The First of August marks the Anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, an object lesson of the horrors of war and the grandeur of Resistance against impossible odds. In a world where the Resistance now combats fascist tyranny in so many arenas and theatres, the Warsaw Uprising remains a song of the glories of antifascist action, revolutionary struggle, and liberation movements, and a cautionary tale of its dangers and points of failure.
For sixty-three days, nearly a million civilians trapped in the city under Nazi occupation were savaged in this war of survival, a tragic and glorious Resistance doomed by the political implications of an independence movement which was timed to liberate Poland before the advancing Soviet forces with the goal of keeping Poland free rather than trading the Nazi Occupation for a Soviet one, which explains why it failed while the parallel Paris Uprising coordinated with the Allied Liberation succeeded. Had the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising forged an alliance and coordinated with the Soviet tanks on the far side of the river to break the Nazis, and negotiated who was in control of what later, results could have been very different.
This is one of the great lessons of the Warsaw Uprising; always communicate before taking action. Another is the value of solidarity; who stands alone, dies alone. Most important of all is a lesson I would hope is obvious; win first, settle accounts and divide the spoils later.
A campaign of disruption, ambush, and sabotage, using the confusion of political mass action as concealment and a unifying narrative, can make mischief behind enemy lines and in cities under occupation, and can be very useful in coordination with an army which can challenge an enemy directly, especially as scouts, but this is not the kind of war the Warsaw Uprising chose to fight. Much like Hamas in the Gaza War, they fought a campaign of total war for control of the city, with the city itself and the lives of all its people in the balance, with horrific consequences.
Yet they fought, without regard to the cost, in a campaign both absurd and noble, tragic and glorious, a last stand against a nihilistic barbarian modernity of fascist tyranny and terror, doomed and beautiful as was the defense of the Great Siege of Malta, and bearing to the last the only title that matters, that of Invictus.
Here I reference the great poem Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
This was an international campaign waged by volunteers which, as reported by Transnational Resistance, included “several hundred and represented at least 15 countries – Slovakia, Hungary, Great Britain, Australia, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, the United States of America, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Rumania and even Germany and Nigeria.”
Today it finds echo and reflection in the International Brigades defending Ukraine both as forces integrated into her military and as independent volunteers like myself and my friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and those operating within Russia as allies of the peace movement now pervasive throughout the Russian military and the civilian democracy mass movement, which include the many Polish patriots and Resistance fighters who rallied to the cause of liberty under threat of nuclear annihilation and imperial conquest by Russia in answer to the call for volunteers by myself and the few hundred Defenders of Mariupol who escaped with me as the city was being sealed off for destruction on April 18, a new Polish Resistance founded in the meeting of which I wrote in my post of April 20 2022, What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw on April 20 in Warsaw.
The circumstances of Mariupol, Rafah, and Warsaw in 1944 are comparable; so also with the crimes against humanity of the enemy. Here was the re-enactment of Guernica which established the fascist doctrine of Total War.
Himmler’s SS retaliated massively in the Wola Massacre, during which two hundred thousand civilians were murdered and Warsaw destroyed by explosives. His orders read; ”The non-fighting part of the population, women, children, shall also be killed. The whole city shall be razed to the ground”.
The entire story is told in Norman Davies’ book Rising ’44 The Battle for Warsaw. Admire them as heroes, our antifascist brothers and sisters. but also learn from their mistakes, and avoid allowing the innocent to bear the cost of your nobility of purpose.
We fight for a humankind united as guarantors of each other’s universal rights and humanity, though we must do so in a world not yet of transcendent and glorious ideals but of ambiguous, ephemeral, and relative truths and values, wherein imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle leave us as few chances for stands on principle which do not threaten risks of ideological fracture as they do for debate and negotiation with those who would enslave us.
Resistance is always war to the knife.
As the iconic photo below is described in ExecutedToday; “One legacy was eerily and unknowingly captured by a LIFE magazine photographer in 1948, of a young girl in a school for disturbed children in Poland. Her face a scramble of innocence and madness as it peers into the lens, she illustrates her “home” as an incoherent chalk vortex. It wasn’t known until many years after this photo became emblematic of a generation wracked by horror, but “Tereska” — Teresa Adwentowska — was an orphaned survivor of Wola.”
7 sierpnia 2024 Dziedzictwo oporu: Rocznica Powstania Warszawskiego 1944
Pierwszego sierpnia przypada rocznica Powstania Warszawskiego 1944, lekcja poglądowa o okropnościach wojny i wielkości ruchu oporu przeciwko niemożliwym przeciwnościom. W świecie, w którym Ruch Oporu walczy teraz z faszystowską tyranią na tak wielu arenach i teatrach, Powstanie Warszawskie pozostaje pieśnią o chwale antyfaszystowskiej akcji, walki rewolucyjnej i ruchów wyzwoleńczych oraz ostrzegawczą opowieścią o jego niebezpieczeństwach i punktach niepowodzenia.
Przez sześćdziesiąt trzy dni prawie milion cywilów uwięzionych w mieście pod nazistowską okupacją było atakowanych w tej wojnie o przetrwanie, tragicznym i chwalebnym ruchu oporu skazanego na polityczne implikacje ruchu niepodległościowego, który miał wyzwolić Polskę przed nacierającymi siłami sowieckimi mając na celu utrzymanie Polski wolnej, a nie zamianę okupacji nazistowskiej na sowiecką, co wyjaśnia, dlaczego się nie powiodła, podczas gdy równoległe Powstanie Paryskie koordynowane z Wyzwoleniem Aliantów odniosło sukces. Gdyby przywódcy Powstania Warszawskiego zawarli sojusz i skoordynowali się z sowieckimi czołgami po drugiej stronie rzeki, aby rozbić nazistów i negocjować, kto będzie kontrolował, co później, wyniki mogłyby być zupełnie inne.
To jedna z wielkich lekcji Powstania Warszawskiego; zawsze komunikuj się przed podjęciem działań. Inną jest wartość solidarności; kto stoi samotnie, umiera samotnie. Najważniejsza ze wszystkich jest lekcja, która, mam nadzieję, jest oczywista; najpierw wygrywaj, rozliczaj się, a później rozdzielaj łupy.
Kampania zakłócania porządku, zasadzki i sabotażu, wykorzystująca zamieszanie politycznej akcji masowej jako ukrycie i jednoczącą narrację, może zrobić krzywdę za liniami wroga i w okupowanych miastach i może być bardzo przydatna w koordynacji z armią, która może rzucić wyzwanie wróg bezpośrednio, zwłaszcza jako harcerze, ale nie na taką wojnę zdecydowało się Powstanie Warszawskie. Toczyli kampanię totalnej wojny o kontrolę nad miastem, z samym miastem i życiem wszystkich jego mieszkańców w równowadze, z przerażającymi konsekwencjami.
A jednak walczyli, bez względu na koszty, w kampanii zarówno absurdalnej, jak i szlachetnej, tragicznej i chwalebnej, o ostatni bastion przeciwko nihilistycznej barbarzyńskiej nowoczesności faszystowskiej tyranii i terroru, skazanej na zagładę i pięknej, jak obrona Wielkiego Oblężenia Malty, i nosząc do końca jedyny tytuł, który ma znaczenie, tytuł Invictus.
Odwołuję się tu do wielkiego wiersza Invictus, co po łacinie oznacza Niezwyciężony, autorstwa Williama Ernesta Henleya.
„Z nocy, która mnie okrywa,
Czarny jak dół od bieguna do bieguna,
Dziękuję jakimkolwiek bogom mogą być
Za moją niepokonaną duszę.
W upadłym szponach okoliczności
Nie skrzywiłem się ani nie płakałem na głos.
Pod ciosami przypadku
Moja głowa jest zakrwawiona, ale nie pochylona.
Poza tym miejscem gniewu i łez
Krosna, ale horror cienia,
A jednak groźba lat…
Znajdzie i znajdzie mnie bez lęku.
Nie ma znaczenia, jak cienka brama,
Jak obciążony karami zwój,
Jestem panem swojego losu:
Jestem kapitanem mojej duszy. “
Była to międzynarodowa kampania prowadzona przez wolontariuszy, która, jak donosi Transnational Resistance, obejmowała „kilkaset i reprezentowała co najmniej 15 krajów – Słowację, Węgry, Wielką Brytanię, Australię, Francję, Belgię, Holandię, Grecję, Włochy, Stany Zjednoczone Ameryki, Związku Radzieckiego, RPA, Rumunii, a nawet Niemiec i Nigerii”.
Dziś odbija się to echem i odbiciem w międzynarodowych brygadach broniących Ukrainy zarówno jako siły zintegrowane z jej wojskiem, jak i jako niezależni ochotnicy, tacy jak ja i moi przyjaciele z Brygady Abrahama Lincolna, oraz jako sojusznicy ruchu pokojowego wszechobecnego w Rosji. masowy ruch wojskowy i cywilnej demokracji, w skład którego wchodzi wielu polskich patriotów i bojowników ruchu oporu, którzy zjednoczyli się na rzecz wolności pod groźbą nuklearnej zagłady i imperialnego podboju przez Rosję w odpowiedzi na apel o wolontariat przeze mnie i kilkuset Obrońców Mariupola który uciekł ze mną, gdy miasto było pieczętowane na zagładę 18 kwietnia, nowy polski ruch oporu założony na spotkaniu, o którym pisałem w poście z 20 kwietnia 2022 r. Jakie jest znaczenie Mariupola? Przemówienie do Wolontariuszy w Warszawie 20 kwietnia w Warszawie.
Okoliczności Mariupola i Warszawy w 1944 r. są porównywalne; podobnie też ze zbrodniami przeciwko ludzkości wroga.
SS Himmlera masowo zemściło się w masakrze na Woli, podczas której zamordowano dwieście tysięcy cywilów, a Warszawa zniszczono materiałami wybuchowymi. Jego rozkazy czytały; „Niewalcząca część ludności, kobiety, dzieci też ma zostać zabita. Całe miasto zostanie zrównane z ziemią”.
Całą historię opowiada książka Normana Daviesa Rising ’44 The Battle for Warsaw. Podziwiaj ich jak bohaterów, naszych antyfaszystowskich braci i siostry. ale także ucz się na ich błędach i unikaj pozwalania niewinnym ponosić koszty twojej szlachetności celu.
Walczymy o ludzkość zjednoczoną jako gwarancje swoich uniwersalnych praw i człowieczeństwa, chociaż musimy to robić w świecie jeszcze nie transcendentnych i chwalebnych ideałów, ale dwuznacznych, efemerycznych i względnych prawd i wartości, w którym narzucone warunki rewolucyjnej walki pozostawiają nam równie mało szans na stanowisko co do zasad, które nie grozi złamaniem ideologicznym, jak na debatę i negocjacje z tymi, którzy chcą nas zniewolić.
Opór jest zawsze wojną na nóż.
Jak opisano poniżej kultowe zdjęcie w ExecutedToday; „Jedna ze spuścizny została sfotografowana w dziwny i nieświadomy sposób przez fotografa magazynu LIFE w 1948 roku, przedstawiająca dziewczynkę ze szkoły dla niespokojnych dzieci w Polsce. Jej twarz to szał niewinności i szaleństwa, gdy spogląda w obiektyw, ilustruje swój „dom” jako niespójny kredowy wir. Nie było wiadomo, aż wiele lat po tym, jak to zdjęcie stało się symbolem pokolenia dręczonego horrorem, ale „Tereska” — Teresa Adwentowska — była osieroconą ocaloną z Woli”.
At stake here are issues affecting every American citizen and other persons within the boundaries of our law; freedom versus dehumanization as a means of enslavement, the role of justice and the social use of force, and our universal human right of access to healthcare as a precondition of our right to life.
How can the Gideonite fundamentalists and atavistic forces of Patriarchy deny the right of bodily autonomy, the first of all rights of property, our right to choose our own use of that body which speaks to the definition of being human and to the fundamental rights of a citizen in a democracy as a voting co-owner of our government, on the basis of our right to life which derives both from our citizenship and our humanity as a natural condition, when the right of the mother to life precedes that of her fetus and renders her the sole medical authorizing party in any such matter?
Only a woman’s right to choose her own destiny matters here, and no state or any other authority which operates in the place of a father or husband under the Patriarchal legal fiction of in loco parentis, nor the will or judgement of any other persons especially actual fathers and husbands, has any just role in a free society of equals; all else is slavery.
If one abrogates the separation of church and state, a keystone principle of our democracy, and claims Biblical authority as a justification for government policy, surely an act of hubris if not madness, on abortion and for a definition of life, life clearly begins with breath.
As William Tyndale wrote in his beautiful poetic reimagination of traditional sources published as the King James Bible; “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” Genesis 2:7.
This is reinforced elsewhere; “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host” Psalms 33:6. And again; “Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived,” Ezekiel 10. And yet again; “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust,” Job 34: 14-15.
Plus there’s the abortion method authorized in Numbers 5:11-31, the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, and the penalty for causing an abortion outside of this ritual such as by a violent blow, which is a fine paid to the woman’s husband because it is a crime against property or future economic benefit and not a crime against person as there is no life or soul before breath. Abrahamic faiths regard as human only those who have been ensouled at first breath upon being born; prior to first breath at birth we are not human but part of the mother’s body; a fetus has no rights other than hers. This is because Abrahamic faiths regard the body as an organic machine and not a person until it is animated with a soul.
To argue that abortion is murder is to argue that there is no soul, that we are human prior to the animating breath of the Infinite, and that as mere beasts and organic machines each of our cells are individually equal to ourselves and legally persons. Haircuts are murder in this absurd construction.
Let us not mistake the purpose and intention of those who would seize women’s power of bodily autonomy as both a human being and a citizen; this has nothing to do with faith, and everything to do with power.
As I wrote in my post of July 22 2021, Systemic Failures of Unequal Power: the Case of Abortion; To an article in the Washington Post calling out the Texas abortion ban as a canary in the coal mine for legislating away our freedoms, I commented; “There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.”
I received a reply; “There is no freedom without personal responsibility.” This claim was supported by references to abortion as demonic child sacrifice, somewhat beyond the scope of reasonable argument.
Here is my refutation to ideas of personal responsibility:
I do not believe in the idea of the innate depravity of man on which our legal system is based as an extension of the doctrine of original sin, or its formulation by Freud as a polymorphosly perverse human nature which must be controlled rather than celebrated and explored, all versions of the Talmudic concept of the yetzer hara, the evil impulse; humans without the restraining force of law do not devolve to atavisms of ruthless barbarism and become dehumanized, but instead become prosocial and mutually interdependent so long as power is not the only thing which has meaning nor fear and its children force and control the only means of exchange.
Nor do I believe in law and order; law serves power and order appropriates; chaos autonomizes.
There is no just Authority.
All the gods are good, if eaten with the appropriate sauce.
I believe in history, and in justice as revolutionary struggle.
I find the origins of evil not in an evil impulse to be controlled, but in the systems and structures of unequal power; hence responsibility is not personal but social and belongs to us all.
Fear is a co-equal origin of evil, for it is overwhelming and generalized fear coupled with submission to authority which allows fear to be weaponized in service to power, through divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite membership and belonging. Hence arise fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and the centralization of power and the immunity of authority and its enforcers in a totalitarian carceral state of force and control, repression of dissent, and authorized identities.
There is no basis for trying anyone for a crime, when we should be seeking to redress the interdependent, relational, recursive, and holistically distributed causes of our failure which produced it.
Crime is a symptom of the failure of social systems, not of the unfitness or degeneracy of individuals whose choices are the products of forces they are the victims of; clearly perpetrators share in the responsibility for their actions, though not exclusively. They are simply the last domino to fall in a cascade failure of unequal and unjust initial conditions, and we must change those conditions to restore the balance.
Criminals owe us nothing for their transgression of our society’s boundaries of the Forbidden, ideas of virtue, or acts which threaten elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and hierarchies of belonging and otherness. Let us not speak of debts to society, prisons and our culture of punishment and control, for all states are embodied violence.
Crime is an illness of unequal power. Perpetrators are also victims; this does not imply moral equivalence between victims and their abusers. We must heal the flaws of our humanity, rather than punish transgression which centralizes power to an authoritarian carceral state of prisons and police.
It is not the perpetrator who must answer to us, but we who must answer for them.
If the purpose of government is to secure those rights which we cannot secure for ourselves, then justice negotiates and guarantees that no person’s liberty infringes on that of any other.
What are the realistic alternatives to the social use of force? Processes of healing and restorative justice provide models and solutions; therapy not punishment, schools and hospitals not prisons. We all bear sacred wounds which can open us to the pain of others, and it is how we respond to the brokenness of the world and to the flaws, wounds, and pain of others which defines us. We humans are beautiful not in spite of our flaws, but because of them. If a tribe comes together to meet the challenges of its member’s actions and consequences for the lives of others when they are signs of trauma and crisis or harmful to others, to engage in healing process and restore the balance of power, we become a social organism which can heal itself, without the social use of force or vilification.
And we can bring the redemptive power of love as healing and revisioning to bear on the issues we face in the world which are more terrible still, and which will require a united front of diverse and unlike persons to find answers. Let us discover our best selves in our kindness to others.
The question we must ask is not if a thing is good or evil, but why it exists.
Abortion is a symptom of our failure to confront and dismantle patriarchy; it is a fracture point of a flawed system which acts to relieve pressure, avoid change, and maintain unequal and unjust elite hegemonic power. Change the balance of power, giving women full control of their sexuality, and equality of social agency in general, and much of the nonmedical need for abortion vanishes; a solution I much prefer to the tyranny and state terror of enforcing other people’s ideas of virtue.
Patriarchy is a special form of faith weaponized in service to power, and male dominion and control over women looks to Abrahamic faith for an apologetics of tyranny.
What is to be done, as Lenin asked in the work that inspired the Russian Revolution?
As I wrote in my post of December 2 2021, Our Supreme Court Legalizes Patriarchal Sexual Terror and the Theft of Women’s Liberty and Bodily Autonomy; Our Supreme Court is about to delegitimize itself in legalizing patriarchal sexual terror and the theft of women’s liberty in making their bodies property of the state, and this we must resist.
Is witch burning next?
The question before us which we must answer in formulating responses and plans of action is this; is America a failed state? Justice Sonia Sotomayor identified the true issue of the legitimacy of the nation during arguments when she asked; “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the courts survive?”
Does the infiltration and subversion of our government and the capture of our Supreme Court by the Fourth Reich mean that our justice system interprets and enforces not the principles of our founding ideals, liberty, equality, a secular state, testable and objective truth, and unbiased and equal justice, nor our universal human rights, nor the will of the people who look to our government as a guarantor of our parallel and interdependent rights both as citizens and as human beings, but the wealth, power, and privilege of hegemonic elites and the dominion of white male supremacy?
If America is fallen, the street theatre of protest and processes of electoral and legislative action which our Constitution envisions as a system of checks and balances are no longer viable, and we must reply to our subjugation with refusal to obey and with the methods of revolutionary struggle and the total resistance of a nation under Occupation.
This will provoke horrific and brutal repression, and result either in our liberation and the refounding of America as a free society of equals or the tyranny and terror of a regime of Gideonite fundamentalism, patriarchal sexual terror, and white supremacist terror which is the goal of the Fourth Reich that captured the Republican Party with the election of Reagan and captured the government of our nation with the stolen election of a Russian and Fascist agent, Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief, Traitor Trump, now once again Pedophile of the United States.
The enemies of freedom and equality have designed this scenario as a fork in chess, much like their attempts to sabotage and capture the narrative of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, using infiltration agents within the police and security services in coordination with deniable assets in a campaign of arson, looting, and random violence to create a pretext for the federal occupation of America’s cities; in Portland this included abduction, torture, and assassination of protesters by Homeland Security’s secret army as a white supremacist terror force acting under the direct orders of the Triumvirate of Chad Wolf, William Barr, and Traitor Trump. They were hoping for retaliation as a causus belli for imposing martial law. Then as now, we must not give them what they want.
Never play someone else’s game, as my father once told me, and the only way to win against greater power and a rigged system is to change the rules.
Let those who would enslave us reveal their true motives, and leave evil to those who are evil. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
Last night I dreamed of an ancestor of mine called the Red Queen for her method of assassination of collaborators during 1871 Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. Her network called themselves the Bacchantes; women who with torch and ax hunted those who would be their masters. They printed tickets with a figure of Dionysus on one side and the address of enemy agents on the other which were distributed openly among those of a gambling lottery, and would converge on their targets en masse before dawn, to hold their betrayers personally responsible by beheading them and burning their homes and businesses down.
They also used public flash mob ambush, poisoning by servants as made infamous during the Haitian Revolution, explosives positioned along known routes, and the art of luring pursuit along channels into traps and killing zones.
Another model of direct action in antipatriarchal Resistance may be found in Sophie Poldermans’ wonderful history book on the heroines of the Dutch Resistance, Seducing and Killing Nazis.
Unlike our legendary forebears in the Resistance of the Second World War and in liberation movements and revolutions throughout history and the world, we do not yet find ourselves without hope for a Restoration of America as a free society of equals, nor do the imposed conditions of our struggle for democracy leave us without options other than violence and the use of social force. It’s our job to make sure it never comes to that.
Under existential threats both to our nation and democracy throughout the world, to the liberty and equality of our citizens, and to our lives and those we love personally, of overwhelming fear and unanswerable force, the primal drive to reassert control through reply in kind and the use of force and violence becomes seductive.
The siren call of the Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force calls to us from chasms of bottomless darkness, and it whispers; “Seize power and dominion, and no one will ever hurt you again. Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.” Thus do victims become abusers, revolutions become tyrannies, and systemic inequalities and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which rely on divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of belonging perpetuate themselves, and this too we must resist.
Our goals must not merely be regime change or seizure of power from those who would enslave us, but the abolition of systems of unequal power and the abandonment of the use of social force, violence, and control, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
And to the seduction of power and the weaponization of fear by authority in the cause of our subjugation we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again.
As I wrote in my post of May 6 2022, There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion; There is no freedom without that of bodily autonomy.
Our Supreme Court just declared half of humankind to be less than human and property of the state, not merely as patriarchal enslavement but also as dehumanization and theft of citizenship. Next will be the right of women to vote, then of all nonwhite persons, then the right to own property and act legally in one’s own name will be restricted to white men as it was at our founding; no matter where it begins with subversion of democracy and the equality of all human beings, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Women’s reproductive rights exhibit dual aspects as both an issue of liberty, our freedom to choose our own identity without coercion by the state, and as a healthcare issue, as universal free access to healthcare is a precondition of our right to life and therefore a Constitutional guarantee upon which none may legally infringe.
This is a direct attack on the idea of citizenship which is central and foundational to democracy, on the personhood and self ownership of all women, and on our values and ideals of freedom and equality.
It is a telling sign of intent that Alioto has cited as precedent the law which legalized witch burning centuries go in his opinion claiming that the right to abortion is unconstitutional, as MSN has pointed out.
Once again, unequal power has been captured and institutionalized by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as a fascism of weaponized faith and systemic Patriarchy.
America’s Supreme Court, now a political bureaucracy of authoritarian power and without legitimacy, and which has delegitimized all law in America and subverted our courts as instruments of repression of dissent and the carceral state, the true goal of the Fourth Reich in the capture of our institutions and systems of Justice, has outlawed the universal right of abortion and given a woman’s power over her own body to the state.
Yes, we all knew this was coming but it is a life disruptive event and a point of fracture in our history. This we must resist with mass action and legislative judo, but the forces of patriarchy and fascism are enormously against us. What happens next, if half of humankind can be dehumanized as property of the state and citizenship with our universal human rights becomes meaningless? In this moment, all is in motion and chaotic change, but this is also a chance of action and a measure of the adaptive range of our system. Patriarchy has made a move which is irredeemable and cannot be walked back, and they are exposed; its our move now.
If we want to keep our system of Justice as a guarantor of our universal human rights and of our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens, and the meaning of citizenship itself, we must reform the Supreme Court. I suggest either recognizing that this is a political tool and limiting terms to that of the President who appointed each member, or limiting terms and holding a vote to elect all Justices on a one citizen one vote basis so that it is no longer a political appointment.
If the Trump regime teaches us anything, among this must be the need to change our system of government to limit the power of the President and the Supreme Court. If we must have a President rather than an executive committee of the Congress, let us abolish the electoral college and hold an open plebiscite instead.
This must be part of a Restoration of democracy which redesigns our system to guarantee majority rule. We must abolish the electoral college and the parceling of votes by state, and change to a one citizen one vote direct electoral democracy.
The blindfold of Justice has slipped, and we must restore her impartiality to divisions including those of gender and race.
And among the first things we must do once the state is liberated from capture by the Fourth Reich is restore Roe v Wade as a Constitutional amendment along with the Equal Rights Amendment.
Let us enact and declare; No Human Bodies Are Property of the State, and No Women Are the Property of Men.
What does it mean to be a woman, and what are we talking about when we talk about the Patriarchy? A retrospective of my writing
June 24 2025 Anniversary of the End of Roe Versus Wade and Women’s Right of Bodily Autonomy
May 6 2022 There Is No Freedom Without That of Bodily Autonomy: On the Patriarchal Enslavement and Dehumanization of Women in the State Capture of Liberty and Equality in the Supreme Court’s Revocation of the Right to Abortion
July 21 2020 How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force
We celebrate an historic victory which broke the internal siege and occupation of America by a secret army of Homeland Security and destabilized the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich, in which we of Antifa became the only force in modern history to ever defeat the federal government of the United States in battle within its borders, possibly the first such victory since Little Bighorn.
What is important herein is that it was not elite warriors of any kind who did this; not the Black Bloc stalwarts of liberty and diversity who had for months defended the protests in skirmishes with Trump’s deniable assets of white supremacist terror like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Attomwaffen Division, Patriot Prayer, and The Base among other treasonous and despicable criminals, nor the revolutionaries and Abolitionists like myself who bear forward the Torch of Liberty handed us by heroes like John Brown and Harriet Tubman, the Paris Commune and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, the Resistance of the Second World War and the original Antifaschistische Aktion founded in 1932 in Germany and Arditi del Popolo founded in Italy in 1921, though these and many other historical forebears continue to inspire, motivate, inform, and shape our Resistance and solidarity of action.
But no, it was ordinary citizens with no special training or history of liberation struggle who did this, and a stunning demonstration of the power of solidarity and the principle of mass action embodied in the phrase United We Stand. Here the idea of democracy as a free society of equals was tested against state terror and tyranny and its forces of repression of dissent, the idea of citizenship weighed against a carceral state of force and control and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege it serves, and against impossible odds the people emerged victorious.
Victory Portland Day proves that solidarity triumphs over division, love over hate, hope over fear, and that we each of us, anyone, can become Unconquered and free in refusal to submit to authority.
As written by Robert Evans in Bellingcat, in an article entitled What You Need To Know About The Battle of Portland; “The city of Portland, Oregon is currently in the national spotlight after video evidence of federal agents driving rented vans and abducting activists went viral. This footage was taken in the early morning hours of July 15, and an Oregon Public Broadcasting article published on the 16th brought the matter out of the local social networks of Portland activists and on to the national stage.
As I write this, mainstream media personalities are beginning to parachute into Portland to cover what some have dubbed the “fascist takeover of Portland”. The word “Gestapo” is trending on Twitter.
The abduction filmed on the 15th did not happen in a vacuum. As other local reporters have noted, it was the end result of more than six weeks of escalating state violence against largely nonviolent demonstrators. I have been in the streets of Portland documenting this movement since the very first riot. Before the national press unleashes a flood of new stories based on their first few hours in town, I’d like to explain what’s been happening: State and Federal law enforcement are at war with the people of Portland.
The Beginning
Depending on who you ask, Portland’s fifty-plus nights of protests either started on May 27th, when a group organized by several indigenous activists and other activists of color occupied the steps of the Justice Center, or on May 29th, Portland’s first night of large scale protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The evening began with a large, peaceful rally at North Portland’s Peninsula Park. Several thousand citizens gathered there, and marched 4.1 miles to merge with the protesters occupying the steps of the Justice Center.
The Multnomah County Justice Center contains the Portland Police Bureau’s chief headquarters, as well as the city jail. The Youth Liberation Front, who describe themselves as “several packs of feral teens,” had occupied the steps of the Justice Center for a little less than three days at this point. They were all raided by the Police on the night of the 28th, but for the most part police presence was minimal in the days leading up to the 29th.
While several thousand citizens marched from Peninsula Park, a crowd of hundreds gathered at the Justice Center. There were no police in sight. At one point a black man on a Trike rolled up and started playing “It’s been a long, long time coming” by Sam Cooke. A dance party ensued.
At 10:35 p.m. local time, the crowd at the Justice Center marched off into the streets of downtown Portland and, several minutes later, met up with the crowd from Peninsula Park. Together, both groups marched back to the Justice Center and surrounded it. https://twitter.com/i/status/1266610051885658114
At a little before 11 p.m., several dozen protesters began to shatter the windows of the Justice Center. They entered the building, trashing the interior and lighting random fires inside. I watched all this happen from feet away, and it is my opinion that the destruction was unplanned, yet more or less inevitable — you could feel it in the mood of the crowd. The 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis had just burned: there was absolutely no way Portland wasn’t going to try to do the same thing.
Of course, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) arrived very shortly thereafter. In one of the more gentlemanly moments of the entire uprising, they gave a warning to people who’d brought their families and dogs, urging them to leave. A sizable chunk of more moderate demonstrators went home. A thousand or more protesters ranked up, and began shouting at the police. At a little after midnight, the PPB launched the first of what would eventually be hundreds of tear gas grenades into the crowd.
The crowd scattered, pushed by police in several different directions at once. They split into several groups. One rampaged through a series of downtown banks, shattering windows and lighting fires as they ran from the cops. Another, larger group of demonstrators tore through the luxury shopping district, sacking the Apple Store, Louis Vuitton, H&M and, eventually, looting a Target. The rest of the night was a messy haze of gas, flash-bangs, and burning barricades.
The Portland Police have stated that more than a dozen riots took place over the last fifty days, but May 29th remains the only night that truly felt like the actual people of this city were rioting.
A Very Bad Weekend
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was out of town on what has become known as Riot Night. At 11:49 p.m., less than an hour into the rioting, he posted this angry tweet: “ENOUGH. I had to leave Portland today because my mother is dying. I am with family to prepare for her final moments. This is hard, this is personal, but so is watching my city get destroyed. I’m coming back NOW. You will be hearing from me, @PortlandPolice, community leaders.”
Wheeler declared a state of emergency early the next morning and instituted an 8 p.m. curfew for the entire city. Well over a thousand protesters assembled the next day, Saturday, in front of the Justice Center. Starting at around 6:00 p.m., they occupied the intersection of 3rd and Main, which sits between the Justice Center and the Federal Courthouse. Police mostly held back behind the Justice Center until a little after 6:50, when a group of four activists sat down in the middle of the intersection of 2nd and Main.
Police quickly shoved the demonstrators out of the intersection and then occupied it themselves, ensuring it was still just as closed to traffic as it had been when the protesters occupied it. Groups of protesters began to move in to confront the police and laid down in front of their riot line: https://youtu.be/U9rvuYCZJJ0
This situation very quickly turned violent. Police began by pulling people up from the ground and then pushing forward into the crowd behind them, shoving with their nightsticks until, at about 6:58 p.m., one hour before curfew, police started hitting people. The crowd retreated at first, but eventually formed up and halted, waving protest signs in the officers’ faces. Police swung several times at crowd members, driving them back, and eventually charged into the crowd with abandon, even striking at people who were on the ground. At one point an officer lost his baton and charged into the crowd, pummeling a demonstrator with his gloved fists. https://youtu.be/7PbUrGSW6Ew
Following this, the Portland Police ordered the crowd to step back from the road and into the parks. They then began launching tear gas, coating the parks and also dousing dozens of random motorists who had the misfortune to be anywhere within several blocks of downtown.
Again, the demonstrations continued for hours. The crowd was eventually chased down to the waterfront and broken apart by a curtain of tear-gas. Thousands of Portlanders watched the day’s violence on livestreams by various journalists and came out the next day, Sunday the 31st of May, to register their displeasure. An enormous demonstration, between 7-10,000 people, rallied at Laurelhurst Park.
By the time the crowd started marching they were all in violation of the curfew. But there were far, far too many people to arrest, and the Police kept their distance almost the entire march. They seemed to panic at one point, when the crowd began marching across the Burnside Bridge into downtown, towards the Justice Center. Several riot trucks, loaded down with officers, came roaring in to block the bridge. When they got a good look at the sheer size of the crowd, they turned back around. https://youtu.be/KMP2m_1m-zQ
The crowd eventually reached and surrounded the Justice Center. A tense, hours-long stand-off ensued. Activists demanded the police take off their riot gear, then amended that to asking them to take a knee. The police were unmoved. Eventually, the crowd thinned out enough that the PPB felt secure dispersing it. The evening ended with small groups of protesters running through the streets, pursued by officers hanging off the sides of riot trucks and shooting wildly at everyone they saw. It kind of sucked — I have no other words to describe it.
The Cycle of Violence
After that first terrible weekend, the situation in Portland began to stabilize into something predictable. On Monday, June 1st, a second mass rally, similar in size to the one on May 31st, assembled at Revolution Hall near the middle of the city. These people attempted to march to the Justice Center, but by that point the police had called in for an enormous chain-link fence, to wall it and the Federal Courthouse off from the rest of the city.
The protest on June 1st was distinctly different from anything that had come before. A new group of inexperienced activists took the wheel, and they placed great emphasis on talking with the police and avoiding any confrontation. In this they were successful, and the crowd marched across the Hawthorne bridge, toured downtown, and marched back to Revolution Hall with barely any sight of police officers.
This would prove to be the beginning of a split within Oregon’s protest movement. On one end were more moderate liberal marchers, who sought to avoid conflict with the police while engaging in “peaceful protest.” On the other end were more radical demonstrators, who found the rally on June 1st to be pointless. After this night, the two parts of the movement grew further and further apart.
The more moderate demonstrators coalesced around a new organization called Rose City Justice, which continued to lead mass demonstrations for the next couple of weeks. Most of their marches followed the same basic pattern as the one on June 1st, although they also occupied chunks of highway on several occasions. They succeeded in avoiding conflict with the police, but their numbers rapidly dwindled. On June 30th, they announced an end to their nightly marches.
Meanwhile, the more extreme members of the movement gravitated towards a series of nightly protests around the fence walling the Justice Center and Courthouse off from the rest of the city. Thanks to a joke I made during a livestream, they began calling it the “Sacred Fence.” It has a Twitter account now.
The rallies at the fence were met with intense police violence from the very beginning. On June 2nd, after another mass rally by the group that became Rose City Justice, about a thousand activists peeled off and approached the fence. They demanded to be allowed to protest at the Justice Center, and were forced away from the fence by a barrage of police impact munitions and tear gas.
The crowd reformed, repeatedly, and continued to march on the fence. The police eventually responded by an indiscriminate barrage of grenades, kettling the crowd on all sides with walls of tear gas. The amount of gas used was so overwhelming that a photograph of the resultant nightmare was used for a New York Magazine spread.
Again, large numbers of motorists stuck in traffic were tear gassed by the police, temporarily blinding a number of them and helping to spark eight lawsuits seeking to ban the use of tear gas by the PPB. https://youtu.be/vGil6LAaCpY
“Tear Gas Tuesday,” as it came to be known, was also the very first night where Portland crowds were able to repeatedly reform after being gassed and dispersed by the police. As one activist told me after a particularly heavy bout of gassing, “It’s only really scary the first time. Then you get used to it.” The crowd at the Sacred Fence started to bring more traffic cones to douse gas canisters — they also brought umbrellas and shields to deflect impact munitions. They continued to march on the fence, prompting the police to reduce its size to just covering the area immediately around the Justice Center and Courthouse.
The nightly demonstrations took on a predictable cadence after this. Crowds would assemble around the fence and heckle the officers inside. On some nights, the police would choose to start firing impact munitions into the crowd, and eventually gassing them. On other nights, they would not. Every use of force was justified by the police due to the crowd throwing something over the fence: fireworks, water bottles, even a can of beans one time. And, apparently, a half-eaten Granny Smith apple.
The Portland Police removed their fence on June 15th, as the nightly demonstrations at the Justice Center had faded down to just a few hundred individuals on a good night. The Justice Center protests became a regular outlet for activists, a place where someone could always go to have a confrontation with the police. As often as not, the nights there ended in violence.
Yet through the latter half of June and into early July, protesters began experimenting with different tactics. Some small groups of activists started destroying statues, starting with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington on June 14th and 18th. On June 25th, spurred on by the creation of the Seattle Autonomous Zone, several hundred Portland activists attempted to occupy the North Precinct before being forced out by tear gas and batons. At one point, Portland police broke the window of a protester’s car and pulled them out into a cloud of tear gas. https://twitter.com/i/status/1276445729813389314
After being pushed out of the precinct, the crowd set an enormous dumpster fire, which they used to ward off a police advance for several minutes.
For unclear reasons, a small group of activists moved over to the Mid-K Beauty Supply, which abuts the North Precinct, and set fire to the plywood covering its windows. This was a contentious decision and angered several members of the crowd. As the police advanced and began to fire tear gas, a larger group of activists beat the fire out before fleeing.
The next day, June 26th, a number of black community leaders in Portland issued a statement condemning the demonstration at the North Precinct. One of them, Pastor Dr. Steven Holt, called the fire at Mid-K Beauty Supply “a terrorist activity.” Together with Mayor Ted Wheeler, this group held a press conference in front of the burnt plywood façade of Mid-K.
As June ended, Portland protest culture settled into an odd rhythm. There were nightly gatherings at the Justice Center, which sometimes ended in police violence and sometimes ended in parties. Several times a week, new rallies at places like the North Precinct or the Portland Police Association headquarters would occur. These were often heavily promoted by the anti-fascist group Youth Liberation Front, who are probably the strongest consistent voice for Portland’s radical protest scene. On any given day, Portlanders could generally find some sort of peaceful rally or, if they choose, wind up in a skirmish with the PPB.
The Battle in the Courts
On June 11th, a federal judge in Portland issued a two-week restraining order on the use of tear gas. This was a partial granting of the request of a local activist group, Don’t Shoot Portland. Under the terms of the “ban,” Portland police were only able to use gas as a “life-saving measure.” This ban came with a loophole, however. Riots are assumed to be life-threatening situations, and so the PPB increasingly started making riot declarations to justify their use of tear gas.
In one five-day period, from June 30th to July 4th, the PPB declared three riots. The justifications for this were often questionable. For example: the rally on June 30th was a march of about three hundred people that ended at the Portland Police Association headquarters. The PPA is Portland’s local police union. It is a private entity, but the city seems to deploy significant resources to protect it.
By the time the marchers arrived at the PPA building in North Portland, it was surrounded by a riot line, with numerous police vehicles and riot troopers waiting in reserve. The state troopers who guarded the front of the building wore no identifying numbers or name tags. Within minutes of the crowd’s arrival, the police declared an unlawful assembly and demanded the crowd disperse. They justified this by citing “criminal activity” in the crowd, but what that meant was unclear.
Within an hour, and with no clear justification, the PPB declared a riot and began firing tear gas into both the crowd and the neighborhood around them. Local residents were kept out of their homes, and some wound up stuck outside their houses and apartments in the gas cloud.
A few weeks later, on July 14th, a second march again formed up around the Portland Police Association headquarters. On this occasion the riot declaration was made after a police officer slapped the phone out of an activists hand and sent it careening into the window of the PPA building. It broke a window, which the PPB used as justification to declare a riot and deploy tear gas.
Portland Police have also been taken to court for their treatment of local journalists. They have regularly targeted press during demonstrations, with the worst night so far being the first protest at the Portland Police Association. Three reporters were arrested within the span of a few minutes: Cory Elia, Lesley McLam and Justin Yau.
Video taken by Elia shows that his encounter started when he walked past an officer he recognized, John Bartlett, and mentioned his name while livestreaming. Officer Bartlett knocked Elia’s phone out of his hands. Several minutes later, a group of officers grabbed Elia, tossed him to the ground and arrested him. He was charged with two counts of assaulting a police officer.
I filmed Elia’s arrest and saw no sign of any resistance. You can judge for yourself here. https://youtu.be/f41hP83p51I
Justin Yau was arrested the same night for filming an arrest himself. He was also charged with felony riot. Lesley McLam also initially faced felony charges, but the District Attorney rejected these charges. These arrests came after weeks in which Portland police assaulted a number of local journalists. Sergio Olmos was shoved repeatedly by police on the night of June 6th. Cory Elia was thrown into a wall and kicked while on the ground the same night. Reporter Donovan Farley was assaulted on June 7th while attempting to film an arrest. Officers beat him on the legs with truncheons and maced him as he tried to leave. https://youtu.be/YWiY6F5sBtg
On July 2nd, less than 48 hours after the march on the PPA building, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon issued a temporary restraining order against the city, banning police from arresting or using force on anyone they “know or reasonably should know” was a journalist or legal observer. Two weeks later, on July 16th, Portland Police arrested local reporter Andrew Jankowski while he was covering a demonstration.
At this point, most of the Portland press corps, including myself, are actively suing the Portland Police Bureau. The federal injunction does seem to have moderated their behavior, but at the end of the day the level of the anger of individual officers seems to be the only real factor that determines whether or not a journalist spends the night in jail.
The Edge of All-Out War
On July 4th, Portland’s thirty-ninth consecutive night of protests, more than a thousand people assembled in front of the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse downtown. They began launching dozens of commercial-grade fireworks into the concrete facades of both buildings, prompting a response from the police and federal agents inside both buildings.
What followed resembled nothing so much as a medieval siege. The windows of both government buildings had been covered in plywood weeks ago, after the first riots. Officers inside fired out through murder holes cut in the plywood, pumping rubber bullets, pepper balls and foam rounds into the crowd, while the crowd formed phalanxes of shield-bearers to protect the men and women launching fireworks back in response. Federal agents dumped tear gas into the street, but Portland’s frontline activists had long since lost their fear of gas. The feds and the police were eventually forced to sally out with batons to drive the crowd back. https://youtu.be/WcZKsdZkFw8
I reported on the fighting in Mosul back in 2017, and what happened that night in the streets of Portland was, of course, not nearly as brutal or dangerous as actual combat. Yet it was about as close as you can get without using live ammunition. At times, dozens of flash-bangs and fireworks would detonate within feet of us over the course of a few minutes. My ears rang for days afterwards. My hands shook. I could not write for days. https://youtu.be/_lAI_ir5vmQ
The whole situation prompted the first major federal response to Portland’s nightly protests. It started in the media, with CBP commissioner Mark Morgan going on Fox News to denounce local activists as “criminals.”
“These are not protesters, these are criminals, who got together and actually brought weapons, they brought shields, they brought frozen water bottles, rocks, lasers, weapons with the intent to destroy a federal building and harm law enforcement officers.”
I take some issue with this, because there was never any real chance of either the Federal Courthouse or the Justice Center being seriously damaged by fireworks. Both buildings are, at this stage in the protests, essentially fortresses. Before federal agents opened fire, activists in the park actually seemed much more interested in shooting fireworks at the Justice Center, to provide a show for their friends incarcerated inside.
A prisoner inside the Justice Center began waving out at the crowd, and there was much rejoicing.
I also take issue with the next thing Mark Morgan said: ““One of the criminals, that were actually trying to assault one of the CBP employees while he was being arrested, the report right now is that a pipe bomb- a fused incendiary device and a machete was actually discovered during that search. Think about that… Think about the deadly consequences from these criminal actions.”
This is rather interesting, because the Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security actually posted a picture of this “pipe bomb”:
You may notice that this “bomb” has no hole for a fuse. When I showed this to activists on the street, most of them suggested this was probably a device for breaking windows. That seems very likely now that we have the charging document from that weekend. The man with the machete is Andrew Faulkner. He is charged with assaulting a federal officer by shining a laser pointer at their face. Neither he, nor any other Portland protester, have faced any charges related to the possession of a pipe bomb.
Mark Morgan referred to this device, and the other “weapons” of these protesters, as deadly. However, so far, the only person who came close to dying as a result of these demonstrations is Donovan LaBella. On Saturday, July 11th, LaBella attended one of the nightly rallies in front of the Justice Center. People who were in attendance at the time described the general mood as subdued, and the crowd as passive, when Federal Agents with the U.S. Marshals began charging out to arrest and shoot protesters.
In the video below, Donovan can be seen holding a set of speakers above his head. Federal agents fire a munition towards him, and he gently tosses it away. He does not throw the munition towards officers, merely away from himself. After this, a federal agent shoots him directly in his skull with a rubber bullet. Donovan collapses instantly, his skull shattered.
Use of force experts interviewed by Oregon Live say the agent likely did not intend to hit Donovan in the head, “since the risk of serious injury is high.” Sid Heal, a retired Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department commander, stated: “In this particular case, there is no rational way to say that deadly force was authorized.” On July 18th, the New York Times reported on a leaked DHS memo which warned that the agents deployed to Portland had no training in riot control or managing protests.
On July 10th, one day before Donovan was shot, President Donald Trump had congratulated the head of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, for crushing the protest movement in Portland. At a meeting of military commanders in Doral, Florida he praised Wolf by stating: “It was out of control. The locals couldn’t handle it, and you people are handling it very nicely — so nicely that the press doesn’t want to write about it.”
Yet of course the protests and riots have continued, even after LaBella’s brutal maiming. As I type this, hundreds of Portlanders are engaged in a series of pitched skirmishes with federal agents and police officers, just as they have been most nights since the end of May. As federal forces have failed to contain the unrest, the Trump Administration has turned up the heat on their rhetoric. Acting secretary Wolf visited Portland on the 16th. He called protesters “lawless anarchists.” In a statement issued the same day, he wrote that:
“A federal courthouse is a symbol of justice — to attack it is to attack America. Instead of addressing violent criminals in their communities, local and state leaders are instead focusing on placing blame on law enforcement and requesting fewer officers in their community. This failed response has only emboldened the violent mob as it escalates violence day after day.”
This is untrue. Virtually all crime, including violent crime, has been lower in the city of Portland during the last several weeks. The Acting Secretary’s statement was filled with a number of other inaccuracies as well. The bulk of the letter is a dated list of all the alleged crimes committed by Portland protesters, who are generally referred to as “violent anarchists”.
This is certainly very sneaky. By stating it “appears” to be a pipe bomb the statement avoids addressing the fact that no actual pipe bomb has ever been found and no one has been charged for possession of one. Despite the Acting Secretary Wolf’s claims that these demonstrators are intensely violent, the vast majority of the crimes he attributes to them are simple acts of vandalism:
Perhaps this will change as the protests continue. But thus far, the only escalation seen recently has been the federal agents now roaming the streets of downtown Portland in rented vans, arresting activists seemingly at random. These men display no identification, no name tag or badge number or anything else that might be useful identifying them. That fact has rightly shocked Americans across the country, but at this point, it is nothing new to Portland protesters.
Portland Police have been hiding their names for weeks, instead using numbers that cannot be correlated to names by any means available to citizens. Members of multiple different law enforcement agencies, all with different rules of engagement from the PPB, have been policing demonstrations since the very beginning. As Tuck Woodstock, a local reporter, noted on Twitter:
“This is the natural escalation of the last 7 weeks. This is what has come of Portlanders protesting police brutality for 50 days: more bizarre acts of police brutality. Portlanders are risking everything every day. Please notice.”
That is, in the end, what both the Portland press corps and the people out in the streets, protesting every night, seem to want from the rest of the United States. Please pay attention to the videos of officers ripping people’s face masks off to spray mace directly into their mouths. Please pay attention to the video of Donovan LaBella, blood gushing from his head, seizing on the ground. And, yes, please pay attention to the videos of men in full combat gear abducting activists off the street.
Pay attention, because it is my belief that all of this will not stay confined to Portland. Your city might be next.”
In this summer of resistance and liberation struggle against ICE and other white supremacist terror forces of the Trump regime, and in the wake of our victory in the Battle of Los Angeles against the federal occupation, the warning of the heroic reporter Robert Evans seems prophetic. But sadly this is not true; what is true is that our liberty and our humanity must be won endlessly throughout time because we fight not only regimes of fascist tyranny but also systems of oppression which are ancient and vast, and the tides of darkness must be turned by each one of us in our hearts as well as all of us in solidarity of action as guarantors of each others humanity. The Revolution has no end.
On July 25 2020 I declared war on the Homeland Security federal occupation of Portland which the Triumvirate of Trump, Wolf, and Barr had sent in support of their embattled deniable assets including the Oathkeepers, Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and other white supremacist terror forces, with the following post to which I appended my song for Last Stands from which I have no expectation of survival but cannot stand aside, David Bowie’s Cat People. I post it as a farewell to any friends who may survive me, as I did before going to Mariupol during the Siege and to Panjshir in Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul. The situation at Portland was no less a forlorn hope; but civilization has always balanced on the edge of a knife, and the whole project of America was always a desperate gamble. There are things we cannot stand aside from and remain human.
As I wrote in my post of July 25 2020, The Democracy Revolution Comes Home to America; When the forces of tyranny and state terror launch their campaign of occupation throughout our cities to repress dissent and the exercise of our Constitutional liberties and universal human rights, to enact and enforce racial violence, white supremacist terror, and divisions of exclusionary otherness, when those truths we hold to be self-evident are denied by a fascist cabal which has seized our government and begun the subversion of our democracy, when the performance of our citizenship is criminalized, we the people are left as were our founders with no choice but to join together in our common defense and reclaim our humanity and our liberty.
We must reignite the Torch of Liberty and reclaim America as a free society of equals and a beacon of hope to the world.
The Fourth Reich in the persons of President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr and acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf have called us terrorists and violent anarchists as a pretext for the Federal occupation of America, we who are nonviolent protesters against inequality and racist state violence, most of whom want nothing more than to no longer be hunted with impunity by the police and shot in their homes and on the streets like animals simply because they are Black. Its not an unreasonable demand, and the understandable anger which occasionally accompanies it is a result of overwhelming and generalized fear and the legacy of slavery, by those who have been abandoned and betrayed by our government.
But they have not been abandoned by their fellow citizens, for we shall stand in solidarity and face the threat of our dehumanization, enslavement, and genocide as a free and unconquered people. For when the secret police and armies of repression come for us, they will find not a racially divided population disempowered by learned helplessness and conditioned to submit to authority and force, but an America united in resistance.
For our refusal to submit to force and control we are called terrorists who are patriots, by fascists who with lies and violence conspire in the Fall of America and of democracy throughout the world. Yet we shall resist and fear not, and abandon not our fellows in the cause of liberty. They called us terrorists in South Africa too, and the system of apartheid is fallen and gone. Here also, we shall overcome.
A Great Reckoning and Revolution for democracy and our universal human rights began in April of 2019 with a stunning victory in Sudan and the end of the Darfur War, and propagated like a tidal wave globally, much of the year focused by necessity on the liberation of Hong Kong and Palestine, on the contest of dominion for the Mediterranean and the Middle East between Russia and Turkey and its flashpoints in Syria and Libya and the consequences of its refugees as a weaponized human rights disaster for democracy in Europe, and on the games of empire of the theocratic hegemony of Iran and its oligarchic, imperial, and sectarian opponents in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, the seizure of India by a fascist tyranny and its genocidal war in Kashmir, the environmental catastrophe and brutal tyranny of Bolsonaro in Brazil, the absurd show trial which failed to hold responsible the true perpetrators of the horrific murder of Khashoggi and the pervasive global campaign against truth by tyrannies built of death and lies, the regional collapse of state authority and the economy in Mexico and Central America as well as Columbia and Venezuela and their seizure by criminal oligarchies, the manufacture and exploitation of the disaster by America to enact ethnic cleansing through the concentration camps along our border, the genocide of the Islamic Uighur and Rohingya ethnic minorities in China and Myanmar, the destabilization of Chile through privatization and the anthem of a women’s rights movement that engulfed the world, a fascist coup in Bolivia, Greta Thunberg and the emergence of a global Green movement, American imperialism against Maduro in Venezuela, the fall of democracy in Hungary and its reshaping by Orban into a Nazi stronghold and base of operations for the Fourth Reich, global eruptions of National Strikes against austerity capitalism and the subversion of democracy, #metoo and the triumphant resurgence of feminism.
Democracy movements and revolutions seized Hong Kong, India, Britain, France, Spain, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Haiti, Algeria, Eqypt, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Guinea, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon; few places in the world remained untouched by the cry for Liberty.
2019 was a year of great hope tempered with tragic failure, typified by its end and the start of a new year with a fragile peace in Afghanistan after 18 years of war, a peace lost a few days later in a six hour fight in the total darkness of a cave, rescuing the SEALs trapped in a Taliban fortress by the destruction of their helicopters during an assault in violation of the treaty, the whole history of millennia of civilizational conflict bourne by four men who free climbed a mountain in recapitulation of Alexander the Great’s capture of the Sogdian Rock and then with stealth and precision defeated a force which had overwhelmed and pinned down an aerial assault team of SEALs. As with many events which unfold as a regression of throwing words into throwing stones, it was both a tactical success and a strategic failure, a glorious act of heroism and an imperialist provocation which as it was designed and intended to do sabotaged our withdrawal from the madness of a forever war.
Of tactics and strategies relevant to revolutionary struggle and transformational change, I shall say this; a greater force may be overcome by a lesser one through redirection. And the first lesson of this art is diversion and surprise; the last lesson is the same as the first, diversion and surprise. All else is timing.
But now the struggle against fascism and tyranny has come home to America, and from the test case of Portland, where we have achieved victory having besieged the government’s terror force of secret police in the Justice Building while the people own the streets and go and do as they will, and above all having exposed Trump’s hand in the violent and criminal disruptions of the protests, a campaign of occupation and repression which threatens to unfold in Chicago and Philadelphia and in every city which defies tyranny, racist state violence, and the fascist coup against democracy and America.
This we shall resist, as the volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade did in Spain against fascism in 1937 in the first campaign of the Second World War, a resistance now organizing across America and throughout the world. We must bring our Theatre of Resistance to every city with a sustained protest in our nation, while also building solidarity and networks of alliance and mutual aid throughout the world as an international resistance against fascism and tyranny.
Equality is the common birthright of all humankind, and it cannot be stolen from us who in resistance become unconquerable and free.
I ask all who love liberty and would place their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, who would become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world, who would question, expose, mock, and challenge authority when it comes to subjugate us; seize the dream of America and democracy as a free society of equals who are co-owners of their government and a beacon of hope to the world for your own, and unite in solidarity to make it real.
Freedom and our self-ownership as autonomous individuals cannot be granted to us by authority; freedom must be seized.
Liberty belongs to us all.
For I am but a wandering jester, and I must prepare entertainments for our unwanted guests.
So I wrote as I prepared for an unwinnable fight against impossible odds; imagine my surprise when the tide of history turned on this day five years ago. There are lessons to be drawn from such events; resistance itself is a victory and one which cannot be taken from us, hope remains so long as we refuse to submit, and we may claw back something of our humanity from the darkness so long as our solidarity holds. These strategies of resilience may see us through trials and life disruptive events of all kinds, but it can be said simply; Never Stay Down, and Let No One Stand Alone.
As I wrote in my post of July 30 2020, A Shot Heard Round the World: Victory Portland; Jubilation and dancing in the streets; join us in celebration of Victory Portland Day as the fascist occupation force of Trump’s secret police concede defeat by the people and begin their withdrawal. This is a moment of tidal change and a shift in the balance of power in America now and throughout the world in the history of humankind and our possible futures to come, for democracy has stood its ground against tyranny, and tyranny has run from us in fear.
This is a remarkable and absurd triumph of the human will to freedom and refusal to submit to overwhelming force, and to transcend the limits of our flesh and divisions of exclusionary others in solidarity with one another. So few and spectacular are such moments in our history that the memory of them becomes part of our shared identity; Marathon, the Siege of Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware, Gettysburg, the landing at Normandy, and now though on a different scale Portland, which like the shot heard round the world that began the American Revolution in the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 created immense and universal consequences which will continue to shape humankind throughout our history as echoes and reflections.
Civilization has always balanced on the edge of a knife, and the whole project of America, a free society of equals, was always a desperate gamble.
Here the American people in leaderless and nonviolent mass action have defeated in battle the federal government of the United States and its secret and criminal terror force and army of occupation created for this purpose by Chad Wolf as an arm of Homeland Security and operating in concert with deniable forces of fascist and white supremacist terror. We have emerged victorious from this terror campaign by the carceral state which included the assassination, abduction and torture of protestors by police as well as attempts to disrupt and discredit protests for racial justice throughout our nation through police and deniable asset violence, property destruction and looting, and arson.
And though the defense of the protesters, of our rights as both citizens and as human beings under international law, and of our nation against fascist subversion saw our heroic Antifa patriots in the front lines of over fifty cities with sustained liberation movements over several months, a role performed on the stage of the world and before the witness of history, and led in Portland by the legendary Rose City Antifa, of which I as the founder of Lilac City Antifa am immensely proud to have stood with in defense of our liberty, it was the people who won this glorious revolutionary struggle for democracy against tyranny.
Here in the streets of Portland the most brutal and ruthless psychopaths, fascist zealots, and professional murderers and torturers the federal government could seduce, coerce, or buy, officers who like Hitler’s SS were chosen for their loyalty to the Fourth Reich regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, for sociopathy or capacity for violence without empathy, mercy, or remorse, and for elite combat skills and personal history of mayhem and brutality, and gathered from every military service and police force in the nation, these treasonous and dishonorable thugs, some of whom are fascist infiltrators who have embedded themselves throughout our security services, broke and ran when met with refusal to obey by an unarmed line of march which consisted mostly of women. This was the critical moment when the tide of history was turned from fascist tyranny to a free society of equals and a United Humankind; when the police ran from a protest of students and their moms.
Two months of ongoing fighting would be necessary before the September 21 surrender by the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf of Portland, Seattle, and New York to the people as Autonomous Zones, with countless crimes against humanity and violations of our rights as citizens by the federal government including the police assassination of Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl. But the actions of this day in 2020 on the streets of Portland, like Gandhi’s Salt Tax protest, delegitimized the federal government and broke the occupation of cities throughout America.
We are a free society of equals who are co-owners of our government; such is the definition of democracy. There is no government of any kind which imposes its will on the people through force and control and retains its legitimacy, and in such cases we the people may with just cause withdraw the power we have lent the state. This is the principle of Natural Law on which our nation was founded, a truth immanent in nature, inherent to our being, and written in our history and our flesh.
There is no just authority.
A Second American Revolution is playing out in the streets of cities across America, and like the first it is “a shot heard round the world”. So Emerson described it in his Concord Hymn, which commemorates the fight at the Old North Bridge on April 19, 1775, the first shots fired by American soldiers and the first victory of a terrible war in which ordinary people seized control of their own destiny and founded a nation in which no one is better by right of birth than any other. This is the heart of who we are, we Americans; a people forged in resistance against tyranny and united in the dream of liberty and equality.
Two centuries and twenty five years after that first American victory we have begun to awaken and remember who we are. And we must cherish and hold high that memory, and never again allow our identity to be stolen from us by a fascist state of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Today we won the first victory in the struggle for democracy in our time, one which will echo through the darkness of tyrannies and autocracies of state terror everywhere, and find answer among the powerless and the dispossessed, the enslaved and the imprisoned, those whom Frantz Fanon called “the Wretched of the Earth”, and as the poem of a young Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, inscribed on our Statue of Liberty declares as the soul of our nation and a beacon of hope to the world, the “huddled masses yearning to be free.”
Today we have liberated Portland; tomorrow, America and the world.
So I wrote on a day of glorious victory and joy, one which is a case of a general revolutionary struggle in becoming human to seize ownership of ourselves from systems of oppression like divisions of race and authorized national identities.
As I wrote in my post of May 25 2023, The Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle; On this anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege we now have also the national trauma of the Robb Elementary School and Buffalo New York mass shootings, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of our nation and our civilization that must be reimagined and transformed; the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
As Joe Biden said; “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
Regarding solidarity and the total freedom conferred by the act of refusal to submit as Resistance, I have a story to tell you, and a gift to share with you; membership in a tradition of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Here I offer you the Oath of the Resistance, as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut in 1982.
During the summer before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, we joined whole networks of such groups already fighting, and more joined us; together we united in mass action with a vast and diverse resistance and liberation struggle. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. This is all we truly own and which make us human, such defining moments; memories, stories, histories, identities. Against the terror of our nothingness we have only this with which to find a balance; the truths written in our flesh and the joy of total freedom to discover them. It is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before the Fall of Beirut, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers in a sack of murder and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, ordering people into the streets to surrender and setting fires to burn alive in their homes anyone who refused, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes as the building we were in was set on fire, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation which friends of mine were forming. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny and fascism with Liberty and Equality; to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
To all those who hunger to be free, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth, this I say; you are not alone.
Let none stand alone who refuse to submit to the tyranny and terror of force and control, who speak truth to power and question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, who answer division with solidarity, control with disobedience, authorized identities, virtue, and normality with transgression, who run amok and are ungovernable.
Nor can our souls be stolen from us by either the brutal repression of fear nor the seduction of lies and illusions, we who call the enemy by his true names and stand united in the cause of our liberty, for who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled by force and control becomes Unconquered and free.
In Resistance we are all, each of us, Living Autonomous Zones. No one speaks or answers for us, nothing is beyond question, and all authority which claims us is without legitimacy or meaning.
When those who would enslave us come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; let the fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege find not a humankind broken by cruelty and state terror nor divided by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, not hopeless and abject as products of a system of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, not disempowered by learned helplessness nor conditioned to submit to authority and force, but a humankind united in resistance; an unconquerable and United Humankind.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Shoshanna Prepares for German Night, Inglorious Basterds
Cat People by David Bowie
What You Need To Know About The Battle of Portland
Form your own Antifascist network! Portland’s Rose City Antifa and Antifa International resources
Rose City Antifa opposes fascist organizing through direct action, education, and through solidarity with leftist spaces, activists, and organizations.
If you have any information about racist or fascist organizing in your area or if you are interested in learning more about Rose City Antifa and getting involved in our work, please get in touch with us.
Madness and vision, the glorious rebellion against Authority which confers freedom and an Unconquered and self created being as a Living Autonomous Zone and agent of change, the consequences of our civilization’s war against nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dialectics of gender identity; herein I write in celebration of Emily Bronte, on her birthday tomorrow, July 30.
Why is this important, and why now? Herein we may read the futures we must choose between, as we pass through this Rashomon Gate Event of transformative change, ambiguous and relative truths and ephemeral and shifting meanings, and shape ourselves to the image we want to become as we begin civilizational collapse and catastrophic ecological change from which humankind may never survive, in imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle wherein a captured America under the Fourth Reich balances on the edge of becoming a failed state and throughout the world democracies fall and are succeeded by fascist tyrannies, and the hammer of the Third World War threatens to forge us into aberrant and unrecognizable forms.
Herein I write in celebration of the author and her perplexing novel, which continues to provoke impassioned discourse and afright the horses. Emily Bronte saw herself as the Titan Prometheus, cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel, and bearing the stolen fire of the gods. I have always seen in her a kindred spirit, and myself mirrored in her strange and transgressive reimagination of the Bible.
Wuthering Heights reimagines the mythology of human origins as the awakening and progress from an animal state, much like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or Ted Hughes version of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Like its models Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights is both central to the tradition of Romantic Idealism and a critique of it, a dialectical interrogation of the values of Platonic philosophy. Its themes and ideas echo through the works of Iris Murdoch and continue to be relevant after two hundred years.
Published a generation after Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and referential to its themes, with the roles of Victor Frankenstein and his monster transposed to Catherine and Heathcliff and the relational dynamic shifted from parent-child to that of lovers, Wuthering Heights is among the origin texts of feminism. I recommend it for an introductory course of study on feminism in literature along with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Sylvia Plath embodied and re-enacted the relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff with Ted Hughes; Ted Hughes cast himself and Sylvia Plath in the roles as Orpheus and Eurydice as a life performance, the myth being Emily Bronte’s primary source in Wuthering Heights, and we can study its actual praxis in their biographies as theatre. Its nuances as a central myth of our civilization can also be seen in its fairytale version, Beauty and the Beast, in the gorgeous film by Jean Cocteau.
Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Emily Bronte’s secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, and the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
My history with this book begins when as a curious twelve year old I asked my mother, “How do people know if they are a boy or a girl? How do we choose?”
To which she replied, “Everyone is both, of course. Discovering how we like to play the game is one of life’s great adventures.” And she gave me Wuthering Heights to read.
Its relevance to my question was not immediately apparent to me. We may ask, as I did when I first began to read it, “But mom, where is her ax?” To which the answer was, “She has come to redeem and awaken our true nature, not to slay monsters or destroy our cages”.
With time I came to understand Catherine and Heathcliff as the dual nature of a whole person, in a story of transformative rebirth and the renewal of the world. Only secondarily is the novel about revolutionary political and social change, seizure of power, and freedom from arbitrary categories of being.
It is a measure of the distance we have come since it was written that my expectation as a young reader was that Heathcliff was obviously of demonic origin, and there would be something like Buffy’s Ax of Slaying somewhere.
Plus, written by one of the infamous girls called the Three Weird Sisters in reference to the Fates and to the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and not about magic? Alas, we await that version of the novel.
The novel that Emily Bronte wrote is very different. There are at least three stories here, a narrative puzzle box which employs the device of self referential interlocking layers of thematic and narrative structure as if written two hundred years later; the relationships of creative and destructive forces in the universe as reflected and embodied in ourselves and our passions, the origin myth of human emergence from an animal state, and the power dynamics of sex, gender, and identity in male-female relations.
Heathcliff is a monster, and the story arc foregrounds his redemption through love, but I find interesting the fact that he is a monster who is theriomorphic, based on Emily’s beloved dog, whom she used to batter in psychotic rages and ritualistically provoke into savagery as a proxy of her own wildness. Yet this transgressive and bizarre cross-species relationship, a complex bestiality with its chiaroscuro of sadomasochistic and fetishistic elements, has never been reimagined in literature as the allegorical fable of the limits of the human and our relationship with our own animal nature as the werewolf story it so obviously is.
Also, the frame story is one of madness and love; it describes a path of return to sanity in a healing process akin to modern psychotherapy practice and referential to Hamlet. Was the return from madness her own?
Her novel is a song of the destructive power of love, filled with glorious perversities, seizures of power, pagan rites, but above all of gender relations in which men are brutes who may become human with the intercession of feminine redemption and of the transformational creative power of love.
Wuthering Heights is a reimagination of Beauty and the Beast and the myth of Orpheus, steeped in archaic scholarship and following a process of initiation suggestive of Jungian shadow work and individuation, as told by a Byronic heroine. I believe she thought of it as her contribution to the storytelling game on the fateful night the world was given Frankenstein, as in the film Gothic. The next story in that game was told by Jeanette Winterson in her novel Frankissstein: A Love Story.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
Above all I celebrate Emily Bronte’s willingness to embrace the darkness, and like a goddess or demiurge to transform us with the creative powers of life and of love from beasts into human beings, an unmaking of Circe’s Swine.
Things I have learned from Wuthering Heights; be fearless, be free, and own your passion- it is the key to liberation as a self-created being and to the discovery, shaping, and ownership of identity. Love without limits, and embrace its redemptive madness, because it’s the only thing that makes life worth living.
Thanks, mom.
Here I turn to the parallel and interdependent text to which it was written in direct replay, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
What do the figures of Frankenstein and his monster teach us about ourselves and others? Why has Mary Shelly’s reimagination of Romantic Idealism become central to our civilization?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021, Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law, of the social use of force, and of the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
In our history we may study the real world consequences of the tragedy of Victor Frankenstein on a national scale, and this is far from unique as a consequence of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god and underworld king; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, Chavez, Mugabe, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer as examples of state terror and tyranny the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
I like the character of Victor, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism, and the historical liberation from theocratic tyranny which came with atheism and democracy in the Enlightenment and birthed the American and French Revolutions against Church and Monarchy; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of success and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn in order to win a space of relative safety and freedom, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
So say all revolutionaries who free themselves and others by seizures of power and transgression of the Forbidden, but also all fascist tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege who claim the right to subjugate us because they are better; Hannibal Lecter, Hitler, and the far too real monster who admires and has modeled himself after both, Donald Trump.
To be a Nietzschean Superman, beyond good and evil, is a glorious and liberating thing, wherein we break the Great Chain of Being which binds us to a monstrous god and to those who claim to speak in its name as Authorities of faith and state, but when we create ourselves anew, who then shall we become?
Let us remember always the companion text to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which tests the propositions that evil things may be done for good purposes, and that for the Superman and in an amoral universe without meaning or value other than what we ourselves create good and evil are meaningless or equivalent. With the figure of Raskolnikov Dostoevsky invents fascism and interrogates the figure of the fascist tyrant, and predicts the inevitable failure and collapse of all such states from their internal contradictions.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason like the project of the Enlightenment whose apotheosis witnessed a statue of the goddess of Reason looming over the guillotine, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte together created the modern world with their great books Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights 1992 film starring Juliet Binoche, Sinead O’Connor as Emily Bronte
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and slavery, designed famine and war crimes against children and other civilians in service to kleptocratic colonialist regimes and Imperial conquest and dominion; this is the state of Israel in all her horror and terror, and now of Vichy America under the Trump regime and his Theatre of Cruelty.
Israel and America together are Atrocity Regimes of no laws but authoritarian rule by force and fear, no morality but hate, no grand dreams of our humanity and citizenship as equals but nightmares of fascisms of race, faith, and national identity.
Herein we witness again a great and terrible truth; no matter where you begin with ideas of kinds of people, with hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
In Gaza we find a scrying glass of our future as the Trump and Netanyahu regimes plan for the whole of humankind. To this nightmare of tyranny and terror under the iron regimes of those who would dehumanize us, enslave us, and steal our souls we must give the reply written on the gates of Auschwitz by her prisoners; Never Again!
Images of mass starvation from the use of famine as a weapon of genocide and war by Israel confront us daily in our news, and for over fifteen months now, yet the world does nothing to break the Israeli blockade of food and medical aid; indeed both Biden and Trump have bombed our counter-blockade positions in Yemen and made all Americans complicit in genocide as pour taxes buy the deaths of children.
As I wrote in my post of March 19 2024, Israel Unleashes the Third Horseman: Famine in Gaza; Netanyahu now rides upon his black horse of famine, bringing his mad dream of the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem with all of its attendant shadows lingering from the Holocaust.
As the passage in Ezekiel 14:21 warns us when the Infinite unleashes the “Four disastrous acts of judgement” to bring a Reckoning against the Elders of Israel for crimes of idolatry, the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
Israelis and Palestinians are one people divided by history, divisions shaped in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Perhaps Aynn Rand saw truly in this one prediction of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, as she is often paraphrased from her novel The Fountainhead; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
If we wish to preserve our humanity, our reply must always be “All of us, in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and an emerging United Humankind.”
The Gaza War has as its major theme the question of human rights, and if such an idea will have a place in whatever future we may choose. Here then is a retrospective of my witness of history of this conflict, and of its consequences for human being, meaning, and value, and of the choices we make about how to become human together.
As I wrote in my post of February 8 2025, Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians; Once you open the door to theocratic tyranny and terror, there is no going back; we must go through it, and reach our liberation on the other side.
Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump wishes to erase the Palestinians and in their place build a Riviera and playground of wealthy fools and hegemonic elites as a new crusader kingdom, dazzled by fantasies of limitless wealth and a power base independent from the limits of the American political system. This aligns with the historical forces at work which drive the global embrace of authoritarian regimes and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, as capitalism in its terminal stage seeks to free itself of democracy as its host political system.
We have see this dream of madness and cruelty before, during the Crusades which continued from 1096 with the capture of Jerusalem to 1718 in the Austro-Turkish War; the central conflicts involved in the idea of colonial empires authorized by the Infinite as war, plunder, and amoral rapacity versus the ideals of chivalry and the social use of force as defense of the innocent and the powerless are beautifully interrogated in the film Kingdom of Heaven.
If Trump and Netanyahu are permitted to realize their dreams of imperial conquest and dominion through the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians, we will witness the re-enactment of the horrors and travesty of the Crusades, as Vichy America establishes a colony of Christian Identity-Zionist elites beyond the reach of all law by which to destabilize and capture Europe and much else.
And the world will enter a new dark ages as democracy and civilization falls to an Age of Tyrants and wars of imperial dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable horror, possible for seven or more centuries as were the Crusades, and ending with the extinction of humankind.
This we must resist, by any means necessary.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror; I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the Nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, checkpoints and bantustans, concentration camps and slave pens, and systems of surveillance, force, and control, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2025, Anniversary of the Third Intifada of 2021, Now Ongoing In the Tenth Theatre of World War Three Which Contains and Supersedes the Gaza War; Both visitors to the Holy Land seeking signs of the Invisible manifest in its Disneyland of conflicted faiths and those trapped within its nightmare of walls, checkpoints, razor wire, pervasive surveillance, universalized violence, identitarian politics, and the tyranny and terror of one of our world’s most horrific regimes of force and control are here become the ghosts of the Holocaust; Israel echoes with the silent screams of stolen voices and the devouring shadows of a history weaponized in service to power as narratives of victimization and security as power, a strategy designed to first break our solidarity with division and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as falsification and then dehumanize and subjugate us as masters and slaves and as genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Israel as a dream of refuge and of universal brotherhood and love has been betrayed and subverted by Israel as a xenophobic theocracy, military empire, and slave camp; here Auschwitz has been institutionalized on a national scale, its former prisoners now its guards.
Why would anyone choose to recreate a hell they had escaped from, even as its masters rather than its slaves?
I understand all too well the seduction of power as security in a world of hostile and chaotic forces, and how overwhelming and generalized fear can be shaped by authority to centralize power by offering us loaned power over Others as figures of existential threats; to be the arbiter of virtue through force and control. But security is an illusion, the state as embodied violence obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, and our common pain unites us in ways which transcend the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which only love can free us from.
Love as solidarity in action can redeem the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, Tikkun Olam in Hebrew, and liberate us to live as guarantors of each other’s humanity.
As I wrote on the first anniversary of the Third Intifada on this night years ago; This must be the most written about, studied, debated, experimented with and fought over issue in global politics since the Second World War of which it is a result, this nation wherein one people are divided by history as Israelis and Palestinians, and a measure of our humanity, as the classic example of the double minority; what do you do with one city and one nation claimed by two historical communities, as a basis of identity as faith and nationality and the consequences and praxis of identity politics as violence?
Here a nation and a people are riven by dissociative identity disorder, conflicted and locked in titanic struggle as with the fragmentation of identity, memory, and consciousness of multiple personalities, madness on a national and civilizational scale born of the legacies of history and life disruptive events, epigenetic trauma, grief, terror, guilt, despair; and also rage.
In the duality of Israel and Palestine are made plain the origins of evil as violence and tyranny in the recursive and interdependent Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as overwhelming and generalized fear and existential threats are weaponized in service to power by authority, which forms carceral states of force and control as unequal power and embodied violence, through elite hierarchies and divisions of belonging and otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Here fascism as a systemic evil operates as possession and theft of the soul. What can we do about it? As Lenin asked in his essay of 1902; “What is to be done?” How free ourselves of the systemic forces of our subjugation to authority, elites, and those who would enslave us?
We must first recognize and be cautious of those who claim to speak for us and act in our name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism. To free ourselves of the lies and illusions, falsification and rewritten histories, conspiracy theories and alternate realities through which we become dehumanized, we must be truthtellers engaged in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
We must second seize our self-ownership and autonomy in refusal to submit to authority, for the great secret of power is that it is empty and hollow, and is delegitimized through refusal to trust and believe authority, and of force that it is brittle and finds its limit at the point of disobedience. Simple acts, but also inherent powers of human being which cannot be taken from us; for who refuses to submit is free, and becomes Unconquerable.
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 and for freedom of identity.
There is no just authority.
Tonight I sit at home among the vast darkness of my hills, a night which follows days of rain and filled with the songs of frogs and birds, a serenity disturbed only by the chiaroscuro of my memories of this night of 2021 one year ago, in the defense of al Aqsa. Like flashes of lightning, the hand of the past can bring the Chaos and reach out to seize and shake us, destabilizing us and our constructions of normality with unpredictable and sudden disruptive events unmoored from their anchorages in time.
But Chaos is also a measure of the adaptive range of a system, which brings both the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom in our reimagination and transformative rebirth of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimagines Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
One may think of Bringing the Chaos in terms of the redemptive power of love, of solidarity, of our duty of care for others, of seizures of power as the restoration of balance, of Resistance and revolutionary struggle as placing our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and as tikkun olam or healing the brokenness of the world.
In Jerusalem and al Quds, we are betrayed by the normality of submission to authority and the divisions of unequal power, dehumanized by those who commit atrocities in our name, and made complicit in crimes against humanity through narratives of victimization which as Voltaire teaches us permit anything.
Gott mitt uns; it is an ancient terror. And this we must resist.
Old myths, and old grievances, woven into the fabric of our psyche and our civilization. And like all history, memory, and authorized identity, mimetic forces from whose legacies we must emerge.
In this moment I turn once again to the brilliant diagnosis of the illness of power as captured identity as written by Alon Ben-Meirin in Huffpost, though his prescription of a two state system is debatable and for myself must be superseded in time with a secular state with one law for all and no official divisions of tribe, language, or faith, in an article entitled In The Grip Of Powerful Illusions; “The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears to be illogical and unsettling as a majority of Israelis and Palestinians realize that coexistence, whether under conditions of enmity or friendship, is a fact that neither side can change short of a catastrophe.
The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears to be illogical and unsettling as a majority of Israelis and Palestinians realize that coexistence, whether under conditions of enmity or friendship, is a fact that neither side can change short of a catastrophe. Both sides understand that the general parameters of a sustainable peace agreement must rest on a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with some land swaps. However, both sides choose to revel in illusions and live in defiance of time and circumstances. They seem to prefer continuing violent clashes and bloodshed over peaceful coexistence, while blaming each other for the unending destructive path that tragically both have chosen to travel.
There are fundamental imperatives, coupled with long-term mutual security measures, which represent what was on the negotiating table in 2000 at Camp David and in 2010/2011 and 2013/2014 under the Obama administration’s auspices in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Each round, with various degrees of progress, aimed at finalizing an agreement and yet ultimately failed to do so. The question is: why?
Biased and selective perceptions, reinforced by historical experiences, religion, and incompatible ideologies, have locked both sides into immobile positions. The factors that maintain and enhance these patterns include emotions such as fear, distrust, and insecurity. The psychological outcome is mutual denial of the narrative of the other and mutual delegitimization.
Put together, the operative result is stagnation and polarization. What is therefore needed is a consensus-oriented dialogue at the leadership level by both officials and non-officials, and people-to-people interactions, to resolve the issue of perception – a tall order given the current environment that buttresses rather than ameliorates prejudiced perceptions.
There are certain psychological concepts which are relevant to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the concept of illusion is an essential one. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud offers the following definition: “…we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”
What is characteristic of illusions is that: 1) they are derived from deep human wishes, and 2) the belief is held (or would be held) in the absence of any compelling evidence, or good rational grounds, on its behalf.
It is impossible to deny that both Israelis and Palestinians are in the grip of very powerful illusions which only serve to prolong the conflict and prevent any mutual understanding. In particular, the belief shared by many Israelis that they have a biblical right to the land (including Judea and Samaria) and that God gave it to the Jews in perpetuity is undoubtedly an illusion of yesterday.
This belief is not affirmed because there is real evidence that God deemed it to be (although two Jewish kingdoms did exist–the first in the tenth century BCE and the second beginning in 539 BCE–on the same land), but because it satisfies a deep-seated psychological need for a God-given Jewish homeland.
The belief that by expanding the settlements Israel will augment its national security and maintain its hold on the entire land is an illusion of tomorrow, which generally ignores the presence of Muslims in the same land for more than 1,300 years.
It is important to note how these illusions sustain and reinforce one another, and constitute a psychological barrier which is much more impervious to critical reflection. Israel’s illusions have served to create the logic for occupation.
The Palestinians, for their part, are not without their own illusions. They also believe that God has reserved the land for them, and appeal to the fact that they had inhabited the land for centuries. From their perspective, the presence of the al-Aqsa Mosque, which was built in 705 AD in Jerusalem, attests to their historical and religious affinity to the Holy City.
They also cling to the idea that they will someday return to the land of their forbearers, as they have and continue to insist on the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, even though this has become a virtual impossibility.
The Palestinians hold fast to their illusions of yesterday and tomorrow just as blindly and desperately as the Israelis, which leads to resistance to and fear of change. As such, unless both sides change course and accept each other’s affinity to the same land, specifically because it is religiously-based, the situation is bound to lead to a catastrophe.
This has contributed to making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict both chronic and intractable, as the various illusions are continuously and consciously nurtured by daily hostile and often violent encounters between the two sides.
In seeking to bridge concepts that could link between the domains of psychology and politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it could be proposed that a collective mutual resistance to change (both conscious and deliberate, and inner unconscious) protects a vulnerable identity.
Compared, for example, to the stable and mature political identities of the American, British, and French nations, the political identities of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are, in a way, in their adolescence.
Identities in this setting are more vulnerable, and the protagonists are naturally more defensive and resistant to change. By its very nature, the players must find it difficult (if not impossible) to articulate this publicly, as to do so is to admit to this vulnerability.
The concept of psychological resistance to change may well affect the political setting in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular; it is closely connected to perceptions at many levels and provides protection for vulnerable identity formation.
It is this mindset, strengthened by historical experiences, which transcends the more than seven decades since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began. Individuals and groups, Israelis and Palestinians alike, have and continue to interpret the nature of the discord between them as “you versus me” in a prejudiced and selective way.
In turn, this has stifled any new information and enabled the continuing resistance to change, which could shed new light on the nature and substance of the conflict and help advance the peace process.
The concept of unconscious resistance to change in this setting links well to the view of perceptions driving the polarization in the conflict. Historical experience, which formulates perceptions, serves among other things to enhance the sense of identity of “who we really are,” a formative collective assumption that sits at the bedrock of both key players and drives functional and dysfunctional behavior.
In principle, such a mindset prevents either side from entertaining new ideas that might lead to compromises for a peaceful solution. The paradox here is that majorities on both sides do want and seek peace, knowing full well that this would require significant concessions, but are unable to reconcile the required concessions with imbedded perceptions that have precluded these compromises as a result of resistance to and fear of change.
Therefore, any framework for peace must include provisions that would dramatically increase the odds in favor of a solution. First, both sides need to commit to reaching an agreement based on a two-state solution out of the conviction that change, which translates to coexistence, is inevitable. Therefore, they ought to adjust to each other’s requirements, which of necessity requires them to make significant concessions.
Second, to facilitate that, they must undertake reconciliatory people-to-people social, economic, cultural, and security interactions to mitigate their resistance to change, which must begin, at a minimum, one year before the negotiations commence to create the psychological and political atmosphere to cultivate the trust necessary for substantive and successful peace negotiations.
The resumption of peace talks will go nowhere unless Israelis and Palestinians change their prejudiced perception and resistance to and fear of change, and finally come to the realization that their fate is intertwined and neither can live in peace and security without the other.
I feel compelled to conclude my last article for the year with a dire warning that both Israelis and Palestinians alike will do well to ponder upon as they approach the end of the seventh decade of their tragic conflict.
Every Israeli extremist and Palestinian militant, those who want it all must stop and think where Israel and the Palestinians will be in ten years if the current situation persists?
Your illusions of today will not become a reality of tomorrow, and what tomorrow will bring is nothing but more pain, tears, and agony.
Your conflict is evolving ever faster into a religious war. A Muslim-Jewish Armageddon is in the making that will set the whole region on unfathomable fire.
If you are true believers, dare not defy God’s will, for he has thrust you together to put you to the test–you must either live in peace and harmony, or you will be condemned to oblivion and despair.
You possess the power to choose your own destiny. Will it be self-destruction or will it be the fulfilment of a glorious dream?
Rise up and pass a legacy of hope to every Israeli and Palestinian child, for they have the God-given right to grow up and prosper and none should die for your illusions in vain.”
As I wrote in my post of November 9 2023, A Mirror of Our Darkness: Kristallnact; Israel is commemorating this tragedy which opened a door to an even greater tragedy in the Holocaust by doing exactly the same thing to the Palestinians, one people divided by history and faith weaponized in service to power. And this too will open doors to greater state terror and tyranny, unless both peoples can unite against authorities who commit atrocities in their name as a strategy of subjugation and liberate each other from those who would enslave them.
If you think of nations as children who are survivors of abuse, much becomes clear; for once they have seized power they are far more likely to become abusers themselves. This is how fear works, why it is the true basis of exchange, why politics is the Art of Fear, and why states are embodied violence. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been savaged by existential threats long before they began savaging, brutalizing, and dehumanizing each other.
That predatory regimes on both sides have used division and identity politics to centralize power and legitimize authoritarian dominion is a predictable phase of liberation struggle, especially of anti-colonial revolution.
The trick of becoming human, friends, is to embrace ones own darkness in struggle as well as one’s enemies, and emerge from the legacies of our history which shadow us like an invisible crocodile tail.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics, self-justification, and psychopathy of power; the lie that only power has meaning and is real, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; my teenage role model Napoleon, Washington who is central to our family history and coined the motto on our coat of arms in the passcode during the Battle of Trenton, Victory or Death, when the whole Revolution was wagered on a forlorn hope, of the tragic drama of fallen heroes like Robert Mugabe, the monstrous tyrants Stalin and Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the American and Napoleonic Revolutions become Empires, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, India where the glory of liberation came hand in hand with the tragedy of Partition and is now under the boot of Hindu Nationalism, nearly all anticolonial revolutions which with the first period of liberty as new nations became dreadful tyrannies, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
A great many wise people have written beautifully of the horrors of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness; herein I wish only to signpost that the forces which lie both within us and without as social conditions and epigenetic trauma, of atavisms of barbarism and systems of oppression, are universal to human beings as imposed conditions of struggle and operate continually even when obscured from view, beyond the horror and abjection of points of fracture of the human soul like those of Kristallnacht and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
I write to you as one who has lived by the battle cry of Never Again! for over forty years now, and it is of deep and vital importance to apply this principle of action not only in Resistance to fascism as an intrusive enemy of all that is human in us, but also to ourselves and our own use of violence and social force toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As Nietzsche teaches us in Beyond Good and Evil; “Those who hunt monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
In the dark mirror of Gaza, with its monstrous reflections of Kristallnacht and of Auschwitz, do you like what you see, O Israel?
Speaking as someone who has been defined by my resistance struggle against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982 and for a future in which all human beings are equal and share the same universal human rights, throughout the world and ever since, where ever men hunger to be free, including Palestine, I will fight on to resist our dehumanization by state tyranny and terror and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil like that of Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s Vichy America, and those who follow in my wake will fight on for a thousand years if necessary.
We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated.
In this context I paraphrase the iconic speech from Hunger Games; I have a message for Presidents Trump and Netanyahu. “You can torture us and bomb us and burn our nations to the ground. But do you see that? Fire is catching… And if we burn… you burn with us!”
Kingdom of Heaven
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
“If we burn, you burn with us”
The Magicians
Carnival Row
News of Gaza: the meanings of the Palestinian Holocaust
June 21 2025 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human: On Sartre’s Birthday, And A Eulogy
June 5 2025 Fifty Eight Years of Occupation, Theocratic State Terror, and Israeli Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil: Anniversary of the Fall of Jerusalem In the 1967 Six Day War
May 29 2025 Anniversary of the Final Day of the Third Intifada of 2021: On The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force; Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
May 23 2025 Anniversary of the International Criminal Court Issue of Arrest Warrant For Netanyahu and Charge of Leaders of Israel and Hamas Equally With Crimes Against Humanity In the Gaza War
May 14 2025 America Falls With Our Failure of Empathy, Abandonment of Our Universal Human Rights, Cowardice in Confronting Evil, and Complicity in Genocide: Anniversary of Israel’s 2024 Rafah Campaign
May 8 2025 On this Victory Europe Day Celebrating Liberation From the Nazis, As World War Three Rages in Ukraine and Palestine and the Captured State of Vichy America Is Riven By Tyranny and Resistance, Let Us Liberate All of Humankind From Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and the Imperial Conquest and Dominion and the Carceral States of Force and Control of Tyrants
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
September 19 2024 Israeli Terror Attack Kills Americans With Impunity: No BDS, No Arrest of Netanyahu and Other War Criminals, No Policy of Regime Change in Israel
July 24 2024 Tyrant of Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum, Hebrew National Socialism, Netanyahu Addresses Congress When He Should Be On Trial For Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity
May 24 2024 In the Wake of the great Reckoning For the Crimes of Israel, Recognition of the Sovereignty and Independence of Palestine Raises the Question; Whose Palestine? What Will a Future Palestine and Israel Become?
Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, Nur Masalha
The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, Ben Ehrenreich
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine, When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, Occupation Diaries, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation, Raja Shehadeh
Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury
The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said David Barsamian (Editor), Orientalism, Edward W. Said
On Palestine, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948, Ilan Pappe
Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays, Amos Oz
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter
Robert Fisk on Israel: The Obama Years: A unique anthology of reporting and analysis of a crucial period of history, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk
The Unmaking of Israel, Occupied Territories: The Untold Story Of Israel’s Settlements, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount Gershom Gorenberg
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Black
An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Jeff Halper
Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Joel Kovel
Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, Marc Lamont Hill, Mitchell Plitnick
Mornings in Jenin, Against the Loveless World, The Blue Between Sky and Water, Susan Abulhawa
Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, Basem L. Ra’ad
I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, A River Dies of Thirst: journals, Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, Mahmoud Darwish
Palestine on a Plate: Memories From My Mother’s Kitchen, Baladi: A Celebration of Food from Land and Sea, Joudie Kalla
The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, Laila El-Haddad
Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, Yasmin Khan
The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan
Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, Amira Hass
Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story, Ramzy Baroud
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Gilbert Achcar
Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, Marcello Di Cintio
A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel Bari Atwan
Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution, Arafat: The Biography, Andrew Gowers, Tony Walker
Hamas: A History from Within, Azzam S. Tamimi
Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Sara Roy
The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Emile Habiby
Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua
Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel, Gaza Weddings, Time of White Horses, Ibrahim Nasrallah
A Balcony Over the Fakihani: Three Novellas, A Compass for the Sunflower, The Eye of the Mirror, Liana Badr
Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine, Ibtisam Barakat
So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali
Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, Return: A Palestinian Memoir, Ghada Karmi
The Parisian, Isabella Hammad
Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, Zachary Karabell
Remembering the Summer of Fire, so like the Year of the Barricades, 1968 as lived from the angle of view of a child and become an imaginal space in the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams in which we wander; a time of fire but also of rebirth, of the collapse of our society and civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and the shattering of its lies and illusions but also of fearless revisioning of our systems and choices about how to be human together, of the revolutionary struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and transcend the limits of our flesh.
For what did we hope, with such a mad Quixotic quest?
To renew ourselves like a Phoenix from the flames, and discover new worlds and possibilities of becoming human, of beauty and of truth. Some wished to reclaim an Adamic unfallen condition as Original beings uncorrupted by our society and the authorized identities of the carceral state; others to storm the gates of Heaven and cast down the tyrants from their thrones and be free. Some dreamed vast architectures of ideologies and futures they may shape; others desired only to run amok and be ungovernable. Like many, I shared in all of these dreams and desires.
Here in the streets of fire contested by forces of repression and resistance, all of these things could become possible, without limit, because all of us belonged.
The Summer of Fire marks a possible beginning of a United Humankind, though history may remember this as the founding of the United Nations on October 24 1945, and the Black Lives Matter movement was founded on July 13 2017. But throughout the Summer of Fire, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, the outcast and the marginalized, arose in solidarity with one voice as a United Humankind to proclaim We are all equal, and seize their independence from those who would enslave us. May the memory of this glorious time of liberation struggle echo throughout the memory of humankind forever, and may our actions prove equal to our dreams.
Let us remember always that we fight not only to free ourselves and each other from subjugation to a carceral state of force and control and from its overseers and enforcers the police and the right of the state to grant immunity to police to kill nonwhite people at will and without cause as a white supremacist terror force, but to free ourselves from racism as a system of oppression and control as well as its institutions of unequal power. Such a struggle is ongoing and not limited to tyrannical regimes, and every day we survive to defy authority, every refusal to submit, is a victory.
Such refusals to believe and to obey are the primary acts which define the human, and a power which cannot be taken from us. In times of great darkness such as ours now, as we battle ICE terror forces in the streets, it is well to remember that all darkness is balanced with light, and that the state use of force in repression of dissent obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
The myths we choose to live through possess great power, and our stories are tools with which we can seize control of our own evolution and shape the direction of our future. Let us remember, bear witness, and tell our truths and the story of the Summer of Fire to each new generation. Fire catches.
May we all dream better Brave New Worlds.
As I wrote in my post of June 14 2020, A United Humanity Emerges With Global Revolution; Humankind is awakening to an ancient truth; no state holds power which is not lent by its people. When the state no longer serves the people, that power may be withdrawn.
The resonances and echoes of America’s reckoning with racial injustice now reach throughout the world, and have become a global revolution from which a united humankind is emerging.
We will no longer tolerate fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, divisions of exclusionary otherness, or authoritarian regimes of state force and control. We will settle for nothing less than freedom from our historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, plutocracy; nothing less than true equality and an equal share in our government and the benefits of our civilization.
And one thing more; when a man puts his knee on another human beings throat to shut off his air, that man is a murderer regardless of who he is, whether he has a badge or is more white than the victim he subjugates, for both are exactly equal regardless of any differences. And as all human beings have a duty of care for others, we are all obligated to intervene and save others from harm, to stop the perpetrator in the act of his crime by any means necessary.
Let’s put this racist violence six feet in the ground.
In the words of Mikki Kendall writing in Time; “We have created systems of oppression, and then we object when the targets of that oppression dare to say they have a right to exist, to be safe, to not be killed on a whim.
At some point, America will stop lying to itself, not just about the history of oppression inside and outside our borders, but also about current events. Sometimes, hate wears a white hood. Sometimes, it is in a police uniform. American exceptionalism will not save us from the impact of fascism, and despite every victim-blaming narrative that positions the protests now as being excessive, the reality is that there is no right way to fight for your life and the lives of those you love. If Blackness, Black people and Black culture were erased, not only would the world be poorer for it, but no one left would be any safer. They would just be the next target.”
As Austin C. McCoy writes in Truthout; “Thousands of people in more than 40 countries have taken to the streets in a show of solidarity with Black Americans protesting in the U.S. following the vigilante and police murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Since these killings, young communists in Greece marched to the U.S. embassy in Athens to protest Floyd’s murder. In Rome, members of the Migrant Women and Daughters Network stood in front of a war memorial and held signs that said “I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter: Justice for George Floyd.” In Amsterdam, thousands packed into Dam Square.”
“These global expressions of solidarity underscore a long simmering discontent with state violence against Black and Indigenous people, and other communities of color. This global uprising is a descendant of Black and multinational anti-colonial, decolonization and internationalist movements of the 20th century, especially those of the 1960s.”
“Demonstrators gathering in nations like Syria, Palestine, Canada and Kenya signal a surge of anti-racist internationalism guided by desires to communicate across national borders and amplifying victims’ names and Black Lives Matter slogans.
This global uprising is a descendant of Black and multinational anti-colonial, decolonization and internationalist movements of the 20th century.”
“A group of Lebanese journalists, organizers and activists produced an online organizing guide, “From Beirut to Minneapolis,” detailing safety tips for activists who might be exposed to tear gas and pepper spray, what to wear during a protest and what to do if arrested. Transnational tactical communication is not a new development, as Palestinians tweeted similar advice to activists in Ferguson, Missouri, during the 2014 uprisings.
The sharing and amplification of slogans are clear examples of protest solidarity. The names of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd ring throughout the world. They appeared on a Kenyan protester’s sign during a demonstration in Nairobi. Floyd’s name rang in London, as demonstrators chanted his name. People expressed Floyd’s and Eric Garner’s desperate refrain, “I can’t breathe” in Paris and on a mural in Syria, another country wracked by state violence.
However, people are not protesting simply to express solidarity. Thousands of protesters throughout the world are demonstrating and revolting against racism, occupation and state violence locally. In Toronto, a diverse crowd of protesters has taken to the streets to support Black Americans and to protest the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Indigenous Black woman, who fell from her apartment building and died while in the presence of police. Palestinian protesters held signs with pictures of Floyd and Eyad al-Hallaq, a disabled Palestinian shot and killed by Israeli police the same week Floyd died. The police killings of Black people in the U.S. stirred memories of 24-year-old Adama Traoré, a Black Parisian who died in police custody in 2016.
Protesters throughout the world are also highlighting the ways in which contemporary forms of state violence, including policing itself, are legacies of enslavement and colonialism. In the U.S., nearly 40 statues and memorials dedicated to the Confederacy and racist leaders have been dismantled, defaced, decapitated, toppled and designated for removal as a result of the unrest.
The global nature of this revolt presents an opportunity for activists to build upon the transnational connections past organizers have forged.
Demonstrators in the U.K. tore down the statue of English slave trader Edward Colston in jubilation and rolled it into the river. In Belgium, masked demonstrators stood on the base of a statue of King Léopold II, whose colonial regime was responsible for millions of Congolese deaths, and chanted “murderer” while waving a Democratic Republic of Congo flag.
These actions to tear down the symbols of colonialism and slavery underscore arguments that anti-racists, reparations advocates and abolitionists have long argued — a historical reckoning must accompany deep structural change. And these protests suggest that this confrontation with history will have to be on the terms of Black people, Indigenous people and other people of color (BIPOC).
It is important to recognize how some of these global protests might be products of the U.S. development and globalization of police tactics pioneered in military and counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin America, Vietnam and the Philippines, as historian Stuart Schrader analyzes in his book, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. International police exchange programs in the U.S. are latest examples of this trend as law enforcement officials from the U.S., Israel and other countries train each other in police tactics.
While 1960s Black radicals in the U.S. argued they were victims of “internal colonialism,” it seems that many BIPOC are seeing themselves as tied together by methods of 21st-century methods of policing and counterterrorism.
As we move into the third week of protests, calls to redirect peoples’ energies to electoral politics and institutional reform will grow louder from pundits.
While it is important to address the ways that police can harm Black people in the U.S. immediately, the global nature of this revolt presents an opportunity for activists to build upon the transnational connections past organizers have forged.
This is a moment for more Americans to study the transnational connections of policing and state violence in an effort to forge a common anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. We need more global protests as well as gatherings to devise ways to eradicate the scourge of state violence that disproportionately affects BIPOC throughout the world. As scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “The abolitionist future … has to be internationalist, because that is the only way that we’ll stop drawing the borders that regularize between and among people.”
“Fire Catches”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
“If we burn, you burn with us”
Hearing From the Founder of Black Lives Matter Alicia Garza
Patrisse Cullors on a Lifetime of Activism and the Founding of Black Lives Matter /ACLU At Liberty podcast
How did 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement change the world? Our panel responds : Osita Nwanevu, Fabiana Moraes, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Zanele Mji, Abeo Jackson and Daniel Gyamerah
May 25 2025 Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle Against Racist Police Terror As A System of Oppression
We demand an end to the war against Black people. Since this country’s inception there have been named and unnamed wars on our communities. We demand an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people.
This includes:
1 An immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth across all areas of society including, but not limited to; our nation’s justice and education systems, social service agencies, and media and pop culture. This includes an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.
2 An end to capital punishment.
3 An end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees, court surcharges and “defendant funded” court proceedings.
4 An end to the use of past criminal history to determine eligibility for housing, education, licenses, voting, loans, employment, and other services and needs.
5 An end to the war on Black immigrants including the repeal of the 1996 crime and immigration bills, an end to all deportations, immigrant detention, and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids, and mandated legal representation in immigration court.
6 An end to the war on Black trans, queer and gender nonconforming people including their addition to anti-discrimination civil rights protections to ensure they have full access to employment, health, housing and education.
7 An end to the mass surveillance of Black communities, and the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and target our communities (including IMSI catchers, drones, body cameras, and predictive policing software).
8 The demilitarization of law enforcement, including law enforcement in schools and on college campuses.
9 An immediate end to the privatization of police, prisons, jails, probation, parole, food, phone and all other criminal justice related services.
“I0 Until we achieve a world where cages are no longer used against our people we demand an immediate change in conditions and an end to public jails, detention centers, youth facilities and prisons as we know them. This includes the end of solitary confinement, the end of shackling of pregnant people, access to quality healthcare, and effective measures to address the needs of our youth, queer, gender nonconforming and trans families.
Reparations
We demand reparations for past and continuing harms. The government, responsible corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they have inflicted on Black people — from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance — must repair the harm done.
This includes:
1 Reparations for the systemic denial of access to high quality educational opportunities in the form of full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education including: free access and open admissions to public community colleges and universities, technical education (technology, trade and agricultural), educational support programs, retroactive forgiveness of student loans, and support for lifetime learning programs.
2 Reparations for the continued divestment from, discrimination toward and exploitation of our communities in the form of a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people, with clearly articulated corporate regulations.
3 Reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination and racialized capitalism in the form of corporate and government reparations focused on healing ongoing physical and mental trauma, and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing and land.
4 Reparations for the cultural and educational exploitation, erasure, and extraction of our communities in the form of mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs.
5 Legislation at the federal and state level that requires the United States to acknowledge the lasting impacts of slavery, establish and execute a plan to address those impacts. This includes the immediate passage of H.R.40, the “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act” or subsequent versions which call for reparations remedies.
Divest-Invest
We demand investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people. We want investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations.
This includes:
1 A reallocation of funds at the federal, state and local level from policing and incarceration (JAG,
2 COPS, VOCA) to long-term safety strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs.
The retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record expungement of all drug related offenses and prostitution, and reparations for the devastating impact of the “war on drugs” and criminalization of prostitution, including a reinvestment of the resulting savings and revenue into restorative services, mental health services, job programs and other programs supporting those impacted by the sex and drug trade.
3 Real, meaningful, and equitable universal health care that guarantees: proximity to nearby comprehensive health centers, culturally competent services for all people, specific services for queer, gender nonconforming, and trans people, full bodily autonomy, full reproductive services, mental health services, paid parental leave, and comprehensive quality child and elder care.
4 A constitutional right at the state and federal level to a fully-funded education which includes a clear articulation of the right to: a free education for all, special protections for queer and trans students, wrap around services, social workers, free health services (including reproductive body autonomy), a curriculum that acknowledges and addresses students’ material and cultural needs, physical activity and recreation, high quality food, free daycare, and freedom from unwarranted search, seizure or arrest.
5 A divestment from industrial multinational use of fossil fuels and investment in community- based sustainable energy solutions.
6 A cut in military expenditures and a reallocation of those funds to invest in domestic infrastructure and community well-being.
7 Financial support of Black alternative institutions including, but not limited to: cooperatives, land trusts, and a culturally responsive health infrastructure.
Economic Justice
We demand economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership, not merely access.
This includes:
1 A progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state, and federal level to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.
2 Federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized Black people, and compensation for those involved in the care economy. Job programs must provide a living wage and encourage support for local workers centers, unions, and Black-owned businesses which are accountable to the community.
3 A right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing and an end to the exploitative privatization of natural resources — including land and water.
We seek democratic control over how resources are preserved, used and distributed and do so while honoring and respecting the rights of our Indigenous family.
4 The right for workers to organize in public and private sectors, especially in “On Demand Economy” jobs.
5 Restore the Glass-Steagall Act to break up the large banks, and call for the National Credit Union Administration and the US Department of the Treasury to change policies and practices around regulation, reporting and consolidation to allow for the continuation and creation of black banks, small and community development credit unions, insurance companies and other financial institutions.
6 An end to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a renegotiation of all trade agreements to prioritize the interests of workers and communities.
7 Through tax incentives, loans and other government directed resources, support the development of cooperative or social economy networks to help facilitate trade across and in Black communities globally. All aid in the form of grants, loans or contracts to help facilitate this must go to Black led or Black supported networks and organizations as defined by the communities.
8 Financial support of Black alternative institutions including policy that subsidizes and offers lowinterest, interest-free or federally guaranteed low-interest loans to promote the development of cooperatives (food, residential, etc.), land trusts and culturally responsive health infrastructures that serve the collective needs of our communities.
9 Protections for workers in industries that are not appropriately regulated including domestic workers, farm workers, and tipped workers, and for workers — many of whom are Black women and incarcerated people— who have been exploited and remain unprotected. This includes the immediate passage at the Federal and state level of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and extension of worker protections to incarcerated people.
Community Control
We demand a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us – from our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land – while recognizing that the rights and histories of our Indigenous family must also be respected.
This includes:
1 Direct democratic community control of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, ensuring that communities most harmed by destructive policing have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information.
2 An end to the privatization of education and real community control by parents, students and community members of schools including democratic school boards and community control of curriculum, hiring, firing and discipline policies.
3 Participatory budgeting at the local, state and federal level.
Political Power
We demand independent Black political power and Black selfdetermination in all areas of society. We envision a remaking of the current U.S. political system in order to create a real democracy where Black people and all marginalized people can effectively exercise full political power.
This includes:
1 An end to the criminalization of Black political activity including the immediate release of all political prisoners and an end to the repression of political parties.
2 Public financing of elections and the end of money controlling politics through ending super PACs and unchecked corporate donations.
3 Election protection, electoral expansion and the right to vote for all people including: full access, guarantees, and protections of the right to vote for all people through universal voter registration, automatic voter registration, pre-registration for 16-year-olds, same day voter registration, voting day holidays, enfranchisement of formerly and presently incarcerated people, local and state resident voting for undocumented people, and a ban on any disenfranchisement laws.
4 Full access to technology— including net neutrality and universal access to the internet without discrimination— and full representation for all.
5 Protection and increased funding for Black institutions: including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s), Black media, and cultural, political and social formations.
Carl Gustave Jung has shaped myself and our civilization with his brilliant quest to forge a Grand Unified Theory of the processes of becoming human as a universal faith grounded in a science of the soul, and return medicine to its original function of healing the soul.
Through his vast library of writing across a lifetime of scholarship and the unwavering courage to embrace both our darkness and our light, this is what Jung proposes; we all of us own our uniqueness but exist in a limitless sea of Being in which we all share, and the negotiations between these boundaries and interfaces of self and other are where the art of psychology comes in as a guide of the soul.
The Collective Unconscious which unifies all humanity as a transhistorical colony organism below the surface of our personalities and awareness and referential to Platonic Idealism and the Logos, being human as a process of growth he called individuation and modeled on alchemy as a pancultural spiritual faith, synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle; personality as an organization of a quaternity of energy systems, archetypes as mythic figures who live and are real within each of us and are motivating and informing sources of ourselves and of human history; these and many more ideas are among the unique insights and radical mysticism of Carl Gustave Jung.
In any other age he would have been considered a magician; an interpreter of dreams who claimed to command the ka-mutef or spirit of a Pharaoh which he consulted with on difficult cases, a scholar of comparative alchemy, myth, and religion around whose tower in the Black Forest he wrote of fairies dancing at night. His wisdom was won through relationships with timeless and otherworldly figures and forces, that which is most ancient in us, and his books reclaim the humanity that the modern world has forgotten. In this his project is to redeem what Schiller called “the disgodding of nature”, and aligns with the holistic philosophy of Gregory Bateson; equally it can be considered a form of universal faith of the Sapientia Dei or Wisdom as Jung himself claimed.
What Jung did was to restore to religion its original function as medicine of the soul, universalize it as a syncretic faith, and forge an integrated and consistent method for becoming human with the rigor of scientific method. This method which he called Analytical Psychology echoes the dream incubation chambers of the temples of Asclepius, whose symbol of intertwined serpents is the emblem of the medical profession. Secondarily, it implies a political praxis or action of values as a United Humankind as embodied in the United Nations founded during his formative years as a guarantor of our universal human rights and an instrument of peace versus wars of imperial conquest and dominion. Third, it is also a form of Surrealism.
Surrealism is defined by twin characteristics; the quest to transcend ourselves, often in terms of religious mysticism, and the use of dreams as a door to the Infinite. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood is a Surrealist classic; Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada, is the other best example which immediately comes to mind for me, but many works either advance the Surrealist project of transformation or use dream images and symbols extensively. Jungian psychology can be described as Surrealism, also as syncretic mysticism, as he modeled it on alchemical philosophy and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination. Coleridge had in fact done the heavy lifting for Jung as a philosophical framework, though he built something quite different on its foundation.
Among Jung’s other sources, Tibetan Buddhism has the Bardo, and Islam the alam al mythal, as states of being and interfaces between life and death and the individual and the Infinite, an Infinite which for Jung is not divine but human; Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue is a stellar example of modern mysticism as Surrealism. Through the influence of Philip K. Dick, Surrealism has become pervasive in our culture, and both the science fiction and fantasy genres may be considered special forms of Surrealism with their own conventions.
There is much shared ground in Surrealism with Absurdism, though Absurdism does not always posit an Infinite Being to whom we are trying to reach, especially in its Nihilist form with Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, but it can as the Pauline Absurdism in Flannery O’Connor’s Thomism or in Nicholas of Cusa, precursor of Kurt Gödel’s from whom I derive my epistemology of the Conservation of Ignorance. The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in Jung’s writing as literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, develops with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, and Albert Camus, and continues today in Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
How can I say these outrageous things about Jungian psychology being a system of magic, a syncretic faith, and a school of art? Let me recount for you my relevant history; I have studied and been oriented to Jungian psychology since I was a teenager interested in myths and fairytales from the age of twelve when I read Frasier’s massive work on folklore, The Golden Bough, and then read the original Grimm’s Fairytales which had been presented to me in bizarre variations as our ancestral family history by my father and his Beatnik friend, William S. Burroughs, who practiced magic together.
I was made strange by a primary trauma in which I died and was reborn and experienced a moment of supraconsciousness out of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, when the police opened fire on a protest in People’s Park, Berkeley, the most massive and terrible incident of domestic terror ever perpetrated by our government since the Civil War.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a concussion grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”
Here I must share with you the other Defining Moment of my ninth year, in the context of my life mission to unravel the origins of evil as illnesses of power and violence, and of the consequences for me of growing up with three voices, English as my home language, Chinese from the age of nine, and French from seventh grade, and of spending ten years from fifth grade in near-daily study and practice of Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines.
How I met my teacher happened like this; during the first weeks of fifth grade I spent recess at school either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose.
This is how division, otherness, and disconnectedness escalate into war, and why interdependence, solidarity, and communication can restore the balance of peace when things begin to fall apart.
That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. Having escaped by chance the fate of becoming a nine year old mass murderer, I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
This was 1969 and he arranged for me to study with a scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China.
I called him Sifu Long because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with nuances of the Fall of the Angels from the Book of Enoch; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, “Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves.”
“Once we were dragons,” he began, “we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who insist on living in boxes from which they refuse to venture out and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.
But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion, to see the true selves of others. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness.”
These studies included arts from The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung’s primary reference on Taoist practices, Chan or Zen study, the game of Go, kung fu very like that of the television series with whose protagonist I identified, and possibly best of all Chinese and Japanese language, poetry, and inkbrush calligraphy. Here was a method of questioning oneself with a fabulous knowledge base, with which we may seize control of our own evolution, and which again set its mark of difference upon me as a bicultural person in my origins.
Fate handed me a Gordian Knot of problems to solve five years after this, in the summer before I entered High School, when I went to Brazil to train with a friend as a fencer in preparation for the Pan American Games, and I first escaped my gilded cage and was immersed into a bifurcated and discontiguous world of aristocratic privilege and the vast horrors of the surrounding slums of abandoned street children, beggars, garbage mound gleaners, quasi-slave laborers, and the ruthless and brutal police and gangsters who ruled them in partnership. Here I witnessed the true costs of our luxuries, and when the police came to murder children for the bounty placed on them by the rich, I fought in their defense.
These issues, unequal wealth, power, and privilege, became my subjects of study, and throughout the years since I have struggled to understand them as systems which produce evil, a Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force, and divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite hierarchies of belonging from which are born fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and subjugation to authority. When I speak of evil and its origins and functions, this is what I mean.
During Middle School and High School I read through the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series, and became interested in the curious and the arcane and made a deep study of grimoires and the literature of ceremonial magic; Grimm’s Fairytales as a lost faith, the Kabala, the art of Hieronymus Bosch of which I made a collage on one entire wall of my bedroom as a gate of dreams, and shaped by the bizarre stories my father’s Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs would tell in the evenings after dinner; his journeys to other worlds, duels with magical beings, the art of curses and wishes, poetic vision as a path of reimagination and transformation, how to believe impossible things and transcend ourselves and the limits of our humanity.
Above all was the shadow work encoded in stories as magic rituals in which he passed to me the chthonic guardian spirit which possessed him as its avatar as the successor of Nietzsche; for all his stories ended with our repetition together of Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest; ”This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. Thus I became heir to his powers of poetic vision as Jungian shadow work, and as the reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
Also there were my conversations with my mother, a psychologist, biologist, and scholar of Coleridge who wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from Jerzy Kosinski’s childhood therapy journal and Soviet mental hospital records, weaving discussions of religious symbolism and The Painted Bird together as an exploration of the problem of evil, and led me through the nuances of symbolism using as a text Émile Mâle’s The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. From her I inherit a duality of vision, the symbolic and the psychological, which echoes Monet’s dictum, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks inward, the other looks outward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
At this point during my last year of high school, I read a just-published book which fixed me on the origins of evil and its functions as a field of study, Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary work on Hitler, The Psychopathic God, and another which suggested intriguing possibilities and solutions, Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
My Freshman year at university I designed a Jungian Studies course and talked a professor into meeting with me as a private weekly class for credits, and haunted the library at the Jung Institute of San Francisco, where they had beautifully written studies of my beloved operas and many other things. My initial special studies tutorial included Jung’s three volumes on alchemy as a mystery faith and the structural basis for his psychology as a path of reintegration of the self; Alchemical Studies, which contains his commentary on Secret of the Golden Flower, a primary text which was the basis for my traditional supervised meditation disciplines for a decade with Dragon Teacher and my point of entry into Jung’s world, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Psychology and Alchemy. Later I made a close study of Aion, the final volume of his four works on alchemy, though I worked through the entire corpus of his works throughout my undergraduate studies.
During this time I was a student in the Nexus program of integrated arts and sciences in four main disciplines plus linguistics, which served my personal mission to explore the origins of evil and its functions through the intersection of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, as suggested to me by reading Waite.
My literary studies focused on Classical mythology and literature, Arthurian Romance, fairytales, and Shakespearean theatre in an attempt to reconstruct the lost faith of pre-Christian Europe as guided by Jacob Grimm, Ted Hughes, William Blake, Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Shakespeare, and I spent a number of glorious summers pursuing amateur theatricals at the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon and performing at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest a short drive from my home in Sonoma. In graduate school I studied Comparative Literature as I developed my reading lists for teaching my high school AP English students including twenty world cultures plus Modern American Literature. And of course I traveled to the places I read about, to disrupt my own expectations.
Regarding the science of history, Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, May 15 1969. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third a part of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital. In this interpretation I was influenced by my context of growing up in a Reformed Church community, where spoken English reflected that of the King James Bible whose rhythms shape my writing still, and the influence of Coleridge, Blake, and other Romantic Idealists and religious symbolism in medieval art through my mother, who was a scholar of both.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean during the gap between junior and senior undergraduate years ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Camus and Sartre, Beckett and Pinter, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe free of any meaning or value we ourselves do not create, and the madness of our historical attempts to control fate and nature including our own in a mad world, where security is an illusion, truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, and relational, and our fear has been weaponized globally by carceral states in service to power, the centralization of authority, and our enslavement and dehumanization. In this second unfolding of understanding I found guidance and allyship with fellow revolutionaries and scholars of Marxist thought and its praxis, as we waged liberation struggle, often with Soviet advisors, against Apartheid in South Africa, American imperialism in Central America, and other theatres of Resistance to tyranny and oppression.
Here also I must note that I had been an enthusiast of history since childhood, as my partner Dolly and I discovered that we shared each other’s dreams of past lives together and worked out an enormous backstory unfolding over centuries for what became our grand romance. As motives for scholarship go, it wasn’t half bad.
As to Philosophy, I remain the boy who in eighth grade read all the works of Plato and Nietzsche, and adopted Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter text to the Bible. And the next year as a Freshman in high school I became an enthusiast of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus and his disciple James Joyce’s mad quest to create a universal human language in Finnegan’s Wake. High school was also when I first wrestled with the Kabala, though I failed to read it in the original coded scholar’s Aramaic mixed with Andalusi Romance and had to rely on Gershom Scholem’s translation. And of course I had been formally studying Taoist and Zen Buddhist literature from the age of nine. My enthusiasm for Surrealist literature and film through my teenage years may also qualify as a philosophical interest, as might my immersion in magic, though later in graduate school at UC Berkeley Godel, Chaos Theory, Quantum Physics, and Batesonian Holism set their hooks in me.
So for my four disciplines of scholarship; as to my hobby of languages, I grew up with three voices; English, Chinese, and French, with some Japanese and Portuguese before I began high school. And everywhere I went, I made a serious effort to learn the language.
My English is influenced by the King James Bible and the local Dutch community of my childhood hometown, whose speech was full of thee’s and thou’s. My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court.
My Second Voice from the age of nine was Traditional Chinese; inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my decade of formal study of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, martial arts, and the game of Go I studied in both Chinese and Japanese.
My Third Voice from the seventh grade is French, a legacy of having been sent to six years of French classes at the high school because I was beyond grade level in English, which I enthusiastically embraced along with Surrealist film and literature.
This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Japanese I count as my fourth language as it developed over the years, becoming a greater passion at university when I was obsessed with Japanese poetry to the extent that I walked some of the Basho Road to see where he had written his masterpieces, and I claimed Zen as my religion on official forms through much of my twenties.
I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in he Moment of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
I currently write and publish in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Zulu, Afrikaans, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and since the invasion in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and recently Italian and Dari, Afghanistan’s major language and like Urdu derived from Persian, all three of which are mutually intelligible. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.
Including dead languages with no broad communities of native speakers but of scholars of ancient literatures, those of my Buddhist and Islamic scholarship include Classical Tibetan from my time as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order of Buddhism in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I waged a revolution against the monarchy, and from my studies as a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufis in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I fought for independence against the invasion by India; Classical Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and the exception to the dead languages of scholarship classification as a universal language of Islamic faith in which one must be literature to be considered fully Muslim, Classical Quranic Arabic.
So, my literacy includes twenty three languages if we count Latin, which I’ve taught in high school; basic Latin is crucial if you are a new student in America whose native language is not English, especially for university-bound students and solving unknown scientific and technical terms. If you know Latin root words and conjugations, you will master English twice as fast.
Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty three languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Croatian, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, Hungarian, Shelta, Yucatec, and Quiche. and twenty eight of literacy, a total of fifty one.
As a boy I kept a journal in Enochian, greatly interesting as a foundation of ceremonial magic though not a true language, John Dee’s idea of an angelic language used by Aleister Crowley and taught to me by William S. Burroughs who claimed Crowley as his teacher; but its really more of a cypher derived from Gematria or mathematical decoding of Hebrew in Kabala and medieval occultism hidden within a unique orthographic script for Early Modern English, much like Tolkien’s invented languages, with a modified alphabet and around 200 unique terms. So I don’t count it.
Beyond this, my interest in dreams as a field of study has led me to explore three spheres of ideas wherein dreamwork is primary and which were influences on Jung; I have been a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Nepal, a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Kashmir, and an enthusiast of Surrealist art, literature, and cinema; and I see the same interconnections and commonalities between them as Jung did.
Having properly situated my understanding of Jung in the topologies of my intellectual environment as I grew up, a crucial stage of investigation in any study of human identity as informed, motivated, and shaped by our historical adaptations, I now turn to the man himself and his work.
Jung spoke in metaphors, densely layered references, and multiple meanings; his psychology is literary and philosophical rather than scientific and medical, a Quixotic quest to map the human soul and to describe a universal process of becoming human.
Poet, historian, literary scholar and philosopher, whose project was surrealist and mystical; Carl Gustave Jung pioneered ideas which have been taken in multiple directions by others, his comparative mythology shaped into a new discipline by Joseph Campbell, his archetypal psychology forged into a new classicism by James Hillman. His massive work on psychological types formed the basis of the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator test; the Rorschach test is an equally famous tool which puts Jungian theory to work.
His last book, Man and His Symbols, is an excellent introduction to his ideas, intended for general readers and accessible enough to use in high school English classes to teach basic symbolism in literature as I did.
Anthony Storr’s The Essential Jung is a great follow-up and broad overview; beyond this I suggest reading Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Psychotherapy by Marie-Louise von Franz, and The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, continuing the study of all four authors together.
Of James Hillman, read next Dreaming the Dark, and thereafter The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, Kinds of Power, and Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung’s Red Book, A Terrible Love of War, Pan and the Nightmare, and We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse.
Of Joseph Campbell, read next Creative Mythology, Myths to Live By, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine edited by Safron Rossi, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87, Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, the three volumes of the Masks of God series, Tarot Revelations coauthored with Richard Roberts, and The Mythic Image.
The works of Marie-Louise von Franz balance them as the fourth partner of the set; Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, and Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, would begin my list.
Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology, by June K. Singer is still the finest state of the art text for both general readers and clinicians. Also read Singer’s Modern Woman in Search of Soul: A Jungian Guide to the Visible & Invisible Worlds.
His humanistic-existentialist works, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, The Undiscovered Self, and Answer to Job, are wonderful companion studies to the works of Sartre and Camus.
I do like the topical collections assembled from disparate essays in his collected works; Dreams, and also Jung on Active Imagination edited by Joan Chodorow.
His collaboration with Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, is a joint attempt to found a new science of mythology, and a launching point for both Campbell and Hillman.
I especially love Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake in eighth grade, as a 14 year old who for the first time had found a book by someone who spoke for me.
Do read the marvelous Aion: researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, which builds on his foundational studies of alchemy and is illuminating in terms of the Sartre/Merleau-Ponty debate.
His autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections was a treasured companion of mine for years, filled with wit and wisdom, strangeness, visions and occult weirdness. When I first read it I considered it a grimoire, magic having been an enthusiasm of mine throughout my teenage years, parallel and interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film during weekend forays to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley where I was wont to run amok.
And then there is The Red Book, in which the genesis of his ideas is written, an extended interrogation of Herman Hesse’s Abraxis as described in the novel Demian, a reimagination and transformation of Gnosticism and the founding of a syncretic faith which touches the whole mystical tradition of humankind, which can be read as a journal of madness like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or a crisis of faith comparable to Augustine’s Confessions. Jung’s autobiography which I read in high school, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is an except from the Red Book which leaves out the crazy ass parts. The thing is, I like the crazy parts best. Our universe, and humankind, are both irrational. Jung should have learned, with all his wisdom, to do as the humorist Gini Koch advises in her signature line; “Go with the crazy”.
On the subject of Jungian psychology:
A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, by Robert H. Hopcke.
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, by Connie Zweig & Jeremiah Abrams.
The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion, by Edward F. Edinger.
Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts, Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life As an Elephant, by Daryl Sharp.
Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson.
Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Susan Rowland
Jung Interviews with Richard Evans
How to Integrate Your Shadow – The Dark Side is Unrealized Potential, by Academy of Ideas
Carl Jung and the Shadow: The Mechanics of Your Dark Side, film by Adrian Iliopoulos on his YouTube channel The Quintessential Mind
Carl Jung’s Philosophy of The Shadow, by BanditRants
The Shadow – Carl Jung’s Warning to The World, by Eternalized
The World Within: Jung in his Own Words interview and documentary
The Wisdom of the Dream documentary
The Liberation of the Heart: Marion Woodman on Truthful Relationships and the Shadows of Power
Marie-Louise von Franz on the Anima in Men
Carl Jung and the Journey of Self-Discovery | Historical Documentary | Lucasfilm
C.G. Jung at Bollingen
September 25 2023 My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages
Before all else must come the tactics and strategy of Resistance in the moment we now face, always the only moment we have and a Rashomon Gate of possible futures; as both Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different answers, What is to be done?
The atrocities and crimes against humanity of the ICE terror force now being called Los Diablos, The Devils in Spanish, and the federal troops occupying sanctuary cities in a campaign of white supremacist state terror and ethnic cleansing, which recalls to me the horrors of the Serbian regime I fought half a lifetime ago at Sarajevo, are an immediate threat we must confront daily, but far from a unique one.
The Fourth Reich of the Trump regime is trying to subjugate us through division and terror, and to this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In America we are at war with our own government, a captured state of fascist tyranny, and all Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. And no mater where you begin with authorized political identities of otherness and belonging, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Any Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and in addition to the official ICE terror force of Homeland Security which pays six figure salaries to the most brutal psychopathic thugs and racist fanatics gathered from our prisons and security services, states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Men without badges, wearing masks, without warrants and who offer no rights of trial as we our guaranteed by our founding documents, who abduct people at random and send them to secret foreign prisons without probable cause or evidence of any kind, without Miranda rights or hearing the evidence against them in a court of law; such teams as ICE now employs are not police of any kind but extrajudicial crime syndicates of racist terror. Resist to the death abduction of yourself or others.
In the words of the character Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow, episode Turncoat; “You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re outcasts, misfits, and proud of it. If the enemy attacks in formation, we pop em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, we raid their camp in the night. And if they’re going to hang you, you fight dirty. And we never surrender.”
How shall we resist? By any means necessary, as Sartre wrote in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, and was made famous by Malcolm X. All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, but this does not mean taking unnecessary risks. One must study the possibilities like a problem in chess, have plans for everything you can imagine, and spring the trap only when it is properly set.
The first lesson of the Art of War is diversion and surprise; and the last lesson is the same as the first. On the modern battlefield any threat that can be seen or identified can be destroyed; so don’t tip your hand.
In the context of Resistance against ICE kidnapping teams, your enemy has military weapons, armor, and communications, and possibly some training; if Trump calls in the National Guard to support them as he has threatened today, they will unquestionably be trained to work as a team in ways far superior to that of any pickup team you may be able to put together, even if your team has better skills individually. This means you must avoid direct confrontation; you must be clever, unpredictable, strike anonymously from the shadows when the enemy is off guard and at their weakest in ways which cannot be countered, and never use the same trick twice.
Of course, you want to train as a team as much as possible, and as broadly as possible which among other things means cross training in each other’s disciplines exactly as all military forces do.
This brings us to one of the crucial and decisive factors in any conflict; the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce such as Resistance, so the reaction must be part of its design if one is to use force to shape the future.
Another such principle is that in the Calculus of Fear, too little invites Chaos and social disorder, and too much galvanizes Resistance. I’d have thought the world would have learned this at Nanking, but its something tyrants never truly learn. People who have nothing left to lose are uncontrollable and dangerous, like ourselves.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened,, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
ICE and the federal occupation of sanctuary cities and general campaign of ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror are our direct threat and must be purged from our society, but this is also a symptom of more general issues of white supremacy as a system of oppression and unequal power designed to create and enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white privilege, and of the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control and the state as embodied violence.
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
This is system of oppression which creates and enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which we must we must destroy utterly if we are to truly become a free society of equals.
As I wrote in my post of December 18 2024 International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”; We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.
The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
As I wrote in my post of June 7 2025, A Battle For the Soul Of America and the Freedom of the World: ICE Versus The People; In the streets of Los Angeles and throughout Vichy America, the People rise in mass action and solidarity to do battle with Homeland Security’s army of occupation and white supremacist terror, ICE.
Is this not the beauty of human beings, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows? This is the primary act of becoming human which defines us, this refusal to submit to authority, or to betray our duty of care for others.
Here also is our victory, for who cannot be ruled or controlled, who disobeys and disbelieves the lies of those who would enslave us, becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a power that cannot be taken from us.
This is now the fifth time Trump has tried to terrorize America into submission through use of secret armies of federal occupation; and each of these previous campaigns of repression of dissent, which loosed looting, arson, and random violence under the direction of Homeland Security on our cities to delegitimize the Black Lives Mater protests and seize control of the narrative in service to the centralization of power and authority to the carceral state, each and every such action has failed.
The sole result of all of this state terror and repression of dissent was the defeat of the Homeland Security army in the Battle of Portland and the articles of surrender published by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf and their joint declaration of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones beyond control of the federal state. To my knowledge, we Antifa are the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on ground within her borders since Little Bighorn.
We have been victorious over forces like that of ICE which the Trump regime sends against us now; it can be done, friends, and we all of us can do it again, here and now.
When the enemies of liberty come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not an America divided by propaganda of otherness and defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but a United Humankind of Living Autonomous Zones and the Unconquered, citizens who refuse to become subjects, and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights.
And if we all stand together and the circle is unbroken, we will be victorious.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of January 23 2021, Inclusion and the Embrace of Otherness is the Test of Democratic Societies: On Immigration; Our new President Biden and his government seem committed to ideals of equity and fairness, in our system of immigration and in all things, which I celebrate and will help in any way I can; but in this area of policy I believe we need a few things more.
Inclusion and the embrace of Otherness is the test of democratic societies.
We need a version of the English Slave Act; anyone who sets foot on American soil is free, safe, and under our protection.
We need a borderless state with citizenship by declaration; if you accept the responsibilities of membership in our nation and agree to live in accord with our principles and agreements with one another, you are an American. If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?
We need to reimagine and transform our security services and repurpose Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to provide safe passage to our shores and a humane landing which welcomes new Americans with food, medical attention, and education.
The horrific ethnic cleansing and systematic torture and abuse of the Trump regime did not emerge from nothing, but from an ancient injustice by which our nation created wealth and elite power and privilege for white supremacy; we have drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and generate mass cheap exploitable labor which fuels agriculture, hospitality, childcare, and other markets and industries.
Illegal migrant labor is slave labor.
Let us emancipate our workforce so that everyone working here has the same rights and legal protections as citizens, no worker can be used against another, and all share in the wealth and benefits of their labor.
Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa
A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, Lauren Markham
January 17 2025 Origins of Our Migrant Crisis: Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in Latin America’s Destabilized Nations
Let us enact the Restoration of America; liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all.
First among the policies which I recommend as a platform for change in our upcoming 2028 elections must be the abolition of police; repeal the Patriot Act, disarm and demilitarize the police and abolish the counterinsurgency model of policing, the dismantle the carceral state and its prisons as a strategy of the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor, and the abandonment of the social use of force by the state.
There are many other thoughts I have on the subject of the Reformation of the Democratic Party as an institution of liberation struggle and the Restoration of America, but this must come before all else, because if we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
Let us abolish the police, and begin again with healing the flaws of our humanity and the legacies of our history rather than the enforcement of virtue, authorized identities, repression of dissent and thought control through surveillance and propaganda.
Police abolition is about seizure of power from those who would enslave us and bringing change to institutionalized white supremacist terror, but it is also a ground of revolutionary struggle at the heart of the idea of America as a free society of equals who are co owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens.
The institution of police is profoundly un-American and inherently racist, and it cannot endure alongside any kind of land of the free.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2025, Why Are Police Evil? Police Are Evil When States Are Evil, and States Are Inherently Evil: the Case of Tyre Nichols; Why are police evil?
Why does the state use police to enforce its authority and laws, and train and arm them not to render aid but to kill, not to redress unequal power and injustices but to perpetrate them as institutional hate crime?
Such questions thunder through the streets of Memphis, America, and the world as brutal repression and state terror is met with resistance, as it did during the historic Black Lives Matter mass protests for racial justice.
On January 10 2023, Tyre Nichols died from being beaten by five police officers on the seventh. That the policemen who murdered him simply because they could were black signposts issues of internalized oppression and systemic white supremacist terror, as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege require enforcers to keep the slave castes at their work; the phenomenon of the overseer is a symptom of these inequalities and a strategy of loaned power and assimilation on the part of carceral states and colonial regimes, both of which America remains long after the Civil War. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is an exemplar of the overseer, one who has joined an elite who does not regard him or any of his people as fellow human beings; Kamala Harris represents both my hopes and my fears for our future, and may possibly be another such overseer of the carceral and white supremacist state and social system. The emergence of overseers among slave populations is entirely due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle, as a symptom of systemic oppression.
We Americans still have armed police to enforce our subjugation of nonwhite others, through the whole of the passing Biden era whom we elected on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and our seizure of over fifty American cities for several months of battle against a secret army of Homeland Security terror troops working with deniable fascist assets like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. In this we were victorious, we Antifa being the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on American soil since Little Bighorn. The articles of surrender declared by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf which designated Portland, Seattle, and New York as Anarchist Zones beyond state control is unparalleled in our history. Of this I am immensely proud as a triumph equal to our defeat of the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, yet the Pandemic was weaponized as a national Quarantine by our betrayers to stop the protests without changing anything.
Why have we not abandoned the use of state terror and abolished the police?
Is it because in creating terror and learned helplessness through the random murders of nonwhite citizens the police are doing exactly what they are chosen and trained to do?
Police are evil because they enforce unjust systems of white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror; police forces are designed and intended as enforcers of unequal power and overseers of carceral states of force and control, states whose purpose is to institutionalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness through which caste systems are perpetuated, citizenship made conditional, and those who create the wealth of elites commodified and dehumanized as de facto slaves. Police began as slavecatchers and overseers, and remain so today.
In the murder of Tyre Nichols we have a special unit of overseers who beat a fellow Black man to death simply because they could, but this obscures the central fact of the case that this horrific crime is fully aligned with the purpose of the special unit of which they were members and of the institution of policing in general; to criminalize Black identity and act as a force of state terror in the repression of dissent and the theft of citizenship.
Police are evil when states are evil, and all states are inherently evil, for the state is embodied violence.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As I wrote in my post of May 25 2025, Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle Against Racist Police Terror As A System of Oppression; On this anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of police and other madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of imperial conquest and dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
Those who would enslave us make monsters of some of us in order to terrify the rest of us into submission and legitimize the centralization of power to the state.
If we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of America’s historical memory and vision of ourselves; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort. This image is shaped by the three primary forces of race, wealth, and gender which together act to authorize identity and subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us. And this we must resist.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as written in The Root; “In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America”.
If we count only the known victims of racial violence since Emancipation, we have a legacy of crimes against humanity in a nation founded on the principle that all persons are created equal which reveals this to be an Original Lie; racism is not a failure of our system, but a key element of its design. Now count all the Black people who lived and died as American slaves from the first landing in 1661 to Juneteenth.
The names of the victims of racism in our nation become an infinite loop of misery and despair, a lamentation of the brokenness of the world and of the human cost of a system which uses divisions of exclusionary otherness to change some of us into things to be used for the profit of a few oligarchic families of apex predators. Ideologies of white supremacy perpetuate inequality in our society today; the wolves are still among us, even if they must disguise themselves as sheep.
Among the most terrible instruments of those who would enslave us is this erasure and silencing of Black voices, of concealment of the scope and horror of the legacy of slavery in the power asymmetries and inequalities we are heir to. We have hundreds of years of lost lives and names to reclaim, and we can not lose a single one more.
Every one of those lost lives is an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for Liberty; let us honor them with our actions as songs of survival and revolution, and make of one another living monuments to our unconquered freedom in defiance of those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of December 29 2020, A Cry for Justice and Transformation: a Roll of Martyrs in the Struggle for Equality Against Racist Police Violence, White Supremacist Terror, and State Terror and Tyranny; Let the names of the martyrs murdered by our police become more than a litany of sorrows, but a song of revolution and transformative change; George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, Dijon Kizzee, Walter Wallace Jr., Jonathan Price, Casey Goodson Jr., Andre Hill, and countless others whose names have been stolen from us.
How many of their murderers are now on Death Row? How many exiled to the Island of Lost Souls? Here I do not advocate for death or exile as punishments within the power of the state; but merely to underscore the significance of our failure to consequent criminal violence by police, so long as it reinforces white supremacy.
How shall we answer the failure of our nation to achieve the ideals of its founding? How can we begin to reverse the tide of racist and fascist totalitarianism?
Disarm the police. Demilitarize the police and abandon the counterinsurgency model if policing. Abolish the police and replace them with humanitarian social services; transform security services designed to kill and enforce inequalities and injustices into services designed to aid our freedom, equality, and pursuit of happiness, and with an absolute imperative to safeguard our right to life.
We must bring our institutions into service to our people and the principles and values of our Constitution and Bill of Rights; the choice is not between liberty and security, but of security in the service of liberty rather than the reverse.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2021, Abolish Prisons, Police, and the Carceral State of Tyranny and Terror, Force and Control; I write today to amplify the voices of the imprisoned and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity, and to support the work of the Prison Abolition Initiative and Black Lives Matter.
Such ideas bear the weight of our historical legacies of slavery, racism, and the interdependent purposes of the carceral state to re-enslave Black Americans as prison labor, and to centralize power and authority, both political strategies designed to reinforce the wealth, power, and privilege of elites and to subvert democracy and a free society of equals through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of exclusivity and membership.
As you may know, I tend to think in terms of literature, and to me this issue constructs and presents itself in the contexts of Kafka’s The Trial, Dostoevsky’s autobiographical novel The Idiot and his prison journal The House of the Dead, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
America, we can do better than this; the Czar, the Nazis, Stalin. They are not, and must not become, our teachers. We must be better, and if we cannot escape the legacies of our history and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems and institutions of dehumanization and commodification we must seize our power and our Liberty in refusal to submit to authority, by any means necessary.
Let us abolish the police and the instruments of repression of dissent; let us throw open the gates of our prisons, and be free.
In the words of Lenin which began the Russian Revolution, What is to be done? As I wrote in my post of April 12 2021, Cry Havoc: Seize the Streets to Disarm the Police; While the world reels in stupefaction as the true nature of justice in America is revealed in the spectacle of the George Floyd trial, US Army medic Lt Caron Nazario is tortured and terrorized by police, and Daunte Wright in another nonsensical harassment because of a disorderly air freshener impudently dangling from his rearview mirror, is murdered without cause by a twenty seven year veteran of the police force who claims to have mistaken a gun for a taser. And the streets are once again consumed with unruly and uppity protests.
This is what happens when police are permitted to carry guns. No one should be authorized by the state to use deadly force against their fellow citizens. It is an insane idea, which we must abandon.
Where are our leaders and representatives who should be rallying the masses and championing the cry for equality and racial justice at the head of these protests?
In response to the racist murders, torture, and white supremacist terror perpetrated by the police against our Black citizens, President Biden mumbles some boilerplate apologetics of state force and control and asks us nicely not to riot, loot, burn, or otherwise enact public grief, rage, and despair at our abandonment by the government and victimization by its forces of repression.
We must clarify and prioritize this situation for our representatives.
Seize the streets to disarm the police.
Take the streets until we are free of the state terror and racial violence of police. Disarm and abolish police. Hold our representatives accountable for the white supremacist terror of our government, for the carceral state and the institutionalized re-enslavement of Black Americans as prison labor, for the subversion of liberty and equality and the divisions of racist elitism which police and our corrupt justice system enforce.
Liberate America from this horrific and depraved regime of racist patriarchs and their hired thugs. Abandon our endemic and pervasive surveillance and repression of dissent. Abolish the counterinsurgency model of policing. Renounce force and control and the substitution of order for justice.
Law serves power, authority, hierarchy, and hegemonies of elite wealth and privilege; and law must never be allowed to replace morality. Law and order are instruments of subjugation and enslavement, commodification, dehumanization, and falsification; choose Liberty instead.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Let us demonstrate the failure of law and order through disobedience, resistance, and refusal to submit to authority. For authoritarian force and control is powerless against resistance, and we who refuse to submit and obey become Unconquered and free.
Who cannot be compelled is free.
We must free ourselves from the Empire of Fear and work toward the liberation of America and the world from inequality and injustice.
As written by William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 1, lines spoken by Marc Anthony which can be said by us of all the victims of police violence and white supremacist terror, whose names are an endless litany of wrongs;
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever livèd in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy—
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men.
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
As I wrote in my post of July 23 2020, Abolish State Terror and Tyranny: Forces of Unequal Power; A precondition of both tyranny and terror is unequal power, and secret power is the most vicious and terrible kind, whether in cases of sexual abuse and exploitation or of an authoritarian state of force and control.
Power operates by the same rules at every level; the differences are those of scale and the instruments of enslavement, dehumanization, and repression available to governments with vast resources and legions of intermediaries with badges and guns.
In all cases the objective of force and control is submission to authority, and this operates through learned helplessness, silence, erasure, and marginalization.
Our best strategy of engagement in resistance to unjust authority is exposure of its crimes against humanity and the surfacing and amplification of the voices of its victims, for in the words of the great champion of the people Bob Woodward, “Democracy dies in darkness”, and we must bring its enemies into the light.
Reverend Al Sharpton’s Eulogy for Amir Locke and All Black Americans, Who Are Nameless Suspects Awaiting Murder By Police, Each and Every One
Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, Stuart Schrader
May 25 2025 Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle Against Racist Police Terror As A System of Oppression
We are seized and shaken in the jaws of the Fourth Reich under the Trump regime here in America, but as the regime begins to collapse under the fracture and division of its delegitimation through exposure of the Epstein Files and the evaporation of the QAnon conspiracy theory and the new myth of Exile which forms the basis of the regime as a theocracy, the people are questioning how we can reshape the Democratic Party, the only organization that can directly challenge the Republican Party, and its political ideology and agenda as an instrument with which to seize power from the Republicans.
This will remain among the great questions of our time so long as the two party system can withstand the impacts of ranked choice voting and the resulting fragmentation and balkanization of power and political topologies, and not only for America but for the world. How can we reclaim the purpose of America as institutionalized Revolution and a guarantor of democracy for all humankind?
With what platform can we rally mass action? What songs of liberty will inspire us to unite in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us?
What does it mean to be an American, in this crisis of the second capture of the state by the Fourth Reich and the near-inevitability of the fall of global democracy and civilization and a future of tyranny and barbaric wars of imperial conquest and dominion, a Second Dark Age which humankind will not survive?
And in all of this, what does it mean to be human?
As a prelude to any future interrogations of our values and their praxis, we must examine the strategies of the 2024 election and why they failed.
First, the Democratic Party abandoned the principle of our universal human rights in meeting the mass protests against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians with a Great Wall of Silence.
Second, they abandoned the entire progressive agenda along with Palestine, universal healthcare and the Green New Deal, a labor centered economy, ecological action and independence from fossil fuels, abolition of police and social justice for nonwhite citizens, open borders and equality for migrants, everything that might actually help us survive and win a true free society of equals. It was monstrous what they did, the Democratic Party, in abandoning the people who can lead us into the future for entrenchment in an increasingly unworkable and obsolete past.
Third the failure was far more broad than that of the Democratic Party in aligning its goals with the will and wellbeing of the People; for in choosing to run a one issue abortion campaign, Harris and her political machine waged a revolution against the system of Patriarchy, two thousand seven hundred years of entrenched power dated from the Hanging of the Maids in Ulysses. It was a glorious and necessary thing, but it proved a bridge too far as nonwhite men joined the Republicans in voting to hold onto the only form of power they had. Even at the cost of ceding the power to hunt and kill them at will by white men and the police who are a white supremacist terror force; and the campaign did nothing to play race against gender identity politics.
Trump voters elected a figurehead who is a white supremacist terrorist and theocratic sexual terrorist because they wanted permission to do the same. This is the tide of darkness we must turn, and it is far bigger and more ancient and universal than Trump or his Nazi-Klu Klux Klan followers.
Our choice of figureheads and leadership for revolutionary struggle is determinative in the success or failure of the next Presidential election, for we are barbarians who vote for one human being who we grant extraordinary powers over our lives. I think we should abandon the office of the President for an executive council chosen, led, and with oversight by the Senate; but in the meanwhile we must find a champion.
While I will be problematizing the ideal platform of my imagination in future essays, here I wish to review the lengthy vetting process of the last election’s Presidential debates in search of clues to possible future Presidents.
As I wrote in July of 2024, Weighing the Biden Restoration of Democracy In the Shadows of the 2019 Presidential Debates; Is stopping the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich and the madness of a second Trump regime in which to complete the subversion of democracy and the fall of civilization to a Dark Age of theocratic fascist tyranny enough to justify a second Biden term?
The Restoration of democracy is necessary, but is it enough? Solidarity in Resistance to fascism and tyranny is unquestionable for myself as both an ideal and a praxis of action, one which in light of the dangers of ideological fracture and division is an inherent truth of democracy demonstrated by history many times, and notably in the collapse of the Social Democrats in Germany over the issue of service in World War One which removed the only viable blocking force to the rise of fascism and similarly the disintegration of the Industrial Workers of the World over the same issue which contained labor unions as a threat to the capitalist oligarchy which now rules America.
So while I resist the second capture of the state by Trump and the Republicans in our upcoming election and cannot compromise on the principle of solidarity of action in liberation struggle, I also cannot vote for or endorse Biden who has made us all complicit in genocide by supplying Israel with arms and refusing to use BDS to stop the bombing of Gaza.
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such very different answers?
What we really need is to replace Genocide Joe with a Presidential candidate of moral vision. One who will guarantee our humanity and our universal human rights, end our complicity in the war crimes of Israel, reform our justice system beginning with purging the agents of theocracy from our Supreme Court, enact universal women’s rights of bodily autonomy and reproduction, disarm and demilitarize the police to end their reign of white supremacist terror, enact universal free healthcare as a precondition of the right to life, and transform our reliance on fossil fuels with the Green New Deal to end the threat of human extinction.
Herein I now interrogate the disconnects of meaning and failures of vision of the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency as previously enumerated by way of a forensic examination of its corpse, as illuminated in the shadows of the 2019 Presidential Debates.
As I wrote in my post of December 20 2019, The years Final Democratic Presidential Campaign Debate & A Recap of Those Previous; Bernie Sanders as always spoke with passion and vision and articulated clear plans and objectives in the restoration of America to her former glory. He is the only figure in politics today who operates from a coherent ideology which organizes all his policies, like Plato’s ideal of a philosopher-king.
Elizabeth Warren, the genius of capitalism and chessmaster of the Beltway, was as always twelve moves ahead of her opponents and has read a dozen great books on any topic of policy you might name. Anyone who enters her arena ends up looking like Salieri to her Mozart.
Pete Buttigieg has during the course of this campaign been revealed as yet another wolf in Grandmother’s clothing, waiting to pounce when we are lulled off guard. I so wanted him to be as he represents himself, and not a carnival huckster and master of the bait and switch, sleight of hand, shell game, and the images of funhouse mirrors. He combines so many iconic dreams in his illusory presentation of self, all wrapped up with a pretty bow, yet every time he claims to agree with our goals and ideals he then proposes his own plan which will in fact sabotage all progress. There’s even video of him advocating for coal mining, a policy which for me places him beyond the boundary of ourselves and into the realm of otherness. Sadly, I must name Jiggy a conservative agent of infiltration and subversion. Perhaps his military background renders him unable to think outside of authoritarian structures and hierarchies; that’s the charitable version of why he has sought to deceive us.
He could also be exactly as I see him, now that I realize why he seemed so familiar; for I saw him many times in the great play Angels in America, in his true form as Roy Cohn, former lawyer of Donald Trump. Watch Tony Kushner’s play if you need to confirm it for yourself; it’s the greatest work of twentieth century American theatre, so I can guarantee its worth your time.
Tom Steyer’s concluding sermon was magnificent; “Donald Trump is not against immigration from white people. He is against immigration from non-white people. That’s a racist argument from a racist President and it has led him to break the laws of humanity.”
Amy Klobuchar kept her claws in this time and was funny, brilliant, fearless, and empathetic; every time she spoke I saw her as Mrs. Mazel. Seriously. In terms of performance of identity, tonight was a victory, perhaps one transformational to her political future.
Andrew Yang launched a brilliant attack on the political consequences of economic inequality, “You know what you need to donate to political campaigns? Disposable income.” Recasting his looney Basic Living Stipend as reparations was a stroke of genius.
Joe Biden just makes me want to puke.
And now, a recap of my posts on the debates:
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2019; Biden Presided Over America’s Lost Chance to Defend Women From Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Inequality at Work and Under the Law, and Bequeathed Us the Monstrous Grifter and Overseer of the Carceral State Clarence Thomas; Anita Hill calls out Joe Biden in The New York TImes; Biden presided over the Clarence Thomas hearings and America’s lost chance to defend women from sexual violence, harassment, and inequality at work and under the law.
If Biden had used his opportunity differently, we could have launched our epochal #metoo reckoning and wave of social change nearly three decades earlier. How many women’s lives did Biden doom?
Biden’s defense of the patriarchy is an unforgivable breach of public trust, but only the most visible reason he is unfit for public office. There is also the disturbing and outrageous story of his actions before he became a national political figure, marshalling white supremacists against school bussing and desegregation, exactly opposite the Freedom Riders and Bernie Sanders. Of the two, I know who represents me and who I prefer.
We are presented with the spectacle of a misogynist and racist as a major Democratic Party presidential candidate; Biden is the poster boy for everything that is wrong with the leadership and collaborationist wing of the Democrats, who under their masks are little different from their Republican partners.
I don’t want a choice of reactionary clowns for President. I think we deserve better.
The vast political and financial machine of the Democratic Party is trying to anoint Biden as its chosen contender in the coming fight with Trump for the soul of America and the destiny of the world. This is nothing less than a campaign of repression against Progressive Democrats, which includes the stunning betrayal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All.
We Progressives will be resisting and organizing for revolutionary transformation of our Party, that it may become reflective of its constituency and its principles. At the same time we are being pressured to unite against Trump and support whomever wins the Democratic primary and nomination, and we have a choice of policy to make which will greatly influence our future possibilities and set of choices.
I counsel restraint in limiting ones’ options, caution against taking pre-emptive positions, making non-negotiable demands, unilateral decisions without communicating with ones’ partners, or taking actions which sabotage trust or compromise our principles and values.
As much as I’d love to say we must defeat Trump and fascism by any means necessary, I cannot. Our first duty is to remain true to ourselves and each other; this is also the first principle of Resistance.
Let us not accept binary choices, when both are bad.
Therefore I refuse to sign the Indivisibles 2020 Campaign Pledge to vote for whomever runs for President in the next election as a Democrat. We must define ourselves positively, by what we are for, as well as negatively, by what we are against.
Whoever best represents my values and principles will merit my vote and support, and must at minimum be personally free of misogyny and racism. Thus far, I’m campaigning and voting for Bernie.
And so I have my own campaign pledge, which I ask all of you to take with me:
My America is a free society of equals, wherein we are guarantors of each’s others rights in solidarity and co-owners of the state, and I stand for the absolute legal and structural equality of all human beings.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As I wrote in my post of May 16 2019, the Democratic Party’s Blacklist to Repress Dissent; Yet again the leadership of the Democratic Party has taken steps to crush dissent within its ranks and marginalize the progressives and socialists who are challenging old ways with new ideas.
For those of you who have trouble telling the American political parties apart, the Democrats are ostensibly the liberal partners and opposition of the ruling Republican conservatives.
Let’s test that proposition, shall we? We have the betrayal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All, the timid waffling and deflection on calling for impeachment of the President, the support and pressure of others to support the campaign of racist and misogynist Joe Biden for President, and now this- a blacklist.
Echoing the malign and nefarious Hollywood Blacklist and the political show trials of the McCarthy era, this damning piece of villainy has no place in a democratic society and for me proves a final argument that we must radically transform the Democratic Party as an equal goal of our revolution with thwarting and overthrowing the Republicans.
As I wrote in my post of June 5 2019, Worker Ownership of the Means of Production: Bernie’s Plan to Transform Capitalism and Convert Private Into Common Wealth; By giving workers shares in the corporate profits they produce, Bernie Sanders plans to transform capitalism, the ownership of business, and the nature of wealth. Workers would literally own the means of production through the fund of shares they control and their power as voting shareholders in corporate governance, democratizing the economy and abolishing the division between labor and ownership.
This bold and tantalizing idea has the potential to revolutionize our society in a single nonviolent and fair legislative enactment. No one loses; no one is coerced, there is no authority and no force, no show trials, purges, repression, or any other violence or tyranny such as that which characterized the communist revolutions of the early twentieth century. In Our Revolution, there are only winners.
As Mathew Lawrence writes in The Guardian, “The return of ownership to the heart of progressive politics has come not a moment too soon. Ownership matters. How our economy is owned and by whom powerfully shapes how it operates and in whose interest.”
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2019, Biden Is Unfit to Represent America; Racist, misogynist, dismissive of climate change and reluctant public supporter of womens reproductive rights; Biden is unfit to represent America and is a de facto Republican infiltration agent in the Democratic Party.
With a successful career built on a persona which excuses and contextualizes his horrible actions as jokes, his glib manipulation is obvious to me as the telltale sign of a psychopath.
What then disambiguates Biden from Trump? Only the facts that he is not a known foreign agent and traitor to the United States, and has no known history as a sex predator personally, though his record as an enabler of patriarchal sexual terror and the silencing of women during the Anita Hill hearings is indisputable..
I don’t think that’s enough of a difference to vote for him for President, do you?
As I wrote in my post of June 29 2019, The Presidential Debates Are Now a Referendum on the Democratic Party; Kamala Harris became a celebrity Thursday night for calling out Biden and Trump on their record and for speaking with passion and vision; beyond modeling the target behavior of challenging authority which is the true calling of anyone who does not identify as conservative, she changed the fundamental nature of the debate.
The presidential debates are now a referendum on the Democratic Party; what shall our values and direction for the future be?
In what is now a clear contest between competing visions of the meaning and purpose of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris acted as the picador of the Democratic Socialists and other Progressives, those who embrace egalitarian transformation of our society, sinking barbs into the Collaborationist wing of the party and their counterparts and partners in hegemony and dominion of America the Republicans.
That the Beltway-centric political machine of the Democratic Party has sheltered a racist-misogynist agent of subversion and infiltration whose sympathies and true allegiance are with the Imperialist-Theocratic Gideonite alliance of the Republican Party which has conspired to overthrow global democracy with the aid of a foreign power in treasonous conspiracy sickens and disgusts me.
But the depravity and un-American nature of the Republicans and their Collaborationist Democrat puppets and subsidiaries are not my subject today; today I wish to explore future possibilities and the ideals, values, and principles of an America which has reclaimed its heart.
We face two great challenges today which will drive our range of choices for all our tomorrows; the extinction of humankind and the viability of Earth as an ark of life, and the fall of democracy and civilization.
Democracy as a category subsumes most of the other great issues of our time; the four ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, but also the causes of equality in the aspects of race, gender and sexual personae, religion, and other issues of diversity and inclusion, immigration which includes all of these intersectionally, the transition to a borderless state with virtual citizenship for all who so declare, universal safeguard of human rights and democracy everywhere on earth, freedom of the press and freedom from surveillance, education which is critical to citizenship and democracy, reform of our justice system and the goals of a noncoercive society in which there are no prisons and no police, reform of our security services with the goal of racial justice and equality including disarming and demilitarizing the police and the abolition of Homeland Security and its subsidiaries ICE and the Border Patrol, universal healthcare and the decommodification of the medical industry, worker co ownership and the evolution to a postcapitalist society.
We deserve a world free of need and free of fear, in which we all share our common resources and benefit from co ownership of our government in a free society of equals.
There is much to be done; let us begin the rebirth and moral regeneration of our civilization.
As I wrote in my post of July 24 2019, Joe Biden Architect of the Iraq Invasion; Hey America, if you’d like a version of Trump as our next President who’ll move the evils from the shop window to the back room just like the good old days, and think it would be grand fun and maybe profitable to start a war with Iran or just about anybody, Joe Biden is your guy.
With a history as a segregationist, disbeliever in women’s claims of sexual victimization as the chief derailment officer in the Anita Hill hearings, whose reluctance in support of women’s reproductive rights makes his true position as a theocrat clear, Biden will keep all those different people out of the swimming pool.
As a principal architect of the Iraq Invasion, we can count on him to feed our young hooligans into the war machine and convert their lives into profit, especially when there’s oil to be stolen.
All joking aside, one of my nephews returned from service in Iraq as an oxycontin addict, originally prescribed in a military hospital, thinking he’s Jesus and wandering around the city giving sermons to pigeons. Every politician who voted for war is directly responsible for the terrible costs borne by countless veterans, sometimes as in World War Two for the survival and freedom of us all, sometimes merely for the profit of others.
When our government is an edifice of lies, illusions, and swindles operated for the benefit of plutocrats, who can sort wars of survival from those of greed?
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2019, The Democratic Presidential Debates; Surprises in this last round of Democratic Presidential debates; at least for those who were hoping the two leading Progressives would eliminate each other in a destructive fight.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders teamed up to deliver a decisive rebuke to the collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party; I would dearly love to see them as President and Vice President in either configuration of roles lead us in reawakening America’s values.
Especially fun was watching Biden, patriarch and racist warmonger that he is, flop about and gobble witlessly in fish-eyed stupefaction, caught flat footed and outshone by everybody, as if waiting for his party handlers to arrive and tell him what he stands for.
Tonight vision and passion triumphed over vacuity and image; I hope that this signifies the direction of the future of Democracy and of the Democratic Party.
As I wrote in my post of September 14 2019, on the third Democratic Presidential debate; Triumph of the Faceless Men; the candidates of the Third Democratic Presidential debate were led onstage with bags over their heads, shuffling in servile abjection after the power brokers of the Democratic National Committee, hellbent on foisting upon us a dissent-free monochrome and male campaign unable to challenge the power asymmetries which are driving our society to destruction, or interrupt the flow of bribes from the plutocrats who are breaking our economy and annihilating our future as a nation and a species, have whipped the candidates into line, who with glassy eyes and brute inarticulate sheeplike bleeting and grunts jumped through the hoops set out for them, avoiding unauthorized topics and playing their assigned roles, then except for Bernie Sanders sitting up to beg for their treats of blacklist restricted funding.
Who spoke for the survival of the earth and of humanity, for the rights of self-ownership and the bodily autonomy of women, for the victims of the legacy of slavery and the genocidal campaign of racist state terror and crimes against humanity in the concentration camps at our border?
Only Beto O’Rourke directly challenged the gun lobby, at a time when gun violence is our most immediate threat and inseparable from white supremacist terror, and it is no longer safe to send our children to school or leave our homes to go shopping.
I praise the candidates for returning civility to public discourse, for their display of unity on shared core values and principles; but America is fighting for its survival, beset by existential threats to democracy and to our lives, and we need leadership who will take the fight to the enemy and win back our liberty and our future.
If the current factors of climate change and the extinction of living systems remain unaltered, we may have only three more elections before we are all dead.
We may have less than that before we lose the vote, if we permit tyranny to go unchallenged, and look then to see policies of white supremacy make those of the Confederacy and the Nazis seem moderate, and inequalities of gender which return us to the Dark Ages of misogynist patriarchy.
So no, there were no winners in this circus, and the American people were the real losers. This was a day of the Hollow Ones, who have been eaten by the political machine which has betrayed us yet again.
May we all one day regain our fire and our defiance.
As I wrote in my post of October 15 2019, America redefines itself: the Democratic Presidential debates round ad nauseum; As Biden goggles in stupefaction, coughing up platitudes and party boilerplate like hairballs, a guttering fire which dimly echoes the scripted glibness of his glory days as a diversionary talking head and apparatchik, the Warren-Sanders détente holds while the outliers swarm and hurl barbs at pack leader Elizabeth Warren.
I’d love to have the Progressive alliance of the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders team as President and Vice President in either configuration of roles; and my wish for this election is for them to run together. The balance of Warren the conservative policy wonk and Beltway insider committed to salvaging capitalism and Sanders the Democratic Socialist and ideologue committed to revolution and social transformation achieves an ideal state of dynamically unstable forces able to adapt to changing conditions with agility and harness chaos as an engine of growth and life.
All living systems must have both a revolutionary and innovating force of adaptation through which to evolve and meet the challenge of new threats to our survival, and a conserving force which insulates meaning from change and ensures the survival of our values and principles such as those embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and of those traditions and anchorages which have allowed us to survive thus far. In both natural and cultural evolution, we need both forces working cooperatively to manage change and shape our future.
The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our ideational form, the loss of our culture and traditions.
The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For the origins of my idea of life as a game played by representatives of these shaping forces, I refer you to Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, and Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.
To return to the immediate subject of the debates, a brief summary:
Joe Biden would have been a good news anchor, if someone else was writing his copy. I think he should run for President against Trump- but as a Republican.
Biden’s handlers advise him to run on his record. I think he should too; the invasion of Iraq, the Anita Hill hearings, his opposition to desegregation. Whoever’s interests he represents, I do not believe that they are ours.
Kamala Harris has changed the course of history in calling Biden out on his antibusing past, in which his hidden face as George Wallace is exposed, and we owe her a great debt. She has established her role as a champion of the people unafraid to defy authority when it is wrong, and I hope she will continue to do so in whatever office she may hold.
Beto O’Rourke has also championed the powerless, and has a lot of good things to say; I agree with his plan to tax churches which refuse to support gay marriage out of existence. He is a committed crusader against gun violence and racism. He’s also learning fast, and is another figure I expect to see in the future national political arena. Beto, we don’t need to confiscate people’s guns, just make the manufacture or sale of guns and ammunition a federal crime, and possession or bearing arms legal proof of intent to kill.
Pete Buttigieg has great value as a figure of liberty, being a gay combat veteran with an Arabic name. We need more diversity in our representatives. In his own field of expertise he is unsurpassed among the candidates; in his lockup with Tulsi Gabbard over Syria he was absolutely right. He should be Bernie’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Of course, Tulsi Gabbard is wrong about everything. Her attempts to reprise the role of Sarah Palin as a political circus clown fail to amuse.
Amy Klobuchar threw groundless accusations at Elizabeth Warren, enacting Margaret Atwood’s analysis of seizures of power from the patriarchy resulting in female on female violence rather than mutual support. I found this ugliness disturbing. Also the fish-eyed glassy stare of bewilderment as Castro discussed monopolies was that of someone who just isn’t smart enough to follow a high level conversation.
Andrew Yang seems like a nice fellow with a single-issue candidacy, who is utterly clueless about human nature. Give a hundred people a basic living stipend of one thousand dollars a month with no strings attached and 97 of them will refuse to work unless they are bribed, as was endemic and pervasive in the Soviet Union, and was also a contributing cause in the Fall of the Roman Empire. Many will simply go on a bender til the cash runs out. Of the other three, one will take that money out of circulation by ratholing it in savings or buried in the backyard, one will spend it on shiny baubels, and one will squander it on unrealistic ventures and dreams they have no education or background to achieve. Tie the Basic Living Stipend to a target behavior that will pay America forward, like meeting grade targets while enrolled at university or a trade journeyman apprenticeship in critical fields, and we have a winnable plan. Keep trying, Andrew; you’ve got time to learn.
Would it surprise anyone to learn I’m still voting for Bernie Sanders?
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2019, Our Greatest Living onservative Theorist: Elizabeth Warren; Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders form a dyadic pair representing the conservative and revolutionary forces in politics in their purest form; though interdependent, they are polar opposites like the positive and negative sides of a magnet, and play the black and white sides of the board. I regret that our form of government does not allow for two Presidents who harmonize and balance one another; which seems to me ideal.
The revolutionary force, that which innovates and governs transformative change, is in this configuration represented by Bernie Sanders, committed to my own politics of Democratic Socialism.
The conservative force is here represented by Elizabeth Warren, beltway insider and policy wonk, who is committed to salvaging capitalism from the failures of its internal contradictions, and is our pre-eminent conservative political theorist in America today. Points against her in my accounting include her deceit regarding free universal health care, which she has no intention of enacting if elected, and her atrocious choices regarding foreign policy, particularly the carte blanche she offers Israel in the continuance of its state terror and campaign of racist and theocratic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
I personally have a zero tolerance policy for fascist nationalisms of blood and faith, and hope to one day see it reflected in American policy.
So for the 2019 Presidential debates; during the last go round our right to choose a candidate was stolen from us by the power brokers of the Democratic Party, which also denied us a forum for assessing our leadership and our spectrum of ideologies, so of no real use to us in finding a champion of the People with which to seize power from the Republicans.
However, all of my objections to Biden during the 2024 campaign season still apply, and also apply equally to the Collaborationist-Zionist wing of the Democratic Party and anyone whom in future they try to shove in front of us as an anointed candidate.
As I wrote in my post of June 27 2024, This Is Bullshit: the First Biden-Trump Debate of the 2024 Presidential Election; This is bullshit.
Two antique visions of America battle for our future, Traitor Trump the fascist tyrant and Russian agent whose mission is to bring down democracy, versus Genocide Joe the neoliberal who made us complicit in crimes against humanity in Gaza and refuses to protect free speech and rights of protest at universities, abandoning both our rights as citizens and our universal human rights. Our choice of futures is now between a theocratic white supremacist patriarchy led by a rapist, and the Bill of Rights made meaningless. All other issues are misdirections and a Wilderness of Mirrors.
A few short days ago, Biden set hero of the people Julian Assange free, a victory for the transparency of the state and our freedoms of information, speech, and press, but with conditions which echo those offered to the IWW unionists imprisoned by the state long ago for mobilizing against capital and the commodification and dehumanization of the working class. Biden has not championed our rights, but rid his regime of an embarrassing prisoner at the cost of our rights and in abandonment of the idea of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue of truth.
Who thinks Biden is on the side of the people against tyranny, after this? Biden, who began his career leading white separatists against school integration, chief silencer of women’s witness in the Anita Hill trial which bequeathed us the kleptocratic grifter Clarence Thomas, architect of the invasion of Iraq to steal oil wells as a strategic resource of imperial dominion? And who has done nothing to disarm the police as institutional white supremacist terror, nothing to abolish racist terror at our border and replace ICE and Border Patrol with a mercy force to provide safe conduct for migrants, nothing to disarm Israel and end our complicity in genocide.
There are vast differences between Biden and Trump, madness, treason, and fascism among them, but this does not make the Democratic Party’s soft tyranny less terrible than the Republican Party’s theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and Nazi white supremacist terror.
As I wrote in my post of March 6 2024, Super Tuesday Confronts Us With A Grim Choice Of Futures, and We Must Change the Rules of the Game; As I have often said since the October 7 terrorist attack which has upended the political landscape of America in our year of elections between tyranny and liberty, If you enable or enact genocide and crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.
Yet this election may decide the survival of democracy and humankind across the coming several centuries, and I now calculate our chances to escape an Age of Tyranny and wars of unimaginable horrors at less than two percent; I say again, I believe that in less than two possible futures out of every one hundred, something resembling ourselves can look at the ruins of our civilization and our species a millennium from now with questioning and wonder. With all of our technology and our understanding, why did we choose to annihilate ourselves?
The dangers of ideological fracture and division cannot be overstated; the IWW global union movement self destructed over the issue of peace during World War One, as did the Social Democrats in Germany, removing our respective blocking forces for the rise of fascism and resulting in the Second World War; there are many other and more recent examples of movements for change and progress being shattered by forces of reaction and the state, but these two will serve to illustrate what will happen next if Trump once again captures the state.
We must unite in solidarity together to confront this threat and drive fascist tyranny from the stage of history.
Yet Biden’s massive and extralegal supply of Israel with war material while it is used to rain death of the people of Gaza, on the absurd pretext that the criminals who attacked Israel claim to act in their name as a strategy of subjugation of the Palestinians to their theocratic rule, such decisions by Biden personally have made all of us as Americans complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity.
To this I say; Never Again!
Our choice is now to abandon either democracy and all of our rights as citizens, or the idea of our universal human rights and our historic role as their guarantor throughout the world. I’d like to keep both democracy and human rights.
How can we do this and win a future for humankind as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings?
If this is our goal, and with the imposed conditions of struggle as they have resolved themselves on Super Tuesday wherein Trump and Biden will face off once again in the sudden death match of futures that is our Presidential election, only one course of action remains for us which bears any hope for the triumph of liberty over tyranny; change the rules of the game.
I’m sure we can all think of many possibilities for bringing change with such a mission, but tonight I find myself enchanted with the idea of liberating Biden from Biden as articulated by Michael Moore. Who better to trust as our moral compass than the author of V For Vendetta, who wrote the immortal words; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here are my thoughts on our elections in a less hopeful moment, in my post of January 4 2023, On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza; Biden has made us all complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza, war crimes our taxes pay for. America has abandoned the idea of our universal human rights. Our nation has fallen, and with it global civilization based on humanist values and democracy.
Nothing remains to be saved; maybe the Rights of Man and America as a free society of equals was always a performance, lies and illusions designed to distract us from the fact that we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the state merely embodied violence as institutions of force and control.
Joe Biden has betrayed us, failed to place his life and ours in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and instead enabled and conspired in crimes against humanity with Netanyahu and the theocratic fascist settler regime and imperial conquest and dominion of the state of Israel, which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
And this we must resist, beyond hope of victory or survival, in solidarity as guarantors of each others humanity. To fascism of blood, faith, and soil and to state tyranny and terror regardless of where it surfaces or in whose interest it is perpetrated, we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
To this my unfiltered reaction to a Joe Biden campaign fundraising post timed to leverage the despair and torment of others in service to power, a comment has articulated one of the primary arguments in the apologetics of power; that we cannot control our proxy state, and secondarily that the crimes against humanity of Israel have the mandate of popular support here in America which place us all with Biden in the fork of a dilemma.
Here is the comment in question; “oh, come on. Dramatic much? Netanyahu is the criminal, Biden doesn’t control him, and cannot abandon our strongest ally in the region. Half the country wants to see Hamas wiped out, so what should Biden do? Listen just to this side? Get real.”
To this I replied; Yes, Netanyahu is a war criminal, but Biden has not only refused to stop funding ethnic cleansing, but has sent military aid to Israel and made us all complicit. We have abandoned the idea of universal human rights in funding the random mass murders of civilians with our taxes, voting to block the UN from bringing Netanyahu to trial for war crimes, and refusal to use our powers of Boycott, Divest, and Sanction to stop the Gaza War and bring democracy to Israel with regime change and the reimagination and transformation of systems of unequal power and state tyranny and terror.
Our nation has chosen to send warships to the perpetrator, and not humanitarian aid the victims, when we could easily have broken the Israeli blockade of food, water, and medical relief with our immense Navy, and silenced the bombs. It is not only the humanity of the Palestinians which has been abrogated here, but of our own as well.
In fact America does control Israel as a client state through our taxes and military support, but to what ends? Do we advance the cause of secular democracy or theocratic tyranny, of peace or war, liberty or submission to force and control, of our universal human rights or hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness based on divisions of race and faith?
In a region of one people divided by history and in our own nation, are we building bridges or walls?
Biden was elected to lead the Restoration of America after the loathsome regime of Traitor Trump, and has betrayed us. There is nothing left of us to save.
America has fallen, both as a democracy due to the capture of the Republican Party by a fascist-theocratic Fourth Reich and the subversions of our institutions and ideals by the Trump regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and because of the Democratic Party’s refusal to confront evil and purge our destroyers from among us, both in our client state of Israel and here in America in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection. All of this generates from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; fear weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us as divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In Gaza we see the inevitable results of this process of dehumanization, for to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence, and no matter where one begins with othering we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz. And this we must Resist.
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Get real, ends the apologetics of power, referencing the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger used so infamously to authorize our imperial wars in Vietnam and Central America including the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, and the massacres of the Suharto regime of Indonesia. A foreign policy modeled on Hitler’s dictum; “Who now remembers the extermination of the Armenians? The world respects only power” does not lead to a more humane future, nor to a United Humankind and a free society of equals.
In this injunction to get real and its legacies of history bearing horrors, atrocities, and crimes against humanity as state policy and fear become an engine of destruction, there are embedded issues and forces central to the questions of our humanity and how we choose to be human together; what is truth, who is authorized to question it, and how can we engage in the sacred calling to pursue the truth without falsification by the lies and illusions of propaganda?
We wander in a Wilderness of Mirrors, wherein all claims must be questioned, especially those of authorities who claim to speak and act for us as a strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent. To this I can but say, democracy requires an electorate able to perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Get real, we are exhorted by those who wish to steal our power. In Gaza, real people are dying because we are willing to sacrifice their lives to our power.
Thus for the ghosts of elections past, conducted in the Old Republic before the Fall of America to the Fourth Reich. Though it remains possible to bring a Restoration of democracy, we must confront the truth of the moment we live in, for it is a Rashomon Gate event of possible futures. And this is why the normal strategies of the Democratic Party no longer work in the imposed conditions of struggle we now face; normal doesn’t live here anymore.
So, what would I like for a President?
I would like a truth teller, who performs politics as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth. Someone fearless in the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and who can bring change to systems of oppression and unequal power with poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and in our choices about how to be human together. I want a wise, sympatico, visionary President; someone who will place their life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth.
I want a Jester of King Lear, who will speak truth to power and remind us of our humanity while doing so; I want someone like Mrs. Maisel.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Rashomon
King Lear
Civilization as a game played between conserving and revolutionary forces, a reading list
Torch of Liberty 
