On this the anniversary of one of history’s most terrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man, state terror and racial violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and of the massive scale of hate crime when enacted by a government as an authorized policy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil so very like those now employed by America against our own Black and other nonwhite citizens and in concentration camps for Latin migrants at our border, and most especially by the federal ICE white supremacist terror force, let us consider the nature of the path we are on and where it might lead.
There is nothing more dangerous than a man who believes God is on his side, for this belief justifies all evils. He who has granted himself absolution from any crimes committed in the pursuit of a sanctified goal, like the Pope once granted beforehand to all Crusaders for any sins committed during conversion by the sword, has opened the door to a bottomless well of depravity, perversion, brutality, and atavisms of barbarian darkness.
The Srebrenica Massacre stands out from the background of war crimes and atrocities in a chiaroscuro of wickedness and of terrors; the three legged race to the dehumanization of peoples and the degradation of values between the Bosnian Orthodox Serbs, their victims the Muslims of Bosnia who were abandoned in place by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Catholic Croatians likewise set adrift by the defeat of the Austrian Empire in the wake of World War One having recurred like Nietzsche’s Eternal Return to echo the collapse of civilization in a whirlpool of destruction. The Siege of Sarajevo alone lasted three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, to which it compares unfavorably in other respects as well.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
QUO VADIS, AIDA? | Official UK Trailer
Thirty years after the genocide, the peace of Srebrenica hides deep scars
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, by Julian W. Connolly provides the definitive reader’s guide to the novel by a professor who taught it for over twenty years.
Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama,
by Alexander Burry explores the interpretation of his works in Sergei Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler, Leos Janacek’s opera From the Dead House, Akira Kurosawa’s film The Idiot, and Adrzej Wajda’s drama The Devils.
This day we mourn the death of Jaime Alanis, hero of liberty, equality, and justice for all, murdered by the ICE white supremacist terror force while defending laborers from abduction and imprisonment in foreign gulags and from the wanton brutal criminality of the state.
He is an American hero, because he died on our soil defending our ideals and our common humanity, though he belongs to the world and all those who hunger to be free.
If we are to judge our fellow humans by their actions and not the color of their skin, he is among the best of us, and ICE and the Fourth Reich regime of Trump which it serves are among the worst and most despicable criminals in our history.
Those living near the Nazi death camps claimed to know nothing about them, though the ashes of the dead rained upon them for years. But we know. How shall we answer, if we know and do nothing?
As written by Diana Ramirez-Simon in The Guardian, in an article entitled Farm worker dies a day after chaotic immigration raid at California farm: Jaime Alanis died after sustaining injuries during raid where authorities say they arrested about 200 people; “A farmworker died Friday from injuries that he sustained a day earlier in raids on two California cannabis farm sites as US immigration authorities confirmed they arrested 200 workers after a tense standoff with authorities.
Jaime Alanis’s death was confirmed in a social media post by the United Farm Workers advocacy group. “We tragically can confirm that a farm worker has died of injuries they sustained as a result of yesterday’s immigration enforcement action,” the post read.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that authorities executed criminal search warrants in Carpinteria and Camarillo, California, on Thursday. They arrested immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally and there were also at least 10 immigrant children on site, the statement said.
Four US citizens were arrested for “assaulting or resisting officers”, the department said. Authorities were offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of one person suspected of firing a gun at federal agents. At least one worker was hospitalized with grave injuries.
During the raid, crowds of people gathered outside Glass House Farms at the Camarillo location to demand information about their relatives and protest immigration enforcement. A chaotic scene developed outside the farm that grows tomatoes, cucumbers and cannabis as authorities clad in helmets and uniforms faced off with the demonstrators. Acrid green and white billowing smoke then forced community members to retreat.
Glass House, a licensed California cannabis grower, said in a statement that immigration agents had valid warrants. The company said workers were detained and it is helping provide them with legal representation.
“Glass House has never knowingly violated applicable hiring practices and does not and has never employed minors,” the statement said.
It is legal to grow and sell cannabis in California with proper licensing. State records show the company has multiple active licenses to cultivate cannabis.
On Friday, about two dozen people waited outside the Camarillo farm to retrieve the cars of loved ones and speak to managers about what happened. Relatives of Jaime Alanis, who has worked picking tomatoes at the farm for 10 years, said he called his wife in Mexico during the raid to tell her immigration agents had arrived and that he was hiding with others inside the farm.
“The next thing we heard was that he was in the hospital,” Juan Duran, Alanis’ brother-in-law, said in Spanish, his voice breaking.
Elizabeth Strater, national vice president of the United Farm Workers, said Alanis was injured after a 30-foot fall from a building during the raid.
After immigration agents arrived at Glass House’s farm in Camarillo on Thursday morning, workers called family members to let them know authorities were there. Relatives and advocates headed to the farm about 50 miles (80km) north-west of downtown Los Angeles to try to find out what was going on, and began protesting outside.
Federal authorities formed a line blocking the road leading through farm fields to the company’s greenhouses. Protesters were seen shouting at agents wearing camouflage gear, helmets and gas masks. The billowing smoke drove protesters to retreat. It wasn’t clear why authorities threw the canisters or if they released chemicals such as teargas.
Ventura county fire authorities responding to a 911 call of people having trouble breathing said three people were taken to nearby hospitals.
At the farm, agents arrested workers and removed them by bus. Others, including US citizens, were detained at the site for hours while agents investigated.
The incident came as federal immigration agents have ramped up arrests in southern California at car washes, farms and Home Depot parking lots, stoking widespread fear among immigrant communities.
The mother of an American worker said her son was held at the worksite for 11 hours and told her agents took workers’ cellphones to prevent them from calling family or filming and forced them to erase cell phone video of agents at the site.
The woman said her son told her agents marked the men’s hands with ink to distinguish their immigration status. She spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because she feared reprisals from the government.
United Farm Workers said in statement that some US citizens are not yet accounted for.
Maria Servin, 68, said her son has worked at the farm for 18 years and was helping to build a greenhouse. She said she spoke to her son, who is undocumented, after hearing of the raid and offered to pick him up.
“He said not to come because they were surrounded and there was even a helicopter. That was the last time I spoke to him,” Servin, a US citizen, said in Spanish.
She said she went to the farm anyway but federal agents were shooting teargas and rubber bullets and she decided it was not safe to stay. She and her daughter returned to the farm Friday and were told her son had been arrested Thursday. They still don’t know where he is being held.
“I regret 1,000 times that I didn’t help him get his documents,” Servin said.”
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 February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Amy Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with or without 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.
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.
As I wrote in my post of September 3 2024, Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others; On this terrible day we mourn the extrajudicial and political assassination by police, ultimately under the command of the Fourth Reich Triumvirate of the President of the United States Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr, and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad, four years ago of a committed fellow antifascist and brother in the great struggle against white supremacist terror and the carceral state of the Fourth Reich, Michael Reinoehl, who has in a live broadcast interview publicly claimed responsibility for killing in self defense a member of a violent racist terror organization on August 29 2020 in Portland.
To whom does responsibility in such a tragedy belong? First responders are immune from prosecution for trying to save lives because of the doctrine of our duty of care for others; does this not also apply as a general humanitarian principle to intervention to prevent our own death and that of others? Who perpetrates the threat or use of deadly force, displays or fires guns at others to intimidate or kill them, is responsible for the harm their actions cause; so also with organizations of terror which arm, train, fund, and provide communications and logistics support for them, regardless of whether they are a deniable asset of state terror such as the Patriot Prayer group which fielded the perpetrator, police who hide behind the immunity and authority of their badges to enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and authorize others in the commission of acts of terror, or those who provide ideology and authorization, logistics and communication, and other organizational infrastructure for them as a conspiracy of white supremacist terror, even if it originates from the White House.
I now wish to clarify publicly and irrevocably that I neither endorse violence nor the avoidance of responsibility for our actions; anyone who reads my writing will realize that I believe violence is a result of unequal power and of fear, and this informs and motivates everything else. We have a right to defend ourselves and others from harm, but not to compel virtue by force. My abhorrence of the social use of force is the basis for my opposition to law and order, prisons, police, surveillance, tyranny, state force and control, normality and other people’s ideas of virtue or idealizations of beauty, state authorization of identities, and violations of our rights of conscience and of bodily autonomy. I envision a society free of the use of social force and without violence.
As to public confrontations as theatre; I understand the value of public image and presence and of protest in raising awareness of a cause, and especially in the four primary duties of a citizen in the face of unjust authority to question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, and the inviolable principle of solidarity which means that if they come for the marginalized and the oppressed we come for them, and in my world you stand with those who stand with you, but this does not imply an endorsement of ridiculous macho posturing, the fetishization of guns and other male jewelry, or the valorization of warlike displays of toxic masculinity which may become preconditions and incitements to violence. This is especially true where guns are involved; their power is seductive and malign. The fetishization of instruments of violence normalizes and precedes violence.
Who bears arms bears death, has chosen to bear death among us and has degraded every human relationship and interaction to a kill or no kill decision.
Choose life.
But never let this stay your hand in defense of the lives and liberty of yourself or of others; for who respects no laws and no limits can hide behind none. To fascism I give the only reply it merits; Never Again! And to tyranny I say; Sic Semper Tyrannis.
I am a monster and a hunter of monsters, and mine is a hunter’s morality; I have no use for anything which limits our ability to confront and destroy threats such as fascist terror and tyranny, which must be met on its own ground, beyond all laws and all limits.
War to the knife; and we must be very cautious that our actions serve the cause of liberty and not tyranny, and bring hope.
What is the great lesson of Michael Reinoehl, murdered by police assassins for the murder of a fascist terrorist?
If they know you are armed, they will not come to arrest you, but will send a sniper team to assassinate you.
Let us remember always that the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce, and remember the warning of Nietzsche; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
Here endeth the lesson; or maybe not. For I have used a word throughout my witness of history and eulogy for a comrade which is itself a ground of struggle; Antifascist. A word that cuts slices, polarizes, incites, damns or grants permission, identifies friend or foe, confers nobility of purpose, and engulfs the world in the fires of transformation and rebirth symbolized in the stolen fire of the gods of our Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2020, A Useful Past: What is Antifa?; What do we mean when we say we are Antifascists? What do our enemies mean when they use the term? These mirror reverse meanings face us Janus-like in dialectical contradiction as negative spaces of each other like Escher’s Drawing Hands, and while factions struggle to control the narrative in the media I don’t see much direction provided by anyone speaking as an Antifa-identified voice. I’m changing that, for I speak to you today as the founder of Lilac City Antifa.
In calling Antifa a terrorist group, Trump has inverted its values and libeled every American serviceman, from those who fought in World War II to our entire military services today, for they have been the primary force against fascism and tyranny throughout the world. I am an American patriot and an Antifascist; and if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
The Second World War has been much studied, filmed, and written about; but of course what we mean when we speak of Antifa today proceeds from the history of those whose public service of vigilance in exposing and confronting fascism developed from the partisans of that conflict and from the Allied military and intelligence services sent to assist them in the liberation of Europe, from the Resistance and from those who hunted escaped Nazis after the war.
To begin with, both the OSS which became the CIA and the Jedburgh teams which became the Green Berets or US Special Forces originate as antifascist forces, and this is true generally of the European intelligence and special operations forces and community born and forged in the war against fascism.
One may discover strange and unlikely allies in the Antifascist community because of this history; and we may say the same of enemies. Both our allies and our enemies are partners in a dance, wherein we choose our futures and how to be human together.
A very specific historical context and tradition informs and motivates those who, like myself, use the term Antifascist as a descriptor of identity; I have appended some articles on this useful past, but Antifa is a personal choice to work against fascism and may sometimes be a component of an ideology or belief system but is not an organization. No one calling themselves Antifa speaks for or answers to anyone else; it is a nonhierarchical and mutualistic network of alliances. This is intentional, as it makes our network of alliances impossible to infiltrate, and though we contain members of many nations security and military services, no one can give orders to anyone else. There is no special tie nor fraternal handshake; membership is by declaration.
To claim you are Antifa is to be Antifa. This means whatever we intend when we say it.
For myself, to be an Antifascist is to belong to a tradition of resistance which originates in the Second World War, a war that has never ended but went underground. I look also to the American Revolution against imperial tyranny and colonial inequality and to the Second American Revolution and the great crusade of Abolition against slavery that was the Civil War, to the Paris Commune and the Garde Militaire which survives it, and to our direct origins in the Italian Arditi del Popolo, the Antifaschistische Aktion direct action forces of the German Democratic Socialists from whom we inherit our name, the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and the Resistance, for antecedents and inspiration. For the principles which I feel are consistent with Anti-fascism, see my repost below of the original proclamation with which I founded Lilac City Antifa.
Proclamation of Lilac City Antifa: Resistance Against Fascism and Tyranny; We, the People of Lilac City and of America, being of all imaginable varieties of historical origin, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual personae, faith and the lack thereof, class and status, and all other informing and motivating sources of becoming human and frames of identity as yet undiscovered, declare our independence from fear and from authorized identities, boundaries of the Forbidden, images and narratives of ourselves made for us by others as instruments of subjugation, the tyranny of false divisions and categories of belonging and exclusionary otherness among us.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
We stand united as human beings whose universal rights depend on no government but on the inherent nature of our humanity, and as American citizens and co-owners of our government in a free society of equals, inclusive of all who so claim and declare as heirs of the legacy and idea of Liberty and of America as an historical expression and manifest form of its ideals and values, among these being freedom and the autonomy of individuals, equality as an absolute structural principle in law and ideal in social relations, truth and its objectivity and testable nature and our right to seek and verify and to communicate it which includes freedom of the press and the right of access to information and from surveillance and all forms of thought control, justice and its impartiality, and a secular state in which freedom of conscience is absolute and there can be no compulsion in matters of faith.
We are a web of human lives which connect us with one another and anchor us to our Liberty, to our history and to our future, and we are resolved to our common defense as human beings and as Americans, and to the mutual safety and freedom of ourselves and of others from fascist violence and intimidation, coercion and the social use of force, in the performance of our identities and in our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We are American patriots and heirs to the glorious tradition of resistance by those who stood for Liberty at the balance points of history, at Saratoga and Yorktown, Gettysburg, Normandy, and many others, against the three primary threats of tyranny, inequalities of race and gender and slavery in all its forms, and fascism which combines and expands them, as we must always do against the atavistic forces of barbarism and the nightmares of totalitarian force and control which threaten our nation and our civilization, against what madness and evil may together do.
We must unite together as free citizens who will not be broken by fear, but instead embrace our differences as a strength and a heritage purchased for us all by the blood of our sacred dead in countless wars throughout our history.
To all those who have offered their lives in our service, members and veterans of the military and other security services: join us. If our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us. For America is a Band of Brothers, sworn to one another and to the defense of our union, with liberty and justice for all.
To all enemies of America and a free society of equals: We are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
Join us in resistance, who answer fascism and tyranny with equality and liberty.
I am an American patriot and an Antifascist. Pledge thus with me:
I swear zero tolerance for racism or the supremacy of any persons by categories of identity, racist violence and white supremacist terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, hate and its symbols and speech, for all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and for all inequalities and divisions of exclusionary otherness and victimization of the dispossessed and the powerless.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As you have sworn to challenge and confront fascism, therefore I offer you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut in 1982 by Jean Genet; here is the story of how it happened, and of my true origin.
During the summer before my undergraduate senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “We have nothing but moments stolen from death; these alone belong to us, and set us free. It’s a poor man who has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Georges Bataille, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, our house set on fire and about to be burned alive as the soldiers called for us to come out and surrender, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with a very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
We escaped capture that day because we were led through the checkpoints of the encirclement by an unlikely ally, a figure who materialized out of the background at the far end of the alley and walked over to us grinning. This was the sniper whom my friends and I had been playing our games with for two weeks, who had been utterly invisible and had outwitted every attempt to track, trap, ambush, or identify him, and who had in fact besieged the city from within. He held out his hand to me and I shook it as he said, “Well played, sir. I’ve tried to kill you every day for fourteen days now, but the Israelis have occupied the city, and this changes everything. We have a common enemy, and they don’t know that, so I’m in a position to help you. But I can’t fight them alone. Want a partner?”
So began a great adventure and friendship, which I share with you now in the context of the nature of antifascist resistance because it illustrates something which can never be forgotten by anyone who does this kind of work; human beings are not monsters, are deserving of human doubt, and are never beyond redemption.
The struggle between good and evil in the human heart often pivots and balances on the differences between the purpose of the use of force; to punish transgression when inflicted by authority as an act of subjugation and repression against the powerless, or to seize power and to protect the powerless as a duty of care. Be very sure you know which cause your actions serve.
The end goal of Antifascism, and of revolutionary struggle and liberation, is to achieve a democratic society of true equality, diversity, and inclusion in which we can abandon the social use of force.
Such a day will not be easily won, nor quickly, even with seizures of power, for the systems of oppression in which we are embedded also inhabit our flesh as living stories, and we must escape the legacies of our history if we are to create ourselves anew in a free society of equals. Of our histories, memories, identities let us remember always this; there are those we must escape and those we must keep and remember, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of January 14 2025, A Curse Upon Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration; In less than a week’s time a man who modeled himself on Hitler will be Inaugurated as President of the United States, to the hooting and champing of his dishonorable and treasonous Deplorables who celebrate his white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror because they want permission to do the same.
This event of fracture and disruption calls for rituals of grief and healing for our shared public trauma, but also for solidarity in Resistance and performances of acts of refusal to submit and bringing a Reckoning.
If I had enough hands, and windows into their private spaces, I would flay their white skins and mount them on my wall, I would douse them in gasoline while they sleep and drop the match, I would visit horrors on them and give reply to their violations, atrocities, tyranny and terror with those of my own as they merit; but I do not because I would not become as they, and we must never allow our enemies to become our teachers.
Look to Israel, a nation which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and to the genocide of the Palestinians if you require a scrying glass into our future should we choose the path of force and violence without embracing the humanity of our enemies regardless of their otherness and monstrosity; and we must also embrace our own if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems of oppression.
The enemy are monsters because they have transgressed the limits of the human, and we must not join them in the place of unknowns. I have lived in this place, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, for forty three years now since the Siege of Beirut, and as Nietzsche warned the Abyss has begun to look back at me.
Imposed conditions of struggle may require seizures of power by force, but in so doing we must not forget to see others as fellow human beings, even if we must meet them in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves.
When the Matadors rescued me from the police death squad in Brazil over fifty years ago, the leader said; ”You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” This principle serves well enough for Resistance, but the moment we are now living in requires both Resistance, always War to the Knife without law or limit, and Revolution as reimagination and transformative change. Revenge is a weakness we cannot afford if we are to build a better future than we have the past.
Herein I offer all of you a curse upon our enemies, betrayers of our humanity and of our nation; join me in invoking a Reckoning and in Solidarity of action to make it real.
A Curse Upon Our Enemies: Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration
I invoke death and horror upon all who voted for Traitor Trump or celebrate his Inauguration, Rapist In Chief, Russian agent, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, and ruin upon all their works. May all they love and dream come to nothing and be destroyed.
By the beard of the Ice King of Entropy and the poison songs of the Queen of Lies,
By the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones and the Wailing in the Darkness,
By the Abyss and the terror of our Nothingness,
May our enemies and all who celebrate today the Inauguration of Traitor Trump live loveless and die unmourned,
May their bodies be prisons of illness and pain, and their souls consumed by their cruelties.
In annotation of the text, I refer in my poem and conjuration here to the old and true forces of our universe, which I sometimes call the Giants of Frost and Old Night to convey something of the wonder and terror of a universe free from any meaning or value except for that we ourselves create, but also as symbols of Defining Moments which I have lived.
In my imagination I give form and force to The Wailing in the Darkness as an incident in the defense of Mariupol, hours crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a partially collapsed tunnel filled with the voices of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth. They are with me still, my companions in darkness at the edge of life and death, and they whisper things in my dreams; of horror and despair, loneliness and abandonment, of being shattered into countless fragments of myself under the hammer of mass trauma to which I can bring no healing and give no answer as to why humans do such things to each other.
At the time this bothered me not at all; I have survived worse and more terrible, as no doubt I will again. But I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russians were doing with the children they abducted, who could not even call for help that was not coming from the torture brothels on army bases far away in Russia, and this silencing and erasure is another form of Wailing in the Darkness.
When I speak of the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones, I am thinking of the Jar of Eyes.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and the price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and demanded I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
ICE agents face angry protesters during California farm raid
Farm worker dies a day after chaotic immigration raid at California farm
September 3 2024 Anniversary of the Assassination of Antifascist Comrade Michael Reinoehl: Violence, Responsibility, the Social Use of Force, and Our Duty of Care For Others
This month’s Festival of Artemis and the Stag King falls on the night of the the full Buck Moon, a sacred hunt like that of Valentine’s Day or Lupercalia, named after the role of the Stag King or Horned One in the rites of Artemis, winged hunter and daughter of the Wolf Goddess whose title is Potnia Theron, the Lady of the Beasts.
The figure of her consort conflates the Greco-Roman Pan, the Celtic Cernunnos, the Egyptian ram deity Banebdjedet who was the soul of Osirus and by a convoluted route of misrepresentation became the Goat of Mendes or Baphomet in medieval occultism, and the Christian devil with the original Stag of Artemis whose festival is tonight.
For my purposes the Crown of Horns signifies wildness, sovereignty, freedom, abundance, boundless and untamed eroticism, as the ideal of masculine beauty enacted through the Stag Dance performance, which tells the story of a ritual hunt and is followed by a Great Feast, enacting the myth of Acteon. The substitution of a deer for Iphigenia as a sacrifice to Artemis during the Trojan War by Agamemnon alludes to the ritual Hunt and Feast of Artemis; that her hunting hounds were a gift of Pan is another connection to the Horned One.
Herein I have gathered some liturgical elements for a ritual of Artemis and the Stag King organized around Afternoon of a Faun and Beauty and the Beast; let us do the Stag Dance and share a lavish Feast.
Let us violate normalities and transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden.
Let us free the truths written in our flesh.
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I write in my recurring Full Moon post, Of the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves, Monsters, Freaks, the Limits of the Human and the Tyranny of Normality: the Werewolf As Metaphor of Freedom and Truths Written In Our Flesh; Tonight as darkness falls, the full moon rises, and the wildness calls to me once again with its songs of chaos as freedom and as beauty, of transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, violations of normality, and seizures of power from Authority as revolutionary struggle, the wildness in me gives answer and soon will become uncontrollable as a tidal force of passion, truths immanent in nature and written in my flesh which must be lived and set free, and I will run amok and be ungovernable.
A maker of mischief, I.
For like all human beings I am a thing of nature cursed with the vision to transcend the limits of my flesh, through poetic vision and the rapture and exaltation of love and desire, and in this liminal moment on the cusp of becoming I write to all those who in the performance of otherness as seizure of power over the ownership of themselves become Unconquered and free, self-created beings unbound by any law or tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, including all those who question and challenge authorized identities of sex and gender, many of whom are now enacting recapitulations of the annual celebrations of June’s Pride Month. The liminal time of the parades may have passed, but this is no reason our revels must now be ended; the revolution is within us, who in refusal to submit to authority become Unconquered and free, agents of change and Bringers of Chaos as Living Autonomous Zones.
Let us embrace the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
For law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Mariupol the Abyss began to look back at me, and I am shaped by my history to dread purposes as a thing without pity, fear, or remorse. I wonder now, could I have become something other than a monster, had I chosen differently, to abandon rather than stand in solidarity with my fellow human beings? But then I would be complicit in their suffering, as America is in Gaza and the Palestinian Genocide, and no longer human.
How if the best we can do is to try to claw something of our humanity back from the darkness, before it annihilates us all, and maybe save someone else from becoming as I am? Our lives are dragons teeth, sown in the shadows of terror and unanswerable forces of dehumanization, but from which multitudes arise.
O my brothers, sisters, and others, let us arise and resist, and abandon not our fellows, let us embrace our monstrosity and place our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, if only for one last time of glory and refusal to submit.
When those who would enslave us come for us and for others, as they always have and will, let them find not a humanity subjugated by learned helplessness, despair, abjection, and division, but united in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights. If we do this, we may hope to remain human.
Let us reply to Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin, and to all tyrants with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
This day we fight.
What do I mean by the enigmatic principle, Embrace Our Monstrosity?
Many of the modern pathologies of disconnectedness from our nature are born of the need for control and of fear of our inchoate passions as threatening otherness, an internalized oppression which has riven the human soul, divided and abstracted us from ourselves as part of the processes of nature. This is a madness of inauthenticity, falsification, power, control, dominance, vanity, greed, myths, histories, and authorized versions of truth which valorize war and authorize elite hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, all of which arise from an Original Sin of ownership of nature which abstracts us from ourselves as the otherness of our own flesh and the truths written therein, as in the allegory of Adam Naming the Beasts.
Patriarchy, racism, sectarian division, and other identitarian forms of power, operating in mutual interdependence with capitalism, which Jean Genet called necrophilia and William S. Burroughs reimagined as the Algebra of Need, and its prefigural developmental stages of elite hegemony and political forms monarchial aristocratic feudalism and then as nationalist imperialism, all find anchorages in civilization as control of threatening nature and our fear and hatred of ourselves.
Jung described the primal disunity we must heal within ourselves; “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and become torn into opposite halves.” He was speaking of psychosis and the work of reintegration and becoming human, but it applies equally to dialectical civilizational processes of history wherein we have found ourselves conflicted and at war with nature on multiple fronts.
As the state is embodied violence, the historical processes of civilization which create it are also expressions of the conflicted human soul and the primary struggle for ownership of ourselves and self-creation versus authorized identities. 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.
Here I think also of Camille Paglia’s magisterial critique of Patriarchy as a civilizational task of controlling nature, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. In the case of Emily Dickinson, metaphysical ax murderess whose poetry is a savage and relentless struggle with Patriarchy and avenging of its countless victims, she writes;” Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”
Personally I adore Emily Dickinson as a figure of Liberty; she reminds me of an ancestor of mine who was a member of the Paris Commune, an anarchist revolutionary, abolitionist, and suffragette called the Red Queen in reference to the character from Alice in Wonderland, after her preferred method of assassination. Hers was a simple doctrine; to take the enemy’s power, go directly for and behead the apex predator of a system of oppression, second totalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, from the shadows and in the most savage and terrifying ways possible, and then put everything they owned and controlled, all that serves unequal power, to the torch.
Once the true nature of our captivity and enslavement by elites has been realized, and Authority exposed as a seducer and betrayer whose apologetics of power are but lies and illusions, the choice between freedom and rebellion or dehumanization and subjugation becomes horribly clear, a chiaroscuro of terror and the grandeur of resistance.
So also with the plunder and capitalist exploitation of our common natural resources in service to wealth and power which is driving the existential threat of ecological collapse and human extinction, for it is rooted in the same fear, drive to dominance and control, and internalized oppression as in the sexual terror of Patriarchy or the white supremacist terror which threatens our democracy.
Our lives become expressions of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others. This I call the Narrative Theory of Identity, and in the context of liberation and revolutionary struggle to win a reimagined humanity which heals our disunity with nature through the embrace of our otherness and our true and authentic selves which dwell among the chasms of darkness of our passions, through transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden, refusal to submit to Authority, violations of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, and other Acts of Chaos and Transformation, we may heal the flaws of our humanity, the brokenness of the world, and the origins of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which Schiller identifies as “the disgodding of nature.”
Here I look to stories of our own to balance those of submission to Authority and denial and control of our nature. William S. Burroughs, whose bizarre fairytales haunted the nights of my youth, forged such a myth in his novel The Wild Boys, which I describe in my celebration of his work as follows; The Wild Boys envisions feral youths in rebellion against the Authority that created them, set in a dystopian future in which man’s animal nature has been betrayed by civilization but which also has the power to redeem him, the final part of his Anarchist trilogy which extends his recurrent theme of werewolves as symbolic of our essential wildness and unconquerable nature and a type of Nietzschean Superman; beyond good and evil.
As he wrote it during the period of his visits, I have often wondered how much of it was drawn from his conversations with my father, who mythologized our family history with the absurd claim that we are not human but werewolves, beings of the Wild Hunt, magic, and darkness, unbound by any law and with the blood of ancient terrors in our veins, and had been driven out of Bavaria in 1586 for that reason. Drachensbrute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women.
The Wild Boys extends de Sade and Rousseau’s ideal of the natural man as uncorrupted by civilization and unlimited by its boundaries, as truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, in a reversal of Freud’s ideology of civilization as control of our animal nature.
David Bowie created his character of Ziggy Stardust based on The Wild Boys; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau here mingle and intertwine. Certainly it is among the many stories I have adopted as part of my personal myth and identity, which include Milton’s rebel angel, the visions of William Blake, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, and the iconography of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, a pantheon and ancestral family with the wonderful image of the titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape with his three gorgon daughters Madness, Illness, and Death, balanced with the triple goddess of Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance; really, what more could one ask for?
Such myths offer models of harmony with nature in the figure of the werewolf as a controlling metaphor for the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves. Rather than a thing of clay animated as the toy of a tyrant deity of alien and unfathomable motives as in the Abrahamic faiths, we can free ourselves from the dehumanizing legacies of our Patriarchal and Authoritarian histories by looking to counter-narratives of freedom, such as the werewolf defined as a being of wildness and uncorrupted nature.
Myths about were beings tell us how we humans view ourselves and our relationship with the natural world in specific historical contexts.
The bite is an interesting metaphor, and is akin to other forms of the medical model of madness which describes transpersonal and other states of awareness as a degradation or dehumanization rather than exaltation and participation in something greater than we are, and as an intrusive force from outside rather than a sign of our natural condition; allegories and metaphors of the desacralization of nature and the falsification of ourselves, part of the story of the human cost of the industrial and authoritarian age like the loss of magic in the age of iron.
In terms of story, there are many unexplored possibilities for the reimagination of were beings as heroes of authentic being versus normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and champions of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
Like the exhibitions in a carnival freak show, monsters help us define our limits and establish boundaries by providing examples of the truly other.
What is human?
Transgression explores and redefines our boundaries; indeed is necessary to growth and the discovery of possibilities of being. Let us parse the meaning of our reactions to violations of norms and to the truly other with great care, particularly with regard to the use of social force and control to authorize normality and codify and enforce virtue.
As the anthropologist Sam Dubal relates in his book Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army, modern Uganda provides a case study of the tribal warrior societies our werewolf myths are based on, a group who modeled themselves on gorilla warbands to achieve a higher state of being than human and reawaken our connection with nature and our natural selves, and whose acts of terror were in part ritual transgressions of the Forbidden, as were the crimes of Jean Genet. While the anticolonial warriors of the 19th century Leopard Society in Africa, Boxers in China, or Thugee in India may not be accessible to us, in the LRA we have ready examples of the use of savaging and primalism in war.
When thinking about werewolves we must place our mythologies in the context of stories told about them as monsters and figures of terror by their enemies, just as the Christians did witches or the European peoples claimed by Church and King did the Viking berserkergangr with whom they struggled for dominion.
All divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness authorized by those who would enslave us demonize the many in service to the power of the few.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
How we imagine and honor the wildness of ourselves is reflected in how we imagine and honor the wildness of nature; our idea of the werewolf reflects our relationship with our animal nature, and with nature itself. If you think of your animal nature as evil, hostile, subhuman, barbaric, a thing of bottomless appetites to be controlled as Freud conceptualized what he provocatively called our polymorphously perverse nature, it is a fearsome thing, a degradation checked only by the restraining force of law; the doctrine of the innate depravity of man, corollary of original sin, being the basis of all law and of the carceral state, an idea very useful in subjugating us to authority.
But if instead our freedom and wildness is beautiful, and nature to be celebrated rather than feared, humankind is restored to wholeness and harmony with nature. This is perhaps a better way to study the idea of our wildness and harmony as animals and beings of nature expressive of its forces; look inside yourself and question your feelings and ideas about sex, death, and the possibilities of becoming human in a universe of imposed conditions which owe nothing to normality and other peoples ideas of virtue.
To be a Wolfman is to be without limit, autonomous, free, to transgress the boundaries of the Forbidden and dwell among the unknowns of our maps of human being, meaning, and value. To live in harmony with our nature is to abandon dominion and live as one wild thing among others in a free society of equals, without tyrants, elites, or inequalities, for all living beings are equal and merit honor, especially the ones we must consume.
Do not be deceived by the lies and illusions of those who would enslave us and steal our souls; our wildness is a thing not of terror or debasement, but of freedom and of beauty; and it awaits within you as a wisdom of your own darkness, which holds nothing which is not yours. Claim your wildness, and be free.
As I wrote in my post of October 28 2023, Let Us Be Wolfmen: Embrace the Wildness of Nature and the Wildness of Ourselves; On these Nights of the full moon, a cosmic event of enormous powers of change and transformative rebirth, let us embrace our monstrosity as Bringers of Chaos in the destabilization of order, disruptions of normality, transgressions of the Forbidden, and seizures of power from Authority in revolutionary struggle.
To all those who would enslave us as tyrants of unequal power, let us bring a Reckoning.
Now is the time of the Wolf and of the sacred hunt as love and as solidarity in liberation struggle, dyadic forces of the embrace of nature. Here is a ground of struggle signified by the figure of the wolfman as embodiment of our true nature uncorrupted by the subversions, lies, and falsifications of Authority; the image of human nature and our best selves.
Who are we when liberated from the legacies of our history and systems of unequal power? What is this truth we pursue in the pursuit of those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh?
As I wrote in my post of February 14 2022, On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love: the Case of Valentine’s Day and the Festival of the Wolf; Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but to one another, the wedding of same sex couples under Christian law which Emperor Claudius II forbid as related by John Boswell in his Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.
The modern custom of sending messages to one’s lover, whether a forbidden love or not, originated in 1415, with a message sent by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
So we have in one holiday defiance of authority, transgression of the Forbidden, and the injunction to seize the gates of our prisons and be free.
But this holiday is far more ancient, dating from the sixth century BC and encoding the historical memories of primordial rites of fertility called Lupercalia, the Festival of the Wolf. Rites which echo through our flesh and find form not only as Valentine’s Day as a celebration of the uncontrollable and liberating power of love which exalts us like a madness, but also as a form of the Wild Hunt which we know as the story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.
Angela Carter got it nearly right in The Company of Wolves; so also with season two, episode three of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Midnight approaches, and as I ready my wolfskin for the sacred Hunt I think not of the ravishment of our passion but of the redemptive and transformative power of love, of its unique function as a force of healing and reconnection, and of transgression of the Forbidden and defiance of authority as a seizure of power over the ownership of oneself.
Of this I have written tonight a spell of poetic vision, awakening, and transformation, which I share with you here. Good hunting to you all.
Love Triumphs Over Time
When first I learned of love,
And realized that in loving others we humans were not merely escaping
the boundaries of our lives and the flags of our skins
As transcendence, rapture, and exaltation
But discovering ourselves and those truths written in our flesh
And the limitless possibilities of becoming human
Among the unknown topologies of being marked Here Be Dragons
In the empty spaces of the maps of our Imagination
Beyond the doors of the Forbidden
Where truths are forged,
And in the years since I have always known this one true thing;
We are more ourselves when we are with others
Because humans are not designed to be alone
For we are doors which open one another
And restore each other to ourselves in an indifferent world
When we are savaged and broken and lost;
Love is the greatest power of all the forces
which shape, motivate, and inform living things
Love creates, love redeems, love transforms,
Love triumphs over the pathology of our disconnectedness
From Beauty, from the Infinite, and from the community of humankind;
Love triumphs over Time.
Thus for the embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves as love; also it manifests as resistance, seizures of power, and revolutionary struggle. As I wrote in my post of May 24 2022 The Problematization of Tuesday: Why Do We Celebrate Tyr’s Binding of Fenris One Day Each Week?;
How much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice in order to confront and limit evil?
This is always the true and final question of Resistance; not of the origin of evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, of the renouncement of love as the cost of power nor the redemptive power of love to free us from its grip and from those who would enslave us, not of our dehumanization, commodification, and falsification as theft of the soul nor of our power to become Unconquered and free in refusal to submit to authority, not of addiction to power and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness of hegemonic elites of wealth, power, and privilege and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil nor of seizures of power and revolutionary struggle for the ownership of ourselves against authorized identities of unequal power. The question we must face is simply this; how much of ourselves are we willing to trade for our liberty?
Resistance is always war to the knife, under imposed conditions of struggle against those who do not recognize us as fellow human beings, and who have shifted the ground of struggle beyond all limits and all laws, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden to subvert and degrade our humanity and all human being, meaning, and value, and here is where we must meet them.
Who so ever acts to subjugate us beyond all laws and all limits may hide behind none. I am a hunter of tyrants and fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. Let us give to fascists, tyrants, and all those who would enslave us the only reply it merits; Never Again!
Here the myth of Fenris and Tyr may illuminate us, for in sacrificing his hand to bind the wolf which represents his animal nature as all devouring need there is an exchange of qualities, a hierosgamos and transformative rebirth as they unite and become dyadic forces. It is a myth which reflects and refers to the human transformation of wolves into dogs, predators into partners in hunting and war, and in which the breaking of the oaths and bindings which create and sustain the universe, human nature, and civilization are part of the processes of self creation and transformative rebirth, the work of Chaos in the reinvention of the world and our liberation from imposed orders of meaning and authorized identities.
Of Chaos as the principle of freedom I have written often and will again, for I am a Bringer of Chaos and a maker of mischief for tyrants; but here I wish to speak to you of the true nature of the myth of the Binding of Fenris as a metaphor and allegory of our primary ground of struggle as our relationship with the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
For there are two paths we can travel in this; that of control and domination of our nature, as Freud described us with his delicious phrase as “polymorphosly perverse”, chthonic forces to be surmounted and harnessed, or that of Jung, who wrote of shadow work as unification with our monstrosity, especially that which provokes disgust, revulsion, fear, and horror in us.
Here is a myth we can interpret and live as binding our animal nature, as Freud has authorized us to do with disastrous consequences for the ecological systems in nature and for human suffering under capitalism as a system of oppression, or as binding together with our animal nature as a primary human act of becoming. One leads to exploitation and dominance of nature and inevitably to our own extinction; the other to harmony, interdependence, and a sustainable civilization.
First we must situate the figure of Fenris as an archetypal wolf in the context of our fear of nature and its myths and allegories, and then interrogate the consequences of our denial of our own nature for how we have chosen to be human together.
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!”
I question and challenge the idea of normality, the authorization of identities, and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue.
When you begin to question the boundary and interface between normality as authorized identity and transgression as seizure of power, between subjugation and liberty, the grotesque and the beautiful, idealizations of masculinity and femininity, of madness and vision, and to challenge the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, you enter my world, the place of unknowns and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of human being, meaning, and value.
One could think of the Binding of Fenris as slavery, abjection, degradation to an animal state or pathological denial of our nature which results in unequal social power as patriarchy, hegemonic elites, capitalism and ecological devastation; or its mirror reverse, hierosgamos, transformative rebirth, interdependence, and harmony with nature.
As we enter the liminal time of this night’s Full Moon celebrations, allegories of the performance of ourselves as a guerilla theatre of disruption and the frightening of the horses, I say to you all, my brothers, sisters, and others; Welcome to freedom and its wonders and terrors; to reimagination, transformation, and discovery. May the new truths you forge bring you joy.
Thus I write of the wolf that lives within us, in celebration of our monstrosity and beauty; sometimes you have to let your demons out to dance.
Liturgical Elements For A Rite of Artemis and the Stag King
Nijinsky dances Afternoon of a Faun
Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
The Afternoon of a Faun
an eclogue, by Mallarme
THE FAUN
These nymphs, I do not want to let them go—
their clear, carnation-tinted afterglow
still shimmering in air, the warp of sleep.
Was it a dream I fell for?
Doubt, as deep
as elemental midnight, ramifies
in branching silhouettes before my eyes,
the only forest left, which only proves,
alas, that I embraced, instead of love’s
triumphant close, an eidolon of roses.
Let’s think it through…
or did these girls your prose is 10
limning merely embody some deep ache
your storied sensuality can’t shake?
O Faun, already the reverie disappears
of chaste eyes, blue and cold as a fountain’s tears,
and of the sighing other—was she not
the first’s antithesis, more like the hot
breath of the breeze felt in my fur at noon?
No, no! Day, in a stultifying swoon,
quells with its swelter what fresh insurrections
morning may stir; no watery inflections 20
are heard, besides the spritz of melodies
my reeds spurt in the clearing; the one breeze—
from my twin pipes—too soon exhausts its strain,
the sound dissolving in an arid rain,
to hang, on the horizon where no motion
disturbs the smooth indifference, without passion,
the contrived exhale, visibly defined,
of inspiration leaving earth behind.
O coast of Sicily, calm estuary
my vanity vies with the sun to harry, 30
silent under the sparks of flowers, LEND
YOUR VOICE: “I sat here, cutting reeds, to bend
them to my talent, when, against the far
backdrop of golds and grays where the vines are
dipping their green arms in the little spate,
I saw an animal whiteness undulate
languidly; and amid the watery, slow
prelude where reed-pipes are born and grow—
not swans in flight, but—Naiads! diving, turning…”
Gold light of the panic hour: world burning, 40
torpid with heat; no sign, no way to see
how such windfall of ecstasy could flee
this piper feeling for the key of A.
Someday I’ll wake again to the mania
which I was born to, in the ancient light
poured out by morning, singular, upright—
lilies, in innocence as pure as yours!
Their lips excepted—those delicious purrs
of kisses, intimating sure betrayal—
my body, bare of witness, virginal, 50
yet bears the ghostly mark of deity’s
supernal teeth. But hush! Such mysteries
will speak, if they must speak, their secrets through
the large twin pipes we play in heaven’s view,
which take the burden of the cheeks’ lament,
and dream, in long slow solos, of time spent
in this exquisite spot, amusing it
with our mistaken songs confusing it
and all its beauty with their credulous speech;
and dream, as high as love’s accents can reach, 60
of drawing from some daily scene, a fine
bosom or back, the eyes shut tight, a line
resonant, droning, ineffectual.
But try, cruel virtuoso of withdrawal,
Syrinx, to fringe our ponds again, for me!
My song shall dabble in idolatry
a long while; taken with my cadences,
I’ll join the painters stripping goddesses
of all their shifts of shade; then, when my lips
have sucked the glistening essences of grapes, 70
to squelch remorse my ruses and self-lies
deflect, I shall hold up to summer skies,
laughing, longing for stronger drink, the cluster
I’ve drained, and breathe into its empty luster,
blowing and gazing through it till night falls.
Come, nymphs, let’s sigh what each of us RECALLS:
“My eye, slicing the rushes, trained its aim
on deathless necks, which sought to quench their flame
among the pools, and set the forest sky
aquiver with the umbrage of their cry; 80
but—quick—that dazzling wash of locks is gone
amid the gems, in flashing and frisson;
I run up; there, before me, in a knot
(as if drugged by the grief of being not
one flesh, but two) the sleepers, limb and limb
entangled, lie exposed. I ravish them,
still interlaced, and rush the three of us
to this rose garden where no frivolous
shades shuttle, and the roses let the sun
despoil them of their fragrance, where our fun 90
can spend itself completely, like the heat.”
Delicious wrath of virgins, savage, sweet,
I love you, love your holy nudity,
the burden of it, thrashing to wriggle free
from my lips burning, charged with a galvanic
shudder, to drink the flesh’s secret panic
from heart to foot—the one’s impassive foot,
the other’s frightened heart—since both had put
their innocence away now, and were wet
with frantic tears, or vapors less upset. 100
“My crime came when I, with a conqueror’s cheer
at having calmed in them that traitor, fear,
tried to divide their kisses’ tousled tuft
the gods had done so much to intergraft:
for, as I turned my passion’s giddy face
to one, to hide it in her folds of grace,
(keeping a single finger on the other,
in hopes her whiteness like an eider feather
would borrow color from her sister’s flush,
the little one still too naive to blush) 110
ah, then, as if on waves of death, my prey,
ungratefully as ever, slipped away
from my slack arms, unmoved by sympathy
for sobs that still intoxicated me.”
Oh well! Others, with ropes of braided tresses,
will drag me by the horns to learn what bliss is.
You know, my heart, that, ruddy now, and ready,
cracked pomegranates buzz with bees already,
and my blood, wild for the next mouth to arrive,
flows to sustain desire’s deathless hive. 120
When gold and ash imbrue our woodland shade,
carousals kindle as the leaf-lights fade:
Etna! on you, and your volcanic rock,
where Venus’ candid feet delight to walk,
sad slumber thunders, or the flame sinks low.
The queen, I have her!
I’ll be punished…
No,
but words desert the soul; the limbs grow numb
in noon’s proud silence and, though late, succumb.
I must sleep now, all blasphemy far off,
here on parched sand, mouth wide with joy to quaff 130
the vintage the stars press.
Farewell, sweet pair.
I’m entering the darkness you now are.
L’après-midi d’un faune, Stéphane Mallarmé (read in French)
Translation: The Afternoon of a Faun: Mallarmé’s elusive eclogue slips from the translator’s grasp like nymphs from its titular faun, Christopher Childers
We celebrate the passing by Congress of the 14th Amendment on this day in 1868, as the victory over slavery was consolidated.
Our victory over a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation ended the Civil War, and this was a glorious triumph of solidarity and resistance, but it did not truly make us all social equals or equal under the law, merely began the liberation struggle which is ongoing now.
Are we Free At Last? So proclaimed Martin Luther King, Jr. in his historic speech; “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.
We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual.
There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.
And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.
We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
Here are the lyrics of the spiritual song referenced at the end of his historic speech;
Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last
Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last
Way down yonder in the graveyard walk
I thank God I’m free at last
Me and my Jesus going to meet and talk
I thank God I’m free at last
On my knees when the light pass’d by
I thank God I’m free at last
Tho’t my soul would rise and fly
I thank God I’m free at last
Some of these mornings, bright and fair
I thank God I’m free at last
Goin’ meet King Jesus in the air
I thank God I’m free at last
Remembrance is among the purposes of anniversaries such as today’s, that we may never repeat the mistakes of the past and free ourselves from the legacies of our history. For myself, remembrance has a future-directed purpose as well, provides us mission statements and acts as an informing, motivating, and shaping source, and in regard to Abolition and democracy as interdependent processes of becoming and a praxis of action in this year of Rashomon Gate events wherein tyranny and liberty play for our nation, it reminds me who we are, we Americans, and what’s worth fighting for.
As written by Heather Cox Richardson in Letters From An American; “On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
From the perspective of 2024, Kennedy’s comments seem prescient, but the country could go even further backward. The 2024 Republican Party platform, released today, calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment not to protect equal rights for Americans from discriminatory laws, as those who wrote, passed, and ratified the amendment intended. Instead it calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of fetuses from the time of fertilization. It says that states should start passing laws protecting those rights: so-called fetal personhood laws that have their roots in the 1960s and were considered a fringe idea until about fifteen years ago. Those laws prohibit all abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and several forms of contraception.
Saying states should pass such laws echoes the language Trump has used to try to avoid the Republicans’ extreme and unpopular abortion stance by claiming, as the Supreme Court did in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, that states alone should write laws covering abortion. But in its reaction to the Republican platform today, the antiabortion Susan B.
Anthony Pro-Life America organization made it clear that the platform’s reference to the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to open the way for a national abortion ban. The Fourteenth Amendment, after all, gives Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
“It is important that the [Republican Party] reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” the organization said in a statement. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”
Free At Last Martin Luther King speech
The History and Legacy of the 14th Amendment/ National Constitution Center
The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution, Eric Foner
Here as so often we have sacrificed our future on the altar of profit, wealth which only elites can share but for which everyone must pay with their lives.
Is it worth it?
For the deaths of the children at summer camp in the historic Texas flood I accuse Trump, Musk, and the Republican Party’s sabotage of our institutions of public service including the National Weather Service, and for the disaster of the flood itself I accuse capitalism and humankind’s war on nature. The first is a politically manufactured disaster; the second is a consequence of capitalism as a system of oppression and unequal power which, to paraphrase William S. Burroughs, turns beauty into wealth and life into death.
Whose wealth and power does the death of the Camp Mystic children serve?
As I wrote in my post of September 10 2021, The Disease of Capitalism as Addiction to Power and the Disasters of Climate Change: the Case of Texas; As the world is battered with floods and fires, and I have previously discussed patriarchy as sexual terror and vote suppression as theft of citizenship and white supremacist terror in the context of Texas as our Heart of Darkness, I turn now to the third primary inherent evil of our systems, structures, and institutions of being human together, capitalism.
Texas is the epicenter of our oil industry which confers global dominion and a hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege to the American Empire and the elites for which our host political system is an instrument, like the stolen skin of a monster who moves among his prey disguised by a human mask.
Here also is an example of the Third Law of Motion; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, for the transformation of nature into wealth and power which has unleashed the pandemic and other disasters of climate change as life on earth becomes extinct originates with our dependence on fossil fuels. William S. Burroughs used heroin addiction as a metaphor and allegory of capitalism; he called it the Algebra of Need.
The consequences of our addiction to power and our subjugation by plutocratic elites of Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror can be read in the horrific death tolls of the Pandemic and the disasters of hurricanes, floods, fires, rising seas and vanishing water.
Here also we may look to Texas for the causes of our existential threats.
As I wrote in my post of February 23 2021, Origins of the Disaster: Elitism and Racist Inequalities and Injustices Drive Our Catastrophic Systems Failures in Our Responses to the Pandemic and the Texas Power Failure; Texas, founded by slavers and white racists who revolted against Mexico’s antislavery law, has always provided a ready image of our Heart of Darkness and America at its worst; and the shattering of its infrastructure under the hammers of climate change as a consequence of oil dependance and the perfidy and kleptocracy of our political and economic system is sadly no exception.
Our response to the disaster of a snowstorm from which existential threats of water and power shortages have emerged has also, catastrophically, been typically American; create divisions and hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and authorize an elite to receive what help is available, while transferring public wealth to private elites.
It is exactly the same as with our response to the Pandemic, which is why waiting in line for a vaccine which is either not available or not available to you is like waiting in line for bottled water or a generator for your area which the federal government has made available but which your state has made no effort to distribute as needed, while power costs rise a thousand percent.
Beyond the failures of our government and our economy of disaster capitalism which rig the game to serve the interests of power and wealth, there is the pervasive and endemic racism as the basis of both, the gorilla in the room of our legacy of historical injustices and inequalities like Klimt’s image of Typhoeus in the Beethoven Frieze, which reimagines Goya’s interpretation of a parallel myth in Saturn Devouring His Children, confronts us with a chthonic figure of America’s shadow self which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail.
There is no liberty for anyone unless there is equality for everyone.
And like Klimt’s bestial rebel or Goya’s mad emperor, this power asymmetry and identitarian elitism creates authority and legitimates our subjugation by it, which in recursion authorizes identities and births tyrannies and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Fear, power, force; here lies the heart of state tyranny and terror, racist police gun violence and white supremacist terror, vote suppression and the subversion of democracy, the falsification of ourselves through propaganda and the shaping of some of us into monsters with which to terrorize and control the others; but also of our plutocratic and oligarchic capitalist kleptocracy and the policies of deregulation and privatization which are directly responsible for the systemic failures of our responses to the Texas emergency and to the Pandemic.
America’s nearest parallel in these cases is with Chile, whose economy and society have been savaged and totalized as effects of privatization policies exported by America. As I wrote in my post of November 13 2019, Chile: How Privatization Destabilizes Economies and Drives Wealth Inequality; Today in the streets of Santiago the victims of an economy destabilized by privatization fight for survival and for change in conditions of widespread poverty in which the middle class live in shantytowns on reclaimed garbage dumps; of their struggle for dignity and the preconditions of the universal human right to life, including first health care and safe drinking water, I have every hope for success.
But what makes Chile important to us here in America is that it provides a case study of the effects of privatization and deregulation; for it is American policies which have failed here, ones we have embraced ourselves. The Chicago Boys, economists whom the tyrant Pinochet installed in 1973 to create a firewall against socialism, had been students of Milton Friedman, a devotee of Ayn Rand’s fascist and nihilistic philosophy of might makes right, borrowed from Stalin’s hatchet man Molotov and his ideology of state terror, and who oversaw the remaking of America through an assault on our institutions of social justice.
To see where such policies inevitably lead, we need look no further than our sister state, Chile.
As I wrote in my post of February 17 2021, The Snows of Texas: When Privatization and Deregulation Meet Climate Change as Consequences of Corrupt Oligarchies of Oil; Oil has always been a key strategic resource of political dominion and hegemonies of wealth and power; for the last century, who controls it controls all. This week we witness in the snows of Texas the stormfront of our historic legacy of reliance on fossil fuels combine with our decades of privatization and the looting of the public wealth by nepotistic oligarchs in a spectacular demonstration of our failures in environmental and political systems.
There can be little doubt that the savagery of extractive capitalism has brought us to the brink of extinction in tandem with the concentration of wealth and power in the extreme minorities of plutocratic and oligarchic elites.
Texans are dying in the frozen wastes of a failed system, victims of a performative state government which has handed control of its power grid to its paymasters and sealed the state off from federal help.
The environmental and economic consequences of privatization replicate those which underpin the humanitarian disaster in Yemen; vanishing water supply, failing crops, evaporating jobs. These cases represent our common future if we do nothing to stop the cascade failure of our systems; and come summer the firestorms will return, and the viability of the earth and its living systems will worsen every year.
As I wrote in my post of December 30 2019 What Will You Do When Global Warming Comes For You: thousands of Australians escape the fires consuming their continent by fleeing into the sea; Where will we hide from a world destroyed by greed? Before the seas rise to annihilate our major cities, before the air we breathe and the water we drink runs out, we must face the fires of our destruction and an arid and lifeless world. For a vision of what our future holds we need look no further than Australia.
Unless we seize ownership of our destiny from the plutocrats who are engineering our extinction. Make no mistake; our choice to allow some of us to capitalize on the death of all of us is a political decision in which we are all complicit.
As I wrote in my post of May 13 2019 Biodiversity and Extinction; Earth is an Ark hurtling through space, filled with precious life among chasms of emptiness.
How shall we answer this nothingness? Will it be with wisdom in maintaining the balance of life in all its subtle and glorious interconnectedness, diversity, and beauty, a dance of joy and of love?
Or will we be defeated and consumed by our own vanity and greed, surrendering to the dark and to despair and turning all we have or ever will into profit until there is nothing left, not water to drink nor air to breathe, and the last of us die with inarticulate brute cries, bloated in toadlike satiation and trumpeting our splendid dominance and rulership of the world?
We must choose who we are to become, we humans; stewards of our homeworld and of one another, or destroyers. Can we find a path forward in coexistence, or will we allow our appetites and desires to drive us to suicidal ruin? For we have but two choices of futures in this; we will be lightbringers or we will annihilate ourselves.
And finally, from my post of April 1 2020 There Is No Return To Normal;
April 1 3020
As I read this journal entry from a nearly forgotten and unimaginable time before the death of the seas and the poisoning of the air, before the few surviving enclaves of humanity retreated into self-contained arcologies deep within the earth, undersea, and in near orbit, before even the iron age of the Fourth Reich and other tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, before the centuries of the Third World War and the emergence of the posthuman species, I ask myself a simple question; why?
Why did humankind allow itself to be destroyed by greed? In the end it came down to a handful of oligarchic families and their corporations, ruling hundreds of millions of slaves. Why did the many not cull their destroyers from the herd?
Why was there no resistance?
Hegemon Xotl
As written by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian, in an article entitled Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know; “Why exactly so many people drowned in the terrible Independence Day floods that swept through Texas’s Hill Country will probably have multiple explanations that take a while to obtain. But it’s 2025, and people want answers immediately, and lots of people seized on stories blaming the National Weather Service (NWS).
There were two opposing reasons to blame this vital government service. For local and state authorities, blaming a branch of the federal government was a way of avoiding culpability themselves. And for a whole lot of people who deplore the Trump/Doge cuts to federal services, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, the idea that the NWS failed served to underscore how destructive those cuts are.
Many of them found confirmation in a New York Times story that ran with the sub-headline: “Some experts say staff shortages might have complicated forecasters’ ability to coordinate responses with local emergency management officials.” Might have is not did. Complicated is not failed. It’s a speculative piece easily mistaken for a report, and its opening sentence is: “Crucial positions at the local offices of the National Weather Service were unfilled as severe rainfall inundated parts of Central Texas on Friday morning, prompting some experts to question whether staffing shortages made it harder for the forecasting agency to coordinate with local emergency managers as floodwaters rose.”
A casual reader could come away thinking that staffing shortages had had consequences. But if you give the airily innuendo-packed sentence more attention, you might want to ask who exactly the anonymous experts were and whether there’s an answer to their questions. Did it actually make it harder, and did they actually manage to do this thing even though it was harder, or not? Did they coordinate with local emergency managers?
The piece continues: “The staffing shortages suggested a separate problem, those former officials said,” and “suggested” sounds like we’re getting an interpretation of what these anonymous sources think might have happened or been likely to happen, rather than what actually did. Suggestions are not facts. Likelihoods are not actualities. Eventually we get to a named source: “A spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding.”
In other words, there’s no answer to the suggestions and questions and intimations. Nevertheless, a lot of readers gathered the impression that this was not speculation aired by unnamed experts but confirmation that the NWS had failed. One prominent public figure with three quarters of a million BlueSky followers shared the New York Times piece with this note: “The United States government is no longer able to protect us from real hazards, such as flash floods, because it’s shifting funds to fake hazards, such as a non-existent immigrant crime wave.”
If you read down a couple of dozen paragraphs in this New York Times piece, you get to the former NWS director of Congressional Affairs saying “that the local Weather Service offices appeared to have sent out the correct warnings. He said the challenge was getting people to receive those warnings, and then take action.” Nevertheless, the idea the NWS failed became so widespread that Wired magazine published a report specifically to counter it: “Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas.”
They link to the pundit with almost a million followers, who had posted on Twitter: “Now TX officials are blaming a faulty forecast by NWS for the deadly impact of a storm.” Those officials are, but why would we believe them? Wired continues: “But meteorologists who spoke to Wired say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the extreme severity of the storm.” With that, we’re onto another piece of the picture: the difference between accurately predicting a risk and knowing exactly how severe it will be.
Climate change, which some reports mentioned and others did not, is both a contributing factor for specific weather disasters and a reason why the future will not necessarily look like the past. For both fires and floods, the old rules about how fast they’ll move and how big they’ll get have expired. Hotter air holds more moisture, and that can and does lead to more torrential downpours and worse flooding. On the other hand, as local newspaper the Kerrville Daily Times reported, Kerr county has a history of extremely heavy rainfall leading to rapid river rise and devastating floods.
The Washington Post had a better assessment of what went right and what went wrong: “But even as weather forecasts began to hint at the potential for heavy rain on Thursday, the response exposed a disconnect: few, including local authorities, prepared for anything but their normal Fourth of July. When the precipitation intensified in the early morning hours Friday, many people failed to receive or respond to flood warnings at riverside campsites and cabins that were known to be in the floodplain.” The county, in this report, did not send its first cell-phone alert until Sunday, while “most cellphone alerts were coming from the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio station. But some alerts about life-threatening flooding didn’t come until the predawn hours, and to areas where cellular reception may have been spotty.”
It seems like the National Weather Service did its duty despite the cuts, but more are coming. Fossil Free Memo reports: “Just days before the flood, Texas Senator Ted Cruz helped pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, a sweeping fossil fuel giveaway that also slashed $200 million from Noaa’s weather forecasting and public alert programs. The money was meant to improve early warnings for exactly the kind of fast-moving, deadly flooding that just hit his own state. The cuts weren’t in the House version. Cruz added them in the Senate, behind closed doors, as chair of the committee that oversees Noaa.” The impact of cuts to vital services is going to degrade everyday life and add to the dangers we face, and as far as politicians like Ted Cruz are concerned, that’s the plan. It will be important to connect cause and effect, when there is a connection.
The desire to have an explanation, and the desire for that explanation to be tidy and aligned with one’s politics, easily becomes a willingness to accept what fits. But knowing we don’t know, knowing the answers are not yet in, or there are multiple causes, being careful even with the sources that tell us what we want to hear: all this equipment to survive the information onslaughts of this moment. We all need to be careful about how we get information and reach conclusions – both the practical information about climate catastrophes and weather disasters and the journalism that reports on it. Both the weather and the news require vigilance.”
Part of what makes this a shared national trauma is that it is a disruptive event aimed at American identity and the near-universal rite of summer camp. Whether this translates into mass action for climate policy change and a reversal of the Trump-Musk sabotage of public services remains to be seen.
As written by Emma Brockes in The Guardian, in an article entitled At US summer camps, kids get a glimpse of their future. That’s what made the horror in Texas so visceral: Camps are a rite of passage for American parents and children. That’s why the tragedy at Camp Mystic was intimately imaginable; “Among the many dreams that the US offers its citizens, there’s this: that the American child, around the age of eight, will go to sleep-away camp a few hours from home and begin one of the key formative experiences of their life. They will return every summer. They will learn independence. They will form bonds with people who will one day godparent their children. As an adult, a friend of mine – no kidding – returned to the hallowed ground in Pennsylvania where her summer camp once stood, bought a piece of land and built a house there. Whenever we visited, she’d point out the ruins of the old dining hall down by the lake and get a haunted look on her face.
I mention this because, among the many devastated reactions to the flash floods in Texas last week, there is one that is particular, and particularly acute, to millions of Americans: a gut-level blow of unfathomable loss striking at an experience many consider to be sacred.
There’s no real equivalent to these kinds of summer camps in Britain. But for 26 million American kids each year, going to camp is indistinguishable from summer itself. And as with Camp Mystic on the banks of the Guadalupe River, where 27 campers and staff were killed by the floods, many have been going for long enough to be attended by generations of the same family. In a country relatively short on long-range tradition, summer camp is right up there.
As a result, as news of the floods started to break last weekend, there was a frenzy of communication between parents across the country, many of whom had dropped their own kids off at camp the previous week. “Unimaginable” was the word bouncing around on the text chains, but what made this disaster so horrific is that, for many Americans, the scene at Camp Mystic was intimately imaginable.
You knew the excitement and nerves of the youngest children being dropped off for the first time; you could see, in your mind’s eye, the camp director, mirrored wrap-around sunglasses balanced on top of his baseball cap, marshalling cars stuffed with gear to their cabins. These camps, many of which have been running for more than 100 years, run like clockwork. You could put the American Camp Association in charge of the US military and it would probably do just fine. The idea of any evil befalling your child at summer camp is, in the minds of many Americans, more remote than something happening to them at school.
Still, as an outsider, when my own kids got within age range two years ago, I was instinctively hostile to the whole thing. It seemed cultish. Seeing your child off to be minded by a bunch of untested 18-year-olds from Europe and Australia, brought in via a visa loophole, seemed nuts. The closest experience I’d had in my own childhood was a week at Brownie camp, and I’d hated every second of it.
This wasn’t, I knew, how many of my American friends felt. Immortalised in movies like The Parent Trap and books like Meg Wolitzer’s coming of age novel The Interestings, camp is where they first discovered their tribes – in the close-knit Jewish camps of the north-east; in the arts and theatre camps and the YMCA camp network, to which my own kids (after launching a campaign to persuade me) would themselves end up going. No tech, no phone calls, basically no laundry. Up at 7.30am and lights out at 9pm. A “bucolic” camp in rural New Jersey that was also my personal nightmare: in a wood, on a lake, where there were bear drills and snapping turtles and the occasional snake, plus no air conditioning, and – ugh – group fun.
And I was wrong, as it turned out. At eight years old, my kids did two weeks at camp and a year later, before we left the US for good, they lobbied to be allowed back for three. Their half-brother, two years their senior, was already pulling down the full two months at his camp up in the Berkshires. And while it won’t be the defining experience of their lives, when they’re 50 I have a feeling they’ll still be talking, occasionally, about camp – not the friends they made, but the even more delicious experience of making a sworn enemy, a kid from New Jersey who furthered the opinion that New York is full of “crusty rats”.
It inoculated them against other failures of nerve and made change seem not just survivable but fun. In other words – and as American parents this week consider in light of the full horror in Texas, where stories of what happened at Camp Mystic continue to unfold – it seemed to contain within it a promise of the future.”
We remember this anniversary of the KGB’s Parthian Shot against America as the systems and institutions of state terror and tyranny it enforced began to fracture and collapse much like America and the whole of civilization grounded in democracy and the values of the Enlightenment are doing today, from the mechanical failures of their internal contradictions.
Who guessed in 1987 that the recruitment of an amoral narcissist and brutal psychopath with misogynist perversions including rape and pedophilia, an idiot whose inherited wealth and privilege created by human trafficking during the Klondike gold rush in his grandfather’s string of brothels shaped him as a multigenerational family cult of sexual terror and predation in ways parallel to his multigenerational Klu Klux Klan and Nazi ideology to produce a terrorist of both sex and white supremacy; who could have guessed such a disfigured soul and mentally crippled buffoon as Donald Trump would one day become apex predator of America and our President?
The KGB did, and once they understood his bottomless depravities and capacity for evil they began to mastermind his rise to the top as a puppet tyrant, a project continued under his ultimate handler Putin, once kingpin of the East Berlin black market and now master of Russia, and through his star agent Trump of America as well.
Well do I remember the day I first realized Trump was not merely an ideological enemy of democracy and a sex criminal but actually an enemy agent whose mission is the destruction of America; January 20 2017, watching him take the Oath of Office on television as Russian bombs fell on the American servicemen he had abandoned in Syria.
This was during the Deir ez-Zor Offensive of January 14 to February 14 2017, launched by ISIL versus the Assad regime of Syria during which the Russian and Syrian Air Forces in a combined operation bombed the city followed that night by a helicopter assault of 200 men. While US Special Forces led the main battle against the ISIL capital city of Raqqa, members of the CIA Special Operations Group making mischief behind enemy lines in Deir ez-Zor, under siege by ISIL since May 2015, found themselves under aerial bombardment followed by savage street fighting against Russian Special Operations and regular Syrian Army including the elite Republican Guards of the 101st Airborne who had heroically defended the city from capture. This despite a common enemy in ISIL, but neither Russian nor Syrian forces were aware of the Americans among them, who had infiltrated ISIL.
Normally this Russian attack on American troops would have been a serious violation of the Russian-American accords in the Syrian conflict, which come down to The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend, but if Putin knew he had the thumbs up from the incoming President Trump to kill Americans much becomes clear.
Herein I signpost that Russia and her primary ally the Dominion of Iran which included at the time Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen with her quasi-independent proxy Hezbollah also controlling areas of Palestine and elsewhere, were common enemies of ISIL with America and our allies, but also rivals for power in the region. Certainly this is true for Turkey with whom Russia contested for dominion of the Mediterranean in Libya and the Middle East in Syria; Turkey remains a key American ally who is also the great enemy of our allies the Kurds, Syrian Anarchists, and mostly Communist international volunteers who comprise our forces in Syria then and now. Nothing in the Middle East is simple.
There is also an important legal difference between uniformed combatants, like the Green Berets in Raqqa flying American flags, who are protected under the Geneva Convention and other Rules of War, and spies who are not. Like myself, such persons live beyond all rules, in the unknown and blank spaces on our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons. Fighting the people you are trying to help is among the risks of the profession, as is being disavowed by your own side, hanged as a spy, and killed as an enemy by your own; but those who play the Great Game know this and are trained for such misfortunes.
In this case our fellow Americans either fought their way out of the city and escaped with allies or remained to use the legitimation of the battle to advance in ISIL command and access to plans and information, as they might have done anyway with warning of the attack. But there was no warning, the chain of command went dark, and networks built with great care were unnecessarily put at risk.
At that moment Trump revealed himself to be an adversary with the power of a Commander In Chief to disrupt, harm, sabotage, and hijack to his own ends the common mission of all Americans to set other men free.
The Game changed when Trump took his Oath of Office on January 17 2017 knowing that he did not intend to defend America against all enemies foreign and domestic, as Russian bombs fell on American servicemen in Syria.
As I wrote in my post of August 27 2023, Behold the Monster: Trump Surrenders to Justice; Here is a Mirror of Dorian Grey wherein America may behold the monster of our soul which lives beneath the mask of normality, in the mug shot of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump. Here the nadir of our atrocities, perversions, amoral nihilism, degenerate brutality and atavisms of animal instinct glare back at us with the malign and savage rage of a baboon, and like Nietzsche’s Abyss we must beware lest our shadow capture us in the mirror of its gaze.
Half our nation remains under its spell, while those still free mock and poke the beast with a stick. Trump has surrendered to justice with no mass protests by loyal followers despite his threats and plots of coup, terror, and civil war, and we rejoice in his pathetic diminishment and humiliation, yet the danger has not passed.
So I wrote two years ago during the Restoration period of American history under the Biden Presidency, which unraveled with our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and our abandonment of the principle of universal human rights.
Now we are in far more perilous and aberrant times, prisoners of the captured state of Vichy America and the Fourth Reich led by Putin’s star agent, Traitor Trump.
Let us remember his origins as a Soviet and later Russian agent whose wealth comes from money laundering for Russian crime lords through real estate and moving Russian spies around the world through his beauty pageant and modeling monopoly, that last also a cover for his sex trafficking syndicate which operated interdependently with his buddy Epstein’s pedophile blackmail racket, important as the Epstein-Maxwell syndicate originated with Israeli intelligence and explains Trump’s fanatical devotion to Israel and the Netanyahu regime.
The only allies Trump never betrays are the ones who hold blackmail leverage over him, like any other crime lord. In the end, that’s all he is.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy; “Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.
Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.
Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.
Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.
Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.
Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.
According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.
Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.
The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”
Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.
The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.
“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”
Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.
Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”
He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”
Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”
“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”
As written in Trumpfile.org; “Donald and Ivana Trump fly to Moscow and are put up by the Soviet government in a suite across from the Kremlin. Ivana’s assistant Lisa Calandra joins them. There, they discuss deals with the Politburo (the highest committee of the communist government) and an agency that noticed Trump years before.
Almost a decade after he became a target, the KGB meets with Donald Trump.
The operatives feed Trump common KGB talking points and flatter him by floating the idea that he could be president someday. Trump’s ego latches on.
“For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.
This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites, and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.” Former KGB agent Yuri Shvets, The Guardian.
Almost immediately after returning to the U.S., Trump begins teasing a presidential run.
In September, Trump takes out ads attacking NATO and accusing our allies in Japan and Saudi Arabia of exploiting us. The KGB celebrates.
“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish [the ad] under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.” Shvets.
Trump announced a meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev before the trip but months later says the meeting never takes place. Trump does meet Gorbachev in December at the U.S. State Department.
For months, Trump teases a presidential run. He even gives a campaign speech to Republican donors in New Hampshire, but he never registers as a candidate. When Trump makes a formal run for office in 2000, his platform is in line with the policies Russia is looking for: a leftist, populist agenda that will be more welcoming to the former Soviet Union than Ronald Reagan and the establishment presidents that followed.
Recruiting Donald Trump
According to The Art of the Deal, Trump was invited to Moscow after sitting next to the Soviet ambassador at a 1986 luncheon.
“The idea got off the ground after I sat next to the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, at a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, a great businessman who is the son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter [Natalia Dubinina] it turned out, had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it. One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government. They have asked me to go to Moscow in July.” The Art of the Deal.
In January 1987, according to The Art of the Deal, Trump received a letter from Dubinin inviting him to Moscow to meet with officials from Goscomintourist (or Intourist), the Soviet state agency for international tourism. The cover story was that the agency wanted to discuss real estate. Unbeknownst to Trump at the time, Intourist and the connected hotel in which the Trumps stay are operated and surveilled by the KGB.
Trump’s book leaves out that he first met Yuri Dubinin six months before the luncheon, in March 1986. The first place Dubinin visited after arriving in New York City was Trump Tower, where he met with Trump and flattered him. Natalia, his daughter, was with him. She admits years later that her father’s intention was to “hook” the assumed billionaire.
“Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him like honey to a bee.” Natalia Dubinina (Politico).
Yuri Dubinin worked closely with the “powers that be” in Moscow, but he was not a KGB agent. His daughter, however, might have been. When Natalia Dubinina and her father met Trump, she was in a top position at the Dag Hammerskjold Library at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The person who held the job before her was a KGB agent, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence identified the position as a vital resource and frequent cover for the KGB in 1985.
The Deal‘s retelling of events leaves out another major detail. Dubinin was not the only Soviet official involved in Trump’s trip. The visit was planned by Vitaly Churkin, “a bureaucrat who rose through the Soviet ranks, strengthened his position as a diplomat in independent Russia, and became Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations in 2006.”
The recruitment of Donald Trump fulfilled earlier demands from General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Kryuchkov spent most of the 1980s trying to improve the KGB’s recruitment strategies, urging agents to get more creative.
“Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.
The Center, as KGB headquarters was known, was especially concerned about its lack of success in recruiting US citizens… The PR Line—that is, the Political Intelligence Department stationed in KGB residencies abroad—was given explicit instructions to find “U.S. targets to cultivate or, at the very least, official contacts.” “The main effort must be concentrated on acquiring valuable agents,” Kryuchkov said…
One solution was to make wider use of “the facilities of friendly intelligence services”—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German spy networks… [and acquire] “prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science.” These should not only “supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”
…There were, of course, different stages of recruitment. Typically, a case officer would invite a target to lunch.” Politico Magazine.
The invitation to Moscow was the second stage in KGB recruitment. The first stage was inviting him to the luncheon. It probably wasn’t difficult reaching him; he was already a target for recruitment, and the KGB’s Czech counterpart was compiling kompromat years earlier.
The trip to Moscow isn’t the end of Churkin’s involvement with Trump.
“Churkin met again with Trump in 2013 and spent 2016 stridently defending Trump at the United Nations, despite Trump not having been criticized by anyone there, in an incident that baffled international observers. The details of Trump and Churkin’s relationship, their meetings, and why Churkin defended Trump remain a mystery, because on February 20, 2017, one month after Trump’s inauguration, Churkin died suddenly at the age of sixty-four.” Sarah Kendzior, Hiding In Plain Sight.
Trump’s State Department issues a gag order after Churkin’s death, blocking the release of autopsy results after the New York City medical examiner’s office declares a toxicology test is needed. He is the fifth Russian diplomat to die unexpectedly and from unknown causes after the 2016 election.
At the time of Trump’s recruitment, 34-year-old Vladimir Putin is one of Kryuchkov’s officers. His current assignment is to recruit Latin American students studying in Germany. They will eventually be sent to the U.S. as undercover agents for the KGB.
Update 7/9/24: A previous version of this post said that, upon returning from Moscow, Trump began telling reporters that he has a plan for the Soviet Union. The source we obtained this from had the date wrong. The interview was two years prior. In it, Trump says if he or someone like him is in power, then the U.S. and the Soviet Union will join forces, combine our nuclear stockpiles, and “dominate” Third World countries–even if it takes cutting off millions of people from food and water. (Yes, he really does say that.)
Update 2/22/25: In February 2025, a retired intelligence official and former KGB chief admitted to recruiting Donald Trump. “In 1987, I worked in the 6th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR in Moscow. The most important area of work of the 6th Directorate was the acquisition of spies and sources of information from among businessmen of capitalist countries. It was in that year that our Department recruited the 40-year-old businessman from the USA, Donald Trump, nicknamed “Krasnov”. Alnur Mussayev on Facebook.
The Kyiv Post confirmed Alnur Mussayev’s identity, stating that he “rose up the ranks of the Soviet KGB” before becoming head of Kazakhstan’s security service after the fall of the Soviet Union.
American journalist Stash Luczkiw dug deeper into Mussayev’s social media posts and found one from 2018 confirming that Russia has compromising material / kompromat on Trump.
“Donald Trump is on the FSB’s hook and is swallowing the bait deeper and deeper… I have no doubt that Russia has kompromat on the US President, that over the course of many years the Kremlin has been promoting Trump to the post of President of the main world power. The ruling elite of the United States understands well that their President is deeply dependent on the Kremlin, but openly admitting this does not allow the status of a [sole superpower].” Alnur Mussayev on Facebook – Feb. 18, 2018.”
As written by Luke Harding in Politico, in an article entitled The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow; “t was 1984 and General Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov had a problem. The general occupied one of the KGB’s most exalted posts. He was head of the First Chief Directorate, the prestigious KGB arm responsible for gathering foreign intelligence.
Kryuchkov had begun his career with five years at the Soviet mission in Budapest under Ambassador Yuri Andropov. In 1967 Andropov became KGB chairman. Kryuchkov went to Moscow, took up a number of sensitive posts, and established a reputation as a devoted and hardworking officer. By 1984, Kryuchkov’s directorate in Moscow was bigger than ever before—12,000 officers, up from about 3,000 in the 1960s. His headquarters at Yasenevo, on the wooded southern outskirts of the city, was expanding: Workmen were busy constructing a 22-story annex and a new 11-story building.
In politics, change was in the air. Soon a new man would arrive in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s policy of detente with the West—a refreshing contrast to the global confrontation of previous general secretaries—meant the directorate’s work abroad was more important than ever.
Kryuchkov faced several challenges. First, a hawkish president, Ronald Reagan, was in power in Washington. The KGB regarded his two predecessors, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, as weak. By contrast Reagan was seen as a potent adversary. The directorate was increasingly preoccupied with what it believed—wrongly—was an American plot to conduct a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR.
It was around this time that Donald Trump appears to have attracted the attention of Soviet intelligence. How that happened, and where that relationship began, is an answer hidden somewhere in the KGB’s secret archives. Assuming, that is, that the documents still exist.
Trump’s first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987 looks, with hindsight, to be part of a pattern. The dossier by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele asserts that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for “at least five years” before his stunning victory in the 2016 US presidential election. This would take us back to around 2011 or 2012.
In fact, the Soviet Union was interested in him too, three decades earlier. The top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged his 1987 Moscow visit. With assistance from the KGB. It took place while Kryuchkov was seeking to improve the KGB’s operational techniques in one particular and sensitive area. The spy chief wanted KGB staff abroad to recruit more Americans.
In addition to shifting politics in Moscow, Kryuchkov’s difficulty had to do with intelligence gathering. The results from KGB officers abroad had been disappointing. Too often they would pretend to have obtained information from secret sources. In reality, they had recycled material from newspapers or picked up gossip over lunch with a journalist. Too many residencies had “paper agents” on their books: targets for recruitment who had nothing to do with real intelligence.
Kryuchkov sent out a series of classified memos to KGB heads of station. Oleg Gordievsky—formerly based in Denmark and then in Great Britain—copied them and passed them to British intelligence. He later co-published them with the historian Christopher Andrew under the title Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations 1975–1985.
In January 1984 Kryuchkov addressed the problem during a biannual review held in Moscow, and at a special conference six months later. The urgent subject: how to improve agent recruitment. The general urged his officers to be more “creative.” Previously they had relied on identifying candidates who showed ideological sympathy toward the USSR: leftists, trade unionists and so on. By the mid-1980s these were not so many. So KGB officers should “make bolder use of material incentives”: money. And use flattery, an important tool.
The Center, as KGB headquarters was known, was especially concerned about its lack of success in recruiting US citizens, according to Andrew and Gordievsky. The PR Line—that is, the Political Intelligence Department stationed in KGB residencies abroad—was given explicit instructions to find “U.S. targets to cultivate or, at the very least, official contacts.” “The main effort must be concentrated on acquiring valuable agents,” Kryuchkov said.
The memo—dated February 1, 1984—was to be destroyed as soon as its contents had been read. It said that despite improvements in “information gathering,” the KGB “has not had great success in operation against the main adversary [America].”
One solution was to make wider use of “the facilities of friendly intelligence services”—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German spy networks.
And: “Further improvement in operational work with agents calls for fuller and wider utilisation of confidential and special unofficial contacts. These should be acquired chiefly among prominent figures in politics and society, and important representatives of business and science.” These should not only “supply valuable information” but also “actively influence” a country’s foreign policy “in a direction of advantage to the USSR.”
There were, of course, different stages of recruitment. Typically, a case officer would invite a target to lunch. The target would be classified as an “official contact.” If the target appeared responsive, he (it was rarely she) would be promoted to a “subject of deep study,” an obyekt razrabotki. The officer would build up a file, supplemented by official and covert material. That might include readouts from conversations obtained through bugging by the KGB’s technical team.
The KGB also distributed a secret personality questionnaire, advising case officers what to look for in a successful recruitment operation. In April 1985 this was updated for “prominent figures in the West.” The directorate’s aim was to draw the target “into some form of collaboration with us.” This could be “as an agent, or confidential or special or unofficial contact.”
The form demanded basic details—name, profession, family situation, and material circumstances. There were other questions, too: what was the likelihood that the “subject could come to power (occupy the post of president or prime minister)”? And an assessment of personality. For example: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?”
The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”
Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”
When did the KGB open a file on Donald Trump? We don’t know, but Eastern Bloc security service records suggest this may have been as early as 1977. That was the year when Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a twenty-eight-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. Zelnickova was a citizen of a communist country. She was therefore of interest both to the Czech intelligence service, the StB, and to the FBI and CIA.
During the Cold War, Czech spies were known for their professionalism. Czech and Hungarian officers were typically used in espionage actions abroad, especially in the United States and Latin America. They were less obvious than Soviet operatives sent by Moscow.
Zelnickova was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelnickova moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.
According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan. (The agents who undertook this task were code-named Al Jarza and Lubos.) They opened letters sent home by Ivana to her father, Milos, an engineer. Milos was never an agent or asset. But he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would ask him how his daughter was doing abroad and in return permit her visits home. There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited Milos in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or “cover.”
Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika, or Communist Party reform—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?
The KGB wouldn’t invite someone to Moscow out of altruism. Dignitaries flown to the USSR on expenses-paid trips were typically left-leaning writers or cultural figures. The state would expend hard currency; the visitor would say some nice things about Soviet life; the press would report these remarks, seeing in them a stamp of approval.
Despite Gorbachev’s policy of engagement, he was still a Soviet leader. The KGB continued to view the West with deep suspicion. It carried on with efforts to subvert Western institutions and acquire secret sources, with NATO its No. 1 strategic intelligence target.
At this point it is unclear how the KGB regarded Trump. To become a full KGB agent, a foreigner had to agree to two things. (An “agent” in a Russian or British context was a secret intelligence source.) One was “conspiratorial collaboration.” The other was willingness to take KGB instruction.
According to Andrew and Gordievsky’s book Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, targets who failed to meet these criteria were classified as “confidential contacts.” The Russian word was doveritelnaya svyaz. The aspiration was to turn trusted contacts into full-blown agents, an upper rung of the ladder.
As Kryuchkov explained, KGB residents were urged to abandon “stereotyped methods” of recruitment and use more flexible strategies—if necessary getting their wives or other family members to help.
As Trump tells it, the idea for his first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. This was in autumn 1986; the event was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia “had read about Trump Tower and knew all about it,” Trump said in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal.
Trump continued: “One thing led to another, and now I’m talking about building a large luxury hotel, across the street from the Kremlin, in partnership with the Soviet government.”
Trump’s chatty version of events is incomplete. According to Natalia Dubinina, the actual story involved a more determined effort by the Soviet government to seek out Trump. In February 1985 Kryuchkov complained again about “the lack of appreciable results of recruitment against the Americans in most Residencies.” The ambassador arrived in New York in March 1986. His original job was Soviet ambassador to the U.N.; his daughter Dubinina was already living in the city with her family, and she was part of the Soviet U.N. delegation.
Dubinin wouldn’t have answered to the KGB. And his role wasn’t formally an intelligence one. But he would have had close contacts with the power apparatus in Moscow. He enjoyed greater trust than other, lesser ambassadors.
Dubinina said she picked up her father at the airport. It was his first time in New York City. She took him on a tour. The first building they saw was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Dubinin was so excited he decided to go inside to meet the building’s owner. They got into the elevator. At the top, Dubinina said, they met Trump.
The ambassador—“fluent in English and a brilliant master of negotiations”—charmed the busy Trump, telling him: “The first thing I saw in the city is your tower!”
Dubinina said: “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
This encounter happened six months before the Estée Lauder lunch. In Dubinina’s account she admits her father was trying to hook Trump. The man from Moscow wasn’t a wide-eyed rube but a veteran diplomat who served in France and Spain, and translated for Nikita Khrushchev when he met with Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace in Paris. He had seen plenty of impressive buildings. Weeks after his first Trump meeting, Dubinin was named Soviet ambassador to Washington.
Dubinina’s own role is interesting. According to a foreign intelligence archive smuggled to the West, the Soviet mission to the U.N. was a haven for the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Many of the 300 Soviet nationals employed at the U.N. secretariat were Soviet intelligence officers working undercover, including as personal assistants to secretary-generals. The Soviet U.N. delegation had greater success in finding agents and gaining political intelligence than the KGB’s New York residency.
Dubinin’s other daughter, Irina, said that her late father—he died in 2013—was on a mission as ambassador. This was, she said, to make contact with America’s business elite. For sure, Gorbachev’s Politburo was interested in understanding capitalism. But Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow looks like a classic cultivation exercise, which would have had the KGB’s full support and approval.
In The Art of the Deal, Trump writes: “In January 1987, I got a letter from Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, that began: ‘It is a pleasure for me to relay some good news from Moscow.’ It went on to say that the leading Soviet state agency for international tourism, Goscomintourist, had expressed interest in pursuing a joint venture to construct and manage a hotel in Moscow.”
There were many ambitious real estate developers in the United States—why had Moscow picked Trump?
According to Viktor Suvorov—a former GRU military spy—and others, the KGB ran Intourist, the agency to which Trump referred. It functioned as a subsidiary KGB branch. Initiated in 1929 by Stalin, Intourist was the Soviet Union’s official state travel agency. Its job was to vet and monitor all foreigners coming into the Soviet Union. “In my time it was KGB,” Suvorov said. “They gave permission for people to visit.” The KGB’s first and second directorates routinely received lists of prospective visitors to the country based on their visa applications.
As a GRU operative, Suvorov was personally involved in recruitment, albeit for a rival service to the KGB. Soviet spy agencies were always interested in cultivating “young ambitious people,” he said—an upwardly mobile businessman, a scientist, a “guy with a future.”
Once in Moscow, they would receive lavish hospitality. “Everything is free. There are good parties with nice girls. It could be a sauna and girls and who knows what else.” The hotel rooms or villa were under “24-hour control,” with “security cameras and so on,” Suvorov said. “The interest is only one. To collect some information and keep that information about him for the future.”
These dirty-tricks operations were all about the long term, Suvorov said. The KGB would expend effort on visiting students from the developing world, not least Africa. After 10 or 20 years, some of them would be “nobody.” But others would have risen to positions of influence in their own countries.
Suvorov explained: “It’s at this point you say: ‘Knock, knock! Do you remember the marvelous time in Moscow? It was a wonderful evening. You were so drunk. You don’t remember? We just show you something for your good memory.’”
Over in the communist German Democratic Republic, one of Kryuchkov’s 34-year-old officers—one Vladimir Putin—was busy trying to recruit students from Latin America. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985, together with his pregnant wife, Lyudmila, and one-year-old daughter, Maria. They lived in a KGB apartment block.
According to the writer Masha Gessen, one of Putin’s tasks was to try to befriend foreigners studying at the Dresden University of Technology. The hope was that, if recruited, the Latin Americans might work in the United States as undercover agents, reporting back to the Center. Putin set about this together with two KGB colleagues and a retired Dresden policeman.
Precisely what Putin did while working for the KGB’s First Directorate in Dresden is unknown. It may have included trying to recruit Westerners visiting Dresden on business and East Germans with relatives in the West. Putin’s efforts, Gessen suggests, were mostly a failure. He did manage to recruit a Colombian student. Overall his operational results were modest.
By January 1987, Trump was closer to the “prominent person” status of Kryuchkov’s note. Dubinin deemed Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to Moscow. Another thirtysomething U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the future U.N. ambassador—helped put it together. On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant.
Moscow was, Trump wrote, “an extraordinary experience.” The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square. Seventy years earlier, in October 1917, Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had spent a week in room 107. The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was— in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.
Meanwhile, the mausoleum containing the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed corpse was a short walk away. Other Soviet leaders were interred beneath the Kremlin’s wall in a communist pantheon: Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov—Kryuchkov’s old mentor—and Dzerzhinsky.
According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.
That July the Soviet press wrote enthusiastically about the visit of a foreign celebrity. This was Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and journalist. Pravda featured a long conversation between the Colombian guest and Gorbachev. García Márquez spoke of how South Americans, himself included, sympathized with socialism and the USSR. Moscow brought García Márquez over for a film festival.
Trump’s visit appears to have attracted less attention. There is no mention of him in Moscow’s Russian State Library newspaper archive. (Either his visit went unreported or any articles featuring it have been quietly removed.) Press clippings do record a visit by a West German official and an Indian cultural festival.
The KGB’s private dossier on Trump, by contrast, would have gotten larger. The agency’s multipage profile would have been enriched with fresh material, including anything gleaned via eavesdropping.
Nothing came of the trip—at least nothing in terms of business opportunities inside Russia. This pattern of failure would be repeated in Trump’s subsequent trips to Moscow. But Trump flew back to New York with a new sense of strategic direction. For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics. Not as mayor or governor or senator.
June 9 2025 We Celebrate the Anniversary of the Indictment of Traitor Trump, Russian Spy and Most Effective Enemy Agent Ever to Attack America, For Espionage in the Theft of State Secrets
February 23 2025 How It All Began; World War Three, the Capture of America and the Subversion of Democracy by Traitor Trump and the Fourth Reich, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the Fall of Civilization
For those who wish to study Our Clown of Terror as an example of the failure of humanity and the subversion of democracy, how monsters are shaped by the depravities and moral collapse of racism and patriarchy as illnesses of power and how our inner and outer worlds inform, motivate, and shape one another, here is my reading list:
Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Trump Is F*cking Crazy: (this Is Not a Joke), by Keith Olbermann
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Rick Wilson
March 14 2022 Russia’s Wars of Imperial Conquest and Dominion Since 2020: the Case of Syria in the Russian-Turkish Conflict for Dominion of the Middle East
We celebrate the liberation of Snake Island by Ukraine two years ago today, a signal victory in this theatre of World War Three in a story which has become iconic and made of Snake Island a monument to the unconquerable human spirit and the glorious fight for Liberty.
The flag of Ukraine which now flies above Snake Island proclaims her free, and Snake Island is forever Ukrainian, but it is now also a global heritage site of the heroism of resistance to tyranny and imperial conquest, for it lives within all of us as a symbol of freedom conferred by defiance of subjugation under threat of death.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As I wrote of the sinking of the Russian flagship which the defenders of Snake Island so memorably defied in my post of April 14 2022, Victory in the Black Sea: Ukraine Sinks the Russian Flagship Moskva; In a war which offers few causes to celebrate victory, I rejoice in the sinking of the Moskva by defenders of Ukraine, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet which the garrison of Snake Island famously defied.
“Russian warship, go fuck yourself”!
So glorious defiance has become prophecy.
Why is control of the Black Sea the key to Russia’s plans of imperial conquest? As I wrote in my post of April 18 2022, Last Stand at Mariupol: Fight at the Steel Works; Russia wants to conquer Ukraine for the same reason Japan invaded Manchuria; because it is an industrial heartland from which the conquest of the world may be launched, and the warm water ports of Mariupol and Odesa are key to this imperial plan of dominion, as well as to control of a land corridor to Crimea.
The sixty-five ports of the Black Sea connect Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, and all of these with the Mediterranean, dominion of which Russia has long disputed with Turkey in Libya and Syria. If Russia intends to follow the conquest of Ukraine with that of Eastern Europe, the capture of Romania’s Port of Constanta would open the whole of the Danube region to invasion. The Black Sea remains as crucial to the dominion of the Mediterranean, and of Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as it was when Mithridates VI of Pontus contested for it in his wars with the Roman Empire, or at the Battle of Gallipoli which we seem doomed to refight in Crimea and the Ukrainian seaboard inclusive of Mariupol and Odesa.
We must seize control of the Black Sea or prevent Russia from doing so, to deny its use as a launching pad for the imperial Russian conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Herein the overarching strategic reality which must drive our decisions is the fact that World War Three has now been ongoing for many years, whose theatres of war include Russia, America, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, large regions of Africa including Russian client states Mali and Sudan, and now Ukraine inclusive of her province Crimea.
Should we fail to stop this war of imperial conquest and dominion here in Ukraine where all our humanitarian values and international laws are violated with brutal savagery, and allow it to become a general global war between liberty and tyranny, my fear is that the world may enter an age of tyranny and centuries of war which humankind will not survive.
For Putin’s hand rests on the button of our nuclear annihilation and extinction, and it calls to him, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
As written by Lorenzo Tondo in The Guardian; “Ukrainian forces are set to raise the country’s flag on Snake Island, a strategic and symbolic outpost in the Black Sea that Russian troops retreated from last week after months of heavy bombardment.
“The military operation has been concluded, and … the territory, Snake Island, has been returned to the jurisdiction of Ukraine,” Natalia Humeniuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern military command, told reporters.
Ukraine’s military earlier stated that the national flag had been returned to the island shortly before 11pm on Monday. “On the island of Zmiiny, the Ukrainian flag was returned again,” an update read.
However, a clarification was later issued confirming the flag had been delivered by helicopter and would be raised as soon as Ukrainian troops arrive on the island.
“The flag was delivered to the island by helicopter. It will wait for the arrival of the troops, then it will wave,” Humeniuk told CNN, adding that her earlier remarks should be “understood metaphorically”.
“No one landed on the island. So who will install it, stick it in, raise it?” she said. “And no one will risk people for the sake of a photo for the media.”
Ukraine has considered control of the island as a critical step in loosening Moscow’s blockade on its southern ports.
However, it was not clear if Ukrainian troops would seek to re-establish a permanent presence there, as it is dangerously exposed to bombardment.
On Sunday, a military official told the Guardian the area of the Black Sea around Snake Island was still a “grey zone”, meaning that, technically, the Ukrainians did not intend to bring their forces back.
Snake Island became known internationally when Russia first captured it in February. A Ukrainian soldier posted on the island told an attacking Russian warship to “go fuck yourself”, a phrase that has since become one of the most popular Ukrainian slogans of resistance.
The Ukrainian postal service issued a stamp showing a Ukrainian soldier giving the finger to the Russian cruiser Moskva, which was later sunk. Since Russia took control, Ukrainian troops have attempted to retake it several times.
Russia claimed it had pulled out from the island on Thursday as a “gesture of goodwill” to show it was not obstructing United Nations attempts to open a humanitarian corridor allowing grain to be shipped from Ukraine.
A Russian military attack of the town of Serhiivka, near Odesa, on Friday has been interpreted by Ukrainian authorities as payback for Russian troops being forced from Snake Island the day before.
At least 21 people, including two children, died in the attack after two Russian missiles struck a multi-storey block of flats and a recreation centre.
“The occupiers cannot win on the battlefield, so they resort to vile killing of civilians,” Ivan Bakanov, the head of Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, said. “After the enemy was dislodged from Snake Island, [they] decided to respond with the cynical shelling of civilian targets.”
Ukraine’s president, Volodymr Zelenskiy, said that although the pullout did not guarantee the Black Sea region’s safety, it would “significantly limit” Russian activities there. “Step by step, we will push [Russia] out of our sea, our land, our sky,” he said.”
So we celebrate a great victory today, for both the people of Ukraine and for all humankind. Why is this important to us, safe in our homes and far from the horrors of war and the nightmare sounds of artillery bombardment devouring whole cities, like the sound of God’s head being split open by a hammer?
Why is it important to resist our dehumanization and those who would enslave us, and to reply to the terror of our nothingness with refusal to submit and solidarity with others, regardless of where or when such existential threats arise, who is under threat or any divisions of identitarian politics weaponized by conquerors to isolate their victims from help?
As I wrote in my post of April 20 2022 What is the Meaning of Mariupol? Address to the Volunteers in Warsaw; As we gather and prepare to take the fight to the enemy in direct action against the regime of Russia itself, against Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs and elites who sit at the helm of power and are now complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity both in Ukraine and her province of Crimea in the imperial conquest of a sovereign and independent nation and in Russia in the subjugation of their own citizens, and in the other theatres of this the Third World War, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan , Mali, and the Lake Chad region of Africa, and in the capture of the American state in the Stolen Election of 2016 which put Putin’s treasonous and dishonorable agent and proxy Donald Trump, Our Clown of Terror, in the White House to oversee the infiltration and subversion of democracy by the Fourth Reich, we are confronted with countless horrific examples of the future that awaits us at the hands of Putin’s regime, and we have chosen Resistance as the only alternative to slavery and death.
As we bring a Reckoning for tyranny, terror, and the horrors of war, in the crimes against humanity by Russia in Ukraine which include executions, torture, organized mass rape and the trafficking of abducted civilians, the capture of civilian hostages and use of forced labor, cannibalism using mobile factories, genocidal attacks, erasure of evidence of war crimes using mobile crematoriums which indicates official planning as part of the campaign of terror and proof that the countless crimes against humanity of this war are not aberrations but by design and at the orders of Putin and his commanders, threats of nuclear annihilation against European nations sending humanitarian aid, and the mass destruction of cities, we are become a court of last appeal in the defense of our universal human rights and of our humanity itself.
The Russian strategy of conquest opens with sustained and relentless bombardment and destruction of hospitals, bomb shelters, stores of food, power systems, water supply, corridors of humanitarian aid and the evacuation of refugees; anything which could help citizens survive a siege. Once nothing is left standing, a campaign of terror as organized mass rape, torture, cannibalism, and looting begins, and any survivors enslaved or executed. This is a war of genocide and erasure, and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again!
In this war which is now upon us, Putin’s goal is to restore the Russian Empire in the conquest of the Ukraine and the Black Sea as a launchpad for the conquest and dominion of the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; but he has a parallel and far more dangerous purpose in the abrogation of international law and our universal human rights. The true purpose of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Vladimir Putin in this war is to make meaningless the idea of human rights.
This is a war of tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil against democracy and a free society of equals, for the idea that we all of us have meaning and value which is uniquely ours and against enslavement and the theft of our souls.
Within the limits of our form, of the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, we struggle to achieve the human; ours is a revolution of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase meaning repair of the world which refers to our interdependence and duty of care for each other as equals who share a common humanity.
I’m sure all of us here know what Shlomo Bardin meant when he repurposed the phrase from the Kabbalah of Luria and the Midrash, but what do I mean by this?
There are only two kinds of actions which we human beings are able to perform; those which affirm and exalt us, and those which degrade and dehumanize us.
We live at a crossroads of history which may define the fate of our civilization and the future possibilities of becoming human, in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and between solidarity and division, and we must each of us choose who we wish to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
As you know, my friends and I come to you from the Siege of Mariupol, a battle of flesh against unanswerable force and horror, of solidarity against division, of love against hate, and of hope against fear.
Here, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which we celebrated yesterday, the human will to freedom is tested by an enemy who exults in the embrace of the monstrous, whose policies and designs of war as terror gladly and with the open arrogance of power instrumentalize utter destruction and genocide, a war wherein atrocities and depravities are unleashed as tactics of shock and awe with intent of subjugation through learned helplessness and overwhelming and generalized fear.
In Mariupol now as in Warsaw then, we affirm and renew our humanity in refusal to submit or to abandon our duty of care for each other. The Defenders of Mariupol who have sworn to die together and have refused many demands for surrender make their glorious Last Stand not as a gesture of defiance to a conqueror and tyrant, or to hold the port to slow and impede the Russian campaign in the Donbas now ongoing and prevent the seizure of the whole seaboard and control of the Black Sea, though these are pivotal to the liberation of Ukraine, but to protect the hundreds, possibly thousands, of refugees who now shelter in the tunnels of the underground fortress at the Azovstal and Ilyin Steel and Iron Works, especially the many children in makeshift hospitals who cannot be moved.
This is the meaning of Mariupol; we stand together and remain human, regardless of the cost. This is what it means to be human, how it is achieved, and why solidarity is important. Among our values, our duty of care for others is paramount, because it is instrumental to everything else, and all else is contingent on this.
To paraphrase America’s Pledge of Allegiance not as an oath to a nation but as the declaration of a United Humankind; We, the People of Earth, pledge ourselves to each other, as one humankind, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This brings us to my purpose in speaking to you today, for one of you has asked a question which is central to our mission of the Liberation of Russia and Ukraine, and to the solidarity of the international community in this our cause; how can ordinary people like ourselves hope for victory over the unanswerable force and overwhelming power of tyranny, terror, and war?
There are two parallel and interdependent strategies of Resistance in asymmetrical warfare; the first and most important is to redefine the terms of victory. This is because we are mortal, and the limits of our form impose conditions of struggle; we must be like Jacob wrestling the angel, not to conquer this thing of immense power but to escape being conquered by it. We can be killed, imprisoned, tortured; but we cannot be defeated or conquered if we but refuse to submit.
Power without legitimacy becomes meaningless, and authority crumbles when met with disbelief. This is why journalism and teaching as sacred callings in pursuit of truth are crucial to democracy, and why the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
What of the use of police in brutal repression by carceral states? The social use of force is hollow and brittle, and fails at the point of disobedience. When the police are an army of Occupation and the repression of dissent, they can be Resisted on those terms; my point here is simply that victory against unanswerable force consists of refusal to submit.
Who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered and is free. This is a kind of victory which cannot be taken from us.
Second is our strategy for survival against an enemy who does not regard us as human, and will use terror to enforce submission through learned helplessness. By any means necessary, as this principle is expressed in 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.
In Mariupol I began referring to this in its oldest form, war to the knife. Its meaning for us is simple; those who would enslave us and who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none.
The question to which I speak today in reply intrigued me, because it was nearly identical to a line which sets up one of the greatest fictional military speeches in literature, Miles Vorkosigan’s speech to the Maurilacans in The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold.
In this story, Miles has just led a mass prisoner of war escape, from a prison which like all fascist tyrannies is fiendishly designed to produce abjection, as described by Julia Kristeva in her famous essay, in circumstances of horror such as those which my friends here and I have just survived, and in which we now find ourselves like the Marilacans having achieved an army, and about to take the fight to the enemy on his own ground.
One of the volunteers says, ”The defenders of Mariupol had those crazy Cossack warriors, swearing an oath to die rather than surrender, professional mercenaries from everywhere, all of them elite forces and utterly fearless. We just can’t fight on those terms; its been seventy years since we fought a total war of survival, and most of us here are professionals and university intellectuals. Poland is civilized, maybe too civilized for what’s coming our way.”
To this I answer with Miles; “Let me tell you about the defenders of Mariupol. Those who sought a glorious death in battle found it early on. This cleared the chain of command of accumulated fools.
The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win and win and win. And for whom nothing, not comfort nor security, not family nor friends nor their immortal souls, was more important than victory.
They were not supermen or more than human. They sweated in confusion and darkness.
And with not one half the resources Poland possesses, Ukraine remains unconquered. When you’re all that stands between liberty and tyranny, freedom and slavery, life and death, between a people and genocide, when you’re human, there is no mustering out.”
To this wonderful speech of a fictional hero who simply refuses to stay down to the fictional survivors of the very real horror of being held captive and powerless by a tyrant, whether as prisoners of war or citizens of an occupied city, I must add this; how if Poland and Ukraine stand together, with all of Europe and America united in Resistance?
And if you are telling me you could not today fight a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this I do not believe. Nor would you do so alone, for during this Passover as the Jewish community remembers the story of the Exile, the world also remembers; we watch it in our news every day, enacted once again in Ukraine. This, too, is a Haggadah, in which all of humankind can share, and which yet again teaches us the necessity of our interdependence and solidarity.
As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here is a truth to which all of us here today can bear witness.
But there is a thing which tyrants never learn; the use of force and violence obeys the Third Law of Motion, and creates resistance as its own counterforce. And when the brutality and crimes against humanity of that force and violence are performed upon the stage of the world, visible to all and a history which cannot be erased, part of the story of every human being from now until the end of our species, repression finds answer in reckoning as we awaken to our interdependence and the necessity of our solidarity and duty of care for each other.
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet on that fateful day in 1982, in a burning house, in a lost cause, after we refused to surrender; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
An unusual fellow, but behind the concealment of his literary notoriety he remained the Legionnaire he had once been, and after spying on the Nazis in Berlin in 1939 had returned to Paris to make mischief for her unwelcome guests, and there in 1940 repurposed the oath of the Foreign Legion for what allies he could gather. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole.
My hope is that I have lived and written at the beginning of the story of humankind, and not at its end.
What is the meaning of Mariupol?
Here we may look to its precedents as Last Stands, battles, and sieges; Thermopylae, Malta, Washington crossing the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, Gallipoli, Stalingrad, and its direct parallel the Siege of Sarajevo. Moments of decision wherein the civilization of humankind hung in the balance, and with it our future possibilities of becoming human.
Who do we want to become, we humans; slaves and tyrants or a free society of equals? And how much of our humanity are we willing to trade for the chance of such futures?
What of ourselves can we not afford to lose, without also losing who we are? How much of our humanity can we claw back from the darkness in refusal to submit to those who would enslave us, and in solidarity with each other?
We must each of us face our own Gate of Fire, as did the Spartans at Thermopylae, and choose.
What are we worth, if we permit ruthless bandit kings to commit atrocities, plunder, and enslave others?
What is western civilization worth, if we will not live up to our fine words? And fine words they remain, such as these written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a synthesis and revisioning of ideas from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What is America, if not a guarantor of democracy and our universal human rights, and a beacon of hope to the world?
Let us reply with the words written by J.R.R. Tolkien between 1937 and 1955 in his luminous reimagination of the Second World War and the conflict of dominion which immediately followed it between tyranny and democracy, first against fascism and then between the allies who defeated it as spheres of dominion and systems of economic and political organization but both for different dreams of a free society of equals, in the iconic speech of Aragorn at the Black Gate in The Return of the King which unites ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos; “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight.”
Join us.
Valhalla Calling Sung In Ukrainian
This Day We Fight: Aragorn’s Speech at the Black Gate
6 липня 2022 Перемога в Чорному морі: Україна звільнила острів Зміїний
Ми святкуємо звільнення Україною острова Зміїний, знаменну перемогу на цьому театрі Третьої світової війни в історії, яка стала культовою і зробила острів Зміїний пам’ятником нескореного людського духу та славетної боротьби за Свободу.
Прапор України, який тепер майорить над островом Зміїний, проголошує її вільною, і острів Зміїний назавжди український, але тепер він також є місцем всесвітньої спадщини героїзму опору тиранії та імперським завоюванням, бо він живе в кожному з нас як символ свободи, наданої непокорою підкоренню під загрозою смерті.
Як писав Макс Штірнер; «Свобода не може бути дарована; його треба схопити».
20 квітня 2022 Що означає Маріуполь? Звернення до волонтерів у Варшаві
Збираючись і готуючись до боротьби з ворогом у прямих діях проти режиму самої Росії, проти Володимира Путіна та його олігархів та еліт, які сидять біля керма влади і зараз є причетними до військових злочинів і злочинів проти людства як у Україна та її провінція Крим в імперському завоювання суверенної і незалежної нації і в Росії в підкоренні власних громадян, а на інших театрах цієї Третьої світової війни, Сирії, Лівії, Білорусі, Казахстану, Нагірного Карабаху , а також під час захоплення американської держави на викрадених виборах 2016 року, коли зрадницького й безчесного агента Путіна та довіреної особи Дональда Трампа, нашого клоуна терору, у Білий дім для нагляду за проникненням і підривом демократії Четвертим рейхом, ми ми стикаємося з незліченною кількістю жахливих прикладів майбутнього, яке чекає на нас від рук режиму Путіна, і ми обрали Опір як єдину альтернативу рабству і смерті.
Оскільки ми приносимо розплату за тиранію, терор і жахи війни, за злочини проти людства, зроблені Росією в Україні, які включають страти, катування, організовані масові зґвалтування та торгівлю викраденими цивільними особами, захоплення цивільних заручників та використання примусових праця, канібалізм з використанням пересувних фабрик, напади геноциду, знищення доказів військових злочинів за допомогою мобільних крематоріїв, що вказує на офіційне планування як частину кампанії терору та доказ того, що незліченна кількість злочинів проти людства цієї війни не є відхиленнями, а задумом і накази Путіна та його командирів, загрози ядерного знищення європейських країн, які надсилають гуманітарну допомогу, і масове знищення міст, ми стаємо останньою апеляційною інстанцією у захисті наших універсальних прав людини та нашого людства.
Російська завойовницька стратегія починається з постійних і невпинних бомбардувань і руйнувань лікарень, бомбосховищ, складів продовольства, енергосистем, водопостачання, коридорів гуманітарної допомоги та евакуації біженців; все, що могло б допомогти громадянам пережити облогу. Після того, як нічого не залишиться, починається кампанія терору як організовані масові зґвалтування, тортури, канібалізм та мародерство, а будь-які вижили поневолені або страчені. Це війна на геноцид і стирання, і на фашизм може бути лише одна відповідь; Ніколи знову!
У цій війні, яка зараз на нас, мета Путіна — відновити Російську імперію у завоювання України та Чорного моря як стартовий майданчик для завоювання та панування Середземномор’я, Європи, Африки та Близького Сходу; але він має паралельну й набагато більш небезпечну мету — скасування міжнародного права та наших універсальних прав людини. Справжня мета Четвертого рейху та його маріонетка Володимира Путіна у цій війні – позбутися сенсу ідеї прав людини.
Це війна тиранії та фашизму крові, віри та ґрунту проти демократії та вільного суспільства рівних за ідею, що всі ми маємо сенс і цінність, яка є унікальною, а також проти поневолення та крадіжки наших душ.
У межах нашої форми, вад нашої людяності та зламаності світу ми боремося за досягнення людського; наша – це революція Тіккуна Олама, єврейської фрази, що означає відновлення світу, яка стосується нашої взаємозалежності та обов’язку піклуватися один про одного як рівних, хто об’єднує спільне людство.
Я впевнений, що всі ми тут знаємо, що мав на увазі Шломо Бардін, коли переробив фразу з Каббали Лурія і Мідраш, але що я маю на увазі під цим?
Є лише два види дій, які ми, люди, здатні виконувати; ті, що стверджують і підносять нас, і ті, що принижують і дегуманізують нас.
Ми живемо на перехресті історії, яка може визначити долю нашої цивілізації та майбутні можливості стати людиною, у боротьбі між тиранією та свободою, між солідарністю та поділом, і кожен із нас має вибрати, ким хоче стати, ми люди; панів і рабів, чи вільне суспільство рівних?
On this day of celebration of our Liberty as a free society of equals and our Declaration of Independence from the British Empire, a deniable asset of the Fourth Reich and its agents of infiltration within the carceral state which include all those guilty of treason in the January 6 Insurrection from Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his co-conspirators down to the dishonorable and lunatic barbarians who attacked our capitol on that most terrible of days, perpetrated mass murder and terror on a town parade.
This was a hate crime of gun violence motivated by fascist ideology and a sign of the enormous power of white privilege as immunity before the fact which enables such crimes and many others as the precondition of free access to guns, and a measure of how far we have yet to go to achieve the true goals of the American Revolution as seizures of power to win the social and legal equality of all human beings, and to overthrow the tyranny of systemic inequality founded on the idea that some of us are better than others by reason of birth as class and caste; for on this day a madman has killed people just because he can.
Here is the fascist apologetics of power; an amoral nihilism which claims that there is no good or evil, that only fear is the basis of human exchange and that only power as force has meaning.
The psychopathy of fascism is brilliantly interrogated in the character of Martin Chatwin in the series The Magicians, a victim of monstrous abuse who by seizure of power became himself a king and a monster. Both a film noir tyrant of Freudian horror beyond the limits of the human called The Beast for his abominable crimes and the wounded child he once was locked in titanic struggle within the same flesh, a tragic avenger who helps a victim on her mad quest to kill a Trickster god of cannibalism and sexual terror in order to forge her as his successor, he is a figure of the duality of force and violence.
He has a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “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.
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. As Wagner teaches us in his great opera, only those who renounce love can wield the Ring of Power; this truth has as its corollary the redemptive power of love to set us free.
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.”
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?
While the use of social force may be necessary to free oneself from subjugation and enslavement by others in seizures of power, as an imposed condition of revolutionary struggle, nothing can justify the use of force and violence as dominion and control of others or in their subjugation and enslavement. This is the inherent duality of the use of social force, for liberation struggle has tyranny and terror as its dark mirror image.
Once we have freed ourselves and others, we must abandon the use of social force or entrap ourselves in the Ring of Power once again, as many heroes of revolution have become tyrants, Washington, Napoleon, Stalin, and Mao, and many of those like the fictional Martin Chatwin who became The Beast in The Magicians and the all too real perpetrator of the Fourth of July Massacre three years ago yesterday have become figures of the terror and tyranny in the struggle to free themselves of it.
Systems of unequal power, patriarchy and white privilege as mutually reinforcing, parallel, and interdependent forces, shape some of us into monsters with which to terrify and claim dominion over the rest to us. This is why America has an open market for guns and valorizes violence as false masculinity; tragedies like yesterday’s manufacture consent for the centralization of power to the carceral state, pervasive surveillance and propaganda, and the militarization of the police as an army of occupation. If they scare us enough, we will vote for more tyranny and state terror; this is the Calculus of Fear on which all states are founded.
We have but to compare the reactions of the Republicans in the NRA press release to that of the Democrats in the Bidens’ address to the nation to see who is on our side, and who weaponizes white supremacist terror as gun violence in the repression of dissent and the enforcement of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
“What is to be done?” as Lenin asked in his essay of 1902. While we have many interdependent ongoing existential threats to democracy and to our survival as a species, part of the answer is simply this; the American Revolution is something in which we all participate throughout our lives.
Each of us must reinvent how to be human. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
The Fourth Reich and its deniable assets of patriarchal and white supremacist terror operating in conspiracy with a captured police state of force and control have attacked Fourth of July family and community celebrations throughout America in a terror campaign designed to steal our Liberty by making it unsafe for citizens to gather, even for a neighborhood barbeque.
We must take back America, if our future generations are to live in a free society of equals, and win Independence from fear and force. And we must do so without taking the bait offered by the enemy who seeks to drive us toward a Second Civil War by demonstrating the powerlessness of our institutions of government to defend us.
We must abandon the use of social force; all of it, both ours and theirs, not merely disarming and abolishing the police and purging our society of guns and the right to bear death among us, but also of the systems of unequal power and oppression which drive the Ring of fear, power, and force which has made of us not citizens allied as guarantors of each other’s rights, but bearers of death and subjects divided against each other by overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
Guns and the terror they enable create wealth and power for those who would enslave us, both as imperial conquest and dominion in war and as state tyranny and terror here at home.
To bear arms is to be a bearer of death; choose life.
Of this personal and ongoing process of Liberty we have an example written by Michael Moore; “I, Michael Moore, standing up for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and being completely fed up with recent events that have upset my tranquility, herby declare the following on this Fourth of July, 2022:
1. I refuse to live in a country threatened by white supremacy — and I’m not leaving. So we‘ve got a problem.
2. I cannot in good conscience continue to receive the privileges of “full citizenship” in this land when all of its women and girls have now been, by Court decree, declared official second-class citizens with no rights to their own bodies and conscripted to a life of Forced Birth should they fall pregnant and not want to be.
3. I demand an end to the mass incarceration of Black Americans, an end to police shooting Black people, and I demand that reparations be made to the Black community for all they currently have to suffer and endure.
4. I insist we remove every single Republican from office in November. The Republican Party has dismantled itself and its remaining rogue elements now exist purely to overturn legitimate election results and overthrow the elected will of the vast majority of the American people. This must be halted without delay or equivocation.
Therefore, I will do the following:
~ Until women’s rights have been fully reinstated, and their equal rights are enshrined in our Constitution (now that the required 38 states have passed the Equal Rights Amendment), I will not shut up about this. If you invite me to dinner that’s all I’m gonna talk about. Have me over to your party and it’s going to be, “Dobbs, Dobbs, and more Dobbs!” And I won’t stop until Roe is reinstated and 51% of Congress is female.
~ I will help to organize a massive Get Out The Vote drive amongst the millions who follow me on social media, listen to my podcast, and read my Substack column. I will join with others to tour the country. No candidate will get our support unless they sign a pledge stating they will vote to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land; make gerrymandering and voter suppression illegal; eliminate the filibuster; upgrade Obamacare to Universal Health Care for All; pass strong gun control laws; and end the police executions and racist incarcerations of Black citizens.
~ I will help lead a national strike, in whatever form it needs to take, and if we want to see immediate change, watch what happens when we shut down even 10% of the country. POOF! goes Wall Street! Hit ‘em where it counts.
This I do declare.
Signed,
Michael Moore July 4, 2022”
As written by Shruti Rajkumar in Huffpost, in an article entitled Biden Calls For Gun Reform On Highland Park Anniversary: ‘Much More Must Be Done’
The president’s statement on the Illinois mass shooting arrives in the wake of three back-to-back fatal shootings early this week; “After three back-to-back shootings this week, President Joe Biden condemned gun violence in the U.S. and once again pleaded for tighter gun laws.
On Sunday evening, two people were killed and 28 injured — including many children — in a shooting at a neighborhood block party in Baltimore. On Monday night, five people were killed and two were injured in a separate mass shooting in Philadelphia. Yet another mass shooting occurred at a festival in Fort Worth, Texas, the same night, with three people killed and eight others injured. The tragedies add to the growing list of mass shootings plaguing the country.
“Today, Jill and I grieve for those who have lost their lives and, as our nation celebrates Independence Day, we pray for the day when our communities will be free from gun violence,” Biden said in the statement on Tuesday.
On the anniversary of the 2022 massacre at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, in which seven people died and more than 30 were injured, the president also acknowledged that state’s recent efforts to combat gun violence.
Since the tragedy, Illinois has passed legislation to ban assault weapons — including the one used in the Highland Park shooting — and high-capacity magazines in the state, marking a major win for gun safety.
“Their achievement will save lives. But it will not erase their grief. It will not bring back the seven Americans killed in Highland Park or heal the injuries and trauma that scores of others will continue to carry,” Biden said in the statement. “And as we have seen over the last few days, much more must be done in Illinois and across America to address the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing our communities apart.”
Last year, Biden signed the most significant anti-gun-violence legislation in the past three decades. The landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act outlined ways to reduce gun violence in the U.S., including expansions to mental health services and school security, gun purchase restrictions and enhanced background checks for people under 21.
Several Democrats have been avid proponents of anti-gun-violence reforms, including assault weapon bans. But many GOP leaders have resisted gun regulations, despite the sustained surge in gun violence. There have been over 340 mass shootings across the U.S. so far in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Still, Biden and other lawmakers have insisted on more gun reform legislation.
“It is within our power to once again ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to require safe storage of guns, to end gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability, and to enact universal background checks,” Biden said in the statement.
He continued: “I urge other states to follow Illinois’ lead, and continue to call upon Republican lawmakers in Congress to come to the table on meaningful, commonsense reforms that the American people support.”
As written by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, in an article entitled Fourth of July overshadowed by 16 mass shootings across US: Fifteen people were killed and 94 injured across 13 states as well as Washington DC; “From the nation’s capital to Fort Worth, Texas, from Florin, California, in the west to the Bronx, New York, in the east, the Fourth of July long weekend in the US was overshadowed by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.
The Gun Violence Archive, an authoritative database on gun violence in America, calculated the grim tally using its definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people excluding the shooter are killed or injured by firearms.
The tragic bloodletting was recorded from 5pm on Friday until 5am on Wednesday across 13 states as well as Washington DC. Texas and Maryland both entered the register twice.
In one of the final catastrophes to mar the weekend honoring the nation’s founding, nine people were injured in a drive-by shooting in Washington in the early hours of Wednesday. The victims included two children aged nine and 17. All injuries were reported as non life-threatening.
Police said shots were fired from a dark-colored SUV at a house party in the north-east quadrant of the city shortly before 1am on 5 July. The SUV “fired shots in the direction of some of our residents who were outside just celebrating the fourth of July. It appears that the shooting was targeted”, said Leslie Parsons, the assistant police chief.
Hours earlier, Joe Biden issued a Fourth of July statement from the White House in which he lamented the “wave of tragic and senseless shootings in communities across America”. The president said he and the first lady, Jill Biden, “grieve for those who have lost their lives and, as our nation celebrates Independence Day, we pray for the day when our communities will be free from gun violence”.
Biden repeated his call for “meaningful, commonsense” gun control reforms including a renewed ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and an end to gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.
By the reckoning of the Gun Violence Archive, the US is on track for one of the worst years of mass shootings. The database has identified 350 such incidents so far this year and warns that should the pace remain steady through the second half of the year, the final total for 2023 could reach 679: about double that recorded in 2018.
The archive’s tally of mass shootings over the 4 July weekend involved incidents in: Washington DC, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland (twice), Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas (twice).
One of the youngest victims of the weekend was a 14-year-old boy who was killed early on Wednesday in a shooting at a fourth of July block party on Maryland’s eastern shore. Six others were injured in the incident in Salisbury.
Two people were killed and 28 wounded, including 15 children, in a mass shooting in Baltimore, Maryland, on Sunday. Videos recorded at the scene showed teenagers scrambling to get away from the gunfire. On Wednesday, police were still searching for the shooters, who were thought to have opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon.
Late on Tuesday, another outdoor party in Shreveport, Louisiana, exploded in gun fire, leaving three people dead and 10 wounded.
Tabitha Taylor, a local councilwoman, told CBS News she was livid.
“Now we are the victim of a mass shooting in our community simply because individuals decided to come in and disrupt a good time that individuals were having,” she said.
“A family event that has gone on for years in our community has been disrupted by gunfire because somebody decided to pull their guns and do this. Why, why?”
One of the injured was in critical condition, Angie Willhite, a Shreveport police sergeant, told reporters on Wednesday, adding that others who were injured were expected to survive. No arrests had been made.
“We are struggling with getting information from those who were present,” Willhite said. “We’re not getting a lot of cooperation. We’re going to hope for some quick and immediate cooperation that will lead us to the people we’re trying to find.”
The greatest fatality in a single incident over the long weekend was seen in Philadelphia, where five people were killed when a shooter wearing a bulletproof vest and bearing an assault rifle went on a random rampage on Monday night.
The youngest person to die was 15. A two-year-old boy was shot four times in the legs and a 13-year-old was shot twice in the legs. On Wednesday, both were listed in stable condition.
The 40-year-old suspect was arraigned on five counts of murder as well as charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault and weapons counts of possession without a license and carrying firearms in public, prosecutors said.
Philadelphia police identified the victims killed on the streets as 20-year-old Lashyd Merritt; 29-year-old Dymir Stanton; 59-year-old Ralph Moralis; and 15-year-old Daujan Brown. All were pronounced dead shortly after the Monday night gunfire.
Joseph Wamah Jr, 31, was found in a home early on Tuesday, also with bullet wounds. Investigators believe Wamah was the first victim killed but was not found by family members until hours later.”
The Magicians: Fear, Power, Force, the Origins of Evil and the Carceral State as Embodied Violence
“The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed,” the NRA tweeted. Unless you’ve been killed by an armed citizen.
“Each one of us will experience something in life that transforms who we are. A human life is one of adventure and tempering. A lot of people today tend to use the language of “formative experiences,” but the idea of an awakening or initiation of some kind, is as central to the human condition as sleeping or falling in love. Those who study the stories and myths we tell point out that they often share remarkable similarities. For instance, they involve a separation from home, a test of character, and then a return home with new wisdom or strength.
One of these transformative trials comes when we lose someone we truly and deeply love. Those who have known grief understand something more about life. When we suffer the loss of someone we love, we know what it means to be left alone and behind. On an intellectual level, we know that all things must die. We can rationally appreciate the transience of life, the breakdown of biology, and entropy in the universe. But to know death, to feel and bear loss, gives someone an understanding that no poem, movie, or book could convey.
Many philosophers have explored the idea of grief and death, and for many, it’s the most important thing about being alive.
Memento mori
For many people, like the young or the lucky, there is no need to face mortality. They can walk through their days without a moment’s thought for the big questions about eternity. It won’t cross their minds to reflect on their own death or of those around them. They likely will never ponder that the people they have in their lives will, some day, be gone forever.
They never appreciate that there will come a time when we each will have our last meal, laugh, and breath. That there will be one final cuddle with someone you love, and no more.
Sure, they know it in some remote part of their understanding, but they do not feel it. It’s intellectually “objective” but lacks the emotionally subjective. They lack the deepening that happens for those who have held the hand of a dying parent, cried at a brother’s funeral, or sat staring at photos of a now-gone friend. For those who don’t know grief, it is as if it comes from outside. In reality, the despair of true grief is something that originates from within. It aches and pulses inside your very being.
The source of despair
For such a universal, sensitive, and poignant issue as grief, there is no one philosophical position. For much of history, philosophers were also usually religious, and so the issue was one for priests, scripture, or meditation.
The pre-Christian scholars of ancient Greece and Rome are perhaps an exception. But, even there, philosophers came stewed in a cauldron of religious assumptions. It has become fashionable today to read ancient references to “the soul,” for instance, as being poetic or psychological metaphors. Yet, with the possible exception of the Epicureans, the ancient world had far more religion than our modern, secular sensibilities might prefer.
For Søren Kierkegaard, that visceral sense of mortality we get after experiencing grief he labelled “despair.” And in the long nighttime of despair, we can begin the journey to realize our truest selves. When we meaningfully encounter first-hand that things in life are not eternal and nothing is forever, we appreciate how we passionately long for things to be eternal. The source of our despair is that we want that “forever.” For Kierkegaard, the only way to overcome despair, to relieve this condition, is to surrender. There is an eternal by which to lose ourselves in. There is faith, and grief is the dark, marble door to belief.
The philosophy of grief
After the Enlightenment and the rise of a godless philosophy, thinkers began to see death in a new way. Seeing death only as a gateway to religion no longer worked.
The ancient Greek Epicureans and a lot of Eastern philosophers (although, not necessarily all), believed this powerful sense of grief can be overcome by removing our mistaken longing for immortality. Stoics, too, signed up to the idea that we ache precisely because we wrongly think things are ours for all time. With a mental shift, or after great meditation, we can come to accept this for the false hubris it is.
The German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger argued that the presence of death in our lives gives fresh meaning to our being free to choose. When we appreciate that our decisions are all we have, and that our entire life is punctuated by a final coup de grace, it invigorates our action and gives us a “daring.” As he wrote, “Being present is grounded in the turning-towards [death].” It is a theme echoed in the medieval idea of memento mori — that is, keeping death close to make the current moment sweeter. When we lose a loved one, we recognize that we are, indeed, left behind, and so this in turn gives new gravity to our choices.
For Albert Camus, though, things are somewhat more bleak. Even though Camus’ works were a deliberate and strenuous effort to resolve the listless abyss of nihilism, his solution of “absurdity” is not easy medicine. For Camus, grief is a state of being overcome by the pointlessness of it all. Why love, if love ends in such pain? Why build great projects, when all will be dust? With grief comes an awareness of the bitter finality of everything, and it comes with an angry, screaming frustration: Why are we here at all? Camus’ suggestion is a kind of macabre revelry — gallows’ humor perhaps — that says we should enjoy the ride for the meaningless rollercoaster it is. We must imagine ourselves happy.
Three responses to grief
We have, here, three different responses to grief. We have the religious turn of Kierkegaard, the existential carpe diem of Heidegger, and the laugh-until-you-die of Camus.
For many, grief involves a separation from life. It can feel like the wintering of the soul, where we need to heal and make sense of existence again. It’s a kind of chrysalis. In many cases, we return to life with earned wisdom and can appreciate the everyday world in an entirely transformed way. For some, this hibernation goes on for a very long time, and many start to see their cold retreat as all there is.
These are the people who will need help. Whether we agree with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or Camus, one thing is true for all and everyone: talking helps. Voicing our thoughts, sharing our despair, and turning to someone else is the gentle, warm breeze that starts the thaw.”
“Give me liberty, or give me death!”; with these immortal words of Patrick Henry to the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, in a situation very much like the one we face now under the onslaught of imperial conquest by Russian in the wake of the Stolen Elections of 2016 and 2024, our abandonment of the principle of universal human rights and our complicity in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, our abandonment also of human rights and of the rights of citizens and idea of citizenship itself in the ethnic cleansing ongoing against nonwhite migrants by the ICE white supremacist terror force and a military force of occupation, the capture of our Supreme Court and Congress as instruments of subversion of democracy, the ongoing second mad reign of Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump and capture of the state as Vichy America under the Fourth Reich, and the treasonous and dishonorable coup attempt by the Deplorables of the Fourth Reich’s deniable assets being only the American theatre of the Third World War, in which we have held ourselves aloof in forbearance of the use of force to secure our Liberty and allowed a brutal and amoral enemy to ravage the world unchallenged, with these words Patrick Henry began the American Revolution, and we are still fighting it today.
“If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” He then aimed a dagger at his heart in imitation of Cato the Younger, martyr of the Republic of Rome as it became an empire under Julius Caesar.
Patrick Henry was referencing the suicide speech of Cato the Younger according to Cassius Dio, in Roman History 43.10; “I, who have been brought up in freedom, with the right of free speech, cannot in my old age change and learn slavery instead.”
Here as always, the force and power of tyrants and their carceral states to compel subjugation and consent to be governed as enslavement and dehumanization finds its limit in the simple refusal to obey, for force is brittle and authority hollow without belief in its legitimacy, and this is a power and inherent human quality which cannot be taken from us.
Who so ever refuses to submit becomes Unconquered, and is free.
Among the many nuanced meanings of Independence Day, this remains among them, and it is why we celebrate our Liberty and all who have waged revolution to win it for us.
As we celebrate Independence Day, I offer you a meditation on the contradictions of power, the frailty of order, the illusion of authority, the relativity of truth and the falsification of history in service to power and authority in the form of a story, originally written as a demonstration of Gogol’s method of creating symbols and referential to Ionesco, Kafka, and Akutagawa.
It also contains a true retelling from my family history of a decisive moment when the fate of humankind hung in the balance, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas of 1776, as related to me by my father and to him from his before from the witness of my ancestor Henry Lale who fought at Washington’s side here and in the great Forlorn Hope for a free society of equals that is our nation.
A Declaration of Liberty
I woke that fateful morning, ready to join the other rhinoceroses on the parade ground, when fussing with the shiny bits on my uniform I chanced to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and to my horror discovered that my horn had gone missing.
It was a magnificent horn, a horn of vainglorious strutting, of midnight blue and royal purple like the stains of grandeur and of marvelous sins. In its place was this soft monkey nose, useless in butting heads; worse, someone might think it funny, and I’d have to bring the pain- but how to maintain order without a horn?
It was all the fault of the Devil Weed I had consumed the night before, in an excess of drunken salute to one of the original members of my command, lost in a nameless action in a fight for freedom the world will never know the true history of. Even his name is unknown, an identity assigned upon enlistment; we are the night watch, who hold an invisible line that others may sleep and live in happy ignorance of the chaos and the thousands of myriads of relentless existential threats which surround us.
Throughout much of my life my nation has been the man to my left and the man to my right, fellow bearers of secrets; maybe I’ve been wrong about that.
As to the Devil Weed, it was grown from magic seeds, seeds of transformation, change, and renewal handed down, planted & re-harvested every few years, from the hand of George Washington to an ancestor of mine as payment for a wager just after crossing the Delaware on Christmas of 1776 under cover of night and a storm.
Washington had said, “We’ve eaten all the dogs, burned all the wood, and my balls are frozen to my last bit of lead shot. We can’t cross against the ice floes, and if we stay on this side of the river we die and the Revolution dies with us.”
And Henry my ancestor said “If you go I’m coming with you, but who will come with us? Do these men have another fight in them? Frozen, starving, too many barefoot in the snow, with one man in three in hospital and unfit for duty? Whoever isn’t drowned or crushed by the ice landing a ten mile night march through a storm to the enemy, and then an attack on a fortified garrison with neither powder nor ammunition? I’ll bet you we can’t cross that river and survive, and I’ll buy a night at the best whorehouse in Philadelphia for the whole army if you can pull that off.”
Everything became still as the attention of the whole camp was riveted.
Washington stood, naked but for a red blanket he had wrapped about himself like a toga, and for long moments met the eyes of his men. “Done, and I’ll give you and every man with us a pouch of George’s Own Devil Weed if we live to celebrate. Starved, frozen, and down to the last bullet, I’ll still take that bet. We are Americans.
We are no longer ragged misfits and outcasts begging scraps from our masters feet like dogs; from this moment forward we are not colonists divided against each other by a distant empire but Americans united in our Liberty.”
There were cheers, but not yet a race to the boats. They really were starving and frozen, and for many the coming fight would be down to the knife and tomahawk. So Washington put in his set of false teeth, the pointy cannibal ones made by the Indians he once lived among who taught him how to fight and how to lead. He grinned his terrible grin, and said, “Imagine the Hessians at Trenton, eating and drinking their way through winter with storehouses full of everything we need, firewood, food, fine boots and woolen uniforms, guns and powder, all waiting for men bold enough to take them. Warm they are, with fat goose and roast beast. I’m coming to dinner with the enemy. Who’s coming with me?”
And they rose cheering, and followed him into folly and into glory. Victory or Death, Washington’s password at the Battle of Trenton, became our family motto ever after; certainly it described the conditions of the fight, of the Revolution, and of the fragile nature of Liberty and America.
The American Revolution was an anticolonial struggle which overthrew the system of aristocratic privilege and monarchy, in which some of us are better than others by condition of birth. With all our faults, this is something we may celebrate still.
But there were other stories, things no one made a heroic painting of to hang in a national gallery, both of our origins and throughout our history. Sometimes because the cover story is so much better than the truth, as with the abominable and tragic fate of Amelia Earhart, cannibalized within hours of her island’s liberation by her captors after some eight years of unspeakable depravities; and sometimes because the truth is ambiguous and a relativistic multiplicity which depends on who’s telling it, a Rashomon Gate which transforms us as we go through.
Liberate the Dominican Republic with only a printing press, a radio station, and an airplane to drop leaflets, with the loss of a single foreign national and no American casualties, weighed against the countless deaths of the landing at Inchon? Wonderful. But who can really claim a monster like Trujillo as a friend, as we had for decades before?
Often it is also horrible, something necessary to survival which betrays the ideals and goals we work to achieve and protect, an accommodation with evil. And it is this last category of secrets which provides leverage for our enemies, propagating outward across time like the leprous tracks of an invisible and malign corruption.
Our lives have reflected one another, Henry and I, the revolutionary and the secret agent, as in a dark mirror. We cannot escape each other.
My ancestor helped win the Revolutionary War and create America; I helped bear the message of that Revolution to unknown shores as a Promethean fire and seeds of transformation, among many other things. The dream of America; a free society of equals, Liberty, Equality, Truth, and Justice, a firewall against tyranny and fascism, a new idea of humankind in which no one is better than any other by reason of birth and the age of inequalities is ended, free from colonialism and empires, from slavery and identitarian nationalisms of blood, faith, and soil, and all the kings and tyrants toppled from their thrones. All too often revolutionary struggle has been corruptive of its own ideals, heroes become tyrants, and Liberation become imperial conquest.
The American Revolution, an anti-colonial struggle against an Empire and the system of aristocracy, and the tidal wave of revolutionary struggle it unleashed to reimagine and transform the world and human being, meaning, and value in thousands of myriads of mutinies and rebellions of the new Humanist order against the old Authoritarian paradigm, in every corner of the earth and among all its peoples, a glorious Liberation of the infinite possibilities of becoming human. None of these things happened in the way you have been told.
If I could go back to the beginnings of things, to the Original Lie that founded America and the consequences and events that tipped the balance of the world toward fascism, the equality of all human beings and the glorious revolution against ideas of aristocracy which failed to free the slaves or to liberate us from systems of oppression and unequal power other than monarchy and colonial bondage to a foreign empire, could all the wrongs that came after be redressed? Could we win back our freedom, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, redeem the promise of a free society of equals, and relight the torch of Liberty?
So I scribbled a note retiring my captaincy in the Deniable Forces of the secret police, stepping through the mirror into the monkey world and transforming as I had so many times before, though never before alone.
I had some wrongs to put right.
And here are some thoughts of mine on the subject of Liberty; Manifesto for Bearers of the Torch of Liberty:
To all those who like myself prefer to run amok and be ungovernable to the alternative of submission to authority, who align on the side of Prometheus, rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses, I offer here a manifesto for bearers of the Torch of Liberty.
As I wrote in my post of March 28 2019, in the wake of the Christchurch white supremacist terror and the direct threat of a copycat atrocity against our local mosque here in Spokane; I’ve thought about the origins of evil, of violence and power in the relationships between fear, anger, hate, and other negative emotions as illnesses, for a long time now and in many roles and contexts.
Here are some things I have learned:
First, the process by which violence operates as a system is the same for all spheres of action and levels of scale; within personal and social contexts and in intimate relationships and families as well as nations and historical civilizations.
The precondition of violence as hate crime, and of both tyranny and terror,
is overwhelming and generalized fear as shaped by submission to authority.
Structures and figures of authorized power feed on fear and hate, grow stronger by the cycle of power and violence and the negative emotions and forces of darkness to which they give form and through which they subjugate others.
We must question, expose, mock, and challenge authority whenever it comes to claim us. These are the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen.
Victory or Death; so said George Washington at the Battle of Trenton of the Revolution against tyranny and the idea that some persons are by right of birth better than others.
Victory or Death; so must we ever answer tyrants and those who would enslave us.
Let us be unconquered, masterless, and free; let us answer tyranny with resistance, control with anarchy and civil disobedience, conformity with transgression, and division with solidarity.
Let us answer hate with love and fear with our faith in each other; let us reach out across our boundaries and become better than we now are, let us join together and break the chain of lies which binds us through our most atavistic passions to enslavement by authority and addiction to power.
Let us dethrone authority and abandon power over others for an empowered self-ownership of identity; that we may reinvent how to be human as autonomous individuals, through and for one another in glorious diversity, democracy, and a free society of equals.
Let us be Bringers of Chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.
As I wrote in my journal of May 29 2023, This Memorial Day, Let Us Send No Armies to Enforce Virtue, But to Liberate Only; We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial Day, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars including the First and Second World Wars and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and World War Three ongoing now, and countless others.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate-Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine last year, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
So I wrote two years ago, when I still hoped for a Restoration of America. But much has changed.
We now face near certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an age of civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. As a teenager sorting the primary trauma of my death on Bloody Thursday, March 15 1969 People’s Park Berkeley, when I was hurled from my body by the force wave a police grenade and beheld myriads of possible futures as I stood outside of time, I calculated the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred; as of now we have passed a point of no return. I cannot foresee any chance of the survival of democracy nor of humankind beyond the next thousand years. We fight now, like the Romani who rebelled at Auschwitz, only to choose the manner of our deaths. I will not go quietly.
The question now is whether all that we have lived and dreamed, we humans will be utterly erased and become nothing or if something like ourselves will one day discover the ruins of our civilization, and begin to wonder and to question.
But I could be wrong, and unable to envision possibilities which may still save us. For this chance we must resist, and unite in solidarity against our dehumanization by those who would enslave us.
Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom. But every act of Resistance lets us claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, if only for a time.
We fight now not to defeat the enemy, for our annihilation is as certain as that of the Old Gods before the tide of the Giants of Frost and Old Night when entropy swallows the universe, but to remain Unconquered; like Jacob wrestling the angel in defiance of unstoppable forces or Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea fighting to the last. For this is our victory, this refusal to submit, a victory of the human among endless chasms of the Abyss, and it cannot be taken from us.
The American Revolution is an ongoing process, not only an event of two and a half centuries ago but also occurring now, and without end. This is the America I believe in and fight for; one which ceaselessly adapts, changes boundaries into interfaces, and exalts our humanity.
Where do we find ourselves now, in this moment of decision and constellation of Rashomon Gate Events which converge upon us? How did we arrive here, at the Gates of Auschwitz with the evil leering clown Trump bearing the key? And how might we unwind this fate?
In America we have tracked and for a brief time brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies, and those which remain have abandoned our universal human rights in complicity with Israel in the genocide of the Palestinians. Here appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. Ukraine and Palestine are tests of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe and the fall of civilization, a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
On this Fourth of July, which finds us prisoners of a captured state led by a mad idiot traitor, Nazi revivalist, Rapist In Chief, and Russian agent whose mission is the subversion of democracy and the dismantling of the institutions of our common welfare, figurehead of a Fourth Reich of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and bankrolled by plutocrats who wish to destroy our capacity for mercy, fracture our solidarity as a Band of Brothers and our duty of care for each other, degrade our humanity, enslave us, and turn us into commodities in service to their wealth and power in parallel with the Fourth Reich’s theft of our citizenship and transformation into subjects rather than co owners of the state, I think now of my family motto, Victory or Death, Washington’s password during the Battle of Trenton which followed the Crossing of the Delaware.
We began thus, in a desperate gamble to seize the future, which found reflection in the landing at Normandy on D Day to liberate the world from Nazi tyranny in the most terrible war the world has ever known, a war to define our humanity and who has the power to do so, a war for the future possibilities of becoming human. And we find ourselves here again.
We inhabit this space at all times, at the Gate of Decision; for this is what it means to be human.
I close my interrogation of America and the legacies of our history with a reference to the line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar underlined by Nelson Mandela at Robbin Island to authorize direct action against the Apartheid regime, in circumstances and imposed conditions of struggle very like those we face now in America and much of the world, which we must meet with seizure of power and revolutionary struggle against state tyranny and terror and systems of oppression.
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Victory or Death: Washington Crosses the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, 1851.
The future to which Trump has led us; The Gates of Auschwitz.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness and belonging, you always end up at the Gates of Auschwitz.
But we are not fated to enter here, and as Dante warns us at the Gates of Hell to Abandon Hope. We can Resist, and in so doing choose differently.
Joy to balance the terror of our nothingness:
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers – I Won’t Back Down (Official Music Video)
Here is the book that reminded me who we are, we Americans, and what’s worth fighting for;
This day as I putter about the gardens of my place of refuge, a cottage on a hill which I call Dollhouse Park, in the shadows of state terror and tyranny as Congress deliberates on the Big Bill which will enact the most massive transfer of wealth from public to private hands in all of history, grant our President the powers of a king, and fund a white supremacist program of ethnic cleansing which echoes that of Nazi Germany, the meaning of the Fourth of July and America has become a ground of struggle and negotiated truths in chiaroscuro with lies and illusions. Truly, we wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors.
Our Fourth of July celebrations honor the founding of America as a free society of equals, a Revolution in which my direct ancestors Henry Lale and his wife Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee both fought, these past days having made mischief for tyrants in Hong Kong and in June of 2023 founded the Marseille Autonomous Zone and its networks of alliance in liberation struggle to reclaim the ideals of the French Revolution of 1790 as established by the heroic Robespierre, and of the French Resistance of the Second World War in which I claim membership through the Oath of the Resistance given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut 1982. In all of this maelstrom of history and identity I dream of the glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone on the anniversary of its collapse, first of a global system of such frontiers of human being and imagination beyond all laws and all limits as a United Humankind.
Such are my hopes and dreams for our possibilities of becoming human. Though we face myriads of existential threats both to our species and to our civilization as democracy and the Rights of Man, we may yet emerge from the darkness of our history and the atavisms of instinct which bind us to the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as systems of addiction, tyranny, commodification, falsification, and dehumanization.
May we dream better futures than we have the past, whose legacies of unequal power we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail.
To win such a future, we need not only our dreams as poetic vision, reimagination, and transformation; we must resist subjugation by carceral states of force and control where and whenever they may arise and in whatever forms.
I believe this capacity to refuse to submit lives within us all as a defining quality of being human, and as an inherent power which cannot be taken from us.
We may each of us say with Rachel Platten in her wonderful Fight Song; “I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me.”
“Like a small boat on the ocean
Sending big waves into motion
Like how a single word
Can make a heart open
I might only have one match
But I can make an explosion
And all those things I didn’t say
Wrecking balls inside my brain
I will scream them loud tonight
Can you hear my voice?
This time this is my fight song
Take back my life song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my fight song
And I don’t really care
If nobody else believes
‘Cause I’ve still got
A lot of fight left in me
Losing friends and I’m chasing sleep
Everybody’s worried about me
In too deep they say I’m in too deep
And it’s been two years
I miss my home
But there’s a fire burning in my bones
I still believe, yeah I still believe
And all those things I didn’t say
Wrecking balls inside my brain
I will scream them loud tonight
Can you hear my voice?
This time this is my fight song
Take back my life song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my fight song
And I don’t really care
If nobody else believes
‘Cause I’ve still got
A lot of fight left in me
A lot of fight left In me
Like a small boat on the ocean
Sending big waves into motion
Like how a single word
Can make a heart open
I might only have one match
But I can make an explosion
This is my fight song
Take back my life song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
(I’ll be strong)
I’ll play my fight song
And I don’t really care
If nobody else believes
‘Cause I’ve still got
A lot of fight left in me
Now I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me”
As I wrote in my post of July 2 2020, Our Autonomous Zone is Now Everywhere; These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being and meaning, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
As the bureaucrats of official pomposity and obstruction return to City Hall and the minions of state terror with their sad weapons of fear and pain again set up shop in the Police Precinct, they do so chastened by the exposure of their wickedness and inhumanity and disempowered by our seizure of their domain. The people’s occupation of their citadels of power has been a magician’s trick which reveals the emptiness of their claims to own and control our lives, and like Dorothy’s exposure of the wizard as a humbug this authority cannot be reclaimed once it has been revealed as a lie.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We have questioned, mocked, challenged, exposed, and deflated authority; we now abandon these useless and meaningless monuments of force and control in victory and in triumph, and venture forth into the world to tilt against its windmills that might be giants and liberate humankind.
Our Autonomous Zones are now everywhere.
Each of us who resists tyranny becomes a Living Autonomous Zone. The liberation of Seattle has served its purpose in demonstration of the principle of democracy as co-ownership of the state, and of its institutions as public spaces and instruments of our will, by the people. City Halls and Police Precincts are symbols of this power which we have lent the state, and that power may be reclaimed at any time they cease to represent and serve us.
When the state has lost its legitimacy through use of repressive and illegal force and control such as perpetrated against the protests for equality and racial justice, we the people must resist and reform our government as a free society of equals. In both America and throughout the world, this remains to be achieved.
Keep the dream of Liberty alive; Resist and be free.
Rachel Platten – Fight Song (Official Video)
Here are my journals of the Seattle Autonomous Zone:
June 8 2023 Anniversary of the Liberation of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and the Birth of a Global Autonomous Zones Movement
Three years ago today we launched the Seattle Autonomous Zone, among the greatest experiments in liberty the world has seen since the glorious utopias of our forbearers in history; the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party and American labor movements founded in the communes of the Seattle coast over a century ago, the Paris Commune, the First International of Bakunin, Proudhon, and Marx, and the French and American Revolutions which radically transformed the possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals. We seized and held from those who would enslave us and their police forces of tyranny and state terror six blocks of Capitol Hill.
This epochal moment of liberation and triumph over systems of control and dehumanization is for myself shadowed today by the joy of the Indictment of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, for theft of state secrets exactly like Snowden and many others, not to expose its evils but for profit, secrets he intended to use as blackmail leverage against our nation and as self-aggrandizement props in his pathetic attempt to retain power as a king in exile, a Defining Moment of Reckoning which only just begins now, and the public celebrations of the death of Pat Robertson, fascist apologist who captured the Republican Party in 1980 and opened the door to the crimes against humanity of the Reagan era, the advent of the American Fourth Reich, and the Mayan Genocide perpetrated by his protégé Rios Montt in Guatemala as the most horrific and evil of the consequences of the capture of the state by Gideonite fundamentalist theocracy. Today my joy is made ambiguous by the death of George Winston, greatest pianist since Rachmaninoff and most innovative musician of the late twentieth century after Kitaro, whose songs speak to me of great sadness, loss, and loneliness, the terror of our nothingness and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
But here I wish to honor and balance the darkness with the beauty and transcendent joy of the birth of the Autonomous Zones in Seattle.
These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
Within a fleeting moment of joy Autonomous Zones sprang up in Washington DC encircling the White House, Portland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Austin, and throughout the fifty cities across America where the Black Lives Matter protests had taken control from the government through mass action, and then throughout the world as the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Franz Fanon named the Wretched of the Earth arose in solidarity and for a glorious moment spoke to Authority with one voice, a voice that said; We refuse to submit, and we are free.
As I had printed at the time on the paper currency I distributed bearing the legend “Good for Nothing” on one side and “Good for Everything” on the reverse, with the following lines:
On the one side; “Good for Nothing; Tyranny.
Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.”
On the other side; “Good for Everything; Liberty.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.”
So I wrote at the dawn of our Brave New World, which sought to liberate humankind from our addiction to power and our subjugation to authority and carceral states. Here I do not refer to the great novel by Aldous Huxley, dark mirror of this source, but to Miranda’s line in The Tempest; “O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
For it was a thing of beauty, for a time, until it was consumed by its reflected image, fear and force as is common to both criminals and carceral states as embodied violence, the great lie that in the absence of law and restraining force the most brutal and opportunistic becomes king. In Seattle the Autonomous Zone collapsed because it refused to seize power and misread the use of social force in revolutionary struggle as morally equivalent to the use of force in repression of dissent by those who would enslave us.
It’s a mistake Lenin could’ve warned us about, had anyone been listening, and it’s a mistake we won’t be making again. None of the other Autonomous Zones have ever been retaken by the state; the abolition of the use of social force and of formal authority as states remains our common goal, but this does not mean we surrender our universal human rights nor our solidarity and duty of care for others.
The first thing a successful revolution needs, once it has seized power and the tyrants have been cast down from their thrones, is a Committee of Public Safety like that of France in 1793 to defend the people and meet their material needs for food, medical care, and such. Second comes institutions and systems for preventing the centralization of authority as tyranny, for the leveling of unequal power as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, for ongoing struggle against social hierarchies and divisions and against fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. We can only abandon the social use of force to the degree we are free from its threat ourselves; this is an imposed condition of revolutionary struggle and not a moral dilemma.
Why did the Seattle Autonomous Zone, the first of many throughout the world, fall when others have not?
First because it was a seizure of territory and the police station and government buildings as symbols, which means ground that must be defended, rather than mobile and temporary zones which can be abandoned and reestablished anywhere at any time, by networks of people who are Living Autonomous Zones. As soon as you need a barricade, a checkpoint, a border of any kind, you are fighting the wrong kind of war.
And we had enemies who were immensely powerful and utterly ruthless, willing to commit any depravity to subjugate and re-enslave us through learned helplessness and terror.
Deniable assets of the Fourth Reich under the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf were sent against us both as infiltration agents, spies and provocateurs, and as elite counterinsurgency forces in raids and acts of random wickedness to sow confusion, mistrust, and terror, and to provoke the police, seize the narrative, and manufacture a casus belli for Occupation.
Looking back from the distance of three years, in which I and others have traveled the world establishing networks of Autonomous Zones, and being case zero of a global alliance of Autonomous Zones as a United Humankind which abandons the use of social force and a stateless successor to the United Nations and which offers a way of living together without nations or borders, without war or laws, without police or prisons, without unequal power as patriarchy or racism, without masters or slaves; as I contemplate all of this unfolding of world-historical forces and dialectical processes it occurs to me that the history of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and of the global Autonomous Zones merits being written, especially by those who lived it.
To such ends I will be sharing my journals of the time, and questioning its meaning, and I ask anyone who was there to do the same, to write of your lived experiences and share them with us all here in this public forum as a witness of history.
Memory, history, identity; are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
At the time of their origins on this day three years ago I was thinking of our Autonomous Zones as a globalized quest of the Merry Pranksters and others who formed the tribal elders of my childhood, especially as written in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s novelization of the great trek on the bus Furthur in 1964 to enlighten humankind with Dionysian rituals of music and ecstasy through free love and LSD.
A dialectics of parallel and interdependent forces and themes is revealed in Ken Kesey’s documentary film of the iconic journey of 1964 which launched the psychedelic movement and catalyzed the whole counterculture that was to come, Magic Trip, and of the Autonomous Zones as well; the political and social mission to bring the Chaos, disrupt and destabilize order, perform change and mock authority for the purpose of delegitimation as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, what Foucault called parrhesia in the lectures I attended in 1983 at the University of Berkeley, and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value through poetic vision and ecstatic trance, an extension of Surrealism which appropriated its methods and iconography in the quest for transcendence through dreams and exaltation through transgression.
Here as living Autonomous Zones and bearers of visions of liberty as seeds of change we tilt at the windmills which might be giants to break the mould of man and become free and self created beings.
Magic Trip film: Ken Kesey’s documentary of the trip
June 11 2023 Remembering the Glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone
Strange and unknown remains the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the future, for it is a thing of relative and ambiguous truths, ephemeral and in constant motion and processes of change, and limitless possibilities of becoming. “An undiscovered country whose bourne no travelers return—puzzles the will”, as the line in Hamlet goes, in reference to death and what may lie beyond the limits of human being and knowing.
But it applies equally to the myriads of futures from which we must choose, shaped by our histories and systems of being human together as imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and by our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
The emergence of the Autonomous Zones as a spontaneous adaptation to universal conditions of unequal power and brutal repression by carceral states was in part an echo and reflection of the Occupy Movement which began in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 2011; by October nearly a thousand cities in 82 nations and in 600 American communities has ongoing and sustained sister protests and Occupy movements. The Black Lives Matter movement began in July of 2013 in protest against the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and in 2020 with the death of George Floyd ignited the Summer of Fire; some 26 million Americans joined protests in 200 cities, joined by sister protests in two thousand cities in sixty nations. The Autonomous Zones were a prodigy of the harmonic convergence of these two global movements of social justice, as shaped by influences of the #metoo antipatriarchal movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike and other global ecological movements.
In the Autonomous Zones global protest movements against white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, tyranny and state terror both as democracy movements and as the police abolition movement, recombined and integrated as an agenda of revolutionary struggle against systems of unequal power.
And as we brought a Reckoning for systemic evils, epigenetic trauma, and the legacies of our histories, we also sought to launch humankind on a total revisioning of our being, meaning, and value, and the reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Here is a journal entry of mine speaking as a witness of history to that time of revolutionary struggle and liberation; as I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance becomes Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty are also become a Living Autonomous Zone, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
The people of Seattle have answered brutal repression and police violence, an attempt to break the rebellion against racial injustice and hate crime enacted by the police throughout America and the world led by Trump and his white supremacist terrorists both within the police as a fifth column and operating in coordination with deniable forces like the gun-toting militias now visible everywhere, by storming the citadel of city government with waves of thousands of citizens demanding the right to life regardless of the color of our skin.
The people have seized control of six city blocks, including the police precinct and City Hall, and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a name which rings with history and reflects the Paris Commune and the Italian Anarcho-Syndicalists of the 1920s, Rojava in Syria and Exarcheia in Athens, but was directly modeled on the ideals, methods, and instruments of the Occupy Movement founded in New York’s Wall Street.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
When the people have reclaimed the government of which they are co-owners and this new phase of protest, a movement to occupy City Hall in defiance of tyranny, has seized every seat of power in the nation and restored democracy to America, we can begin the reforging of our society on the foundation of equality and racial justice, and of our universal human rights.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by the Fourth Reich.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As written by Kate Yoder in Salon; “The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novel — a book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but it’s all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.
Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. It’s a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a “no cop co-op” giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a former Sheraton hotel into a “sanctuary” offering free food and hotel rooms — until they got evicted.
“We’re seeing a new resurgence of utopianism,” said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.
Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that they’re living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create “the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions” of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Deal — the climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.
Based on President Donald Trump’s tweets about Seattle’s CHOP (or Fox News websites’ photoshopped coverage of the protest) you’d picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like people sitting around in a park, screening movies like “13th,” and making art. It’s a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protesters’ demands include abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.
“The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection — it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweeted last week.
The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.
A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the “Seattle Police Department” into the “Seattle People Department” with a bit of spraypaint.
The CHAZ follows a long history of anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. The Paris Commune canceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in “The Bloody Week.” Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.
In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them a new vocabulary — the “99 percent” and “1 percent” — and its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the priorities of the Democratic Party.
Alberro compared Seattle’s CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of many ZADs (zones à défendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problems — capitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). “The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds,” Alberro said, “but also to physically halt present forces of destruction” — whether that’s an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.
Seattle has a lengthy history of occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to the Seattle General Strike in the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (now El Centro de la Raza).
And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an “ideal place” to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the book “Ecotopia,” published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green society — complete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains! — formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movement’s focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.
Ecotopia isn’t exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent “Soul City.” Still, it’s apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many “radical” environmental protesters for her research, and most of them haven’t read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly “word for word” when describing the changes they want to see in the world.
Though Seattle’s protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. “Many activists would argue that it’s all part of the same struggle,” she said, arguing that people can’t successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. “There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often don’t come into contact with one another.”
And in the words of those who lived it as interviewed and written by Shane Burley in ROAR and republished by Black Rose Anarchist Federation; “Over the past few weeks we have witnessed one of the largest uprisings in recent US history. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, brought millions of people in the US and around the world out into the streets in aggressive demonstrations. In cities across the country, police precincts were set on fire, corporate stores looted, and as the police turned their sights on the protests, the numbers only grew.
In Seattle, Washington, confrontations with protesters in a gentrified part of the city known as Capitol Hill led to law enforcement’s retreat from their office. Organizers and community members advanced on the area and transformed this eight-block segment of the neighborhood into a collective space, which they soon called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
The CHAZ has become the focus of right-wing rage, from the media to the president, as they intimate that this is a terrorist operation controlled by brutal anarchist cells. Photos, videos, testimonies from the inside the CHAZ paint a very different picture, communicating something closer to other occupations (Occupy movement?) where people moved from simple protests to experimenting in living differently.
Hundreds of people are putting in the labor to keep things like a medical clinic, a café, concerts and speakers, a community garden, and other resources into a stable infrastructure of mutual aid. They have done so with the support of local organizations and even businesses. Now the CHAZ is hitting a point where they are building for the future, discussing differences in direction and priorities, and how they are going to navigate the negotiation between immediate reforms and more revolutionary aims.
I spoke with two organizers of the CHAZ about what drew them there, how it has been working, and where they hope to go with the project. Both are using pseudonyms, one going by Officer CHAZ (OCHAZ) and the other going by Frank Ascaso (FA), who also organizes with the Black Rose / Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation. These organizers were interviewed separately from one another and were combined here into one conversation.
We’re in one of the largest rebellions in the last fifty years. How did you get involved in the demonstrations and the autonomous project that became the CHAZ?
OCHAZ: It’s been a long road to the breaking point. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths really pushed us over the edge this time. I knew I could no longer live with myself if I remained silent and complacent. I became infused with a burning desire to take action, so I rushed to the front lines of the protest marches in Seattle at the earliest opportunity. It was the least I could do, but quite literally a step in the right direction. Everybody’s got a unique story to tell about their journey to Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but for me, it was the ecstasy of finally taking a firm stand against systemic oppression. That feeling became such an intense high, that I never wanted to come down. I am addicted to justice, and it’s one drug that I will never give up.
FA: Networks of activists and organizers here in Seattle had been having discussions as Minneapolis and other cities had ignited in protests and riots. There’s a long history of anti-police organizing here with movements to block the expansion of a youth detention center and a so-called “police bunker,” an expansion to a police facility in the northern part of the city. So in those networks people started talking about what we could do here in solidarity with Minneapolis. So people started planning protests for that weekend. And a whole bunch of various groups, from anarchists to church and pacifist groups to the anti-police coalitions, started planning their own thing. The first weekend of protest there were a half dozen different calls to action, and that’s when the riots started here as well. So that’s when I showed up, in those early days.
How does the CHAZ coordinate with the rest of the city’s protest movement?
FA: I would say they are a piece of it, but I would not call it the center [of the movement]. This moment around Black lives is incredible and every group is taking pretty dramatic action. And I would say that is continuing. There are non-profit groups leading marches, there are church groups leading marches, there’s the anti-prison and abolition groups leading marches, and a lot of those are happening outside the space. They were happening before and they were using their own infrastructure and resources to make them happen, and that is still happening.
For example, there was recently a march of 60,000 people between two of the largest parks in Seattle, which, from what I could tell, had little connection to the CHAZ. There was also a children’s march, which seemed to have little connection to the CHAZ. That said, there are things being planned in the autonomous space. So, for example, last night (June 14) I participated in a protest that marched out of the autonomous zone, a Black Lives Matter march, to challenge the police and occupy streets elsewhere. People are planning things from the autonomous space too, but this moment is so dramatic and diverse that lots of things are happening outside of it too.
What was the process by which the zone was first opened up and established? What were the protests like before its formation?
OCHAZ: As with any social movement, it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact origin. The events leading up to the formation of CHAZ have been so surreal and chaotic at times that I’m not sure whether I’ll ever fully understand what happened to get us here. But I want it to be clear that the “Regime” [CHAZ-lingo for the Seattle Police Department] struck first. They’ve been killing us for decades. For as long as we can remember, the people of Capitol Hill have begged the City Council to clean up their mess, but they never listen. They’re too busy sucking Jeff Bezos’s dick to even glance at us. Our so-called political “leaders” will never miss a wink of sleep over the dead bodies of marginalized folks piling up in the streets, so now we’re going to give them something to really lose sleep over.
But even when we protested “the right way,” by peacefully marching, did they listen then? No. They sent their Seattle Police Department (SPD) goon squad after us, treated us like we were criminals—worse than criminals, because at least criminals get a trial. We were more like animals to them. During the march, I watched as dozens of my comrades were brutalized by riot police, simply for demanding reform and racial equity. We tried safe civil disobedience, but the “good ol’ boys” at the SPD never let us down when it comes to the level of violence we’ve come to expect from them.
FA: There had been a week and a half of steady confrontations in that space. Every day from maybe six or seven o’clock in the evening to midnight or one in the morning, pretty regular confrontations. People were pretty exhausted, actually, by the time the police withdrew from that space. Definitely, lots of people showed up that night, but a lot of folks went home early. So when the declaration of the autonomous zone came out after midnight, a lot of people were not there for the evening — I wasn’t there either.
How did the crowd take the space?
OCHAZ: There wasn’t any particular tactic or method, we just… took it. It was ours anyway, as far as we were concerned. Putting up those barriers just felt like the most natural thing we could ever do to protect ourselves. When shit hit the fan at the protest, we switched to auto-pilot, no thought required, just the pure energy of the crowd directing our concentrated motion. We moved as a unit, as if we all shared the same body and mind in the heat of that moment.
The last thing I remember was facing off against the cops down on Pine Street. Recalling the black bloc tactic, we used our bodies to create a wall, but I never expected one of them to run around and sucker-punch my good pal, Dikembe, who was standing off to the side. “Big D” wasn’t even part of our bloc, just an innocent bystander, and that was the last straw for me. I snapped. I knew the bloc needed me, but D was in trouble. I couldn’t desert him even if it meant putting my own safety at risk. I basically blacked out in rage at that point, and when I came to, I was waking up in CHAZ.
All I know is that our group had rushed the line and eventually took the East Precinct. The cops got pushed back, and our barriers went up. My boy Dikembe was injured pretty bad, but that didn’t stop him from spraying the first of many tags at the border crossing in bright bold letters for the whole world to see: “CHAZ.” To the cops, that tag was a threat to back off. To us, it meant freedom.
FA: That whole day was so weird. There had been clashes with the police every night. The mayor promised not to use tear gas, but the very next night the police used tear gas anyway. The day after that, someone got shot, and the following day the police withdrew. They made this dramatic announcement in the afternoon with the police chief saying they were going to withdraw from the East Precinct.
I think there was a lot of anxiety and confusion about what to do. There was some kind of speculation that the police were withdrawing as a set-up to have people attack the precinct and break windows or burn it down so the police would have an excuse to say how bad the protesters were. This was a rumor. That evening when people got to the space, they got right up to the building and there was hesitation about doing anything. People weren’t sure, “what should we do? Do we attack it? Do we just keep the protest in the space?” And those conversations were going on throughout that day and into the night.
Then there were rumors that Proud Boys were in the area, also totally unconfirmed and probably untrue. So then people were thinking about maybe defending the space. What if other fascists come to attack the space? And my understanding is that out of those conversations came to declare an autonomous zone.
What is the idea behind the CHAZ? What is an “autonomous zone?”
FA: Autonomous zones have a long history, likely going back to the Paris Commune in which the French government refused to defend the city against a Prussian siege, a foreign siege. The people of Paris just kind of took over the mechanisms of the city and thought “we can run this better in our own interests. It turns out we don’t need you protecting us, we can take care of ourselves perfectly fine.” And they sort of restructured the city on a radically new democratic principle, a much more directly democratic form of organization.
And since then there have been a whole series of similar popular democratic actions to reclaim space and infrastructure. To run it in the interests of people instead of the police, business or military. So I see this as part of that tradition and a part of that lineage. And one of the things that is most beautiful about this space is that it is such a clear message in this moment when police can literally not stop killing people in the streets.
This past weekend there was just another Black person killed by the police in Atlanta. The autonomous zone is saying “Hey, it turns out we actually don’t need you. We can run our neighborhoods safely without policing. We can run them in much more humane interests without policing.” That political message is pretty clear and pretty strong out of this particular occupation.
OCHAZ: CHAZ is living proof that a world without police is possible. When we say, “Defund the police,” we mean exactly what that sounds like. Cops only create more problems than they try to solve. Especially for undocumented immigrants, BIPOC, WOC, trans, queer and other marginalized communities who simply do not have the privilege of being protected when they call the police for help (or when the police are called on them by some tone-deaf “Karen,” you know the type).
For us marginalized folks, any minor interaction with the police can be a death sentence. CHAZ is the antidote to all that. Our emphasis on restoration over retribution is a major part of the guiding ethos and driving force behind CHAZ. “Autonomous” to us means autonomy from the SPD’s boot on our collective neck. We don’t need the police, because we look out for each other instead. Call it what you want: a collective, a cooperative, a commune. Above of all, CHAZ is a family.
What is day-to-day life like there right now? Is it just a protest space, or are you rebuilding everyday community structures?
FA: It’s pretty interesting because the first day after the autonomous zone was declared there was almost no infrastructure in place yet. I think the call surprised a lot of people. In the next couple of days, hundreds of people came to start and set those up. Now the space feels like a sort of city within the city. It’s got a medical station. It’s got a pretty sophisticated and abundant food distribution. It has community check-ins around disputes and disturbances. It’s got a discussion space; a café space called “the decolonial café.” A community garden, informational tents, and informational sessions with free literature, nightly film screenings and a band stand with nightly performances from different bands.
So there is a ton of activity going on there, and the space itself feels very vibrant and exciting. It does feel like a festival of resistance. And people can plug into movement spaces and have organizing conversations and plan the next action. Or they can think about how to design the garden and the purpose of a community garden, things like that. To me it’s pretty incredible.
In the first few days there was no structure, by the end of the first week people initiated a general assembly model in the middle of the afternoon. The first one was more like a “speak-out,” people talking about their experiences and processing a lot of stuff. A lot of trauma from the police violence of the previous weeks. Black voices were highlighted in their day-to-day struggles with the police. After that the general assembly turned into a “working group” model with report-backs, breaking away to work on things like logistics and then coming back to the space.
I don’t know if they have been able to make any collective decisions and I don’t know if they really have a process for that, whether it is voting, majority voting, or consensus. But it is definitely a space for the whole zone to talk to each other.
OCHAZ: Well it’s certainly nothing like the way it’s portrayed on right-wing propaganda channels like Fox News. We don’t have guarded “checkpoints,” or any of that rubbish. Our borders are open to anyone who stands in solidarity with Black lives, and anyone who seeks safety and refuge from police harassment. Some people drive into CHAZ from out of state to lend a helping hand, while others live and work completely within the boundary. Everyone who comes here with an open mind sees a flourishing environment filled with boundless love.
It feels like walking through a lucid dream 24 hours a day. We use the park to host recreational activities, such as free movie nights, stand-up comedy shows and dance parties. We have local farmers growing crops, artists painting murals to raise social awareness and wholesome activities for kids and families. There are friendly faces everywhere, like our resident 63-year-old street musician, “Papa Jacoby,” who teaches authentic West African djembe music with a focus on cultural sensitivity.
Everybody is having a lot of fun in CHAZ, but we also can’t forget why we are here and who we are fighting for. That’s why we make sure to hold regular classes on the history of racism, strategies for decolonization and the destructive legacy of whiteness. We’re working hard to unlearn systems of racism, and create a place in CHAZ where for once in the history of America, white folks take a back seat to make room for the unheard voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples.
Everywhere you look in CHAZ, you will find a vibrant, thriving community where every citizen understands that Black Lives Matter, and they mean it with all their hearts. I’ve never seen something so beautiful that it actually makes me cry, but that pretty much sums up CHAZ for you.
How are mutual aid projects supporting the Zone to continue?
OCHAZ: Robust mutual aid programs are key to CHAZ’s success, as well as harm reduction methodologies wherever possible. The people organize themselves around community needs. Our “No-cop co-op” doesn’t accept any cash — anything a citizen of CHAZ needs is provided free of charge from the co-op, because we believe in people over profits. Our kitchen distributes food to the homeless night and day, and we’re not just talking cans of cold beans here. In CHAZ, anyone who is hungry can receive a full, nutritious and locally-sourced hot meal, and we’ll even top it off with a scoop of ice cream and some of those little Keebler mint cookies for dessert.
Around the corner, we have a free childcare center to take some of the stress off working women of color, along with a “no questions asked” medical care facility to anyone in need. Undocumented immigrants in particular, who live outside the CHAZ, are often afraid to see a doctor because revealing their personal information could bring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their doorstep. CHAZ ensures that our immigrant comrades have nothing to fear when they go in for a check-up, by providing a viable alternative to Big Pharma and other western imperialist medical institutions.
Another pride and joy of the Autonomous Zone is our cooperative agricultural program. All citizens are welcome to grow and share crops in our garden area, but of course we have designated the most fertile plot of land to Indigenous peoples, so they can take ownership over what is rightfully theirs without intrusion. To those who would have never believed the people of America could break away from capitalism and say goodbye to the oligarchy: think again — the CHAZ works, and we’re expanding it with even more socially-minded programs every day.
FA: So the mutual aid group in Seattle that formed just as the pandemic hit has been very involved organizing the autonomous zone space. Setting up the food and some of the other distribution resources they used for Covid they have been able to use in this space. So that’s been really great. Then I just think the idea of mutual aid and supporting each other in the space is also a big part of this. So the “No cop co-op,” where people are just providing whatever they have and distributing it freely to people who need it. And the kind of food donations that are coming in are all part of that notion.
Some people are putting in tremendous amounts of work, way more than I am. The medical team is incredible. They have been battling the police for weeks and treating people who have been injured by the police very, very seriously. Their ability to get medical supplies and distribute them to people in need is really incredible.
What do you think about the portrayal in right-wing media? Is it really different from your own experience?
FA: The CHAZ really does feel like a festive and joyous space. There have been lots of efforts to discredit the space from the Seattle Police Department or right-wing media, even just mainstream media.
Are the police or right-wing vigilantes trying to get into the zone?
FA: The police have re-entered the space. The precinct was left completely upended. It was open, unlocked and completely accessible. In the first couple of days, no one went in. There was still that hesitancy about getting into the East Precinct. People were still unsure of what to do. And after the first couple of days the police came in and locked it and fenced it off.
From what I know, that is the only time the police have come into that space and other than that other city services are responding to the area. The mayor has directed the Fire Department, the Department of Transportation and the Parks Department to be the ones who come to that area. So I haven’t seen any police there since they came in the one time.
OCHAZ: The fascists are always on our ass, predictable as usual. Unfortunately, it’s just something we have to expect and figure out how to deal with the best we can. The cops have left us alone for the most part, running scared ever since we exiled them from the Zone. But there is definitely a looming cloud of right-wing assholes threatening to swoop in and destroy what we’ve created here. What those assholes don’t realize, is that we are watching them like a hawk. We’ll never just lie down and take it, or let them hurt even a single hair on our people’s bodies. Sure, we’ve received threats from cops, “patriots,” biker gangs, you name it. But CHAZ has a message to all you bootlickers out there: we’ve got your number. Fuck around and find out.
How are you thinking about the CHAZ in the long term? Are you thinking of this extending into weeks and months?
OCHAZ: I’m trying my best to not get blinded by optimism. We still have a long way to go to achieve racial equity. There’s a lot of work to do to expand our reach, secure our infrastructure, and build up the kind of community that works for everybody, not just whites and white-passing POC. Those among us who come from a place of privilege are still struggling to avoid centering themselves, because dismantling the effects of racism and colorism isn’t just a one-time gig — it’s a full time job.
That’s why we are putting up daily reminders, so that the very roads we walk on will declare loud and clear what we all stand for. Little by little, we’re covering every building in sight with tributes to George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and others. We are de-gentrifying the city, renaming streets that were previously named after colonizers and diligently taking down any and all lingering remnants of our country’s racist past, so we can move on to a better future. We are setting our sights high, toward full self-sustainability, so that we no longer rely on donations from the outside to keep us going. The next thing on my list is to get a greenhouse going, to cultivate crops that will provide a wider range of vegan options for the kitchen.
FA: That’s a great question. When I was there yesterday, it seemed entrenched to me. People have uprooted part of the park and planted community gardens there. There’s a tent city, protesters kind of reminiscent of Occupy. All the mutual aid projects I was mentioning, the medics and the food distribution and things like that, are really well set up. The infrastructure they have is impressive. So it looks like it has staying power, to me.
What will come of that, I am unsure. There are several groups that have issued demands, some of which are aligned and some of which are a little different. We don’t know yet what they will be able to leverage from the city and what the end goal is, and I think a lot of those conversations are still emerging in the general assembly sessions that are happening and conversations in the space. But at this point it has staying power and I don’t imagine it going away anywhere anytime soon.
How have you worked with Indigenous tribes in the area?
OCHAZ: Every decision made in CHAZ comes to fruition with the full acknowledgement and understanding that this land belongs to Indigenous peoples first, full stop. Tribal needs remain a top priority in CHAZ to ensure that they get the representation they deserve, which had previously been stripped away from them by the old regime. We always take special care and consideration to work beneath local tribal leaders for approval. One of the first things we did when we established CHAZ was consult with a Duwamish Chief and his spiritual advisor. We wouldn’t dream of doing anything without their blessing.
Why are you personally so passionate about it?
FA: One, is just being concerned for Black lives, which is part of where it came from and where it started. I think where it has to end is the recognition of Black humanity, Black integrity and Black dignity. Also, at the moment we can try to rethink and radically reimagine what our cities can look like. This is one of those moments. Our budgets, at a local level, so favor militarism and violence. And that’s true at a national level too. This points to the idea that when we organize ourselves to meet human needs what emerges is beautiful constructions of art, new forms of music, new forms of literature, new political ideas, new infrastructures to provide medical care and food for each other. Those are the priorities that we should be emphasizing, and the autonomous zone states that really clearly.
OCHAZ: Simply put, Capitol Hill is my home. Our people are sick to death of being pushed around by the regime on a daily basis. I can’t sit back and watch my people be tormented by the “thin blue line” anymore. We have our own “line” up on Cap Hill: the rainbow line. And our line isn’t thin — it’s thick as fuck, and you better not cross it.”
Torch of Liberty 