interview. “And themes of race, ethnicity, and sexual preference have been a large part of why those books got challenged.”
On its website, ABFE acknowledges that diversity is difficult to define. One definition that has informed their thinking comes from the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom: Diversity includes “non-white main and/or secondary characters; LGBT main and/or secondary characters; disabled main and/or secondary characters; issues about race or racism; LGBT issues; issues about religion, which encompass in this situation the Holocaust and terrorism; issues about disability and/or mental illness; non-Western settings, in which the West is North America and Europe.”
Historically, other reasons for banning books include: sexual imagery, violence, and any content considered obscene. Indeed, arguments over obscenity—how its defined and how that definition relates to the First Amendment—have been at the heart of banned-book controversies throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Many historians point to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the first book in the United States to experience a ban on a national scale. The Confederacy barred the book from stores not only for its pro-abolitionist agenda, but because it aroused heated debates about slavery (some historians argue that the book catalyzed the Civil War).
A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.
These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.
In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”
The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.
In the decades that followed, public officials would continue to challenge the Court’s 1957 definition of obscenity, including Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, whose personal definition famously began and ended with the declaration “I know it when I see it.” But in general, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a simultaneous drop in instances of book bans and rise in more explicit art. Artists and authors felt freer than ever to experiment. Consumers were more willing than ever to un-clutch their pearls and engage with racy material. Sex was mainstream in the novels of John Updike and Erica Jong. Then America elected Ronald Reagan.
“Reagan didn’t run on a campaign of anti-pornography,” Finan clarifies. “But he nevertheless ran an election that depowered those who fought for First Amendment freedoms. [His] election encouraged challenges by people who were unhappy with books in schools and libraries that were increasingly realistic in their depiction of life.” The number of challenges to books made by school boards and libraries rose dramatically: “Suddenly we were facing 700-800 challenges a year,” says Finan. In 1982, the ALA responded to this renewed culture of censorship with Banned Books Week. “The point of the event was to get people to understand that these books weren’t pornographic or excessively violent, but simply depicting the real world…and that many were classics of American literature,” Finan says. “Banned Books Week was the first real [American] celebration of the freedom to read.”
In those early days, Banned Books Week consisted almost entirely of libraries and bookstores hanging posters and displaying banned books. “Those displays were enormously effective communication tools,” says Finan, “because people would wander over and find out that the books they love had been challenged. Suddenly they understood that censorship isn’t just about fringe literature.” Today, those displays remain a centerpiece of Banned Books Week, but partnering sponsors are also seeking to involve readers in other ways. The Washington, DC Public Library, for example, hosts a city-wide scavenger hunt of banned books that began on September 1st and will continue until the end of the month. The books, which have been wrapped in black paper printed with words like “SMUT” or “FILTHY,” have been hidden on shelves in libraries and bookstores all over DC.
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), another sponsor of Banned Books Week, has published a handbook that lists which comic books have been censored and outlines what readers can do to fight censorship. “Since 2011, at least one graphic novel has been included on ALA’s annual list of the ten most frequently challenged books,” said Betsy Gomez, Editorial Director of CBLDF, in an interview. “In 2015, CBLDF fought more than 24 attempts to ban books, including the comics Drama, This One Summer, The Sandman, Fun Home, Persepolis, Palomar. So far, in 2016, CBLDF has defended a dozen books.” The handbook includes programming ideas for educators and libraries to engage their communities in discussions about banned books throughout the year.
Organizations with no official connection to Banned Books Week are also getting involved. Wordier Than Thou, an open mic storytelling group in Pinellas Park, Florida, began presenting last year an annual burlesque show inspired by selected banned books. “[The show] definitely gets people talking about literature,” wrote Tiffany Razzano, founder of Wordier Than Thou, in an email. “[Last year], throughout the night people would come up to me and tell me about their favorite banned book.” The show, which features area burlesque favorite Mayven Missbehavin’, makes thematic sense: “It’s supposedly offensive material [interpreted by] scantily clad women performing classic burlesque stripteases,” she writes. For the sake of surprise, Razzano wouldn’t disclose which books would be featured this year. But last year’s performance included Gone with the Wind, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter.
It’s rare today for a book banning case to make it to the federal courts, but many challenges to books are still taking place on the state and local levels. At the time of this writing, ABFE has joined a protest against the Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, which seeks to remove Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park and other titles from students’ voluntary summer reading lists. The proposed removal is “particularly outrageous,” says Finan, because the books aren’t a part of the school’s required curriculum.
If school administrators are attempting to limit even elective reading, what does the future hold for students who want access to all books, classic and contemporary—books that might broaden their understanding of the world? “The problem of book banning hasn’t gone away, and it probably won’t,” Finan laments. “There are always going to be struggles over the proper limits to free speech.”
Legacy Libraries are the libraries of historical people (as well as a few institutions), entered into LibraryThing by dedicated members working from a variety of sources, including published bibliographies, auction catalogs, library holdings, manuscript lists, wills and probate inventories, and personal inspection of extant copies.
The project began with Thomas Jefferson’s library, which a small group of volunteers began cataloging in September 2007 (and is currently being enhanced and maintained by librarians at Monticello). Since then, more than 150 additional Legacy Libraries have been completed, with another 50 currently in progress and many more proposed for later addition. Subjects include everyone from Samuel Johnson to Marilyn Monroe, Carl Sandburg to Marie Antoinette. Once the libraries have been entered into LibraryThing, it’s easy to see how Legacy Libraries compare with your own, or with each other.
In the shadows of three ongoing wars in which America is complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing and genocide, in Ukraine, Palestine, and the undeclared war against Venezuela which now includes the bombing of an unidentified fishing boat in international waters for no reason other than its nation of origin, the last two of those fought on both American and foreign fronts in the repression of dissent on our university campuses and in the ICE white supremacist terror force abducting and imprisoning without trial all nonwhite persons but most especially targeting Venezuelans, I write now in memorial of the lost cause of secular democracy in Afghanistan but also now in America.
We are now a captured state of the Fourth Reich and a client state of Russia which I call Vichy America, to disambiguate the Trump regime from any legitimate American state. As Afghanistan was under American imperial occupation and dominion during the longest war in our history, so are we now, and much of our future in the Age of Tyrants which has begun may be read in its dark mirror.
The Last Stand of liberty was lost at Panjshir because Pakistan played the role of Russia in America, and while they won a Sunni buffer state between themselves and the Dominion of Iran just as we did in Syria for the Arab-American Alliance, Russia in the capture of our nation through propaganda, dark money, and interference in our elections has won a free hand in the conquest of Ukraine.
And though I fought the Taliban with everything I could bring to the game, their victory over American foreign colonialism against vast and seemingly unstoppable force and power must give us hope that one day, too, we will win our independence, sovereignty, and our future.
As I wrote in my post of September 8 2021, With the Lions of Panjshir: A Notebook of Resistance; I greet you from a place of great darkness and beauty, beyond all limits of the human and boundaries of the Forbidden, among the unknowns marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value. Here ancient truths are tested, and new truths are forged with the limitless possibilities of becoming human. Of these truths I speak to you as a witness of history; of wonderful things, terrible things.
It is a place wherein the flaws of our humanity are reflected in the brokenness of the world, but one in which true heroism is possible and the sacred wounds we bear can open us to the pain of others, where the redemptive power of love reveals the truth of ourselves and our interdependence as our brothers keepers. Is this not the beauty of humankind?
The best and most accurate summation of the Battle for Panjshir thus far is written by Santosh Chaubey for Reuters, Resistance is Futile: Why Panjshir Falling to the Taliban is Inevitable; “Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan, the last province to resist the Taliban’s complete control of Afghanistan, has fallen as per the claims made by the Islamist force. But if we see the genesis of the Taliban’s emergence this time, we find that the Panjshir valley resistance is already a lost battle with no international support coming to the rescue and sustain it against the combined strength of the fundamentalist outfit and Pakistan.
Ahmad Massoud, the Panjshir leader and head of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRFA), and Amrullah Saleh, the caretaker President of the previous Afghan government, are both appealing to get some international support for the challengers. But with major powers like the US, Russia, China, Germany and Britain and the United Nations willing to give the Taliban a chance if they mend their ways, the NRFA, it seems, is going to be just a minor resistance group localised to a limited area if it continues with its efforts.
The United Nations Security Council recently adopted a resolution on Afghanistan. While Russia and China abstained in the vote on the resolution sponsored by the US, UK and France, the message was very clear that the international community had no problem with a Taliban-led government if the Islamist outfit ensured that Afghanistan would not become a terror hub again, like it was under the 1990s Taliban government regime: naturally with additional norms like upholding human rights concerns of women, children and minorities.
(Here I append my own commentary: Norms which like the eradication of Islamist terror are likely unenforceable; fig leaves of legitimacy.)
Clearly, the international community is looking towards a peaceful political settlement this time in the country that has seen civil wars for over 40 years and is willing to give the Taliban a chance with their rapid takeover after the withdrawal of the US and other international troops that showed the powerlessness of the previous Afghan government and inoperability of the security mechanism developed by America across the country since 2001.
Afghanistan has been a graveyard for many countries. The USSR invaded it in December 1979 but faced a humiliating loss after a decade of war much in the same way as the US and other international forces have seen in the last 20 years. While the Soviet Union’s withdrawal led to a bitter tribal war between different Mujahideen commanders with no alternative arrangement set in place and saw the emergence of the Taliban, this time the international community is much more concerned with terror becoming the biggest global threat and its deep correlation with Afghanistan in the past.
To sum it up, the international community is not going to encourage another movement in Afghanistan this time like it did for the anti-Taliban resistance Northern Alliance in the 1990s – until the Taliban fail and go back to the ways of the 1990s to become a radical, fundamentalist insurgent group again that harbours terrorists and threatens global security.
Though the Taliban have denied this, emboldened by Pakistan’s direct support, they now claim to have completely captured the landlocked valley. As confirmed by Ahmad Massoud, Pakistan bombed the valley to give the Taliban an upper hand over the NRFA fighters who were bravely taking on the Taliban forces for the last three weeks.
With direct air support through drone bombing, Pakistan also air-dropped its special forces to fight alongside the Taliban. And though the Taliban have assured the international community that they will not allow Afghanistan to become a terror hub again and will not allow terrorists to use the nation’s soil to plan and perpetrate terror attacks in other countries, the Taliban force at Panjshir valley also includes al-Qaeda fighters.
The correlation between ISI chief Hamid Faiz’s landing in Kabul on September 4 and the Taliban’s claim of complete capture of Panjshir province on September 6 can’t be ignored.
Though the NRFA says the Taliban claim is false, releasing a tweet this morning that says the “Taliban’s claim of occupying Panjshir is false and NRFA forces are present in all strategic positions across the valley to continue the fight, assuring the people of Afghanistan that the struggle against the Taliban and their partners will continue until justice and freedom prevails”, the fact is the NRFA lost its main voice and spokesperson Fahim Dashti in the battle on Sunday while Amrullah Saleh is missing and is reportedly in Tajikistan and Ahmad Massoud has fled.
Panjshir valley resisted the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and the Taliban takeover between 1996 and 2001. But the difference between then and now is the sweeping capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban all across the country, in 33 of the 34 provinces. Just Panjshir was left, but with claims made by the Taliban releasing video clips showing their fighters raising the Taliban flag on Bazarak, Panjshir’s capital city, and capturing Ahmad Massoud’s house and patrolling the valley’s streets, this province too has largely fallen.
The Taliban were not able to capture the northern areas of the country so effectively the last time, in the 1990s, as the Northern Alliance and many ethnic minorities inhabiting these areas fought well with international support. But by co-opting ethnic minorities like the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens and even Hazaras of this area this time by including commanders of these tribes, the Taliban have swept the entire northern Afghanistan area, including the border posts.
The local leadership of Panjshir previously had access to the supply routes to get essential items and arms and ammunition even during the war phase. But this time, these supply routes are under Taliban control, and while controlling the narrow entrance to the valley, they have blocked the roads and have ensured that food, medical and other emergency services supplied to the valley are entirely cut off.”
There are some claims in this article clearly written by someone who is here in Panjshir which I would amend; most importantly, the Taliban have occupied government offices and other parts of the capital of both symbolic and tactical value, but this is not the same as control when the NRF remains armed and can strike at will throughout the province.
Both the government of Afghanistan in exile and Massoud himself remain secure and defiant, having escaped to Tajikistan while we fought diversionary and rearguard actions as well as the main battle on Sunday in which Fahim Dashti was killed, and the fighters of the NRF themselves are like lions with an arena full of prey to hunt; nothing frightens them, not even aerial bombardment, and though they can be killed they cannot be defeated.
As the Taliban have come to their home, the defenders of Panjshir will return the courtesy and come to theirs in Kabul. No program of pacification can entirely crush resistance in this mazelike series of over twenty valleys and goatpaths over towering cliffs in which perhaps a quarter million people live; and it is an hour’s drive from Kabul, where the NRF and other allied sleeper cells, rollover suicide teams, local reaction forces, and infiltration agents within the Taliban and other groups, await their moment of retribution. No conflict in these conditions can be final.
Nor can any victory here be described as total; Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires for many reasons, among them the shifting and multiple loyalties of its people, not merely a checkerboard of traditional ethnic divisions and independent warlords but also an operational environment wherein an entire military culture of armed and trained fighters follow whoever best serves their interests and from antiquity pursue war as a profession, change the ideologies and goals of their factions or join others opportunistically, and many competing organizations share members or have infiltrated each other so thoroughly it has become impossible to tell the wolves from the sheep.
The Taliban has seized Afghanistan; but the Taliban, cohesive through its origins in the fifty students of Mullah Mohammad Omar who founded it in 1994 in Kandahar to restore sharia law, is today united by only four things; first and foremost resistance to American imperialism and colonial dominion and the Deobandi ideology which recasts Islamic faith as anticolonial liberation struggle as it was developed in Delhi in resistance to the British Empire and instrumentalized by Pakistan through its mosques and madrasas; secondly the historical narratives of victimization and blood debt of a decades long anticolonial war of independence which have forged a national identity represented by the Taliban, third the personal charisma, authority, and lines of patronage of its leaders and the direct loyalties of their forces, who are often also clan and tribal leaders with the authority of kings, and fourth unifying institutions and authority such as the Quetta Shura command in Pakistan and the Haqqani Network de facto intelligence service. Having a secure base of operations across an open border with its patron Pakistan has been crucial to its success, but the Taliban is both a proxy of Pakistan, who has recreated Afghanistan as a Sunni buffer state and key ally between herself and Iran, and a genuine independence movement.
These are its strengths; the weaknesses of the Taliban are its ethnic balkanization and chaotic factional multiplicity which make exercising direct control of its own forces problematic. The Taliban remains a theocracy and unifying institution, but with a feudal army, where a nobleman commands his own sworn fighters and obeys his own direct lord but that lord cannot command his soldiers personally, not a modern one with a unifying chain of command. When the situation begins with three major competing organizations of Sunni fundamentalism, Taliban, Islamic State, and al Qaeda, locked in a titanic and ferocious life or death struggle for dominion whose fighters are often members of more than one group, and becomes complex with dozens or possibly hundreds of factions, to claim that anyone is in control or can rule here in Afghanistan is absurd. And here lies the great opportunity which Chaos offers us; to seize our power from any authority who would subjugate us.
The call of Chaos is simply one which I cannot resist, though I am here in Panjshir specifically because of a debt of honor I owe to the father of its current warlord Ahmad Massoud, the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud. So as the Pineapple Express run off the books by special operations forces to smuggle their former partners out of the country during the debacle of the Kabul airlift neared completion, I was organizing an expedition across the Khyber Pass from Peshawar, the heart of the Taliban’s government in exile and bastion of its Pakistani Intelligence handlers and advisors as well as the gateway to the world’s largest arms black market and its tribal borderlands.
Panjshir is lost, and with it the immediate hope of independence from Taliban theocratic tyranny in Afghanistan as well as the American colonial imperialism the Taliban has freed the nation from. This is a predictable phase of anticolonial liberation struggle and a form of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes, as we are sadly familiar with in the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mugabe, and so many other revolutions which become tyrannies, though there are special and unique conditions here in Afghanistan and limits to the comparison of theocracy to any form of liberation struggle arising from secular Humanism as embodied in the American and French Revolutions on the one hand and the Russian and other communist revolutions on the other.
What must be done, as Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different results? For now we must work to bring change and restore democracy and our universal human rights to a sovereign and independent Afghanistan, and move from throwing stones to throwing words. Before all else is this; the people must be co-owners of the state who have chosen to be human together in ways which it embodies, and not its slaves.
I will fight on, for the liberty and humanity of the peoples of Afghanistan and the world, wherever men hunger to be free.
On September 5 2021 I wrote; Confusion during fighting in Panjshir; the Taliban have been lured into a trap in the valley and cannot escape while the resistance control the passes. Taliban mountaineers have been captured attempting to climb the cliffs and seize gun positions. But the road north leads not to resupply or transshipment, but to Taliban held areas, and communications are sporadic. Panjshir is isolated from support, no help is coming from the international community, and the fight now rests with mobile teams behind Taliban lines; significant forces await a route to bring aid. Meanwhile the Taliban in the valley, including elite units and the Red Faction shock troops, are fighting ferociously for survival, as are the people of Panjshir. This is a battle of mutual annihilation, glorious and terrible; it remains to be seen whether it is also futile.
In a post of September 6 2021, I wrote; Taliban has captured the capital of Panjshir using Pakistani drone bombing and airdropped elite Pakistani units, and Massoud and the government in exile have fled to Tajikistan. Now the game has become one of Occupation and Resistance.
To a friend’s post bidding good riddance to Massoud on the basis of his father’s personal moral failings as a CIA allied warlord implicated in sex trafficking, slave labor, and the heroin trade, I replied; No one anticipated Pakistani drone bombardment and direct support with airlifted special forces units, nor do I wish to fight Pakistan as they helped us win the independence of Kashmir from the 1990-1993 invasion and brigandage by India, an independence which lasted until 2019, and allied with me personally in circumstances of horror and desperation; I have met among the enemy a number of those I originally met as allies in Kashmir thirty years ago and other places since, including Pakistan Intelligence Services operatives now advising Taliban commanders they have cultivated and worked with as key assets since the mujahideen period of the Soviet invasion, and their descendants. I spent an evening at a campfire dining with some of them and am not mistaken; they certainly knew me.
Of course you are right that local constructions of values including ideas of gender equality and freedom do not align or share much common ground with ours, and opium is the currency here; America’s soldiers were de facto enforcers of our client warlords control of the heroin market and guards of the opium fields. I do not mean to suggest that there are good and bad sides to heckle or cheer on; we are all bad guys here.
Why am I here? Maybe I just like lost causes, to quote a despicable villain and monstrous perpetrator of sexual and racist terror from Gone With The Wind, a character who nonetheless had some great lines. This world we humans have built for ourselves shapes us to the service of power and its authoritarian systems and structures of inequality and elite hegemonies of weaIth, power, and privilege, offers few innocents to champion, and as George Bernard Shaw suggests in Pygmalion with the magnificent character of Eliza’s father; the requirement of virtue to merit help, whether it be charity or solidarity of action, is a false dichotomy which serves to perpetuate unequal power and maintain hegemonic elites.
I have found but one general principle as a guide to disambiguate when we must resist by any means necessary and when we must forebear the social use of force, and it is not in defense of the innocent as this places a moral burden of judgement on victims of unjust authority, and often there are no innocent.
No, my test for the use of force is simply this; who holds the power?
When is it good to be bad?
In Nietzsche’s formulation, how do we hunt monsters without becoming monsters ourselves?
To these questions I give a hunter’s reply; I am not a good man, who forebears to challenge unjust authority, nor do other people’s ideas of virtue interest me if they take away our power to resist evil. I am far more useful to you than that, if you are among those who engage in struggle against unequal power, theocracy and imperial dominion, tyranny, state terror, carceral states of force and control, fascism of all kinds, violations of our universal human rights and of our ideals as a free society of equals which include a secular state, liberty, equality, truth, and justice.
I am a bad man who is on your side.
For myself, the only thing you need to merit help is to need help, and the test of the use of force and violence is a simple question; who holds power? I am a revolutionary for whom the seizure of power is about autonomy and the restoration of balance. I am on the side of those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth where ever they may be, and I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
I celebrate the victory of the people of Afghanistan over the American Empire even if that takes the form of the Taliban for now, and have argued for our recognition of them as a legitimate independence movement and the government of Afghanistan. But I cannot support the genocidal conquest and assimilation of one ethnic group by another, nor the violation of the sovereignty and independence of any state claimed by another. There is but one legitimacy which any state may claim; the will of its people.
No one may with justice or natural right speak or act in another’s name without their consent; thus Rousseau teaches us, and it is this principle of Natural Law which founded America in the Declaration of Independence.
How shall we answer those who would enslave us?
This we must ever resist, beyond hope of victory or even survival. And in resistance and refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free, for nothing can take from us our refusal of consent to be governed, mastered, and enslaved.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable; let us bring the Chaos, and be free.
Panjshir: Resistance fighters vow to defend Afghanistan’s final anti-Taliban holdout | AFP
August 16 2024 Anniversary of the Fall of Kabul and Afghanistan
A Journey Along Pakistan’s Historic Khyber Pass (2000)
Peshawar Smugglers’ Market
Counting the Costs: A Reading List for Understanding Afghanistan and America’s Longest War
Afghan Voices: History and Literature By Afghan Authors:
The Essential Rumi, Rumi: the Big Red Book, Coleman Barks translator
Games Without Rules: history of the Afghans, Destiny Disrupted: a history of the world through Islamic eyes, Tamim Ansary
The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, The Patience Stone, Earth and Ashes, A Curse on Dostoevsky, Atiq Rahim
A Woman Among Warlords, Malalai Joya
The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland, Saira Shah
Kara Kush, The Sufis, The Way of the Sufi, Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching Stories of the Sufi Masters Over the Past Thousand Years, Caravan of Dreams, The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin, The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin, Idries Shah
General Histories of the American- Afghanistan Wars:
The American War in Afghanistan: A History, Carter Malkasian
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Michael Griffin
In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, Seth G. Jones
The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall
Swimming With Warlords: A Dozen-Year Journey Across the Afghan War, Kevin Sites
A History of America’s War in Afghanistan by People Who Fought It:
Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, Doug Stanton
Not A Good Day To Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, Sean Naylor
Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan, Sean Parnell & John R. Bruning
Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds, Rusty Bradley & Kevin Maurer
The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, Jake Tapper
Roberts Ridge: A Story of Courage and Sacrifice on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan, Malcolm MacPherson
The Chosen Few: A Company of Paratroopers and Its Heroic Struggle to Survive in the Mountains of Afghanistan, Gregg Zoroy
The Hooligans of Kandahar: Not All War Stories are Heroic, Joseph J. Kassabian
American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant, Ann Scott Tyson
And in fiction, there is nothing like William T. Vollman’s Surreal novel of his fight as a volunteer with the mujahideen against the Soviet invasion, You Bright and Risen Angels, referential to the triumvirate of Great Books written about the Second World War, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and John Hawkes’ The Cannibal.
همانطور که در پست خود از سپتامبر 8 2021 نوشتم, با شیرها از Panjshir: نوت بوک مقاومت; من شما را از یک محل تاریکی بزرگ و زیبایی استقبال, فراتر از تمام محدودیت های انسان و مرزهای ممنوع, در میان ناشناخته مشخص شده در اینجا اژدها بر روی نقشه های ما از انسان, معنی, و ارزش.
در اینجا حقایق باستانی آزمایش می شوند، و حقایق جدید با امکانات بی حد و حصر تبدیل شدن به انسان است. از این حقایق من به شما به عنوان شاهد تاریخ صحبت می کنند; از چیزهای شگفت انگیز، چیزهای وحشتناک.
جایی است که در آن عیب های بشریت ما در شکسته شدن جهان منعکس شده است، اما جایی که در آن قهرمان واقعی امکان پذیر است و زخم های مقدسی که ما تحمل می کنیم می تواند ما را به درد دیگران باز کند، جایی که قدرت رستگاری عشق حقیقت خود و استقلال ما را به عنوان برادران حافظ ما آشکار می کند. آیا این زیبایی نوع بشر نیست؟
طالبان دفاتر دولتی و دیگر بخش های پایتخت را هم با ارزش نمادین و هم با ارزش تاکتیکی اشغال کرده اند، اما این همان کنترول زمانی نیست که ان آر اف مسلح باقی بماند و بتواند به خواست خود در سراسر این ولایت حمله کند.
هم دولت افغانستان در تبعید و هم خود مسود همچنان امن و سرپیچی می کنند و جنگجویان خود ان آر اف مانند شیرهایی هستند که عرصه ای پر از شکار دارند؛ هیچ چیز آنها را نمی ترسد، حتی بمباران هوایی، و هر چند آنها را می توان کشته آنها را نمی توان شکست داد.
با آمدن طالبان به خانه شان، مدافعان پانجشیر حسن نیت را پس خواهند داد و به خانه های شان در کابل خواهند آمد. هیچ برنامه ای از اقیانوس آرام به طور کامل می تواند مقاومت در این سری پیچ و خم بیش از بیست دره و بز کوهی بیش از صخره های قوی که در آن شاید یک چهارم میلیون نفر زندگی می کنند خرد;
و این یک ساعت رانندگی از کابل است، جایی که سلول های خواب NRF و تیم های انتحاری رولور، و ماموران نفوذ در درون طالبان و دیگر گروه ها، در انتظار لحظه قصاص خود هستند. هیچ درگیری در این شرایط نمی تواند نهایی باشد.
و نه می توان هر پیروزی در اینجا به عنوان کل توصیف; افغانستان به دلایل زیادی قبرستان امپراتوری ها نامیده می شود که در میان آنها تغییر مکان و وفاداری های متعدد مردمش، نه صرفا یک شطرنجی از تفرقه های قومی سنتی و جنگ سالاران مستقل
اما همچنین یک محیط عملیاتی که در آن کل فرهنگ نظامی از مبارزان مسلح و آموزش دیده به دنبال هر کس که به بهترین وجه در خدمت منافع خود و به دنبال جنگ به عنوان یک حرفه، تغییر نام جناح های خود و یا پیوستن به دیگران فرصت طلبانه، و بسیاری از سازمان های رقیب به اشتراک گذاری اعضای و یا به یکدیگر نفوذ کرده اند تا به طور کامل آن را تبدیل به غیر ممکن است به گرگ ها از گوسفند بگویید.
طالبان افغانستان را تصرف کرده اند؛ اما طالبان، هر چند در ریشه های آن پنجاه دانش آموز ملا محمد عمر که آن را در سال 1994 در قندهار تاسیس شده برای بازگرداندن شریعت، امروز تنها با چهار چیز متحد است؛
اول و مهمتر از همه ایدئولوژی دیوبندی که ایمان اسلامی را به عنوان مبارزه آزادی بخش ضداستعدایی باز می کند، همان طور که در دهلی در مقاومت در برابر امپراتوری بریتانیا توسعه یافته و توسط پاکستان از طریق مسجدها و دانشکده های آن ابزاری شده است؛
دوم روایت های تاریخی قربانی شدن و بدهی خون یک جنگ طولانی ضد استعماری استقلال که هویت ملی را به وجود آورد، سوم کاریزما شخصی، اقتدار، و خطوط حمایت از رهبران آن و وفاداری مستقیم نیروهای خود،
و چهارمین نهاد متحد کننده و اقتدار فرماندهی کویتی در پاکستان و شبکه حقانی در واقع سرویس اطلاعاتی. داشتن یک پایگاه امن عملیات در آن سوی مرز باز با پاکستان حامی اش برای موفقیت آن بسیار مهم بوده است، اما طالبان هم یک طرفدار پاکستان و هم یک جنبش استقلال واقعی است.
این نقاط قوت آن است; ضعف های طالبان بالکانیزاسیون قومی و چندگانگی جناحی آشفته آن است که اعمال کنترل مستقیم نیروهای خود را مشکل ساز می کند. وقتی وضعیت با سه سازمان بزرگ رقیب بنیاد گرایی سنی، طالبان، دولت اسلامی و القاعده آغاز می شود
، در یک زندگی تایتانیک و وحشی و یا مبارزه مرگ برای سلطه که مبارزان اغلب اعضای بیش از یک گروه قفل شده است ، و پیچیده می شود با ده ها یا احتمالا صدها جناح ، ادعا می کنند که هر کسی در کنترل است و یا می تواند در اینجا در افغانستان حکومت پوچ است. و در اینجا نهفته است فرصت بزرگ که هرج و مرج به ما ارائه می دهد; تا قدرت ما را از هر قدرتی که ما را تسلیم کند، به دست آورد.
من پاسخ دادم که به پست یکی از دوستانش که بر اساس شکست های اخلاقی شخصی پدرش به عنوان یک جنگ سالار همدست سیا که در قاچاق جنسی، کار برده و تجارت هروئین دست داشته است، رهایی خوبی به ماساژور داده است
هیچ کس پیش بینی بمباران هواپیماهای بدون سرنشین پاکستانی و حمایت مستقیم با واحدهای نیروهای ویژه هوایی؛ من در میان دشمن با تعدادی از کسانی که در اصل سی سال پیش به عنوان متحد در کشمیر ملاقات کردم و جاهای دیگر از آن زمان ملاقات کرده ام، از جمله عوامل سرویس های اطلاعاتی پاکستان اکنون به فرماندهان طالبان توصیه می کنند که آنها به عنوان دارایی های کلیدی از زمان حمله به شوروی، و نوادگان آنها کشت کرده اند.
من یک شب را در یک آتش سوزی صرف غذاخوری با برخی از آنها و اشتباه نیست; آنها قطعا من را می شناختند.
البته شما درست است که ساخت و ساز محلی از ارزش ها از جمله ایده های عدالت جنسیتی و آزادی را هم تراز نیست و یا به اشتراک گذاری زمینه های مشترک زیادی با ما، و مواد مخدر ارز در اینجا است؛ من به این معنی نیست که نشان می دهد که طرف خوب و بد به heckle یا تشویق در وجود دارد. ما همه آدم بدها اينجا هستيم
چرا من اينجا هستم؟ شاید من فقط می خواهم علل از دست رفته، به نقل از یک شرور نفرت انگیز و عامل هیولا از ترور جنسی و نژادپرستانه از رفته با باد، یک شخصیت که با این وجود به حال برخی از خطوط بزرگ است.
این دنیایی که ما انسان ها برای خودمان ساخته ایم، ما را به خدمت قدرت و سیستم ها و ساختارهای استبدادی نابرابری و هژمونی های نخبه ای از وزن، قدرت و امتیاز شکل می دهد، بی گناهان کمی را به قهرمان شدن ارائه می دهد،
و همانطور که جورج برنارد شاو در پیگمالیون با شخصیت باشکوه پدر الیزا پیشنهاد می کند، نیاز به فضیلت برای کمک شایستگی، چه خیریه باشد و چه همبستگی عمل، یک دوگانگی کاذب است که در خدمت دائمی کردن قدرت نابرابر و حفظ نخبگان هژمونی است.
من یک اصل کلی را به عنوان راهنمای ابهامات در زمانی که ما باید به هر وسیله ای که لازم است مقاومت کنیم و زمانی که ما باید استفاده اجتماعی از زور را تحمل کنیم، پیدا کرده اند و آن را در دفاع از بی گناهان نیست چرا که این مکان بار اخلاقی قضاوت بر قربانیان اقتدار ناعادلانه است، و اغلب بی گناه وجود ندارد.
نه, آزمون من برای استفاده از زور است که به سادگی این; چه کسی قدرت را در دست دارد؟
کي خوب است که بد باشي؟
در فرمول نیچه، چگونه می توانیم هیولاها را شکار کنیم بدون اینکه خودمان هیولا باشیم؟
به این سوالات من پاسخ شکارچی را; من مرد خوبی نیستم، که برای به چالش کشیدن اقتدار ناعادلانه پیشی می گیرم، و نه ایده های مردم دیگر که فضیلت دارند، اگر قدرت ما را برای مقاومت در برابر شر از بین ببرند، به من علاقه مند است. من برای شما بسیار مفید تر از آن هستم،
، اگر شما در میان کسانی که در مبارزه با قدرت نابرابر درگیر هستند، نقض حقوق بشر جهانی ما و آرمان های ما به عنوان یک جامعه آزاد برابر که شامل یک دولت سکولار، آزادی، برابری، حقیقت، و عدالت، مذهبی و سلطه امپراطوری، زورگویی، ترور دولتی، دولت های کارسرال زور و کنترل، و فاشیستی از همه نوع است.
من مرد بدی هستم که طرف تو هستم
برای خودم، تنها چیزی که شما نیاز به کمک شایستگی این است که نیاز به کمک، و آزمون استفاده از زور و خشونت یک سوال ساده است؛ چه کسی قدرت را در دست دارد؟
من انقلابی هستم که به دست گرفتن قدرت برای او درباره خودمختاری و بازگرداندن تعادل است. من در کنار کسانی هستم که فرانتز فانون آنها را هر جا که باشد، بدچاره زمین می نامید، و من زندگی ام را در تعادل با کسانی که از ناتوانان و ناتوانان، خاموشان و پاک شدگان هستند، قرار می دهدم.
من پیروزی مردم افغانستان را بر امپراطوری امریکا جشن می گیرم حتی اگر این امر در حال حاضر شکل طالبان را بگیرد، و برای به رسمیت شناختن آنها به عنوان یک جنبش استقلال طلبانه مشروع و دولت افغانستان استدلال کرده ام.
اما من نمی توانم از فتح نسل کشی و تحریک یک گروه قومی توسط گروه دیگر حمایت کنم و نه نقض حاکمیت و استقلال هیچ دولتی که مورد ادعای دیگری باشد. اما یک مشروعیت است که هر دولت ممکن است ادعا وجود دارد; از مردم آن خواهد شد.
هیچ کس ممکن است با عدالت و یا حق طبیعی صحبت می کنند و یا عمل به نام دیگری بدون رضایت آنها; بنابراین روسو به ما می آموزد، و این اصل قانون طبیعی است که آمریکا را در اعلامیه استقلال تاسیس کرد.
چگونه باید به کسانی که ما را به برنده می کنند پاسخ داد؟
این ما همیشه باید مقاومت کنیم، فراتر از امید به پیروزی یا حتی بقا. و در مقاومت و امتناع از تسلیم شدن به اقتدار ما فتح نشده و آزاد می شوند، برای هیچ چیز نمی تواند از ما امتناع ما را از رضایت به حکومت، استاد، و به بر بردگی.
اجازه دهید ما را اجرا amok و غیر قابل اداره می شود; اجازه دهید ما را هرج و مرج، و آزاد باشد.
Fracture, disruption, death and rebirth, transformation, the triumph of our Shadows and the embrace of our monstrosity, and sacred acts of the violation of normalities and transgression of the Forbidden; when the Wolf catches and devours the Moon in his eternal chase through the celestial spheres, it becomes a Blood Moon, harbinger of Chaos unleashed.
In the simultaneity of the Blood Moon and the Corn Moon, death and rebirth converge as reimagination and transformation.
A Corn Moon signals the harvest of crops planted during the festival of Demeter and the embodiment of the Grandmother, the Cailleach or Baba Yaga, in a corn doll to be replanted in the spring as regenerative magic, and for myself the harvesting of legacies of history from which we wish to escape and liberation from all laws and all limits as systems of oppression and from the tyranny of Authority and other people’s ideas of virtue.
The mythic functions, symbols, and rituals of the Corn Moon harvest also mirror and are interdependent with one of the central stories of humankind, the descent of Dread Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and of the Dead, as the Grandmother assumes her throne in our world for the winter. I like the versions of Persephone’s myth performed in the telenovelas Buffy the Vampire Slayer Once More With Feeling episode and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the Hadestown musical and Stravinsky’s ballet, and I always eat the pomegranite seeds which grant passage to the Underworld on my hummus with crudities.
Together they make a wonderful, terrible thing, the Blood and Corn Moons, to quote the Grinch who was quoting Rudolf Otto regarding immersion in the Infinite through ecstatic trance and vision, described as fascinans et tremendum, wonder and terror. A marvelous way to spend these three nights, while running amok and being ungovernable as a wild thing, exalted by the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Buffy – Once More, With Feeling – Dawn’s Ballet with the Dancing Demon
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Straight to Hell Music Video Trailer | Netflix
“Our Lady of the Underground” – Sung by the Cast of Hadestown on Broadway
Our memories and histories inhabit us like ghosts, ephemeral but casting long shadows in which we live, and a ground of struggle as identity and mimesis. For our memories are never identical with their original, even in the most transparent and authentic witness of history, but structures of reproduction shaped by myriads of others, and how we have interpreted them over time as beings of change and impermanence.
Baudrillard’s simulacra, Sartre’s nausea of inauthentic being, Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, phantasms, falsifications. How do we enter the imaginal worlds of our own self and past, when all becomes a Rashomon Gate Event of transformation, relative truths, shifting and ambiguous meanings? How shall we practice the arts of remembering and the pursuit of truth when all that we are is subject to the Observer Effect and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and what does this mean for our ars poetica?
Schrödinger’s Cat is laughing at me.
So also for my thoughts now during this the week of the Fall of Panjshir, last battle of the recapture of Afghanistan by the Taliban, though we who answered the call of the great warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud’s son for help from the international community in defense of Liberty and the sovereignty and independence of all human souls are fighting still, in the bastion of the Taliban’s power in Kabul as well as in Panjshir and elsewhere in this vast and broken world.
For years later the meaning of these events has changed for me, and its lessons for the future of liberation struggle in Afghanistan against the theocracy of the Taliban which instrumentalized and co-opted the liberation struggle of the Afghan peoples from American imperial dominion and colonial exploitation, have become more clear.
As my stated purpose herein is to memorialize a glorious and tragic failure to redeem our future from the shadows of our past, and a chain of events begun with mistakes in America’s 1979-1989 proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the 1989-1992 Afghan Civil War which directly led to the resurgence of religious wars waged by al Qaeda and ISIS against democracy including 9-11 and the capture of Afghanistan by a theocracy as well as horrific wars in Syria and Yemen, I offer here my writing from the time as I traveled through the Khyber Pass to Panjshir during the Kabul Airlift.
Of our future I say this; Afghanistan under the Taliban is a mirror in which we may see our common fate, if we cannot unite in solidarity to seize democracy from the jaws of theocratic tyranny.
To this pathology of disconnectedness and the terror of our nothingness, to division, abjection, learned helplessness, and despair in the face of overwhelming force, I make reply with Buffy the Vampire Slayer quoting the instructions to priests in the Book of Common Prayer in episode eleven of season seven, Showtime, after luring an enemy into an arena to defeat as a demonstration to her recruits; “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing. Here endeth the lesson.”
As I wrote in my post of August 24 2021, Why Am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a Cave in Afghanistan?; Chaos beckons me with its siren call, like unto like, and as with Ulysses I cannot resist the call of the Unknown to discover what lies beyond our boundaries of the Forbidden. Here I am conjured into desolate and broken canyonlands and endless stars, shattered ruins of an ancient geological cataclysm and the ghosts of empires; a land of tragic beauty.
Trade is flowing across the Khyber Pass and the open border of Afghanistan and Pakistan regardless of the refugee crisis in Kabul, and I go with it, one insignificant bit of flotsam lost in a tide of opportunity for those who capitalize on chaos or like myself use it as a lever of change in a space of adaptive potential. Like a hunting spider I have left my lair in Peshawar, near the heart of the Taliban high command and the mosque from which its directives are propagated, as the great powers of the world meet in the G7 conference to decide the fate of Afghanistan and Taliban forces prepare to invade the defiant and unconquerable Panjshir province where the son of the legendary warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud has been joined in resistance by a government in exile led by Acting President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh.
I am on horseback touring remote villages as a traveling theatre with a projector, generator, screen, and a number of films, an industry still thriving here as in many places with little outside contact, a way of life brilliantly depicted in The Cinema Travellers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, celebrated in the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. I tell people I am a wandering seller of dreams; rather than try to go unnoticed where strangers rarely travel, I set up a show and gather an audience, and no one questions who I am or why I am here.
When you cannot blend in, stand out; it’s a trick I learned from my partner Dolly’s Uncle Bob through our fathers who grew up together in the shadow of the McKay Carnivals he founded during the Depression as cover to carry out the work of Socialism and the Industrial Workers of the World begun by her grandfather John F. McKay and his comrade Eugene V. Debbs, and from Bluey and his circus in Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. How do you hide a large number of highly unusual people with special skills and their support, always on the move? As a show. Let the strangers be truly strange, and sell tickets.
Why am I showing the film Inglorious Basterds in a cave in Afghanistan?
Inglorious Basterds is a great film of the stunning cruelty of force and power and the triumph of the unconquered human spirit, a dance of terror and beauty like the lives of ordinary people here in a place beyond all human law and throughout so much of our world wherein privation and the needs of survival are paramount, and overwhelming and generalized fear is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us. Also it is a film whose episodic and interlayered narrative structure is confusing to those unfamiliar with its intertexts and references; The Secret of Santa Vittoria, The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, Zulu Dawn, The Seven Samurai; but the glorious nature of lost causes and forlorn hopes, of defiance and resistance in the face of certain death, is all too familiar to the audience of my traveling theatre.
Resistance is always victorious, for in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free.
Such is my definition of freedom and of victory in liberation struggle, and like Dorothy’s Magic Ruby Slippers it is a power and liberty which cannot be taken from us, and bears the power to take us home to our true selves.
Its an idea that translates well into Deobandi theological rhetoric, a parallel of Catholic Liberation Theology which originated the Indian revolution against the British Raj and the Taliban’s liberation struggle against American colonialism.
Homer wrote in episodes too, as do I here in my daily journals and publication Torch of Liberty; Inglorious Basterds is a heroic quest to change the balance of power in the world, of revolutionary struggle by those whom Frantz Fanon called the “Wretched of the Earth”, in this case the historically marginalized and othered Jews, and those who place their lives in the balance with them; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Antifascist action is revolutionary struggle and class war; it engages unequal power in the forms of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and often of Patriarchy as well, which is interdependent with fascism as theocracy, and far more ancient, but central to its project of subjugation to hegemonic elites. The origins of evil are in systemic and structural inequalities, the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, and as Wagner teaches us the price of power is renouncement of love. From this pathology of disconnectedness, nihilism, abjection, and dehumanization arises authority and the tyranny of the carceral state; police, prisons, borders, and the force and control of a society organized to dehumanize and falsify us in service to power through hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and authorized identities.
This we must resist, and in refusal to submit we become Unconquered and free. The magnificent Lt Aldo Raine is an antifascist hero whose story models liberation struggle and teaches us how to engage those who would enslave us. It is a story of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but only as cases of a universal condition.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for self- ownership, autonomy, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Inglorious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
This is my theme song for Last Stands, by the magnificent David Bowie, which I only post when I am about to do something from which no return is possible, so far as I can foresee. It is a farewell to those I have loved and a wish for a better future than we have made of our past, we humans. It is also a declaration of no quarter and war to the knife to my enemies, to set the terms of our struggle; enter my arena, and anything goes, for those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none, and there are no rules in my games of resistance to fascism and tyranny.
My victory conditions do not include personal survival, only acts of resistance, which makes my goal in imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force to take the enemy down with me. And to such refusal to submit as absolute commitment tyranny can make no reply; there is no profit in it.
I have done this now more times than I can number or easily remember; yet here I remain to bear witness to the hollowness and fragile nature of power and authority, Unconquered. Here is proof of the unknowability of our limits, of the redemptive power of love as solidarity in liberation struggle, of our inherently autonomous nature and the unconquerable human will to become, and of my Principles of Revolution that force finds its limit in disobedience and that freedom is won by refusal to submit to force as described by Thoreau and by disbelief in authority as described by Voltaire. Here is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
Here Endeth the Lesson: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season seven, episode eleven
References
The Cinema Travelers by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya, film trailer
Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW
by Peter Cole (Editor), David Struthers (Editor), Kenyon Zimmer (Editor)
خاطرات و تاریخ ما ما را مانند ارواح ساکن, زودگذر اما ریخته گری سایه های طولانی که در آن زندگی می کنیم, و زمینه مبارزه به عنوان هویت و تقلید. برای خاطرات ما هرگز با اصلی خود یکسان نیست، حتی در شفاف ترین و معتبرترین شاهد تاریخ، بلکه ساختارهای تولید مثل که توسط تعداد بی شمار دیگران شکل گرفته است، و اینکه چگونه ما آنها را در طول زمان به عنوان وجود تغییر و ناهمانی تفسیر کرده ایم.
سیمولاکرای بودریلارد، تهوع سارتر از وجود غیرممکن، بیابان آینه های اترتون؛ دروغ، توهم، هذیان، دروغ، دروغ. چگونه وارد جهان های خیالی خود و گذشته خودمان می شود، وقتی همه به یک رویداد تحول دروازه راشمون، حقایق نسبی، تغییر و معناهای مبهم تبدیل می شوند؟
چگونه می توانیم هنرهای به یاد آوردن و پیگیری حقیقت را تمرین کنیم وقتی که همه آنچه هستیم تابع اثر ناظر و اصل عدم اطمینان هایسنبرگ است و این برای شاعر آرس ما چه معنایی دارد؟
گربه شرودینگر به من می خندد.
بنابراین برای افکار من در حال حاضر در طول این هفته از سقوط پانجشیر، آخرین نبرد از بازپس گیری افغانستان توسط طالبان، هر چند ما که پاسخ به فراخوان پسر جنگجو بزرگ احمد شاه مسود برای کمک از جامعه بین المللی در دفاع از آزادی و حاکمیت و استقلال تمام روح انسان هنوز هم مبارزه، در بند قدرت طالبان در کابل و همچنان در پنجشیر و جاهای دیگر.
دو سال بعد معنای این رویدادها برای من تغییر کرده است و درس های آن برای آینده مبارزه آزادی بخش در افغانستان علیه حکومت سالاری طالبان که مبارزه آزادی بخش مردم افغانستان را از سلطه امپراطوری آمریکا و استثمار استعماری ابزاری و مشترک می کردند، روشن تر شده است.
همانطور که هدف اعلام شده من در اینجا این است که یادبود شکست با شکوه و غم انگیز به آینده ما را از سایه های گذشته ما، و زنجیره ای از وقایع با اشتباهات در جنگ پراکسی آمریکا در سال های 1979-1989 علیه اتحاد جماهیر شوروی در افغانستان و 1989-1992 افغان آغاز شده است جنگ داخلی که به طور مستقیم منجر به تجدید حیات جنگ های مذهبی توسط القاعده و داعش علیه دموکراسی از جمله 9-11 و تصرف افغانستان توسط یک حکومت مذهبی شد و همچنین جنگ های وحشتناک در سوریه و یمن،
من اينجا نوشته خود را از زمان سفر از طريق پاس خيبر به پنجشیر در جريان پرواز کابل پيشنهاد ميکنم.
از آینده ما من می گویم این; افغانستان در زمان طالبان آینه ای است که در آن ممکن است سرنوشت مشترک خود را ببینیم، اگر نتوانیم در همبستگی متحد شود تا دموکراسی را از فک های طوطی تئوکراتیک به دست آورد.
به این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط و وحشت از پوچی ما، به تقسیم، انتزاع، درماندهی آموخته، و ناامیدی در مقابل نیروی قریب به اتفاق قربانیان، من پاسخ با بافی قتل خون آشام به نقل از دستورالعمل به کشیش ها در کتاب نماز مشترک در قسمت یازدهم فصل هفت، Showtime، پس از luring دشمن را به عرصه شکست به عنوان یک تظاهرات به استخدام خود را؛
“من نمی دانم چه آینده است. اما من نمی دانم که این درست مثل این خواهد بود – سخت، دردناک. اما در آخر، ما خواهیم بود. اگر همه ما قطعات خود را انجام دهیم، باور کنید، ما کسی خواهیم بود که ایستاده باقی مانده است. در اینجا پایان درس است.”
همانطور که در پست خود در 24 آگست 2021 نوشتم، چرا من فیلم باستردز اینگلوریوس را در غاری در افغانستان نشان می دهم؟؛ هرج و مرج به من اشاره می کند با تماس آژیر آن، مانند آن، و به عنوان با اوریس من می توانم تماس ناشناخته ها برای کشف آنچه
نهفته است فراتر از مرزهای ما از ممنوع مقاومت در برابر. در اینجا من را به دره های ویرانه و شکسته و ستاره های بی پایان، ویرانه های شکسته از فاجعه زمین شناسی باستانی و ارواح امپراتوری conjured؛ سرزمین زیبایی غم انگیز.
تجارت در سراسر مسیر خبر و مرز باز افغانستان و پاکستان بدون در نظر گرفتن بحران پناهندگان در کابل جریان دارد، و من با آن می رویم، یک بیت ناچیز از فلوتسام در یک جریان فرصت برای کسانی که در هرج و مرج سرمایه گذاری می کنند یا مانند خودم از آن به عنوان اهرم تغییر در فضای پتانسیل سازگار استفاده می کنند، از دست رفته است.
مانند عنکبوت شکاری من در پشاور، نزدیک قلب فرماندهی عالی طالبان و مسجدی که دستورالعمل های آن از آن منتشر می شود، به جا گذاشته ام، زیرا قدرت های بزرگ جهان در کنفرانس گروه 7 برای تصمیم گیری در مورد سرنوشت افغانستان با هم دیدار می کنند
و نیروهای طالبان آماده می شوند تا به ولایت نافرمانی و تسخیر ناپذیری که در آن پسر جنگجوی افسانه ای احمد شاه اسد توسط یک دولت در تبعید به رهبری امرالله صالح سرپرست ریاست جمهوری افغانستان به مقاومت پیوسته است، حمله کنند.
مقاومت همیشه پیروز است، برای امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد است.
چنین است تعریف من از آزادی و پیروزی در مبارزه آزادی بخش، و مانند دمپایی روبی سحر و جادو دوروتی آن را یک قدرت و آزادی است که می تواند از ما گرفته نمی شود، و خرس قدرت ما را به خانه به خود واقعی ما است.
این ایده که ترجمه خوبی به شعارهای الهیاتی Deobandi، موازی از الهیات آزادی کاتولیک که انقلاب هند در برابر راج بریتانیا و مبارزه آزادی بخش طالبان علیه استعمار آمریکا نشات گرفته است.
اقدام ضد فاشیستی مبارزه انقلابی و جنگ طبقاتی است؛ این درگیر قدرت نابرابر در اشکال فاشیست های خون، ایمان، و روح، و اغلب از مردسالاری نیز، که به هم نزدیک با فاشیستی به عنوان خداپرستی، و به مراتب بیشتر باستانی، اما مرکزی برای پروژه خود را از انحنا به نخبگان هژمونی.
ریشه های شر در نابرابری های سیستمی و ساختاری، حلقه ترس، قدرت و زور واگنر است و همانطور که واگنر به ما می آموزد قیمت قدرت دست از عشق است.
. از این آسیب شناسی قطع ارتباط، پوچ گرایی، آبجک شدن و غیرانسانی شدن، اقتدار و استبداد دولت کارسرال را به وجود می آورد؛ پلیس، زندان ها، مرزها و نیرو و کنترل جامعه ای که برای غیر انسانی کردن و ساختگی کردن ما در خدمت به قدرت از طریق سلسله مراتبی از دیگر بودن انحصاری و هویت های مجاز سازماندهی شده است
این ما باید مقاومت در برابر, و در امتناع از ارائه ما تبدیل به فتح نشده و آزاد.
همیشه مبارزه بین ماسک که دیگران را برای ما و کسانی که ما برای خودمان را باقی می ماند وجود دارد; این اولین انقلابی است که همه ما باید در آن بجنگیم، مبارزه برای مالکیت خود، خودمختاری، و امکانات بی حد و حصر انسان شدن.
I remember when I first realized that Trump is actually a treasonous and dishonorable foreign agent whose mission is the subversion and fall of democracy in America and not merely an apex predator of systems of oppression which include patriarchal-theocratic sexual terror and white supremacist terror; watching him take the sacred and ancient Oath of Office while Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned to their deaths in Syria.
The Stolen Election of 2016 and the whole illegitimate and criminal Trump Presidency which ought to be nullified and erased in its acts and appointments was nothing but a sidelining operation to clear America from the board of play for the invasion of Ukraine by his puppetmaster and handler from the end of the Soviet era, when KGB Colonel Putin ran the black market in East Berlin and used Trump to hide the wealth of crime syndicates and oligarchs, and later to move Russian agents globally through Trump’s sex trafficking ring within the Miss Universe beauty pageant and modeling organizations he owned between 1995 and 2015.
There was never anything more grand to Traitor Trump and his despicable regime than this, the filthy and perverse sexual terror and nihilistic amoral greed of a crime boss in the service of the KGB and Russian syndicates, and he betrayed America every single day of his life as a foreign spy since his first visit to Moscow in 1987.
Can Trumps despisal and mockery of our veterans, inability to comprehend the value of a life of service to one’s nation, and disrespect for the military come as a surprise from a man without loyalty, and whose word means nothing?
How can I know with reasonable probability though not beyond doubt that Trump was a KGB asset before the Soviet Union became an oligarchy and crime syndicate in 1991, and Putin’s star agent in America thereafter?
In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, my friends and I made mischief throughout Europe, across and behind the Iron Curtain as a specialty. These were the Crows, led by the famous Irish gypsy Bluey, clown and Ringmaster of a circus which provided cover for his true enterprises. He made an art of finding what one wants or needs and offering it as a gift or favor to be redeemed later; a laughing trickster, who built an outlaw empire from winning trust, trading favors and secrets, and making things happen for powerful people, and a Great Game of outwitting these same authorities, destabilizing tyrannies, championing the powerless, and subverting systems and regimes of force and control.
I learned much from him.
Bluey once described the Great Game to me like this: “To be Romani is determined by three truths not of our making; First, no one stands with us, so we must stand with each other in everything and trust no outsiders. Second, we will be killed or driven out if discovered, so we must live within identities of disguise. Third, we are powerless and few, so we must live in the margins and in the shadows; its why they call us crows, scavengers. This is how we have survived more than a thousand years, by these three rules.”
This was my entrée into the world of the Romani, which I might have married into had events unfolded differently, ourselves being trapped on opposite sides of the Wall during a firefight, and the reason 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 the official language of Germany and Austria as Standard German. Of course we could all speak some Russian as well, and I was reasonably fluent having worked with Soviet Special Forces and KGB advisors against Apartheid forces in South Africa and Angola among other places, and among the hundreds of Crows were languages from all over Europe and beyond.
As he grew up in Ireland and when ten years old went alone to live in the streets of London, Bluey 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.
So while I cannot claim to have known Trump personally or to possess incriminating proof of his relationship with Putin during the Soviet era, I know the operational environment, the methods of the KGB, and how Putin did business as its kingpin very well indeed.
Enough to call him Traitor Trump, and apply to him the dictum that everything the enemy says is a lie.
The very first time I heard of Trump during the 2016 election campaign was in the context of remarks he had made about veterans. At the time I said to my partner Theresa; “Disrespects veterans? That’s it; that’s all I need to know about a man. I’m voting for Hillary.”
My hope now is that all of us, and most especially every serving or former member of the US Armed Forces and their families, will say the same and vote for whomever runs against the Trump regime and its Party of Treason, Tyranny, and Terror.
As written by Kevin Carroll in The Guardian, in an article entitled The Trump campaign’s conduct at Arlington is shocking but not surprising; “The tranquil majesty of Arlington national cemetery tends to bring forth civic virtues in Americans and eloquence in their leaders. Speaking there in 1985 above the graves of the fallen, Ronald Reagan observed that while we may imagine the deceased as old men, most “were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived … they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers … They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember.”
Nowhere in that vast cemetery is Reagan’s point driven home as poignantly as in section 60, which embraces those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice at painfully young ages since 9/11. Here the dates on the simple headstones are within memory, the grief of loved ones is raw and visitors may witness acts of tenderness in response.
Good manners, Jane Austen observed, hold a society together. George Washington copied longhand in boyhood and preserved into adulthood a list of 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior”. Another general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, cautioned in his Guildhall address after VE Day that “humility must always be the portion” of any man who receives acclaim earned by others’ sacrifices.
Donald Trump and his staff knew – and were reminded of – federal regulations specifically prohibiting the misconduct their campaign engaged in at Arlington’s section 60 this week. But the law aside, only a gross lack of manners, decency and humility could incline a person to film a fundraising appeal over the resting places of dead men and women who cannot decline to participate in the coarse spectacle. The photo of a grinning Trump giving a jaunty thumbs-up over these patriots’ graves is an indelible image of narcissism risen to the point of sociopathy.
Worse is the allegation that two Trump staff members assaulted a small, middle-aged female Department of the Army employee who attempted to enforce the regulation and preserve the cemetery’s dignity. The victim reportedly refrained from filing charges due to a reasonable fear of violence or harassment from Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign defamed this woman as mentally ill. His running mate, JD Vance, said Kamala Harris could “go to hell” for her campaign’s suggestion that the unauthorized footage was intended for use as political footage – just before Trump used it for exactly that.
This ugly incident would have derailed the candidacy of any presidential nominee before Trump’s crude emergence on the American political scene in 2016. In 2024 it is already, probably intentionally on Trump’s part, being replaced in the news by reaction to his social media posts making lewd innuendos about Harris, and QAnon threats to imprison Democratic party leaders. But it is part of a pattern of disrespect for and misuse of the United States military that bears upon Trump’s fitness to serve again as president.
Trump infamously described America’s dead from the first world war as “suckers” and “losers”. Trump also asked my former boss, White House chief of staff John Kelly – on Memorial Day and over the section 60 grave of his Marine son killed in Afghanistan – “What was in it for them?” I walked up to a visibly shocked Kelly moments after that exchange, the details of which he later confirmed.
Trump demanded military equipment parades in Washington of the kind Soviet leaders held on May Day in Moscow’s Red Square, but disdained appearing with wounded service members. He called America’s service chiefs “dopes and babies” and needled them about their public sector pay – God only knows what he thinks of enlisted troops who make a fraction of a general’s salary.
Trump began his run for the presidency in 2016 by mocking the late senator John McCain for being a prisoner of war; he followed this by feuding with the bereaved parents of Muslim American and African American soldiers; recently, he belittled Medal of Honor recipients shot during the brave actions that led to their awards.
More serious than Trump’s words are his actions and plans regarding the armed forces. In 2018 Trump discussed having troops shoot civilian migrants, including women and children, as they tried to cross America’s south-west border – a patently illegal order. In 2020 he unlawfully used national guardsmen to clear protesters from Lafayette Park for yet another campaign photo opportunity. In 2021 Trump and his advisors planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to misuse the military to put down protests anticipated if Mike Pence and Congress refused to certify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory. Trump’s Project 2025 envisions using the national guard for internal immigration investigations, a vast and ill-advised expansion of the American military’s limited role in domestic law enforcement.
Trump sees the armed services as yet another entity to be misused for his personal benefit, damaged and then discarded just as he has with his bankrupt businesses, the evangelical Christian churches and the Republican party. Beyond that, his boorish statements and bad behavior regarding the military almost certainly come from a place of self-loathing. Trump dodged the Vietnam war draft by claiming – probably falsely – to suffer from bone spurs. A gnawingly insecure man, Trump is self-conscious of his lack of the virtues towards which the military strives: as the US army puts it, loyalty to the constitution, dutiful fulfillment of responsibilities, respect for others, selfless service to both the country and subordinates, honor, integrity and personal courage.
His poor form at Arlington this week therefore shocks but does not surprise, as the idea of serving others, much less giving one’s life for others, is anathema to Trump. This attitude would be a sad commentary about any man, but ought to disqualify someone seeking to serve as commander-in-chief.”
Like everything else Trump does in this election, it seems to have backfired on him. And it is absolutely emblematic of his narcissism and inability to understand why anyone would lay down their life for their countrymen. In Trump’s world, it’s every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost. I propose for your consideration that this is not an admirable summum bonum in a national leader or a man of any kind, for it is not only a mask of cowardice bearing the image of amoral greed, but a disloyalty and treason which breaks the bonds of brotherhood from which any nation is made.
As written by Robert Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Democrats seize on Trump cemetery photo op ‘disgrace’ as election issue: Politicians and veterans say episode was on par with ex-president’s history of disrespecting service in armed forces; “Democrats are trying to turn Donald Trump’s clash with staff at Arlington National Cemetery, the hallowed final resting place of America’s war dead, into a broader election issue by highlighting it as an example of his history of disrespecting military veterans.
Congressional Democrats with military records and liberal-leaning veterans groups say the episode is consistent with past instances of the Republican presidential nominee flagrantly denigrating service in the armed forces.
They also see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on Republican efforts to undermine the record of Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, who has come under fire for a series of supposedly misleading statements about aspects of his 24 years of military service in the national guard.
The US army rebuked Trump’s campaign this week after members of the former president’s entourage “abruptly pushed aside” a female cemetery staff member who was trying to prevent them taking pictures of Trump at a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of a soldier who was killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
The cemetery worker was acting in line with the facility’s rules, which prohibits pictures or film being shot in section 60, the burial area for personnel killed serving in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
Pictures later appeared of Trump posing alongside members of the soldier’s family smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign – a gesture denounced by some as inappropriate and crass.
Trump’s campaign also posted video footage on TikTok with the former president claiming – falsely – that “we didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then [the Biden administration] took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.” In fact, 11 US soldiers were killed in Trump’s last year in Afghanistan.
Trump was invited to Arlington by several of the families of those killed to mark the third anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal – the botched handling of which stands as one of the most damaging episodes of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Now Democrats are accusing him of exploiting a revered site for narrow campaign purposes, in breach of the cemetery’s regulations. The former president did not attend the previous two anniversaries marking the withdrawal.
“Arlington National Cemetery isn’t a place for campaign photo-ops. It’s a sacred resting place for American patriots,” Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic House member from New Jersey and former navy helicopter pilot, posted on X. “But for Donald Trump, disrespecting military veterans is just par for the course. It’s an absolute disgrace.”
Gerry Connolly, a congressman from Virginia, demanded the release of footage and paperwork from the incident. He said it was “sad but all too expected that Donald Trump would desecrate this hallowed ground and put campaign politics ahead of honouring our heroes”.
Jared Golden, a Democratic Congress member from Maine and an ex-marine, called Arlington “sacred ground and all visitors should take the time to learn the rules of decorum that ensure the proper respect is given to the fallen and their families”.
Although surveys have shown that roughly six in 10 retired service members voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election, some left-leaning veterans groups have added their voice to the criticism.
Jon Stoltz, a former army officer and co-founder of VoteVets, a veterans group that is supporting Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, accused Trump of using the cemetery “for a political ceremony” and predicted that it could turn previously sympathetic ex-servicemen against him.
“They don’t have a right to do that with other veterans who are there,” Stoltz told the Associated Press. “I know there’s veterans who support Trump. He’s just motivated people against him.”
In a statement, Allison Jaslow, chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, added to the condemnation, saying: “There are plenty of places appropriate for politics – Arlington is not one of them. Any aspiring elected official, especially one who hopes to be Commander in Chief, should not be confused about that fact.”
The cemetery’s rules state: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honoured dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”
Trump’s attitude to military service has come under scrutiny because of a track record of dismissive statements, both public and private. This month, he appeared to disparage the Congressional Medal of Honor – saying it was inferior to the medal of freedom, which he bestowed as president – because most of its recipients had “been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead”.
According to his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, he refused to visit a first world war cemetery during a 2018 visit to France, calling the American servicemen buried there “suckers” and “losers” for getting killed.
He also ridiculed the late Republican senator John McCain, saying he was only considered a war hero because he had been captured. According to separate reports, Trump voiced objections to having disabled veterans at a military ceremony which ultimately never occurred, saying “it doesn’t look good for me”.
As I wrote in my post of September 5 2020, All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men: Trump’s Base Begins to Shatter As His Contempt For Our Military Is Revealed; It seems Trump may have finally violated a taboo our society still cares about; his base begins to shatter as his contempt for our military is revealed.
As reported by Time; ‘Trump’s Support Among Military Voters Is Tanking.
At this point four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump held a massive lead of 20 points over Hillary Clinton among military voters. This time around, he’s struggling to keep up. A new Military Times poll revealed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by about four percentage points among active-duty troops.
And that was before today’s bombshell report published in the Atlantic. The article outlines a number of instances when President Donald Trump derided U.S. service members, even describing the country’s war dead as “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump and several top aides have rushed to deny the allegations. Trump told reporters late Thursday that he “would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more.”
That hasn’t dampened a backlash on social media among military veterans. Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, a frequent Trump critic, urged Twitter followers to vote against the president, posting a widely shared video in which he relayed a story about how his father was shot down over Vietnam. “I am stunned that anybody in the United States military would consider you anything but a loser or a sucker,” Eaton said. “You’re no patriot.”
Other veterans posted similar statements in response to the article, which described how Trump cancelled a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t see a reason why he should honor people who managed to get themselves killed, nor did he want to get rained upon in front of TV cameras. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” the report quoted Trump as saying.
Biden, whose late son, Beau Biden, served in Iraq, issued a statement after the Atlantic article was published Thursday that said the comments were yet another sign Trump is unfit for the presidency. If the quotes are true, he said, it’s “another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States.”
The anonymous allegations in the Atlantic article would hardly be the first time the president, who received five military deferments for bone spurs in his heels that kept him out of the Vietnam War, has disparaged the records of military members. As a candidate in 2015, the president said he was no supporter of Sen John McCain, who was held captive in Vietnam for nearly six years after his airplane was shot down over Hanoi. “He was a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump’s interactions with military families have also come under scrutiny, particularly the question of how he has expressed sympathy for those who have lost loved ones in the line of duty. Individual parents and partners have come forward to say whether or not the President contacted them directly.
Eleven Gold Star families, those who lost loved ones serving the country’s military, wrote a joint letter in 2016 to the then-Republican presidential nominee, accusing him of “cheapening the sacrifice” of their deceased relatives in the way he responded to the parents of Captain Humayun S.M. Khan, who died in Iraq in 2004. Trump criticized his father and mother after they spoke out against him at the 2016 Democratic National Convention.
In total, there are 1.4 million active duty service members, or less than one half of one percent of the U.S. population. But as a barometer of Trump’s base, and an indicator of his ability to drive turnout to counter mobilized Democrats across the country, Trump’s tanking numbers with the military are a bad sign for his campaign.”
As written by Jeffrey Goldburg in The Atlantic, in an article entitled Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’. The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic; “When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
Trump’s understanding of concepts such as patriotism, service, and sacrifice has interested me since he expressed contempt for the war record of the late Senator John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said in 2015 while running for the Republican nomination for president. “I like people who weren’t captured.”
There was no precedent in American politics for the expression of this sort of contempt, but the performatively patriotic Trump did no damage to his candidacy by attacking McCain in this manner. Nor did he set his campaign back by attacking the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides. Trump was not invited to McCain’s funeral. (These sources, and others quoted in this article, spoke on condition of anonymity. The White House did not return earlier calls for comment, but Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, emailed me this statement shortly after this story was posted: “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard. He’s demonstrated his commitment to them at every turn: delivering on his promise to give our troops a much needed pay raise, increasing military spending, signing critical veterans reforms, and supporting military spouses. This has no basis in fact.”)
Trump’s understanding of heroism has not evolved since he became president. According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect. Nor does he understand why pilots who are shot down in combat are honored by the military. On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults, and members of the Bush family have publicly opposed him. But his cynicism about service and heroism extends even to the World War I dead buried outside Paris—people who were killed more than a quarter century before he was born. Trump finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible. (The president did not serve in the military; he received a medical deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War because of the alleged presence of bone spurs in his feet. In the 1990s, Trump said his efforts to avoid contracting sexually transmitted diseases constituted his “personal Vietnam.”)
On Memorial Day 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery, a short drive from the White House. He was accompanied on this visit by John Kelly, who was then the secretary of homeland security, and who would, a short time later, be named the White House chief of staff. The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
“He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
I’ve asked numerous general officers over the past year for their analysis of Trump’s seeming contempt for military service. They offer a number of explanations. Some of his cynicism is rooted in frustration, they say. Trump, unlike previous presidents, tends to believe that the military, like other departments of the federal government, is beholden only to him, and not the Constitution. Many senior officers have expressed worry about Trump’s understanding of the rules governing the use of the armed forces. This issue came to a head in early June, during demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in response to police killings of Black people. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former secretary of defense, lambasted Trump at the time for ordering law-enforcement officers to forcibly clear protesters from Lafayette Square, and for using soldiers as props: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Mattis wrote. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”
Another explanation is more quotidian, and aligns with a broader understanding of Trump’s material-focused worldview. The president believes that nothing is worth doing without the promise of monetary payback, and that talented people who don’t pursue riches are “losers.” (According to eyewitnesses, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, Trump turned to aides and said, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?”)
Yet another, related, explanation concerns what appears to be Trump’s pathological fear of appearing to look like a “sucker” himself. His capacious definition of sucker includes those who lose their lives in service to their country, as well as those who are taken prisoner, or are wounded in battle. “He has a lot of fear,” one officer with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s views said. “He doesn’t see the heroism in fighting.” Several observers told me that Trump is deeply anxious about dying or being disfigured, and this worry manifests itself as disgust for those who have suffered. Trump recently claimed that he has received the bodies of slain service members “many, many” times, but in fact he has traveled to Dover Air Force Base, the transfer point for the remains of fallen service members, only four times since becoming president. In another incident, Trump falsely claimed that he had called “virtually all” of the families of service members who had died during his term, then began rush-shipping condolence letters when families said the president was not telling the truth.
Trump has been, for the duration of his presidency, fixated on staging military parades, but only of a certain sort. In a 2018 White House planning meeting for such an event, Trump asked his staff not to include wounded veterans, on grounds that spectators would feel uncomfortable in the presence of amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” he said.”
Zero respect’: Trump’s Arlington visit puts his attitude about the military back in the spotlight/ MSN
Donald Trump can’t comprehend what it means to sacrifice. He’s un-American.
Serving the nation is the epitome of American honor.
Film by The Lincoln Project
‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’: Velshi slams Trump’s Arlington video scandal/ MSN
Two important anniversaries in the history of Chile and socialism occur in September; the September fourth advent of the golden age of Allende and the tragedy of the September eleventh coup which deposed him. These two events will continue to define Chile for all of human history, for it will always remain a nation shaped by the legacy of Salvador Allende as interpreted by his cousin Isabel.
No nation has a finer historian of its secret heart and inner life than Isabel Allende, who rendered it in terms of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy in her classic works of world literature The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and The Stories of Eva Luna, in which she joins the triumvirate of Magical Realism with Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Do read her luminous interrogation of immigrant experience and the negotiations of ideas of homeland and new frontier as conflicted and juxtapositional constructions and source identities, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile.
Isabel Allende’s reimagination of the role of culture in becoming human as an autonomous free being and the special function of language in that process, so like that of Amy Tan, recalls to me Haruki Murakami’s origin story as a writer, the discovery of his voice and authentic self through deliberately composing in English, a second language with which he was not wholly conversant. It is important to understanding their glorious and beautiful novels, but also illuminating as a universal human process of individuation wherein language is our primary identity as reflected in the special issues of migrants as transnational explorers of unknowns.
We are all Strangers who claim membership in multiple cultures and societies, who live on both sides of the boundaries we transgress like the images of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror, who must create ourselves anew and become free. This strangeness is at once the greatest gift of our time and the greatest threat, for how a nation deals with otherness is as central to its identity and mission as it is to our performance of self.
We are our thoughts, and language determines the kinds of thoughts we are able to have. I have practiced the arts of writing and of languages as disciplines of self-creation since my freshman year of high school when I discovered Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, who tried to reimagine and transform humankind through creating a new universal language in Finnegan’s Wake, because through rewriting ourselves and thinking in different ways we can seize direct control of our own evolution and consciousness.
Languages are a hobby of mine; I grew up with three voices, English, Chinese, and French, each with its own identity, by which I mean our personae or the masks we wear in the performances of ourselves as derived from the classical Greek theatrical mask, and the legacies of our history or prochronism, self construal as a history expressed in our form of how we humans have made adaptive choices to changing conditions over vast epochs of time.
From the age of nine I learned the spoken Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong and the Wu dialect of Shanghai with written Traditional Chinese and inkbrush calligraphy, with some Japanese as I studied Chan or Zen Buddhism for ten years interdependent with my studies of languages and martial arts. From seventh grade through high school I attended French rather than English classes; interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film and literature.
I learned some conversational Portuguese in eighth grade for my summer trip before high school to Brazil, a language branded into my soul regardless of little formal study by the trauma of my near execution by a police bounty hunting team whose campaign to kill the abandoned street children I had disrupted. There in the streets of Sao Paulo I first realized the praxis of learning languages not only as a means of connection with others, but also a lever of change, seizure of power, and revolutionary struggle. As the Matadors, founded by the great and terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who rescued and welcomed me into their ferocious brotherhood said; “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
During high school I was an enthusiast of Wittgenstein and his disciple James Joyce, under which influence I attempted the only project of language learning I have ever abandoned; to read the Kabbalah, which is written not in Hebrew but in a coded scholar’s Aramaic and Andalusi Romance, languages of which I could find no living speakers.
During summer breaks at university I continued to travel; I loved the poetry of Basho so much that one such summer I once walked part of his route across Japan to see where he had written them. And then there was the fateful trip between my junior and senior years, on a culinary tour of the Mediterranean as cooking had by then become a hobby of mine, which involved first contacts with Italian, Spanish, and Greek as well as a masterclass in French, wherein I was stranded in Beirut under siege and a chance encounter with the great Jean Genet set me on my life’s path when he swore me to the Oath of the Resistance. This also marks the beginning of my studies of Arabic, both classical Quranic Arabic and conversational Levantine Arabic.
A full accounting of my languages now would be near impossible; those I need shift and change with where I am, and I have lived among many peoples. For example, there was a time over thirty years ago when my attentions were divided between a war of independence in Kashmir and revolutionary struggle against the monarchy in Nepal, with expeditions into Sarajevo under the Siege and other places; and for these theatres of action I needed three kinds of languages; that of the people, Koshur in Srinagar and Newari in Katmandu, of officialdom and bureaucracy which is Gorkhali in Nepal and Urdu in Pakistan as well as Kashmir and near identical with Hindi but written with a Perso-Arabic script and influenced by Classical Persian, and the languages of literary scholarship in which I was engaged, Classical Tibetan as a member of the Kagyu Vajrayana order of Buddhism in Katmandu and in Srinagar Classical Quranic Arabic which I had been learning since Beirut along with spoken Levantine Arabic which has become a fourth natural language for me with English, Chinese, and French, and also Classical Persian and Ottoman Turkish as a scholar of the Naqsbandi Sufi order of Islam. In the Balkans I learned some Croatian written in Latin script, mutually comprehensible with Bosnian as they evolve from the same source.
Since the Invasion of Ukraine I have found myself speaking and writing in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish more than I wish were necessary; I do love the languages and the peoples, though as so often the conditions in which we meet are those of tragedy as museums of private holocausts, as well as the hope of our glorious and beautiful Resistance.
With every new language I choose a new name in that speech like every other student, but I also create new identities as roles to play. By now I’ve lived many lives within the scope of my own, and keep multiple possible selves in reserve as a spectrum of adaptive choices, some with their own passports and verifiable background for travel in such identities. We are all pluralities, but the student of languages enacts selfhood as a theatrical game.
Thinking in other languages shapes thoughts differently, frees us and opens the doors of possibility to new ways of being human, relating to our experience, and organizing ideas about the world. This is why the study of languages is necessary to balanced development for young people; learning languages provides many of the cognitive and emotional growth benefits of living in other cultures, though I regard travel and living elsewhere as critical formative rites of passage to a future self which is created and chosen with intent as opposed to one merely issued as a default identity by our circumstances.
Languages forge connections and immerse us in the worlds of others, interrogating our boundaries as parallel universes of human possibilities and allowing us to change otherness from a threat to a growth opportunity, reinforcing diversity as an adaptive value and also insulating us from modern man’s pathology of disconnectedness.
Writing is a way to structure and improve ones thinking and oneself, because how we write is how we think and we can operate on ourselves, edit and restructure our thought processes, and seize ownership and control of our own evolution and adaptation to change through writing. When we think and write in languages other than our primary home language, we liberate ourselves from the normality in which we are embedded. Haruki Murakami’s use of writing in English, a language he was not truly conversant in when he chose it as an instrument with which to escape the limits of his normalities, is an excellent example of the use of this tactic to shift perspectives and liberate ones experience from the prisons and legacies of our history, and as Picasso declared “to see in a new way”.
In this respect language is primary to all other forms of identity, because it organizes all other systems of relating to self and other. As Rene Descartes wrote in his Discourse on the Method; ”je pense, donc je suis.”
I believe in learning languages and ways of being human other than those of one’s home as a path of autonomy or freedom from the ideas of others as an imposed condition of struggle, of empathy and our duty of care for others in a diverse and inclusive society, and of seizures of power from authorized identities, especially those of nationality which instrumentalize division in service to tyranny.
So also with the selves we inhabit in our imaginal homelands and the brave new worlds we find ourselves in with the unfolding, pluralization, and transformation of ourselves through history.
A History of Chile in Three Acts
CIA, Chile & Allende
Neoliberalism and Privatization as American Imperialism, and State Terror and Tyranny in the CIA’s Pinochet Regime,
What are the roots of Chile’s economic inequality?
Chile, a study of national identity in three parts
4 de septiembre de 2025. Patrias Inventadas: Lengua, Identidad y el Legado del Heroico Salvador Allende de Chile.
Dos importantes aniversarios en la historia de Chile y del socialismo se conmemoran en septiembre: el advenimiento, el 4 de septiembre, de la época dorada de Allende y la tragedia del golpe de Estado del 11 de septiembre que lo depuso. Estos dos acontecimientos seguirán definiendo a Chile a lo largo de la historia, pues siempre será una nación moldeada por el legado de Salvador Allende, interpretado por su prima Isabel.
Ninguna nación tiene una mejor historiadora de su corazón y vida interior que Isabel Allende, quien los plasmó en términos de tragedia griega y shakespeariana en sus obras clásicas de la literatura universal: La Casa de los Espíritus, De Amor y Sombras, Eva Luna y Los Cuentos de Eva Luna, donde se une al triunvirato del Realismo Mágico junto a Mario Vargas Llosa y Gabriel García Márquez. Les invito a leer su brillante análisis de la experiencia inmigrante y la negociación de las ideas de patria y nueva frontera como construcciones conflictivas y yuxtapuestas e identidades originales, Mi país inventado: Un viaje nostálgico por Chile.
La reimaginación de Isabel Allende del rol de la cultura en la formación del ser humano como un ser libre y autónomo, y la función especial del lenguaje en ese proceso, tan similar a la de Amy Tan, me recuerda la historia del origen de Haruki Murakami como escritor, el descubrimiento de su voz y su auténtico yo al componer deliberadamente en inglés, un segundo idioma con el que no estaba completamente familiarizado. Es importante para comprender sus gloriosas y hermosas novelas, pero también esclarecedora como un proceso humano universal de individuación donde el lenguaje es nuestra identidad primaria, como se refleja en las particularidades de los migrantes como exploradores transnacionales de lo desconocido.
Todos somos extranjeros que reivindicamos nuestra pertenencia a múltiples culturas y sociedades, que vivimos a ambos lados de las fronteras que transgredimos, como las imágenes del espejo roto del Duende, que debemos crearnos de nuevo y ser libres. Esta rareza es a la vez el mayor regalo de nuestro tiempo y la mayor amenaza, ya que la forma en que una nación aborda la alteridad es tan central para su identidad y misión como para nuestra propia representación.
Somos nuestros pensamientos, y el lenguaje determina los tipos de pensamientos que podemos tener. He practicado las artes de la escritura y de los idiomas como disciplinas de autocreación desde mi primer año de secundaria, cuando descubrí a Wittgenstein y a su discípulo James Joyce, quien intentó reimaginar y transformar a la humanidad mediante la creación de un nuevo lenguaje universal en Finnegan’s Wake, porque al reescribirnos y pensar de maneras diferentes podemos tomar el control directo de nuestra propia evolución y conciencia.
Los idiomas son una afición mía; Crecí con tres voces: inglés, chino y francés, cada una con su propia identidad. Me refiero a nuestras personalidades o máscaras que usamos en nuestras representaciones, derivadas de la máscara teatral griega clásica, y a los legados de nuestra historia o procronismo, una autointerpretación como una historia expresada en cómo los humanos hemos tomado decisiones adaptativas a las condiciones cambiantes a lo largo de vastas épocas.
Desde los nueve años aprendí el cantonés estándar hablado de Hong Kong y el dialecto Wu de Shanghái con chino tradicional escrito y caligrafía con pincel, y algo de japonés mientras estudiaba budismo Chan o Zen durante diez años, en interrelación con mis estudios de idiomas y artes marciales. Desde séptimo grado hasta la secundaria, asistí a clases de francés en lugar de inglés, en interrelación con mi inmersión en el cine y la literatura surrealistas. Aprendí algo de portugués conversacional en octavo grado para mi viaje de verano a Brasil, antes de la secundaria. Un idioma que se me quedó grabado en el alma, a pesar de mi escaso estudio formal, por el trauma de mi casi ejecución a manos de un equipo de cazarrecompensas de la policía, cuya campaña para matar a los niños abandonados de la calle yo había interrumpido. Allí, en las calles de São Paulo, comprendí por primera vez la praxis de aprender idiomas no solo como medio de conexión con los demás, sino también como palanca de cambio, toma de poder y lucha revolucionaria. Como decían los Matadores, fundados por el gran y terrible Pedro Rodrigues Filho, quien me rescató y me acogió en su feroz hermandad: «No podemos salvar a todos, pero podemos vengar».
Durante la secundaria, fui un entusiasta de Wittgenstein y su discípulo James Joyce, bajo cuya influencia intenté el único proyecto de aprendizaje de idiomas que he abandonado: leer la Cábala, que no está escrita en hebreo, sino en arameo y romance andalusí, lenguas de las que no pude encontrar hablantes vivos.
Durante las vacaciones de verano en la universidad, seguí viajando. Me encantaba tanto la poesía de Basho que, un verano así, recorrí parte de su ruta por Japón para ver dónde la había escrito. Y luego estuvo el fatídico viaje entre mi penúltimo y último año de secundaria, en un tour culinario.
El Mediterráneo, ya que cocinar se había convertido para entonces en una afición mía, lo que implicó mis primeros contactos con el italiano, el español y el griego, así como una clase magistral de francés. Me quedé varado en Beirut, bajo asedio, y un encuentro casual con el gran Jean Genet me marcó el camino de mi vida cuando me hizo jurar el Juramento de la Resistencia. Esto también marca el inicio de mis estudios de árabe, tanto del árabe coránico clásico como del árabe levantino conversacional.
Una lista completa de mis idiomas ahora sería casi imposible; los que necesito cambian según el lugar donde estoy, y he vivido entre muchos pueblos. Por ejemplo, hace más de treinta años, mi atención se dividió entre la guerra de independencia en Cachemira y la lucha revolucionaria contra la monarquía en Nepal, con expediciones a Sarajevo bajo el asedio y otros lugares; y para estos escenarios necesitaba tres tipos de idiomas: El de la gente, koshur en Srinagar y newari en Katmandú, de la burocracia y el oficialismo, que es gorkhali en Nepal y urdu en Pakistán, así como Cachemira, y casi idéntico al hindi, pero escrito con escritura persoárabe e influenciado por el persa clásico, y las lenguas de la erudición literaria en las que me dedicaba, el tibetano clásico como miembro de la orden budista Kagyu Vajrayana en Katmandú y, en Srinagar, el árabe coránico clásico que había estado aprendiendo desde Beirut, junto con el árabe levantino hablado, que se ha convertido en mi cuarta lengua natural junto con el inglés, el chino y el francés, y también el persa clásico y el turco otomano como erudito de la orden sufí Naqsbandi del Islam. En los Balcanes aprendí algo de croata escrito en escritura latina, mutuamente comprensible con el bosnio, ya que evolucionan de la misma fuente. Desde la invasión de Ucrania, me he encontrado hablando y escribiendo en ucraniano, ruso y polaco más de lo que desearía que fuera necesario; Amo los idiomas y a sus pueblos, aunque, como suele ocurrir, las condiciones en las que nos encontramos son las de la tragedia, como museos de holocaustos privados, así como la esperanza de nuestra gloriosa y hermosa Resistencia.
Con cada nuevo idioma, elijo un nuevo nombre en ese discurso, como cualquier otro estudiante, pero también creo nuevas identidades como roles que desempeñar. Hasta ahora, he vivido muchas vidas dentro del ámbito de la mía, y mantengo múltiples yos posibles en reserva como un espectro de opciones adaptativas, algunos con sus propios pasaportes y antecedentes verificables para viajar con tales identidades. Todos somos pluralidades, pero el estudiante de idiomas representa la individualidad como un juego teatral.
Pensar en otros idiomas moldea los pensamientos de manera diferente, nos libera y abre las puertas de la posibilidad a nuevas formas de ser humanos, relacionarnos con nuestra experiencia y organizar ideas sobre el mundo. Por eso, el estudio de idiomas es necesario para el desarrollo equilibrado de los jóvenes. Aprender idiomas proporciona muchos de los beneficios cognitivos y emocionales que ofrece vivir en otras culturas, aunque considero que viajar y vivir en otros lugares son ritos formativos cruciales de paso hacia un yo futuro, creado y elegido con intención, en lugar de uno que simplemente se impone como identidad predeterminada por nuestras circunstancias.
Los idiomas forjan conexiones y nos sumergen en los mundos de otros, cuestionando nuestros límites como universos paralelos de posibilidades humanas y permitiéndonos transformar la alteridad de una amenaza a una oportunidad de crecimiento, reforzando la diversidad como un valor adaptativo y aislándonos también de la patología de la desconexión propia del hombre moderno.
Escribir es una forma de estructurar y mejorar el pensamiento y a uno mismo, porque cómo escribimos es cómo pensamos y podemos operar sobre nosotros mismos, editar y reestructurar nuestros procesos de pensamiento, y tomar la propiedad y el control de nuestra propia evolución y adaptación al cambio a través de la escritura. Cuando pensamos y escribimos en idiomas distintos a nuestra lengua materna, nos liberamos de la normalidad en la que estamos inmersos. El uso que Haruki Murakami hace de la escritura en inglés, una lengua que no dominaba plenamente cuando la eligió como instrumento para escapar de los límites de su normalidad, es un excelente ejemplo del uso de esta táctica para cambiar de perspectiva y liberar la propia experiencia de las prisiones y los legados de nuestra historia, y como declaró Picasso, «para ver de una manera nueva».
En este sentido, el lenguaje es primordial para todas las demás formas de identidad, porque organiza todos los demás sistemas de relación con uno mismo y con el otro. Como escribió René Descartes en su Discurso del Método: «je pense, donc je suis».
Creo en aprender idiomas y formas de ser humano distintas a las de nuestro país de origen como camino hacia la autonomía o la libertad frente a las ideas de los demás como condición impuesta de lucha, hacia la empatía y nuestro deber de cuidar a los demás en una sociedad diversa e inclusiva, y hacia la toma de poder de las identidades autorizadas, especialmente las de nacionalidad, que instrumentalizan la división al servicio de la tiranía.
Lo mismo ocurre con los yo que… habitamos en nuestras patrias imaginarias y en los nuevos y valientes mundos en los que nos encontramos con el desarrollo, la pluralización y la transformación de nosotros mismos a través de la historia.
Torch of Liberty 