A traveling freak show of grotesques and abominations, cruelties and the degradation of our humanity has offered for our amusement a theatrical of performative heroism on this day one year ago, in the Spectacle of the Bloody Ear.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, propaganda, rewritten histories and alternate universes, untruths designed to falsify us and overwrite the programming of our history in service to the wealth and power of hegemonic elites and the tyrants who speak for them but claim to speak and act for us as a strategy of our enslavement and the manufacture of consent.
Here in the funhouse of distorted images and manufactured authority we have but one chance of escape; the sacred calling to pursue and witness the truth.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain, for he wishes to steal your soul.
As I wrote in my post of July 15 2024, Thoughts and Prayers, Just None of Them Benign; A dramatic performance before the stage of the world, the wounded hero who refuses to be silenced hurling defiance to his assassin, marked like a hunter riding to hounds on his first kill, a living bloody flag with which to rally the masses; this was Our Clown of Terror’s greatest performance, and one designed to hand him the Presidency.
An ear nicked by a glass shard or fragment of a bullet, fired by a fellow Republican who has unrestricted access to his sniper position, citizen reports of his doing so ignored by police, Secret Service, and campaign security.
How likely, how believable, is this scene had we been offered it in a work of fiction?
My partner Theresa’s immediate reaction was; “This is fake. It’s a show.” Mine was that the Republican Party has decided to free itself from capture by the Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump, and that it was funded by Republican power brokers and opportunity created by intelligence provided from within Trump’s inner circle and in collusion with his many layers of public and private security.
I suspect these two reactions will be typical among our electorate, who by now have internalized the motto of X Files; “Trust No One.”
This is the nation we live in now, where no one trusts the state or each other, wherein we are divided and our solidarity is a broken and antique thing, and we are no longer co-owners of the state as a democracy, but an audience for performances of democracy which no longer have any meaning.
We wander lost in a Wilderness of Mirrors, falsifications, lies and illusions, rewritten histories and alternate realities chosen by those who would enslave us. And most of us no longer know the difference, for truth is the first casualty of tyranny.
President Biden has made kiss the booboo noises with his iron jaws like a Tin Woodsman short of oil, “Politics must never be a literal battlefield or, god forbid, a literal killing field,” he said in his address to the nation. Biden called for “national unity” and proclaimed “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.” Fine words, with which I would agree in normal times. But normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Calls to unity and the rule of law are fine when we have a functioning democracy, or one which is salvageable; but Biden’s Restoration of Democracy has failed, and with it the rule of law and our unity as a nation who hold some truths self evident.
Absolutely democracy is constituted by political violence, and all liberty is created through resistance, seizures of power, and liberation struggle. Here Obama speaks of the internal operations of viable and functioning systems of liberty; but when liberty fails, is sabotaged or subverted, or is yet to be won, democracy must be established by the use of social force and violence beyond the boundaries of its Law. How else can we bring change to systems of oppression?
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
All Resistance is War to the Knife.
To Traitor Trump, most dangerous enemy spy to have ever tried to bring America down, Russian agent and Nazi fanatic who wants to make of us a white supremacist terrorist state, who conspired in the deaths of policemen and the attempted mass murders of members of Congress in the January 6 Insurrection, rapist who wants to make us a Gideonite theocracy of patriarchal sexual terror, a reality television star who wants to be our king, I send thoughts and prayers; just none of them benign.
As I wrote in my post of July 18 2024, A Crusade Begins: On the Reimagination of the Failed Assassination as Divine Intervention and the Anointing of a King, and Theocracy As the Idolatry of Trump Cast In the Role of Cyrus the Great In A New Myth of Exile; During the coronation ceremonies at today’s Party of Treason festivities, we are confronted by a cultlike homage to the Fuhrer of rows upon rows of fake ear bandages, signs of submission and of the reimagination of the failed assassination of Our Clown of Terror as divine intervention and the anointing of a king, and of Gideonite Theocracy as the idolatry of Traitor Trump cast in the role of Cyrus the Great in a new myth of exile.
QAnon has been instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Age of Tyrants to come, as has the network of Pentecostal, charismatic, and other fundamentalist churches which operate as a Christian Identity-Fourth Reich propaganda insurgency. The story of the subversion of our secular democracy as a theocratic tyranny in America begins in 1980 with the capture of the Republican Party by Christian Identity fundamentalists under Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, which put Reagan in the White House, though it drew on pre existing Confederate and Nazi elements and ideologies.
And all of this draws on far more ancient sources, from the Crusades and the Inquisition, and so we may interrogate with great precision what we are witnessing in this historical moment in the birth of a terrible new faith, and act to save each other from its consequences.
What Trump and the Party of Treason are attempting to launch here is not limited to the goals of a re-election campaign; it is nothing less than a crusade.
As written by Adam Gabbatt and Alice Herman in The Guardian, in an article entitled Christian right see God’s hand in Trump rally shooting: ‘The world saw a miracle’: Attempted assassination bolsters Trump’s support in a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals; “Rocío Cleveland was at a wedding on Saturday when she heard the news that something had happened to Donald Trump. He had fallen, clutching his ear, while giving remarks at a rally and it wasn’t yet clear if he was injured or even dead.
“It took a little bit for it to sink in,” said Cleveland, a conservative activist from Illinois who attended the Republican national convention this week. “I was speechless, I was crying, I was in tears.”
Trump had been tackled to the ground by a Secret Service detail after a gunman, perched on a nearby roof, opened fire on the crowd at a Trump rally. When the former US president rose, shaking his fist, blood dripping down his face – apparently only grazed by the would-be assassin’s bullet – the moment, for Cleveland, was euphoric.
“I think this tragic event that happened to President Trump, I think it will restore the faith in our country, as horrible as it may sound,” Cleveland said. “The world saw a miracle before their eyes.”
Cleveland’s perspective – that Trump’s survival was more than just luck – is shared widely by Christian believers in the Maga (Make America great again) movement who have seen the hand of God in Trump’s recent escape from serious harm at the hands of a gun-wielding 20-year-old shooter with no easily discernible motive.
It also bolsters Trump’s support in a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals – that he and his team have been seeking to woo be deploying Christian imagery throughout his 2024 campaign.
The religious feeling, that Trump was saved in an act of divine intervention, quickly took hold in the Republican party after the shooting, with grassroots activists, internet personalities and powerful Republican lawmakers offering religious explanations for the near-miss.
“I have no doubt that God lowered a shield of protection over Donald Trump,” Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, told the crowd on Tuesday night.
Carson said he had “watched with horror” as Trump was shot.
“And my thoughts immediately turned to the book of Isiah,” Carson said. “That says no weapon formed against you shall prosper.”
Others have also suggested divine intervention. One viral image that circulated on X in the days after the shooting showed how close the bullet came to striking Trump in the brain, rather than grazing his ear.
“God intervened,” a caption on the photo read. The image has been viewed almost 800,000 times.
Trump has not always been a favourite of the Christian right. A thrice-married man who has referred to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, who was reportedly unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness, seemed an unlikely hero when he first ran for president.
But Trump’s selection of the pious Mike Pence as his running mate allayed concerns in 2016, and his nomination of conservative justices to the supreme court paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade – a huge victory for conservative Christians and one that appears to have sealed the bond between them and Trump.
While religious Trump supporters at the grassroots level seized on to a biblical interpretation of the shooting, influential figures in the Christian right have amplified it.
In a podcast episode titled Prophecy or Coincidence, Lance Wallnau, an influential pastor and self-described prophet, said that prayers for Trump had “worked” in saving the former president, and speculated that the shooter had been motivated by the left to commit an act of spiritual warfare.
In the episode, Wallnau referred to an apparent authority on the subject: Trump, who in the wake of the shooting, claimed on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening”
“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” Trump wrote.
Again and again at the Republican national convention, prominent attendees and speakers echoed the sentiment.
“Let me start by giving thanks to God almighty for protecting president Trump, and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired,” Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, said in his speech.
“Together we lift up in prayer all of our leaders for protection.”
Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman turned election conspiracy theorist and Trump ally, said during a podcast interview staged outside the convention center on Monday that an image of Trump on the ground, alive after the shooting, inspired in him a sense of religious awe.
“It’s like right there, you could feel the presence of God talking to us,” said Lindell, his voice wavering. “It’s gonna be OK. It’s gonna be OK.”
Others invoked darker forces. In his speech Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, claimed “the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle”, while Marjorie Taylor Greene, the divisive Florida congresswoman, said “evil came for the man we admire and love so much”.
For Marlene Stuck, who traveled with congregants from her church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Milwaukee for the Republican national convention, the shooting was evidence of a fundamental spiritual truth.
“The word of God works,” said Stuck. “It saved his life.”
As written by Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian, in an article entitled To his supporters, Trump is a martyred messiah, resurrected after crucifixion; “The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.
Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.
But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.
“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.
His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.
The most important revelation was written within hours of the shooting by Senator JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. His was not a gospel of peace, but of wrath. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Pointing his spear at the enemy, Vance settled the apostolic succession. He is a changeling, who once compared Trump to “heroin” and “Hitler”, but his conversion into Trump’s warrior has vaulted him to become the anointed disciple and chief of the praetorian guard of the living godhead.
Before the assassination attempt, the Christian nationalists’ narrative awkwardly tried to fit the licentious, sinful and predatory Trump into a framework in which his apparent absence of virtue and religious faith served virtue and faith. They commonly referred to him as King Cyrus, after the Persian ruler, who did not “recognize” God but was described in Isaiah 45 as “anointed” by the Lord to free the exiled Jews in Babylon.
Trump’s origin story as the son of the brutish real estate operator Fred Trump and the pupil of the nefarious fixer and Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn was always problematic. None of his followers ever acknowledge it, except perhaps for Cohn’s protege Roger Stone, who was handed Trump to run as a client when Cohn was dying of Aids. That true crime story remains dangerous to the Trump mythology.
A movie about Trump’s relationship with Cohn, The Apprentice, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has not yet found an American distributor. Media companies have been intimidated at the possibility of Trump’s vengeance. “If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote the producers of the film.
So, as in Isaiah 45, the 45th president was the king whose “right hand” was invisibly guided from above. “He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshiped by Jews,” proclaimed Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host. The Trump Prophecy, a film hailing his presidency as divinely ordained, produced with faculty and students from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, also cast him as King Cyrus. An evangelical preacher, Paula White, whom Trump invited to speak at his 2017 inauguration ceremony and welcomed to the White House to bless him for nominating Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court, declared: “Because God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority, it is God who raises up a king.”
After Trump’s multiple indictments and felony conviction, he intensified his image-making as a martyr, the victim of conspiratorial forces, of the “Deep State”, “radical left Democrats” and “globalist elites”. He presented himself as selflessly absorbing the blows that were really meant for his supporters, whom he was shielding from “poisoning of the blood” from immigrants. But he instantly translated his supposed self-sacrifice into cries of revenge.
On 4 August 2023, the day after he was formally charged in the January 6 case, Trump posted on Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” By April of this year, Trump had made numerous threats against the judges, court staff and witnesses in all of his cases, who have received death threats and are under the protection of security details, including the US marshals. Trump’s courtroom outbursts forced judges to issue 14 gag orders. In the New York hush-money case, he violated 10 gag orders, which may be pertinent in his sentencing on 18 September. In that case, after Trump attacked Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Merchan said, in issuing one of the gag orders: “The threat is very real.”
On 4 June, after his conviction on 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case, Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them. And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden and you see all the criminality.” Biden, of course, had nothing to do with the New York case.
Two weeks earlier, Trump had appeared before the National Rifle Association convention to warn: “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain.” He conflated gun control with his trials: “No, they want to take away your rights. Well, I know that better than anybody. They want to take away my rights better than anybody, worse than Alphonse Capone.” He returned to guns. “We have to have a gun,” he said. “If we don’t have a gun, we’re dead people.”
On 6 January 2024, a week before the Republican Iowa caucuses, 17-year-old Dylan Butler entered his school in a small town in Perry, north of Des Moines, killed one student and wounded seven more people before he shot himself. He also had an explosive device. “Two friends and their mother who spoke with the AP said Butler was a quiet person who had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school,” the Associated Press reported. After 36 hours of silence, Trump called the incident “very terrible”, adding: “But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
Back in 2015, after Trump announced his first candidacy, he gave an interview to a gun blog called Ammoland. He had previously supported the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, passed in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which a research team at New York University’s Langone Medical Center for the National Institute of Health calculated reduced mass shootings by 70%. That ban was allowed to lapse in 2004 under the George W Bush administration.
Trump wanted to reassure the gun lobby that he was emphatically against gun control. “To the left, every gun is an assault weapon,” he said. “I certainly stand by my opposition to gun control when it comes to taking guns from law-abiding citizens. You mention that the media describes the AR-15 as an ‘assault rifle,’ which is one example of the many distortions they use to sell their agenda. However, the AR-15 does not fall under this category. Gun-banners are unfortunately preoccupied with the AR-15, magazine capacity, grips and other aesthetics, precisely because of its popularity.”
On 9 August 2016, Trump delivered a stemwinding speech against gun control and threatened the assassination of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. He ridiculed the idea of “gun-free zones” and hypothesized being shot by a gunman from the side, saying: “Do you know what a gun-free zone is? That’s like – they study where the gun-free zones – if they would have known you had guns, if they would have known that they were going to be shot at from the other side, it would have been a whole different story. Maybe it wouldn’t have even happened in the first place.”
Then, he incited the crowd against Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although the second amendment, people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Four years later, Hillary Clinton still appeared as a target for Donald Trump Jr, who posted a picture of himself on Instagram on 4 January 2020, holding an AR-15 etched with a Crusader’s Cross, a far-right symbol, and Hillary Clinton’s image behind bars on the magazine. “Nice day at the range. @rarebreedfirearms and @spikes_tactical adding a little extra awesome to my AR and that mag,” he wrote.
On January 6, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to the White House chief of staff, when Trump was informed that thousands in the crowd on the Ellipse whom he urged on to the Capitol refused to be screened for weapons at the magnetometers set by the Secret Service, he shouted: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons! They’re not here to hurt me. They can march to the Capitol from here.”
Among the banners carried by the mob assaulting the Capitol was a large Confederate flag adorned with an AR-15 and the inscription “Come and Take It”. Other flags depicted Trump carrying an assault rifle. One of the rightwing militias staging the attack, the Oath Keepers, stashed a small armory of AR-15s and other weapons at the ready in a suburban Virginia motel.
On 13 July, earlier this month, Trump stepped onto the stage in Butler county, Pennsylvania, where he began by denouncing “the fake news” for not reporting the size of this “big, big, beautiful crowd”. He falsely claimed that Joe Biden had lied about his own crowd sizes, and said: “And we got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed. Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions.” Trump ripped into “Crooked Joe Biden and laughing Kamala Harris”. He said: “Our country’s been stolen from us … one of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over four years and hiding what the obvious facts are … .”
He was referring to the election of 2020: “I tell you what, we did fantastically in 2016. We did much better in 2020. You know we did much better, and it was rigged. It was a rigged deal.”
He turned to talking about people crossing the southern border: “Criminals, we have criminals. We have drug dealers. We have people who should not be here.” On a large screen to the right of his stage, a chart showed how immigration had increased under Biden, though not its recently rapid decrease; he said: “The worst president in the history of our country took over, and look what happened to our country.” Trump turned his head slightly to look at the chart, and said: “And if you, uh, want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened … .” Then the bullet clipped his ear. The shooter with a semi-automatic rifle killed a bystander and critically injured two others.
The reborn Trump announced that he would rewrite his acceptance speech to the Republican convention. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said. On the first day of the convention, a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, issued a ruling in the national security documents and obstruction case stating that the special prosecutor was illegal, and dismissed the entire case against Trump – a ruling nearly all legal experts regarded as bizarre, partial and likely to be overturned.
Trump’s continuing streak of remarkable luck inspired him to descend from his heavenly state into his usual pit of grievance. His idea of bringing the country together is a lengthy self-interested checklist of settling scores. Uneasy rests the crown of thorns. On 15 July, he posted:
As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts – The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!
The motive of the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, remains obscure. From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a quiet boy, awarded a $500 high school prize for his talent at math, who spent two years at a local community college studying engineering, worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and lived at home. He once gave $15 to a liberal organization, but was a registered Republican. Fellow students remember him as always being a conservative.
“He definitely was conservative,” one former classmate told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.” In a school mock debate, the classmate said: “Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”
Another student recalled that others “tormented Crooks ‘almost every day’ and that he often wore ‘hunting’ outfits to class”. Crooks seems to have recently spent time down the rabbit hole of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch; when he shot Trump, he was wearing one of its T-shirts, with the slogan “What The Hell”. He had parked his car nearby filled with explosives. Perhaps he intended to ram it into the crowd in a spectacular suicide.
Crooks left no letter, no manifesto and no clues on social media. His premeditation did not involve making known his personal motive. He wrote no political statement. Trump’s appearance near his home suddenly gave him an opportunity to strike back. He was a bullied boy.”
Dreadful, all of this, but there is nothing new in the weaponization of faith in service to power. We have seen it all before, in many forms throughout human history, and I can tell you one thing with absolute clarity and truth; no matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, with fascisms of faith, race, and nation, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote of Traitor Trump’s puppetmaster in my post of March 6 2022, How if Vladimir Putin Should Be Assassinated? An Interrogation of the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence; There is a line in Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Power That Preserves, third novel of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, spoken of a hero who refuses to be summoned to the rescue because in his other world, our own, a child has been bitten by a snake and must be saved; “Could I damn a world to save the life of one child? I’m not sure I could make that choice.”
Today we contemplate its opposite; I’m not sure I could make the decision to let the world burn and trigger the extinction of humankind to save the life of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose mad imperial conquest of Ukraine now threatens the future of us all.
The life of one war criminal versus the incalculable horrors he will bring; I could not choose to save a monster who may destroy us all over saving humankind and our world.
The violence of the slaver cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains., as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours teaches us.
A senator with whom I am not usually aligned made an entirely reasonable suggestion recently, for which he has been denounced in the media by friend and foe alike, even AOC for whom I have already declared in the next Presidential election, regardless of whether or not she is on the ballot.
I am having difficulty understanding why this suggestion was not embraced with great bipartisan enthusiasm, given our history. After all, assassination and overthrowing inconvenient governments is something we do all the time. We even manufacture or capitalize on unforgiveable just causes of war like Russia’s firebombing of a nuclear site this week to launch imperial conquests of our own; the terror attack on the Twin Towers provided a pretext to seize the heroin fields of Afghanistan and the oil fields of Iraq, sacrifices to our shared rituals of public grieving and need for vengeance, and Hearst’s fictions regarding the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor gave us the Spanish-American War, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands which we stole simply because we could, and later the Presidency of the war’s hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
Go us? We normally seize such chances with great avarice.
Perhaps we are growing up, we humans, and abandoning the use of force and violence. The question is whether we can survive to reach the stage of childhood’s end; and this is the inherent dilemma of force and power, for such forces are dichotomous, bidirectional, and have unintended consequences.
As written by Joan E Greve and Vivian Ho in The Guardian; “Lindsey Graham has attracted widespread condemnation after the South Carolina senator suggested Vladimir Putin should be assassinated in order to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Graham first made the suggestion in an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show on Thursday evening, and he then repeated the idea in a tweet that quickly went viral.
“Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” Graham said on Twitter. “You would be doing your country – and the world – a great service.”
Brutus refers to one of the assassins of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, and Stauffenberg was a German army officer who was executed for attempting to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944.
Graham added in a separate tweet: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”
Despite immediate criticism of Graham’s comments from left and right in the US, he doubled down on the idea in a Friday morning interview with Fox & Friends. “I’m hoping somebody in Russia will understand that he is destroying Russia, and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,” Graham said.
American lawmakers of both parties responded to Graham’s comments with shock, dismay and outrage, pointing out the danger in demanding the assassination of a leader whose troops are currently engaged in shelling nuclear plants.
“I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid [a third world war],” the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar said in a tweet.
Republican members of Congress were no less critical, as Senator Ted Cruz derided Graham’s suggestion as “an exceptionally bad idea”. “Use massive economic sanctions; BOYCOTT Russian oil [and] gas; and provide military aid so the Ukrainians can defend themselves,” Cruz said. “But we should not be calling for the assassination of heads of state.”
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene – the extremist congresswoman who has sparked outrage for, among other things, comparing coronavirus-related restrictions to the treatment of Jewish people during the Holocaust – chimed in from the right with criticism of Graham.
“While we are all praying for peace [and] for the people of Ukraine, this is irresponsible, dangerous [and] unhinged. We need leaders with calm minds [and] steady wisdom,” Greene said on Twitter. “Not blood thirsty warmongering politicians trying to tweet tough by demanding assassinations. Americans don’t want war.”
White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We are not advocating for killing the leader of a foreign country or regime change. That is not the policy of the United States.”
Really? When has this not been precisely our national policy? President Biden ordered the assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, a man in Syria whom our state claimed without any evidence was the new leader of ISIS, who if the charge was true was a danger only to our common enemies al Qaeda and the Assad regime, mass murdering his entire family merely to divert attention from his many failures, just as Trump had done the year before with his supposed predecessor Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Did America not assassinate Salvador Allende and attempt countless times to assassinate Fidel Castro, both heroes as great as any American President?
Did we not kill in massive and horrific numbers to win our freedom from the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, from slavery in the Civil War, and from fascism in the Second World War?
We are a nation founded in death and terror through the words with which George Washington sent twelve thousand soldiers to put down the Whisky Rebellion of 1792 and demonstrate the power of the new federal government to enforce taxes; “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.”
Do not speak to me of the moral superiority of America.
O my brothers, sisters, and others who walk with me through this age of fire, wherein liberty and tyranny hang in the balance and possibly the survival or extinction of humankind, I thank you for the time we have spent together in conversation here, which I cherish as a refuge from the world, as a theatre in which I may process my reactions to the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, and as a forge of action in the performance of my chosen roles as a truthteller, a maker of mischief for tyrants, and in becoming a fulcrum of change.
Ours is a universe of Chaos, irrational and uncontrollable, and circumstances beyond the scope of our volition may visit disaster and life disruptive events upon us at any moment, for any reasons or none at all, and if by chance this is the last thing I have the opportunity to write, I want you and everyone who has been part of my life to know that you have helped me find balance for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of our freedom and the beauty of the world, healing in the redemptive power of love, and hope for our future possibilities of becoming human in poetic vision and the reimagination and transformation of humankind.
If by chance you knew our time here in which to do and be the things that bring meaning and value to our lives may number not millennia but hours and days, what would you do and be? Do and be that now, and never stop; for as Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night, we become what we pretend to be. What matters here is that our performances of ourselves are chosen and owned by us, and that we own the stories in which we live.
The most important question to ask of a story is; whose story is this?
Always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are about to pass through a Rashomon Gate event, of fracture, relativization, the bifurcation of timelines and propagation of alternate futures and realities, and all bets are off as to what awaits us on the other side.
And all of this because a mad tyrant cowers and rages in his warrens of darkness, fragmented and torn apart by the demons which inhabit him as his dreams of empire and dominion fall apart and in accord with Newton’s Third Law create the forces of their own destruction, much as with his predecessor Adolf Hitler at the end, with one crucial difference; beneath his finger lies the button which will launch nuclear annihilation, and it calls to him, whispering; ”Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
So, as Alfred Doolittle said to Higgins in My Fair Lady, “I put it to you; and I leave it to you”; do we save one life and damn the world?
As I wrote in my post of February 22 2022, Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Malcolm X; We are shaped by our histories as narratives in which we play our parts; and we also change and seize ownership of our histories and our stories as we perform and enact them.
This brings us back to issues of unequal power, identity, and the social use of force and violence, issues which the life and works of Malcolm X center and bring into terrible and wonderful focus.
His principle of action, By Any Means Necessary, is like a riddle challenge uttered by a Zen master, for which there is no single interpretation, and to which no words but only deeds may give answer. It is a principle which helped set us free from history, and which in the end rebounded on him and killed him.
A dangerous idea, for the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law and always acts in both directions, action and reaction, unpredictable and slippery in one’s grasp. Yet an idea must be dangerous if it is to be useful in the struggle for liberation.
The violence used by a slavemaster cannot be compared to the violence used by a slave to break his chains, as Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours has been paraphrased, an extension of Nietzsche’s dichotomy of master versus slave morality. This dictum has its reverse; the state has no legitimate authority to use death, violence, force, or control in the repression of dissent, theft of citizenship or violations of our universal human rights, or authorization of identities. This got Trotsky killed by Stalin, as he rightly called out tyranny and terror as tyranny and terror regardless of what those who would enslave us call themselves.
Revolutionary struggle, protest movements, and wars of liberation use force and violence to achieve a society free of inequality when there are no other means possible, due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle when the tyranny and terror of authority, state force and control, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege answer dissent with repression because they are without legitimacy and have only fear to keep the slaves at their work. Those who would enslave us refuse to negotiate because they see only themselves as human, and without debate we are left only the sword.
Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
How do such terrible things arise and seize hold of us, shaping us to their uses?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021, Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne; Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law and of the social use of force and the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now like Saturn a monstrous cannibal god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists? Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
I have no use for anything that limits our power to resist evil; the boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of normality and other people’s ideas of virtue, or the limits of our humanity.
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the French and American Revolutions and their imperial successor states, those of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism as taught to us by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita and by his model Thomas Mann in Death in Venice are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
How does a revolution seize power without becoming a tyranny? How shall we gather the force and will to resist unjust authority, without enforcing our own notions of the good on others in our turn?
This is the dilemma of power; that we must wield force to take it from our oppressors, and that we must relinquish it when it is ours and refuse to shape our fellows to our will.
We must refuse to submit to authority if we are to seize our liberty; and we must refuse to subjugate others that they may do the same if we are to avoid becoming the monsters we hunt.
I like and empathize with the character of Victor in Mary Shelly’s allegory of the origins of evil, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster in all his magnificence, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child, about the interplay of these selves in the growth of the psyche and processes of becoming human, and about the political consequences of otherness and monstrosity.
If we cannot embrace our monstrosity and our shadows, how can we bring change to systems of oppression?
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of dominion and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the processes and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly created the modern world with her great book Frankenstein.
It is a modernity which can unfold limitless possibilities of becoming human, or like Pandora’s Box and the Lament Configuration of the toymaker LeMarchand in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos unleash horrors beyond our imagination, as Putin now threatens to do with nuclear war and annihilation.
With Putin like Dr Strangelove hypnotized by the siren call of his missiles and their promise of ultimate power, the power of total destruction and the end of humankind, chanting Oppenheimer’s ritual invocation; “Behold! I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds!”, the question before us all changes.
Nuclear annihilation whispers from the darkness, unleash me, and I’ll make you powerful. But this is a lie, for such power will also consume us and steal our souls.
The great question to which we must now find answer is no longer when is it good to be bad, but how much of our humanity we are willing to sacrifice for our survival as a species.
As I wrote in my post of February 5 2020, Democracy Falls in America: the Acquittal of Traitor Trump; At the end I am driven finally to reconsider the position of the great, flawed idol of my youth Malcolm X; by any means necessary.
By any means necessary; this is a horrible, terrible principle of action, one fraught with endless possibilities of inhumanity and malign power, yet if we are forced to a resistance of survival as was Camus, who wrote for those who must claw their way out of the ruins of lost positions and face yet another Last Stand, beyond hope of victory or even survival, how else may we combat our dehumanization?
We must never surrender hope, for our resistance can triumph over anything but the loss of our faith in ourselves and one another. So long as one of us remembers the dream of freedom, we may yet redeem our humanity.
My answer to the Republican subversion of democracy remains NO!
Yet beyond this, we must fight not merely against fascism but also for democracy and the universal rights of man. As we resist fascism to defend equality and freedom as our common human rights, so we must use force and violence against social and institutional systems, structures, and ideologies and not persons, for we may seek truth together nonviolently with those with whom we disagree as the signal virtue of democracy and humanism, even with our enemies as brother warriors.
Resisting evil means resisting that of others against our universal humanity, but it also means resisting the seduction of evil and power and of our own use of force to compel others.
Power is the evil impulse which births monsters.
So often in history those who commit true atrocities are utterly convinced of the justice of their cause, Gott Mitt Uns, are informed and motivated by narratives of victimhood and have abandoned the self-questioning which is the fulcrum of a free society of equals. This, too, we must resist.
For this is why revolutions, once power has been seized and tyranny overthrown, may become themselves tyrannies, and why I prefer to let others run amok and be ungovernable to the specter of authoritarian social control.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue.
And remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
Further illumination may be found in Anthony Burgess’ masterpiece Napoleon Symphony, a tragedy of Napoleon and Beethoven’s Eroica and a novel whose discovery was a defining moment of my fourteenth year and has remained with me ever since, despite my teenage adoration of Napoleon as a hero of revolution and liberation, a universal genius and ideal of human being.
Here is the ground of struggle between tyranny and resistance under imposed conditions of systemic unequal power in the use of social force and violence, and between seizures of power as ownership of identity versus the falsification of authorized identities in the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others; history, memory, identity.
Read it as I did beneath a print of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, depicting a Shadow pantheon with the wonderful image of the rebel Titan Typhoeus as a chthonic ape and his three gorgon daughters to his left under signifying masks of Death, Madness, and Desire (I found Disease redundant and renamed her Desire as a better balance of forces, plus she is depicted as a three aspected goddess to the right as Lasciviousness, Wantonness, and Intemperance); really, what more could a boy ask for?
And here is the dynamism of our relationship with our shadow self and all that we fear and experience as disgust and revulsion, fear of nature and of our instinctive selves externalized and projected as fear of otherness, loss of self and of control, and degradation to an animal state which drive identity politics and social constructions of race, gender, and class or caste which includes nationalism and sectarian faith, especially when overwhelming and pervasive fear and real existential threats are weaponized by authority in service to power, as Malcolm X was falsified by Elijah Muhammed’s Black Muslim separatist nationalism as his herald, in reaction against the greater historical and systemic evils and multigenerational trauma and inequality of white supremacist terror and the legacies of slavery.
Processes of transformational change and social adaptation are chaotic and interdependent, and their causes are circular or more complex as we can see in the case of Malcolm X and liberation struggle, and in all such histories. This is one lesson we can learn from Malcolm X; there is no just authority. And those who claim to speak for you often do so as a primary strategy of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and in your subjugation to tyranny.
A second such lesson is that racism in general, and all divisions and social hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, compel submission to authority through the weaponization of fear as an arbiter of our most important relationship, that of the conscious and unconscious or shadow self, which can be read in how we feel and think about nature and those truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh.
We define ourselves through figures of otherness who represent unintegrated parts of ourselves and define the limits of the human; freaks, monsters, and all those beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and that which we claim as ours.
For this fear of nature as the origin of racism I have a simple solution; let us embrace our monstrosity, and perform violations of normality and transgressions of the Forbidden as sacred acts of Chaos in pursuit of truth.
The third gift of Malcolm X to our limitless future possibilities of becoming human is a life lived in revolutionary struggle and resistance against systems, structures, and institutions of unequal power as direct interrogation and engagement with the state as embodied violence, and with the consequences of the use of social force.
He died for our chance to learn these three things, how authority falsifies and subjugates us as a primary historical process, how racism and other inequalities of power are born of fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dichotomous and bidirectional nature of violence and the dialectical processes of the use of social force in tyranny and terror and in resistance and revolution, and as a martyr and teacher of wisdom Malcolm X is a figure of liberation who belongs to all humankind.
How can we disambiguate the violence of the “slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains” as Trotsky phrased it, of tyranny and carceral states from revolutionary struggle and liberation, of action in accord with our duty of care for others and our interdependence and solidarity from the enforcement of virtue and imperialism?
As I wrote in my post of February 4 2022, A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi ; To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.
We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.
As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”
“Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”
Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.
Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.
On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.
The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.
Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.
Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”
There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.
As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and his puppetmaster Putin, his model Hitler, and his mirror image al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty, the state as embodied psychopathy and violence, and government as performance art.
For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to disrupt civilization itself and return us to a pre-democratic barbarian tyranny.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
So I wrote on October 28 2019; and so I must write now of Biden’s secret face and heart of darkness, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, linked now for eternity as figures of terror, murderous retribution, and cruelty.
State terror and imperialism has met sectarian and patriarchal terror as tyranny and organizations of institutionalized violence and power; we can only hope now that they will recognize their twin image in the mirror of death which war and acts of force and violence confront us with, and walk away from the precipice which threatens to consume us all.
As Ken Kesey said in his historic speech to a peace protest against the war in Vietnam recorded in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”
Every word of this remains true, in these and all cases of tyranny and the institutional terror of carceral states of force and control, of authorized identities and falsification by propaganda and rewritten histories, of imperial conquest and dominion and colonial exploitation and enslavement. It is also true now of Russia in the invasion of Ukraine.
As I wrote here of Trump we may also say of his master Putin; for Traitor Trump is but a negative space and shadow cast by his original type, and both are atavisms of fear and force, chasms of emptiness which nothing can fill, no amount of dominion and control of others, displays of wealth and power or vainglorious strutting, to which no sacrifices of things loved by others or the terror and pain of their victims can suffice, for such is the nature of psychopathy and of politics as a theatre of cruelty.
What does this mean?
For us in this moment and in the context of the question of violence and the social use of force, it means that in the unequal balance of power between Russia and Ukraine, wherein real people are dying because someone has the power to steal what they have, a predator for whom nothing is real or has meaning but force and power, we must find answer to the declaration of Ayn Rand’s monstrous protagonist Howard Roark in The Fountainhead as he commits rape; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
Who will stop Putin’s conquest of Ukraine?
If they come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; not divided by hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, nor defeated by learned helplessness and terror, but united in solidarity and refusal to submit as one unconquerable and united humankind.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. There is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
For me, this is simple; the nation invading another is in the wrong. This is no different from chancing to discover a policeman kneeling on someone’s neck, in which case our duty of care for others requires us to save the life of the person who is being murdered right in front of us, regardless of any irrelevant details like which of them has the badge and the gun, the authority and the power, by any means necessary.
Law serves power, and there is no just authority.
Even if neither nation is a democracy, and victims of unequal power have no inherent moral burden of virtue as Shaw teaches us with the figure of Arthur Doolittle in My Fair Lady, one of them stealing the lives and freedom of the other as the right of sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy, and independence cannot be just, and must be opposed.
By any means necessary.
While the political origins of conflict are often ambiguous, its consequences for the people in the path of a conquest are not. As my long term goals remain a united humankind and a stateless society which has abandoned the social use of force and control and with it all laws, authorized identities, and the tyranny of other peoples ideas of virtue, and the emergence of a free society of equals from divisions of exclusionary otherness, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, I stand with Ukraine and with any liberation movement of sovereignty and independence anywhere, and with the people of Russia against the oligarchy and Putin and for all democracy movements against tyranny.
Let us stand in solidarity as a band of brothers, wherever men hunger to be free.
Our duty of care for others sometimes requires us to place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased. I am only one man, and not extraordinary, with nothing but my witness of history and my vision of our future possibilities of becoming human to hurl against the chasms of darkness and the terror of our nothingness in the face of overwhelming force and amoral imperial and carceral states.
But I cannot be complicit in silence with these crimes against humanity, to which as with fascism there can be but one reply: Never Again! A rallying cry complicated by its popularization in the title of founder of the Jewish Defense League Meir Kahane’s book “Never Again!: A Program for Survival, its origin is in Isaac Lambdan’s 1926 poem Masada; “Never shall Masada fall again”; it first appeared in its current form on signs written by the prisoners of Buchenwald after its liberation.
Elie Wiesel defines the phrase in his novel Hostage; “Never again” becomes more than a slogan: It’s a prayer, a promise, a vow. There will never again be hatred, people say. Never again jail and torture. Never again the suffering of innocent people, or the shooting of starving, frightened, terrified children. And never again the glorification of base, ugly, dark violence. It’s a prayer.”
Here I would declare Sic Semper Tyrannis, but this is a phrase from the shadows and legacies of our history from which we must emerge, and includes the assassinations of Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln, whose killers I despise and would not align myself with.
I do not trust certainties or those who act in their name, Gott Mitt Uns bearing a history of atrocities and terror which has no equals, and includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, and the Holocaust. As Voltaire wrote in his 1765 essay Questions sur les miracles; “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
Instead I will say with the magnificent Lt. Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds, and I hope in a way which preserves and reflects the moral ambiguity, contingency, and relativity of the original in the film; “Now that I can’t abide. How ’bout you, can you abide it?”
Refences on the Failed Assassination of Trump
Blood and bravado: the Trump shooting upended an election and shook the US:
A year ago the image of Trump’s raised fist became a political touchstone, helping force Joe Biden from the race and fueling a presidency like no other
Biden urges US to reject ‘extremism and fury’ after Trump assassination attempt: In Oval Office TV address, president forcefully condemns political violence and says country must strive for unity
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/14/biden-trump-rally-shooting-oval-office
The Trump shooting is a reminder: we live in a grim new era of political violence
Moira Donegan
The Guardian view on Trump’s shooting: America’s future must be set by voters, not the gun/ Editorial
Monday briefing: Will the attempt on Donald Trump’s life be a watershed moment – or a new source of division?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/15/monday-briefing-donald-trump-shooting
‘
Did Donald Trump just win the election? Arwa Mahdawi
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/15/did-donald-trump-just-win-the-election
‘Is this what a second Trump presidency will be like?’ – our art critic on the chilling shooting image
Interview
‘Rule of the lawless’: what does the authoritarian playbook look like?
Alice Herman
What is Project 2025 and what is Trump’s involvement?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/26/what-is-project-2025-trump
Here are the references from my essay; first among them my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted on August 24 2021 as I joined the defense of Afghanistan after its fall at Panjshir, and as I prepared to join the defense of Ukraine in Mariupol with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade on March 22 2022.
My hope for us all now is that we may never need to make such Last Stands here in America against a state captured by the Fourth Reich.
Vote this November, friends; I have seen both, and voting is always better than shooting.
Inglourious Basterds: Shoshanna Prepares for German Night
The Undeserving: Alfred P. Doolittle’s Speech in My Fair Lady
The Conscience of the King: Star Trek Season 1, episode 13
By Any Means Necessary speech by Malcolm X
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut film
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117093/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V: St. Crispin’s Day Speech
The Magicians: Fear, Power, Force, and the Origins of Evil
Dr. Strangelove trailer
Oppenheimer Quotes the Bhagavad Gita 11.32.; I am become Death
Translations of the passage
Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, detail of Typhoeus and his daughters
Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies
by Blair Davis (Editor), Robert Anderson (Editor), Jan Walls (Editor)
Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, by Anthony Burgess
Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice
by Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, George Novack, David Salner
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/184450.Their_Morals_and_Ours
The Groundings with My Brothers, by Walter Rodney
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1205543.The_Groundings_with_My_Brothers
Never Again! A Program for Survival, by Meir Kahane
Hostage, by Elie Wiesel
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre (Preface),
Dirty Hands, by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, by Antonin Artaud
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, by Justin A. Frank
The Psychopathic God, by Robert G.L. Waite
The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński
The Torture Garden, by Octave Mirbeau
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Brailovsky (Translator)
The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida
Henry V, Folger Shakespeare Library, by William Shakespeare, Barbara A. Mowat (Editor), Paul Werstine (Editor), Michael Neill (Essay)
Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Leslie S. Klinger (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Guillermo del Toro (Introduction), Anne K. Mellor (Afterword)
Borne, by Jeff VanderMeer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31451186-borne
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, Richard J. Dunn (Editor), Charlotte Brontë (Commentary), Robert Heindel (Illustrator)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann, Michael Cunningham (Goodreads Author) (Introduction), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Ring of Power: Symbols and Themes Love Vs. Power in Wagner’s Ring Circle and in Us : A Jungian-Feminist Perspective, by Jean Shinoda Bolen
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, by John Milton, Christopher Ricks (Annotations)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/336518.Paradise_Lost_and_Paradise_Regained
The Tempest, Folger Shakespeare Library, by William Shakespeare, Paul Werstine (Editor), David Lindley (Editor), Israel Gollancz (Preface & Glossary), Barbara A. Mowat (Editor)
The Power That Preserves (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever #3), by Stephen R. Donaldson
References on Putin and the Ukraine War
e
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ukraine-evacuation-halted-cease-fire_n_62234cf7e4b012a2628b24d8
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/russia-ukraine-how-the-west-woke-up-to-vladimir-putin
Trump’s God: Moloch the Deceiver, Demon of Lies
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1 episode 8, I Robot You Jane
On the historical Moloch
https://mythologyexplained.com/the-demon-moloch-in-the-bible
On the reimagination of the assassination attempt as divine intervention and the anointing of a king
To his supporters, Trump is a martyred messiah, resurrected after crucifixion | Sidney Blumenthal
Christian right see God’s hand in Trump rally shooting: ‘The world saw a miracle
On QAnon as America’s New Fascist Religion and Myth of Exile
Surprise blockbuster ‘Sound of Freedom’ echoes antisemitic QAnon conspiracies/ The Times of Israel
‘Sound of Freedom’ Funder Fabian Marta Arrested For Child Kidnapping
The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, by Mike Rothschild
A Close Reading of the QAnon Shaman Manifesto
‘It happens again and again’: why Americans are obsessed with secret societies
Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, Colin Dickey
The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco
Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici
How does one read such a manifesto?
Herein I write a manifesto of action as Socratic dialog and Swiftian satire, which as stated in the title questions “the Origins of Evil and the Social Use of Force, and of the State as Embodied Psychopathy and Violence”.
As the motto of my publication Torch of Liberty declares, my intent is “to incite, provoke, and disturb.”
Consider also that I claim the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen as Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and that I do these things in performance as what Foucault called a truth teller, in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling.
In this essay I interrogate a set of interdependent problems which I believe are central to the project of becoming human we all share, and the consequences of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force posed to us by the situation we face in this moment, and here I use the term moment in the ways that Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou did, wherein a monstrous tyrant threatens nuclear war and the extermination of all humankind on a whim of infantile tantrum, and we must choose one or the other.
It is a dilemma which like all use of social force makes us complicit in evil, a primary strategy of fascism in our subjugation, and which reproduces the conditions from which states arise as embodied psychopathy and violence, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Badiou claims events are fundamentally indeterminate and structured by the dialectics of possibility and impossibility, maybe-maybe not as my mother used to say to students who asked her for positional declarations, judgements, authorized versions, singing the words and bouncing her hands from side to side.
For Derrida, as my friend Rene Troy Tun has described, “the event in its absolute singularity is thus resistant to cognitive description, critical objectification, interpretive reduction, and theoretical elaboration.”
Here with this primary existential question of human being, meaning, and value I struggle to find synthesis; like the performance of our identities, this process need not be determinative or prescriptive, but a space of free creative play.
If we have no answers, we must learn to ask better questions.
In this tilting at windmills I use Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars as my model, a magisterial work which comes in male and female versions and whose meaning changes with a difference of seventeen lines between them.
How if Vladimir Putin, or his star agent Dopnald Trump, Should Be Assassinated? Do we save one life, that of a mad tyrant who will destroy us, and damn the world?
Such is my witness and confession.
Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavić
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/321566.Dictionary_of_the_Khazars
Works of Jacques Derrida
Works of Alain Badiouhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/show/118587.Alain_Badiou?from_search=true&from_srp=true
Torch of Liberty 