The beautiful, brilliant, compassionate, transgressive, and fabulously wonderful and strange alternate universe of Edmund White seduces and outrages, provokes and problematizes the imaginal spaces of our civilization which like the discontiguous and off kilter celebrity portraits of Andy Warhol explore our ambiguous boundaries and interrogate the ill fitting interdependence of our chiaroscuros of self and other.
Best of all is his ability to laugh at himself, to turn his infinite curiosity about the world and the savage lyricism of his unique Gaze on himself as well as all of us, and thereby create new possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
He began by reinventing himself as Wilde’s Dorian Grey, questioned the relationships between Beauty and The Good, and ended in Beckettian Absurdism.
I was saddened by the news of his death, because he tried to give us all something beautiful to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world, and now there will be no more of this from him. We must now, each of us, bear it on alone, with little but the redemptive power of love of illuminate those truths written in our flesh.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
As I wrote in my celebration of his life and work in my literary publication Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium entitled Edmund White, on his birthday January 13; Fearless, empathetic, of refined and elegant prose, heir to the European belles lettres tradition, beloved for his compelling autobiographies and his glittering, insightful literary criticism, Edmund White has polished and made beautiful our lives by the invocations of his words.
His fame was won on the stunning power and lyrical beauty of his autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony.
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s, a fourth volume of novelized autobiography, can stand on its own as a history of the New York intellectual arts scene during the Cultural Revolution.
States of Desire Revisited: Travels in Gay America, his classic of world literature and celebrated masterpiece, is a road trip through American possibilities of being human and an exploration of cultural boundaries of identity and the transgressions which challenge and define them.
He wrote the foreword to The Stonewall Reader by New York Public Library, the definitive work on this pivotal moment of history.
Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, and The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, together form a collage of beautiful images, memories, and the interfaces between persons and the places which shape one another through time. I love his Paris Trilogy best; like the Netflix telenovela Emily In Paris it will make you want to go live there and become part of its story.
Hotel de Dream, a biographical novel of Stephen Crane which recalls Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, borders on Surrealism as the fantasies and memories of the dying author conflate and intertwine in marvelous ways. I wonder now how much was a self portrait and Freudian death transcendence, and how much a version of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memiors Of Hadrian crossed with Fellini’s 81/2.
Fanny: A Fiction, a historical novel concerning the relationship between Mrs Francis Trollope and her great friend, the radical Fanny Wright, is a sweeping epic of America, the fragile and complex nature of Idealism and the difficulties of making the transcendent real, and the infinite varieties and vulnerabilities of love.
His brilliant and gorgeously written literary criticism and biographies run to several books, all wonderful resources for anyone who loves to read, which include: Sacred Monsters, Arts and Letters, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, Genet: A Biography, Marcel Proust, Altars by Robert Mapplethorpe & essay by Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading, Sacred Monsters, and The Burning Library: Essays.
Conversations with Edmund White provides an intimate overview of his ideas.
A Saint from Texas, among the best books of 2020, is the subject of a brief review of mine which I reprint here; From the disciple of Proust who carries onward Truman Capote’s weaponization of gossip and Oscar Wilde’s art of the epigrammatic phrase, in a classic doppelganger story which interrogates themes of identity, otherness, and belonging in an allegorical fable of two sisters, one who becomes a nun in Columbia, the other who becomes a society matron in Paris.
On a secondary level Edmund White’s A Saint From Texas extends the Proustian mission of exploring love as a pathology and life as survivorship among hostile circumstances. Here as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice beauty is a deceptive illusion, to hold wealth and power is also to be its captive, all values are corruptive lies, all authorized identities and normalities are falsifications and theft of the soul, and the shadow of death watches over all our revels.
A Saint From Texas is a savage and relentless bonfire of the vanities, with ravishing and incandescent language which masks its descent into the Absurdism of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.
As always the ars poetica and lyric beauty of his language and the visionary insight of his aberrant angle of view are delightful and like the transformational cycles of trauma and redemption which are his subjects serve to exalt and enrapture us.
All true art defiles and exalts.
As written by Alan Hollinghurst, Yiyun Li, Colm Tóibín, Adam Mars-Jones, Olivia Laing, Mendez, Tom Crewe and Seán Hewitt in The Guardian, in an article entitled Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’;
“‘He showed me gay fiction could also be high art’
Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst
British novelist
Edmund White’s luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a “cure”; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 90s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye.
What amazed me about A Boy’s Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller! It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It’s hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close.
‘He brought a lightness into my life’
Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li
American author
About 10 days ago, when I left the east coast for a book launch in London, Edmund and I were in the middle of reading Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel. “Don’t you worry, darling, we’ll finish when you get back,” he said.
Edmund and I were close friends for the past eight years. At the beginning of the pandemic, we met at 5pm on Skype, Monday through Friday, which became our two-person book club. This continued after the pandemic. The first book we read was The Complete Stories by Elizabeth Bowen. Between that collection and The Hotel, my estimation is that we read between 80 and 120 books. Sometimes we marvelled with fake shivering (Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, for instance). Sometimes we compared our underlined parts in the books, and when we found we underlined the same adjective, the same phrase, or the same paragraph, we pretended, once again, to be surprised. When we read Henry Green’s novels, Edmund would act the dialogues out in a British accent. There was a detail from a Yasunari Kawabata novel that we returned to often as a private joke: “Are you low on B?” (As in Vitamin B.) “Yes, I feel low on B.” This would be the closest that we would admit that we were feeling saddened by the losses in our lives. Edmund lost many beloveds to Aids; I lost two children to suicide. And yet there was never a heaviness in our conversations. I think Edmund brought a lightness and a cloudlessness into my life. We gossiped, we giggled, and sometimes I would stare at my little screen, dumbfounded, when Edmund enlightened me with a graphic reminisce of gay sex from 20 or 30 years ago, in a castle or back alley in Europe. Then we would stare at each other before bursting into laughter.
When we first read Bowen together, sometimes Edmund or I would say, “I wish I could write like this.” And the other person would repeat, “I wish I could write like this.” In a few days, I shall return to America where Edmund Valentine White III is no more, and I shall finish The Hotel by myself. Neither he nor I will make our friendship into fiction. I wish I knew a pair of characters like us in literature.
‘He loved gossip and intrigue’
Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín
Irish novelist
Edmund White wrote with style; he cared about style; he made it seem natural and effortless. He wrote and indeed spoke with a kind of delightful candour. He loved revelation and gossip and intrigue. The idea that everyone he knew had secrets fascinated him. He chuckled a lot. He read all the latest French novels. He saw no reason why he should keep things to himself and, because he was gay in a time when gay life had not appeared much in fiction, that became one of his great subjects.
A Boy’s Own Story, which came out in 1982, had enormous influence. It was an essential book for several generations of gay men. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, White charted the changes and the tragedies of the gay life that had seemed so promising in A Boy’s Own Story.
In writing about gay characters, White also became one of the chroniclers of city life, especially New York and Paris. (During a brief stay in Princeton, he suggested that the only relief from tedium was to howl nightly at the moon.) White was in full possession of a prose style that was deceptive in how it functioned. His writing could feel like conversation or someone thinking clearly and honestly or taking you slowly into his confidence. The cadences were close to the rhythms of speaking, but there was also a mannered tone buried in the phrasing, which moved the diction to a level above the casual and the conversational.
The book of his that I love most is his 2000 novel The Married Man, which is a kind of retelling of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. White dramatises with considerable subtlety the conflict between the idea that the personal is political (“which,” White wrote in 2002, “may be America’s most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics”) and the legacy of Vichy France filled with secrecy and ambiguity and the ability to live several compartmentalised lives.
In the recent years, White’s apartment in Chelsea, shared with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, was a centre of fun and laughter, a place where you got all the latest news. Books were piled up. They, too, were treated as kind of news. He worked every day, writing at the dining-room table. He made light of his illness. He was, in many essential ways, a lesson to us all.
‘I gave his novel a bad review – which positively inflamed his charm’
Adam Mars-Jones
Adam Mars-Jones
British novelist
I met Ed White in London in 1983, at the time of the UK publication of A Boy’s Own Story. I had reviewed the novel for Gay News, and he knew that my verdict was unfavourable but not what my objection was (I described it as a cake that had been iced but not baked). This didn’t deter him from making a conquest of some sort – a degree of resistance could positively inflame his charm. We took a stroll round Covent Garden. I bought him a punnet of whitecurrants, a fruit with which he was unfamiliar, though feigning ignorance in order to please me would have been perfectly in character. He must have registered my lack of carnal interest but went on sexualising our promenade, asking me if one bystander was my type, telling me that another had given me the eye.
To have become his friend without even a moment of sexual closeness was, a least at that time in the New York gay world, an anomaly and perhaps even a distinction. I visited Ed several times in Paris, sleeping on the daybed in his enviable flat on the Île Saint-Louis. In the morning he would help his ex-lover John Purcell get ready for a day of graduate study, a routine – as he was well aware – with overtones of a mother packing her son off to school. We would have one more cup of coffee and listen to some chamber music, Poulenc a favourite. Then he would say, “I must get back to the darling novel” (he was working on Caracole at the time), and lie on his bed to write in longhand. I loved those visits, and some of that was down to Paris, but most to his hospitality. For a night in he might buy rabbit loin in mustard sauce pre-prepared from a traîteur, unthinkable sophistication. It was from him I learned that “cutting the nose off the brie” was not just bad manners, as I hadn’t known, but a named crime.
He was writing a monthly column for American Vogue, sosocialising was a job requirement as well as a pleasure. Even so, I was mildly scandalised that his French literary friends took it for granted that he would pick up the tab in restaurants. Priggishly I would treat him to a meal now and then, though I think he took more pleasure in largesse than in the presumption of equality.
‘He expanded the bounds of what could be written about’
Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing
British writer
I saw Edmund White on the A train once, like glimpsing an emperor in the grocery shop. I must have been barely in my teens when I first read A Boy’s Own Story, the Picador paperback with the brooding boy in a purple vest on the cover. I was seduced by everything: the lovely, supple, almost shimmering language, the explicit precision applied to sex and class. Cornholing, a word I’d never heard before. Above all, it held out an invitation. It was from White that I realised a writer takes the rough material life gives – unwanted, shabby, maybe repellent – and makes it their own by way of sensibility and style, that alchemical translation.
Years later, I met him. He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring’s Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now.
‘His work was as fresh as gay bar gossip’
Mendez
Mendez
British novelist
Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I’d found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that’s not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day.
‘He showed us what was really going on’
Tom Crewe
Tom Crewe
British novelist
Edmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the “San Francisco look”:
A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume.
But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic’s outsized impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn’t memorialise a lost Eden – “Gay life,” White said, “will never please an ideologue; it’s too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.” At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered “an unusual degree of integration with the straight community” worthy of remark: “A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.” It’s a reminder of how amazingly far we’ve travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn’t think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-point. It was just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn’t ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, “is some give in the social machine”.
‘His books were a fabulous reel of anecdote and savage humour’
Seán Hewitt
Seán Hewitt
Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy’s Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White’s camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him for ever.
White’s books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference.
In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: “Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West’s hit comedy Sex: ‘She’s flushin’ my play down the terlet!’”. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I’m grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page.”
As written by Neil Bartlett in The Guardian, in an article entitled Where to start with: Edmund White: After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction; “Edmund White, who has died aged 85, was born in Cincinatti, to conservative, homophobic parents. Although he soon rejected almost all his family’s cultural values, he retained their work ethic: White published 36 books in his lifetime, and was working on a tale of queer life in Versailles when he died.
Starting out his career in New York, during the magical and radical years that fell between gay liberation and Aids, he then worked hard and long enough to be eventually acclaimed as the “elder stateman” of American queer literary fiction. White’s most characteristic trick as a writer was to pair his impeccably “high” style with the raunchiest possible subject-matter. When talking about gay men’s sex-lives, the goods have rarely been delivered so elegantly. Author and director Neil Bartlett suggests some good places to start.
The entry point
A Boy’s Own Story (1982) was White’s breakthrough in the UK. A wonderfully well-told and clear-eyed chronicle of one young man’s progress though the 1950s, it was streets ahead of any other queer “coming of age” novel that had appeared up to that point – and changed British publishing. This was the novel that finally proved to the industry that if your sentences are beautiful and true enough, then book-buyers of all stripes will love you. And not despite the fact that you’re gay, but because of it.
If you want to get to know the author
White wrote six volumes of autobiography; in addition, almost all of his fiction has clear autobiographical roots. For its lavishly deadpan evocation of a truly appalling childhood – and especially for its brutal takedown of White’s own trainwreck of a father – try starting your relationship with the man behind the fabulous sentences by sampling My Lives. And to get his view on Aids and its aftershocks – the context of almost everything he wrote – read The Married Man, his autobiographical novel, which ends with an only very lightly fictionalised account of the death of White’s lover Hubert Sorin from Aids in 1994. The heartbreak that lies at the heart of the last 45 years of gay life has often been written about, but rarely so dispassionately or powerfully as in those pages.
The groundbreaking one
White’s book that almost no one now talks about is one of his most important – and enjoyable. The Joy of Gay Sex is a gloriously sex-positive, wise and witty compendium of advice about how to get the best out of your body – and your heart. The term gets used too often, but this is a groundbreaking volume.
The one to drop into dinner-party conversation
White wrote as he talked: unstoppably, generously and at speed. The exception to this rule was his magisterial 1993 biography of Jean Genet, which took him seven years to research and finish. The result is a heartfelt tribute to Genet’s own art and a scrupulously well-organised account of how a gutter-born queer outsider became one of his country’s greatest literary stylists – and one of the most risk-taking political provocateurs of his century. Genet was about as unlike White in his background and life choices as a fellow gay author could have been; nonetheless, the fact that this book was a labour of love shows on its every page.
The most quotable
Forgetting Elena (1973) was White’s first published book. A scrupulously enigmatic account of life on Fire Island, off Long Island, it somehow manages to transmute its bewildered young protagonist’s doubts and fantasies into something as elegant, beautiful and mysteriously meaningful as a Japanese folding screen. Its opening also features my favourite sentence of White’s: “I am the first person in the house to awaken, but I am unsure of the implications.”
If you only read one
Any claim that White was a “great” writer as opposed to a merely brilliant, sexually explicit or culturally pioneering one – all of which he undoubtedly was – has to rest on his two “big” novels: The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man. The Farewell Symphony, which came out in 1997, is an account of one man’s experience during the almost unbelievable transformation of gay male life that happened between the 70s and 90s. Rooted as it is in very specific times and places, this book couldn’t be more deeply felt, more ambitious in its sense of contested cultural history – or simply better written. The Farewell Symphony and The Married Man, published in 2000, are a definitive refutation of the canard that “gay” writing can only ever really be of interest to a “gay” audience – and a significant part of the reason why that tired old argument is now so rarely heard.”
Edmund White remembered: ‘He was the patron saint of queer literature’
A lone hero confronts tanks with refusal to submit, and bequeaths to humankind a legacy of moral vision and the unconquerable human dream of liberty; today we celebrate the anniversary of Tiananmen Square and the stand of its iconic Tank Man against tyranny and state terror.
I greet you from the belly of the beast, for Hong Kong has been swallowed whole by an abomination, a shining beacon of hope lost to despair and dehumanization among endless fathoms of darkness; yet hope and the dream of liberty endure, and a people dehumanized and disempowered by an amoral colonial occupation by the mainland Chinese Communist Party, a faceless bureaucracy designed to make human beings into things like parts in a vast terrible machine of dehumanization which service the power of the state, cry their defiance and refuse to be subjugated with a wave of resistance and revolutionary struggle through legions of figures of democracy as a goddess of Liberty.
Here the people of Hong Kong and of China in solidarity of action honor the iconic Tank Man and the Tiananmen Revolt of 1989, and in refusal to submit become Unconquered and free.
Tyrannies of force and control find their limit in disobedience and disbelief; our freedom and autonomy are conferred by our refusal of consent to be governed by those who would enslave us, and like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us, and have the power to send us home and return to us our true selves.
Under the tyranny and terror of the Chinese Communist Party’s imperial dominion, the imposed conditions of struggle have left us only symbolic acts of resistance as mass action, and our duty to the future and to our possibilities of becoming human to bring a Reckoning to those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
Resistance is always War to the Knife.
Who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
From whence do such principles of Resistance and revolutionary struggle arise? Possibly you must know something of my history and the forces which have shaped me to understand, for this seems personal because it is; my horror at what the Revolution in China has become as a system of oppression and depersonalization is due in part to my direct and personal relationship with one of its founders as an informing and motivating source as I grew up, my teacher of the Great Game, of martial arts, inkbrush calligraphy and Traditional Chinese language, Chan Buddhism and its literature, poetry, art, the music of the bamboo flute, whom I called Teacher Dragon and studied with from the age of nine through my university years.
He was among those who gathered on Pearl Island to found the Whampoa Military Academy with Sun Yat-Sen in 1920, where Mao was the propaganda teacher, Zhou En Lai the political science teacher, and Chiang Kai Shek the Principal. He had grown up in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo before and during World War One with both Chinese kung fu and Japanese traditional arts including jiu-jitsu, multilingual in the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, the Wu dialect of Shanghai, later the official Mandarin which he learned during the Northern Expedition of 1926 to 1928 against Tso Lin in Manchuria and other warlords which reunified China, Japanese, and very British English, a useful skill set as a Chinese soldier and intelligence agent during the Second World War who could pass as Japanese, and for over twenty five years tested his arts of war in some of the most ferocious conflicts in human history and witnessed much, of which he told amazing stories.
A note on the martial arts I was raised with and later taught; Sifu Long simply called the Chinese half of these arts kung fu because it literally means “hard work” and wished to describe it as labor performed in solidarity with fellow workers for the common good and in revolutionary struggle as opposed to any kind of elite membership or artifact of high culture. The man was a lifelong personal friend of Zhou En Lai, and since 1931 sometimes an operative of Kang Sheng, head of Chinese Communist Party Intelligence and key ally of Zhou; his kung fu was an art of the people.
This consisted of the traditional Shaolin Five Animal styles, depicted so well in the telenovela series Kung Fu, and elements of other traditional arts, but revised and adapted for use in military combat with an emphasis on mass attack based on the premise that if you are unarmed, you are on a mission such as infiltration where arms cannot be carried and are being ambushed by a team of captors or assassins. This unique premise among martial arts, that unarmed combat is against armed and multiple opponents trained as a team rather than a single challenger in a duel or at worst case a melee in a bar, and part of general small unit warfare, special operations, and intelligence, shaped our arts and were adapted to actions which would be familiar to any military Close Quarters Battle team, as Applegate originated it in 1925 in Shanghai from many of the same sources used by Sifu Long and others at Whampoa Military Academy to create a fighting art for the Chinese Army, which has now evolved into Wushu and its sparring form Sanshou.
Sanshou was invented at Whampoa Military Academy by Chinese martial artists under the direction of Soviet advisors; Wushu in March 1928 in Nanjing at the founding of the Kuomintang’s Central Wushu Academy under General Zhang Zhijiang, which gathered some four hundred martial artists under the instruction of Fu Zhensong, founder of Fu Style Baguazhang, Sun Lu-t’ang who founded Sun-style tʻai chi chʻüan and taught xingyiquan (hsing-i ch’uan), Wu (Hao)-style taijiquan (t’ai chi ch’uan) and baguazhang (pa-kua chang), Yang Chengfu who taught his family Yang-style tʻai chi chʻüan, Wan Laisheng who taught the Shaolin Six Harmonies style, Gu Ruzhang who taught Northern Shaolin or Bak Siu Lum and the Iron Palm method of Qugong with which he had once put down a rampaging circus horse by breaking its spine with an open palm strike, and the warlord of Tianjin Li Jinglin, Vice President of the National Martial Arts Academy, called China’s First Sword, who taught the second major group of arts other than Shaolin, Wudangquan which includes the Wudang straight longsword, taijiquan (t’ai chi ch’uan), xingyiquan (hsing-yi ch’uan) and baguazhang (pa kua chang), and Bajiquan.
In 1929 a second academy was opened by General Li Jinglin as the Southern Kuoshu Institute with the Five Tigers as teachers, Baguazhang master Fu Chen Sung; Shaolin Iron Palm master Gu Ruzhang; Six Harmony master Wan Laishen; Tan Tui master Li Shanwu; and Chaquan master, Wang Shaozhao.
My martial arts balances these Chinese influences with those of Japan, like the arts and disciplines bearing the twin names Chan and Zen and including the game of Go, playing the shakuhachi or Zen flute, poetry and literature in both Chinese and Japanese, and inkbrush art and calligraphy, plus lots of sharp and pointy things.
Recitation of my enthusiasms and subjects of study as I grew up would be an endless litany of wonderful strangeness; my point here is that for over sixteen formative years from childhood through university I was immersed in the highly unusual bicultural world of my teacher, a traditionalist who helped create modern China. And I internalized his sense of betrayal and outrage at the Chinese Communist Party, whose true origins are in the Loyalty Purge and Massacre of the Jiangxi Soviet of 1930-31, in which Mao killed three out of four of the communists, some one hundred thousand people, and seized absolute control. In this mass murder and crime against humanity Mao established the First Rule of Tyranny; When the state’s absolute monopoly on power is in doubt, kill everyone not personally loyal to you. This aphorism, not included in the public version of the Red Book, became the founding principle of the Chinese Communist Party as an instrument of terror and tyranny, as autocratic and totalitarian as the regime of any king or emperor.
This was the Moment of Decision for my teacher which revealed to him the true nature of the glorious shining lies by which Mao sought to unite China under his absolute control; the reverse side of this Coin of Janus came in 1936 during the Xian Incident, when my teacher was among those who kidnapped Chiang Kai-Shek and forced him to break his secret deal with Hirohito and join with the CCP in a war of national liberation against Japan and its puppet state of Manchuria.
Democracy in China is a dream stolen by dead tyrants, but one which may be restored. Now is the time we must stand in solidarity with the people of China against tyranny and state terror, for who stands alone dies alone. As the line in the film Brazil goes which inspired so many adventures of my youth; “We’re all in this together.”
There will be no mass action in China today in recognition of the solidarity and courage of the democracy movement of 1989, nor of that which propagates throughout China today, for the long shadow of the Chinese Communist Party’s iron fist has cast the nation under a spell of fear, darkness, and silence like that of a fairytale wicked witch.
Such are the legacies of history and the powers of abjection from which we must awaken.
But in Hong Kong and China today, a people unite in subversion of their conqueror’s laws and find subtle ways to signal solidarity in revolutionary struggle. The brutal repression of the CCP’s regime has galvanized, not subjugated, the democracy movement of the Chinese peoples. Like the Rape of Nanking, the terrors of Xi Jinping’s regime have failed to drive the people of China into abject submission through learned helplessness, and like the thuggery of the British Empire’s reply to Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest has sacrificed any pretense of legitimacy for its hegemony of power.
It is a triumph of the human spirit that the hope of freedom and democracy still lives and is an indestructible part of the Chinese national character, for the peoples of China must struggle in a vast laboratory of pervasive and endemic surveillance and thought control, like rats trapped in a maze by demented captors whose bizarre experiments and crimes against humanity, which echo those of Mengele but on an industrial scale, are designed to falsify and dehumanize their own citizens.
And this is nothing compared to the imperial conquest of Hong Kong now underway, the threat of imperial conquest and dominion of the Pacific Rim, the genocide of Islamic minorities in Xinjiang and of Buddhists in Tibet, and the horrors of their client states like Myanmar which enact a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of Pol Pot’s abattoir of Cambodia, spectacles of terror and brutal repression perpetrated with the arrogance of power of an authoritarian state bereft of all moral values, wherein only violence, force, and power have meaning. Such is the future the Communists would bequeath us all.
Yet the peoples of China resist and yield not, and abandon not their fellows, as the Oath of the Resistance challenges us all to do, and we who love liberty must stand in solidarity with them.
A wave of vigils, protests, mass actions, and forlorn hopes commences this week throughout the world, as peoples of all nationalities unite as one humankind, inheritors of our universal human rights and the principles of freedom, equality, truth, and justice which democracy is designed to uphold and which none of us may deny any other and remain truly human.
As the lyrics of the Chinese national anthem teach us; “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves.”
As written by Helen Davidson in The Guardian, in an article entitled World won’t forget Tiananmen Square, US and Taiwan say on 36th anniversary of massacre: Date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, with government using increasingly sophisticated tools to censor its discussion; “The world will never forget the Tiananmen Square massacre, the US secretary of state and Taiwan president have said on the 36th anniversary of the crackdown, which China’s government still tries to erase from domestic memory.
There is no official death toll but activists believe hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the streets around Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s central plaza, on 4 June 1989.
“Today we commemorate the bravery of the Chinese people who were killed as they tried to exercise their fundamental freedoms, as well as those who continue to suffer persecution as they seek accountability and justice for the events of June 4, 1989,” said Marco Rubio, the US’s top diplomat, in a statement.
“The CCP [Chinese Communist party] actively tries to censor the facts, but the world will never forget.”
Responding to Rubio’s remarks on Wednesday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Lin Jian, said: “Erroneous statements by the US side maliciously distort historical facts, deliberately attack China’s political system and developmental path, and seriously interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
Separately, Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory, also praised the bravery of the Tiananmen Square protesters.
“Authoritarian governments often choose to silence and forget history, while democratic societies choose to preserve the truth and refuse to forget those who gave their lives – and their dreams – to the idea of human rights,” said Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te.
Ahead of the 1989 massacre, protesters had been gathering for weeks in the square to call for democratic reforms to the CCP. The student-led movement attracted worldwide attention, which turned to horror as tanks rolled into the square to clear the encampment. Several protesters were also killed at a smaller demonstration in Chengdu, a city in south-west China.
The date of 4 June remains one of China’s strictest taboos, and the Chinese government employs extensive and increasingly sophisticated resources to censor any discussion or acknowledgment of it inside China.
Internet censors scrub even the most obscure references to the date from online spaces, and activists in China are often put under increased surveillance or sent on enforced “holidays” away from Beijing.
New research from human rights workers has found that the sensitive date also sees heightened transnational repression of Chinese government critics overseas by the government and its proxies.
The report published on Wednesday by Article 19, a human rights research and advocacy group, said that the Chinese government “has engaged in a systematic international campaign of transnational repression targeting protesters critical of the Chinese Communist party”, with Uyghurs, Tibetans and Hongkongers particularly likely to be affected.
The Pillar of Shame, a statue made by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt to commemorate the victims of the 1989 Beijing Tiananmen Square massacre, displayed at the University of Hong Kong before it was removed in 2021. Photograph: Jérôme Favre/EPA
The report cited Freedom House research in 2023, which found that China had been responsible for about 30% all recorded acts of physical transnational repression since 2014.
“Protesters targeted by [transnational repression] frequently live in fear of surveillance; targeting; abduction and forced repatriation, especially around embassies and consulates; and ‘collective punishment’ retaliation against relatives still in China, which also leads people to cut ties with their family,” the report said.
The Article 19 researchers found that, with Tiananmen Square vigils snuffed out in China, pro-CCP agents appear to be targeting commemorations in other parts of the world.
In 2022, a replica of a statue known as the Pillar of Shame, by the Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, was vandalised in Taipei. The statue is designed to memorialise the people who died on 4 June 1989. The original was on display at the University of Hong Kong for 23 years before it was removed by university authorities in 2021.
For many years, Hong Kong, and to a lesser extent Macau, were the only places on Chinese territory where the event could be commemorated.
But since the 2019 pro-democracy protests and the ensuing crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, the annual 4 June vigil in Victoria Park has been banned.
In recent years some high-profile activists have been prosecuted over attempts to mark the day. For the last three years a government-sponsored food carnival has been held on the site during the week of the anniversary.
On Tuesday there was a heavy police presence in Causeway Bay, near the park, Hong Kong Free Press reported.
A performance artist, Chan Mei-tung, was stopped and searched, and later escorted from the area by police. She was standing on the road chewing gum, according to the outlet. In 2022 Chan was arrested after she stood in the same area peeling a potato.
On Tuesday Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee, warned that any activity conducted on Wednesday must be “lawful”, but was not specific. A key criticism of Hong Kong’s national security laws are that they are broad and the proscribed crimes are ill-defined.
One of the few groups of people in China who are still outspoken about the events of 36 years ago are the rapidly ageing “Tiananmen Mothers”, parents of young people killed in the massacre, who have called for an official reckoning.
One of the founding members, 88-year-old Zhang Xianling, gave a rare interview this year with Radio Free Asia, saying that she still lives under close surveillance.
Zhang said: “I don’t know why they are so afraid of me. I am 88 years old and I have to use a wheelchair if I can’t walk 200 metres. Am I that scary?”
Earlier this week Li Xiaoming, an ex-PLA officer who has lived in Australia for 25 years, gave an interview to Taiwan media, about his involvement at the Tiananmen crackdown as a junior soldier.
Li said he was compelled to talk “as a warning to the world”, and also to Taiwan which is facing the threat of Chinese annexation.
“Although the CCP leadership sees the 4 June incident as something shameful, what they learned from it is the need for strict control – eliminating any sign of unrest early on, controlling and blocking public opinion, and brainwashing to people. They work to crush all instability at the earliest stage,” he said according to Channel News Asia’s translation.”
As written by Chris Lau in CNN, in an article entitled Overseas Hong Kongers carry Tiananmen’s torch as vigils to remember massacre victims are snuffed out back home; “Hong Kongers living overseas are helping to keep the flame of remembrance alive for the victims of China’s Tiananmen massacre as authorities in a city that once hosted huge annual vigils continue to stamp out dissent.
Until recently Hong Kong was the only place within China where large-scale gatherings each June 4 were tolerated to remember the moment in 1989 when the Communist Party sent tanks in to violently quell peaceful student-led democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
But the annual candlelight vigils have been silenced the last three years in the wake of pandemic restrictions and Beijing’s ongoing political crackdown in Hong Kong, which was upended by its own huge democracy protests in 2019.
This year is set to be no different.
As a result, it is overseas where the most concerted commemorations were taking place for the 34th anniversary.
Protests, vigils and exhibitions are planned in multiple cities around the world including in Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, the United States and Canada bolstered by a growing cohort of Hong Kongers who have chosen to move overseas.
“I think it’s sad to say that what Beijing and Hong Kong are doing is trying to erase history and the memory,” said Kevin Yam, a former lawyer in Hong Kong, who will be attending a ceremony in Melbourne, Australia, where he now resides.
“For those who can still remember, we have the obligation to let the world know that we have not forgotten,” he told CNN.
A new museum in New York is a vivid example of how Tiananmen commemorations are going global.
On Friday, Zhou Fengsuo and Wang Dan, two former student leaders who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen protests and now live in the United States, unveiled a June 4th Memorial Exhibit on 6th Avenue
The display includes items collected from those who survived the massacre including newspapers chronicling the event, a blood-stained shirt from a former journalist and a decades-old printer used by protesters that was sneaked out of China.
Zhou said the idea to create a New York exhibition began five years ago but the closure of Hong Kong’s own June 4 museum by authorities in 2021 “added to the urgency”.
“Hong Kong has been carrying the torch for commemorating the Tiananmen massacre, keeping the legacy alive. When the museum was shut down, with the Hong Kong alliance’s leaders in prison, we knew it was a critical moment,” he said.
“We have to continue here in the United States.”
The 2,200-square-feet venue in New York can host up to 100 guests at a time, with schools and universities already reaching to request for a tour, Zhou said, adding they have raised enough funding to keep it running for “many years”.
A censored massacre
Thirty four years ago, Beijing sent in People’s Liberation Army troops armed with rifles and accompanied by tanks to forcibly clear the square where students were protesting for greater democracy.
No official death toll is available, but estimates range from several hundred to thousands, with many more injured.
Authorities in mainland China have always done their best to erase all memory of the Tiananmen massacre: Censoring news reports, scrubbing all mentions from the internet, arresting and chasing into exile the organizers of the protests, and keeping the relatives of those who died under tight surveillance.
The censorship has meant generations of mainland Chinese have grown up without knowledge of the events of June 4.
But Hong Kong was different.
Somber and defiant vigils were an annual political cornerstone, first under colonial British rule and then after the city’s 1997 handover to China. Every June 4, come rain or shine, tens of thousands of people would descend on Victoria Park with speakers demanding accountability from the Chinese Communist Party for ordering the bloody military crackdown.
But Hong Kong’s political culture has changed drastically in the aftermath in 2019’s huge and sometimes violent democracy protests.
Beijing responded with a sweeping national security law that outlawed most dissent. Leading democracy activists, including key Tiananmen vigil figures, have been jailed, critical newspapers shuttered and the political system overhauled to ensure only “patriots” are allowed.
Authorities banned the vigil in 2020 and 2021 citing coronavirus health restrictions – though many Hongkongers believe that was just an excuse to clamp down on shows of public dissent.
Last year, the park remained in darkness again, barricaded off on all sides with police stopping and searching passersby to “prevent any unauthorized assemblies which affect public safety and public order, and to prevent the risk of virus transmission due to such gatherings,” according to a government statement.
The Hong Kong Alliance, the group behind the past vigils, has disbanded with three leading figures in jail facing national security charges.
This year the park is again open after three years of coronavirus pandemic closures. But it is hosting a fair put on by patriotic pro-government associations to celebrate Hong Kong’s handover to China – an anniversary that is more than three weeks away.
In the run up to this Sunday’s anniversary, authorities made clear commemorating Tiananmen this year would not be tolerated.
Security secretary Chris Tang – a former police chief – said he expected some might use “this very special day” to advocate Hong Kong independence and subvert state power, acts banned by the new national security law.
“But I want to tell these people that if you carry out these acts, we will definitely take decisive action,” he warned, adding: “You will not be lucky.”
Hong Kong police maintained a heavy police presence around the park on the anniversary’s eve, deploying multiple police coaches and even an armored vehicle at one point.
A handful of artists and activists defied warnings and turned up either at the park or surrounding streets on Saturday evening to make private commemorations with floral tributes and banners, only to be quickly intercepted and taken away by officers.
A police spokesman said four people were arrested on suspicion of disorderly behavior in public or carrying out acts with seditious intent as of Saturday. Police said some individuals had protest props bearing allegedly “seditious” wording. Four others were brought in for further investigation, police added.
Private mourning
Richard Tsoi, former secretary for the now-defunct Hong Kong Alliance, said he planned to commemorate the event either at home or at a private location.
“Definitely there will be not be large-scale commemoration activities. Whether one can mourn in public without breaking the law is also a question,” said the ex-organizer, who used attend every vigil in the past.
Throughout Hong Kong physical reminders of the Tiananmen massacre, including a famous “Pillar of Shame” statue that used to stand in the city’s oldest university, have been dismantled in recent years.
Yet last month a replica of the “Pillar of Shame” was erected in Berlin, with the help of its original Danish artist Jens Galschiot and a prominent Hong Kong activist now living in Germany. The artist also provided more than 40 giant banners printed with an image of the pillar to 18 cities for their commemoration events, including Los Angeles and Boston.
Another pillar was unveiled in Norway last year.
“It is true that the commemorations around June 4th have expanded and become more global since it has become impossible to do anything in Hong Kong,” he told CNN.
Hong Kongers, Zhou says, are playing a key role in keeping Tiananmen remembrance alive overseas,
“Since last year, many places have seen record numbers in attendance largely because of Hong Kong immigrants,” he said.
Many Hong Kongers have left for overseas with the city’s population dropping from 7.41 million to 7.29 million last year.
In Britain – where more than 100,000 Hongkongers have since settled after London offered an easier pathway to citizenship two years ago – about a dozen marches and vigils are slated to take place throughout June 4 across the country, from Nottingham and Manchester, a popular destination for Hong Kong immigrants.
In London, marchers will gather at Trafalgar Square before marching to the Chinese embassies, where a vigil will be held.”
BBC On Tiananmen
World won’t forget Tiananmen Square, US and Taiwan say on 36th anniversary of massacre
Örkesh Dölet descended on to Tiananmen Square with thousands of fellow student protesters. He’s now 36 years into exile: As the anniversary of the 1989 massacre approaches, the Uyghur activist reflects on his lifelong dedication to the fight for democracy, Nuria Khasim
April 15 2023 Pax Sinica and the Case of China’s Secret Police Station in New York: Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party Disguise Imperial Conquest, the Silencing and Repression of Dissent, and the Theft of Liberty as Peace and Prosperity
It seems few corners of our public lives and spaces in social media are free from lurking trolls, enforcers of other people’s ideas of virtue and The Good, and even in an Antifascist forum wherein actions in Resistance to the Trump regime and its co-conspirators in tyranny and state terror which include the Netanyahu regime of war criminals one does occasionally chance upon apologists of Zionist terror and genocide.
Unsurprising as the governments of both Israel and America have worked relentlessly and with immense wealth and power in their joint propaganda efforts for over seventy years to convince us all of this Big Lie; that to criticize Israel, most especially in the reign of terror that is the Occupation and now in the Final Solution of the Palestinians in which American tax dollars buy the deaths of children, is the same as antisemitism. This is not and never has been true; but it is a lie which is very useful to the enforcement of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the centralization of power to carceral states of force and control, and the politics of nationalist identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
The following conversation occurred in the comments of my article of yesterday on the Freedom Flotilla to break the Israeli blockade of food and medical aid to Gaza.
“What antisemitic filth are you sharing in the name of humanitarian aid? Did you read this before posting??” “Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest brought down the British Empire in India, because the British were capable of being shamed; the state of Israel is not. To a Zionist, only fellow Jews are truly human.
Israel will kill Greta Thunberg, who will be running the blockade on this ship, without hesitation and with the arrogance of power, amoral nihilism, and fascist hate. They will enjoy it, glory in it, celebrate it. We too must be without pity, fear, or remorse, but in solidarity of action, defense of our humanity, and refusal to submit.”
To this I replied; I write only truth as I understand and have lived it. Never have I ever made the error that the Netanyahu terror regime wishes us all, Jews and others, to make; that Jewish identity means support of the state of Israel. As I have written, I will die as gladly on the steps of a synagogue as a mosque defending our common humanity. This I have tested many times.
And the response was; “Wait, you WROTE that antisemitic filth???”
So we come to my final position in Resistance to our dehumanization and the struggle between the stories we tell about ourselves and those told about us by others as authorized identity, and the necessity of witness and truthtelling; Yes, I am the author of all that I publish unless other sources are cited as I often include as context the articles I am writing in reference to in my journals. Again, I am not against Jews; it is possible that I am Jewish through my great grandmother in the direct maternal line, and I am a scholar of Kabbalah since high school. I am also an Antifascist and a hunter of Nazi revivalists, hence my often used battle cry of Never Again!
But this is not the same as the state of Israel, though the Zionists would like us all to believe so. I am on the side of human beings and of our universal rights in all causes; those who do not wish to be regarded as beasts should not behave as beasts to others.
Thank you for this illuminating conversation; you amuse me, and I will be quoting it in a future essay, without of course using your name which would be rude.
I am reminded of a similar conversation many years ago with an apologist of the January 6 Insurrection and its precursor the Unite the Right March, as both concern issues of witness, truthtelling, and the complicity of silence.
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton:
“Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
As I wrote in my post of May 19 2024, Is Zionism Fascism? Is Protest Against the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians Antisemitism and Hate Speech?; The question of whether an author’s historical claim to stand with Israel makes them a Zionist and a fascist was posed in an online forum, as Israel violates Biden’s Red Line and begins the assault on the refugees of Rafah, reverse face of the question of whether protest against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians constitutes antisemitism and hate speech. Among the first objections to these questions was that an author’s ideology has nothing to do with their work rather than emerging from it, of which we in the group are all members of a fandom.
Here is my reply:
Actually a very relevant and complex question. Why must one peoples Return mean anothers Exile? Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Netanyahu and his settler regime and apologists would like everyone, especially their own citizens, to conflate being Israeli with being Jewish, and to use fear to centralize power to a carceral state of force and control and legitimize their authority as necessary to security. But none those things are true, and security is an illusion.
The idea of Israel as an empire of tyranny and terror is antithetical to an Israel founded to protect Jewish peoples from tyranny and terror. The Netanyahu regime and the Occupation which long precedes it are subversions of Zion as a refuge for the powerless, the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and also a dark mirror of Judaism as the work of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world.
Marx began Das Capital with an eschatological vision of the New Jerusalem and the limitless possibilities of a humankind free from the profit motive as an analogy of Original Sin, and free from its praxis as the reduction of human relations to cash exchange. There are far more such possible futures of becoming human together through love rather than fear, more than we can now imagine.
Friends, everything the enemy says is a lie; never let them define the terms of debate or the rules of the game.
Fascisms of blood, faith, and soil now rule most of our world, and to this I say Never Again! Regardless of whose name those who wish to enslave us claim to act as a strategy of our subjugation and dehumanization.
No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of being human, of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote in my post of December 11 2023, What is Hate Speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who Decides What Is Permitted, and How Shall We Enforce Limits On Each Other’s Freedoms? Case of the Repression of Dissent By Universities Beholden to Special Interest Money; Free speech ends where hate and violence begin; and dehumanization is criminal incitement to violence.
Yes, but what is hate speech? What is Anti-Semitism? Who decides what is permitted, and how shall we enforce limits on each other’s freedoms?
Such questions about our fundamental rules of how to be human together are now being fought out on university campuses throughout our nation and the world, which pit student mass protests against the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza against repression of dissent by authority both within education systems and between institutions of education and those of the state, and often shaped by the special interest money which has been allowed to define the terms of the debate.
In large part the world has accepted the state of Israel’s claim that criticism of its use of force inclusive of vast war crimes in Gaza is anti-semitism. There are two problems with this; first, Palestinians and Israelis are both semites, one people divided by history as faith, ethnicity, and national identity weaponized in service to power. Second, this falsification is deployed globally by the state of Israel to both defend and subjugate the Jewish diaspora by enforcing identification of being Jewish with the state of Israel, which also deflects questioning of its brutal colonial-Apartheid settler regime.
We must beware those who claim to speak and act in our name, and most especially commit unforgiveable acts to make us complicit in their crimes, for this is a strategy of fascist tyranny.
Netanyahu’s settler regime, founded on conquest and theft of indigenous people’s lands as manifest destiny authorized by God in imitation of our own Conquest of the Native Americans, the state of Israel institutionalized as a military society designed as a refuge for and avenger of Jews, and the whole Zionist ideology of identitarian politics and a nation of one faith and one blood, remains today the world’s most extreme and dangerous fascist successor state to the Nazis.
But this need not remain so. Israel would very much like to convince her own citizens and all of us that to be a Jew is to be a member and figure of the state of Israel, and that to call out and oppose the state of Israel for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza is to be guilty of hate crime against Jewish people, but this is a lie, and one of many.
So we come to this final question; how do we oppose state tyranny and terror without confusing and conflating a state with the people it claims to speak and act for? How answer division with solidarity?
Netanyahu has incited anti Jewish hate as well as anti Israeli horror at his atrocities and war crimes. When a state demonizes itself before the world, it is the diasporic population of those it claims to act in service of as legitimation of power who suffer first. This is a primary strategy of fascism; making those in whose name it claims to act complicit in unforgiveable crimes. But the use of force obeys Newtons Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce and resistance. The crimes of Israel have reawakened a slumbering monster and put every Jewish person and community at risk. We must now bring regime change, peace, and democracy to Israel or witness the return of the global Fourth Reich and its policies of Judenfrei. Save the Jews; bring down the Israeli state.
Herein we may find guidance in Jean Genet’s restatement of Nietzsche’s principle of how those who hunt monsters become monsters themselves in the use of violence to enforce authorized identities and ideas of virtue; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
Yesterday we witnessed a ray of light pierce the immense darkness of our moment, in twin events of fracture on both of the primary fronts of the Gaza War; in the Israeli regime of tyranny and terror and in America’s complicity in the atrocities and crimes against humanity of our colony and proxy state. On the Israeli front, Benny Gantz threatens to leave the coalition government which would bring it down unless Netanyahu stops the genocide, and on the American front Biden for the first time in the history of the American-Israel partnership aligns us with the principle of our universal human rights inclusive of Palestinians as fellow human beings in an empathetic speech which defines goals of peace and equality in the region and reveals that he is working on solutions rather than obstructing them and abetting the atrocities of Israel, something I wish he would have communicated with us all on October 7.
To clarify, Biden personally, our government, and our nation will forever bear a measure of responsibility for how the immense arsenal we provided Israel has been used, regardless of what may happen next. For these crimes against humanity both Netanyahu and Biden among many others belong in the same court as Milosevic. Nothing in this must divert our gaze from the future and the possibilities for change which Biden and Gantz have now offered us. In both Israel and America, we now have agents of change speaking not merely of ceasefire, but also of our future and solutions which might allow us to emerge from the legacies of our history.
America and Israel have been partners in a Faustian bargain; in its wake we believed the Holocaust proved that only power is real and has meaning, embraced the seduction of power to be the arbiter of virtue, and with the centralization of power to authority forged carceral states of force and control and of imperial conquest and dominion.
But now the tide begins to turn.
As Biden said in his historic Morehouse College speech; “It’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That’s why I’ve called for an immediate ceasefire to stop the fighting, bring the hostages home, and I’ve been working on a deal as we speak.”
“This is one of the hardest, most complicated problems in the world. There’s nothing easy about it. I know it angers and frustrates many of you, including my family, but most of all, I know it breaks your heart. It breaks mine as well.”
Tyranny blinks, and we must seize the moment. As Edwin Markham wrote in Preparedness;
“For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear—
When you are the hammer, strike. “
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power; let us use ours not to dehumanize and enslave others, but to restore our humanity and to liberate each other. As the lyrics of the beautiful elegiac song in the series Wednesday goes, nothing else matters.
Nothing Else Matters, by Apocalyptica from the original Metallica song, as featured on the Netflix series Wednesday
Greta, I wish I was with you on this ship of hope. You sail to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness of a world which has looked away from horrors beyond imagining, from the safety of elite privilege and power, and in America our leaders have made us all complicit in genocide as our taxes buy the deaths of children. What I can do to help, I will do, this I swear.
Friends, I think this forlorn hope of a flotilla needs escort ships to run the blockade.
In this action of solidarity the crew of the Freedom Flotilla place their lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to preserve the principle of our universal human rights. They do so at great peril, for they sail unarmed and defenseless into an enemy who has bombed hospitals and schools, fired on starving masses lured to their deaths by bogus food relief, and assassinated aid workers and journalists.
Gandhi’s Salt Tax Protest brought down the British Empire in India, because the British were capable of being shamed; the state of Israel is not. To a Zionist, only fellow Jews are truly human.
Israel will kill Greta Thunberg, who will be running the blockade on this ship, without hesitation and with the arrogance of power, amoral nihilism, and fascist hate. They will enjoy it, glory in it, celebrate it. We too must be without pity, fear, or remorse, but in solidarity of action, defense of our humanity, and refusal to submit.
I think Greta needs escort ships, and I think she’s worth dying for. Want to be a pirate?
I call on anyone with a ship in the Eastern Mediterranean or within striking range of Gaza to join the Freedom Flotilla and run the blockade with Greta and her team of heroes. If you have a film crew, bring them.
If you are a pilot with a plane capable of aerial reconnaissance, bring it.
If you are a nation to whom our universal human rights means something, bring a fleet of warships, because Israel will be meeting the flotilla with all of the savagery and cruelty they can send, and they are long masters of the horrors of war.
Greta has served us all as the moral compass of humankind, a Pythian seer and figure of Joan of Arc, and history remembers what happened to Joan.
Don’t let the history of state repression of dissent repeat itself here and now, nor of the genocide and use of famine and denial of medical aide as weapons of war which the Freedom Flotilla sails to challenge.
The heroes of the Freedom Flotilla sail now in one of the most magnificent gestures of our modern age, with only love with which to conquer hate; but I fear they do not understand the enemy they confront in the way that I do, having lost someone I loved to assassination by an Israeli sniper in Rafah, fought to defend families at prayer at Al Aqsa and thereafter in what I called the Third Intifada of 2021, and fought in the 1982 Siege of Beirut because I witnessed Israeli soldiers setting fire to children, laughing and betting how far they could run before collapsing into pools of blackened ruin.
Noble and courageous though it is, it will take more than a symbolic act of nonviolent Gandhian Resistance to break the Israeli aid blockade and end the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.
When the imposed conditions of struggle require that force be met with force in the cause of liberation, as they do against the criminal Israeli state and its use of terror in imperial conquest and dominion to subjugate and dehumanize through despair, abjection, and learned helplessness, by what principles of action must we seize power?
All Resistance is War to the Knife, and those who respect no laws and n o limits may hide behind none.
By Any Means Necessary, as Sartre teaches us in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, a line made famous by the great Malcolm X.
For myself, the first rule of war is the same as the last; diversion and surprise.
But what we cannot do without compromising the nonviolent status of the Freedom Flotilla, discrediting its narrative as delegitimation of the Israeli state, and endangering its members, is join it with armed escorts. They still require protection other than the forbearance of vipers, but independently and not from within or with knowledge of any such operations.
The details of such actions in solidarity I leave entirely to your imagination and resources, though I signpost that the previous Freedom Flotilla ship was bombed by Israeli drones and anyone who can fly counter-drone sorties is most welcome. A dive team able to disarm mines may also be useful, should Israel simply plant something wicked on the hull to burn them all alive as they historically so often have. And in case of capture of the Flotilla members, a team with breaching capability must be standing by in Israel and ready to break them out of prison and escape to freedom.
May we act in solidarity to preserve life by our duty of care for each other, for the suffering of one human being is the suffering of us all, and let us harm no one, not even the enemy, as we protect and defend the lives of our allies, for all politics is theatre and as Gandhi demonstrated one must claim the moral high ground to delegitimize tyranny.
If like myself you choose instead to take the fight to the enemy, I’ll meet you on the far side of Forever.
Thus far we have defined three possible strategies of liberation struggle in this context; witness, protection, and destruction of the enemy’s capability to inflict harm. While this may get the Freedom Flotilla safely to the gates of Gaza, it will not open them; only mass action by the citizens of Israel can do that, unless the international community changes policy and sends liberation forces to Palestine and Israel to bring regime change and a Reckoning to her war criminals.
The Netanyahu regime will not open fire on its own citizens, and if enough of them meet the Freedom Flotilla on the shores of Gaza in celebration and solidarity, the regime is finished and the war ended.
Only love can truly free us from the tyranny of hate.
“Be just unto the balance”,” ن عادلا في الميزان كما يوجه سورة 55 الرحمن 9 من القرآن الكريم “, as we are guided in Surah 55 Ar Rahman 9 of Holy Quran.
How may we be just unto the balance with those who do not regard us as fellow human beings, and to whom all outsiders beyond whatever boundaries of us and them are not truly human and merit no human rights?
Where does the balance of justice and of our humanity lay?
When confronted by Rashomon Gate Events wherein we choose our fates and the sets of possibilities of becoming human within which we will live, how may we disambiguate that which exalts us from that which degrades and dehumanizes?
Always we are captives of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, from which only love has the power to redeem us and return to us our souls.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As written by Greta Thunberg in a social media press release; ” The Freedom Flotilla aid mission is about supporting Palestinian resistance and challenging the Israeli blockade and genocide when our complicit governments fail to step up. One month after the bombing of the boat Conscience during our last attempt to sail to Gaza, break the siege and open up a humanitarian corridor, we have yet again set sail towards Gaza – not carrying weapons, but food and medical supplies. Systematic starvation and deprivation of basic needs are some of many methods of warfare Israel is using against Palestinians.
This mission is only part of a global movement for social- and climate justice, liberation and decolonisation led by marginalised people. If we are to stand on the right side of history, it is our duty and about time that we join that movement. Free Palestine.”
As written in The Palestine Chronicle, in an article entitled Greta Thunberg Joins Gaza-Bound Flotilla to Challenge Israeli Blockade; “A new flotilla, including Greta Thunberg and high-profile figures, has departed from Italy to deliver aid to Gaza and challenge Israel’s ongoing blockade.
A group of international activists, including prominent climate activist Greta Thunberg, is preparing to sail from southern Italy to the Gaza Strip in a bid to challenge the Israeli blockade and draw global attention to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding there.
The vessel, named Madleen, is scheduled to depart from the port of Catania on Sunday afternoon, according to the organizers, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
The mission, described as both symbolic and practical, aims to deliver a small quantity of aid while amplifying demands for an end to Israel’s siege. Speaking at a press conference ahead of the departure, Thunberg, visibly emotional, said:
“We are doing this because, no matter what odds we are against, we have to keep trying… Because the moment we stop trying is when we lose our humanity. And no matter how dangerous this mission is, it’s not even near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of the live-streamed genocide.”
The boat’s crew includes high-profile figures such as actor Liam Cunningham and French MEP Rima Hassan, who has Palestinian roots. Hassan has previously been denied entry to Israel due to her vocal opposition to its military campaign in Gaza.
The journey is expected to take about a week—assuming the ship is not intercepted.
This follows a failed attempt in early May when, according to a statement from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, one of its ships, The Conscience—carrying volunteers from over 21 countries—“came under direct attack in international waters”.
The Coalition stated that armed drones attacked the front of an unarmed civilian vessel twice, causing a fire and a substantial breach in the hull.
Ongoing Genocide
Since Israel’s reneging on the ceasefire on March 18, it has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip through a bloody and ongoing aerial bombardment.
On October 7, 2023, following a Palestinian Resistance operation in southern Israel, the Israeli military launched a genocidal war against the Palestinians, killing over 54,000, wounding more than 123,000, with over 14,000 still missing.
Despite habitual condemnation by many countries around the world of the Israeli genocide, little has been done to hold Israel accountable.
Israel is currently under investigation for the crime of genocide by the International Court of Justice, while accused war criminals — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are now officially wanted by the International Criminal Court.
The Israeli genocide has been largely defended, supported, and financed by
June 21 2024 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human: On Sartre’s Birthday, And A Eulogy
May 29 2025 Anniversary of the Final Day of the Third Intifada of 2021: On The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force; Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
ي ٢ يونيو ٢٠٢٥، غريتا ثونبرغ تُدير الحصار الإسرائيلي المفروض على المساعدات الإنسانية المُوجهة إلى غزة مع تحالف أسطول الحرية.
غريتا، ليتني كنتُ معكِ على متن سفينة الأمل هذه. أنتِ تُبحرين لإنقاذ شيء من إنسانيتنا من ظلمة عالمٍ أغفل أهوالًا تفوق الخيال، وأمن امتيازات النخبة وسلطتها، وفي أمريكا جعلنا قادتنا جميعًا مُتواطئين في إبادة جماعية، حيث تُباع ضرائبنا لقتل الأطفال. ما أستطيع فعله للمساعدة، سأفعله، أقسم بذلك.
أصدقائي، أعتقد أن هذا الأمل اليائس في أسطول يحتاج إلى سفن مُرافقة لكسر الحصار.
في هذا العمل التضامني، يُوازن طاقم أسطول الحرية حياتهم مع حياة الضعفاء والمُهمّشين، والمُكمّمين والمُهمّشين، حفاظًا على مبدأ حقوق الإنسان العالمية. يفعلون ذلك في خطرٍ كبير، إذ يُبحرون عُزّلاً وعُزّلاً إلى عدوٍّ قصف المستشفيات والمدارس، وأطلق النار على جماهير جائعة استُدرجت إلى حتفها بمساعداتٍ غذائيةٍ زائفة، واغتال عمال الإغاثة والصحفيين.
أدى احتجاج غاندي على ضريبة الملح إلى سقوط الإمبراطورية البريطانية في الهند، لأن البريطانيين كانوا قادرين على الشعور بالخزي؛ أما دولة إسرائيل فلا. بالنسبة للصهيوني، فإن اليهود فقط هم البشر الحقيقيون.
ستقتل إسرائيل غريتا ثونبرغ، التي ستُحاصر هذه السفينة، دون تردد وبغطرسة القوة، والعدمية اللاأخلاقية، والكراهية الفاشية. سيستمتعون بذلك، ويفخرون به، ويحتفلون به. يجب علينا نحن أيضًا أن نكون بلا شفقة، أو خوف، أو ندم، بل متضامنين في العمل، دفاعًا عن إنسانيتنا، رافضين الخضوع.
أعتقد أن غريتا بحاجة إلى سفن مرافقة، وأعتقد أنها تستحق الموت من أجلها. هل تريد أن تكون قرصانًا؟ أدعو كل من يملك سفينة في شرق البحر الأبيض المتوسط أو في مرمى قصف غزة للانضمام إلى أسطول الحرية وكسر الحصار مع غريتا وفريقها الأبطال. إن كان لديك طاقم تصوير، فأحضره.
إن كنت طيارًا بطائرة قادرة على الاستطلاع الجوي، فأحضرها.
إن كنت دولة تُقدّر حقوق الإنسان العالمية، فأحضر أسطولًا من السفن الحربية، لأن إسرائيل ستُقابل الأسطول بكل الوحشية والقسوة التي يُمكنها إرسالها، وهم أسيادٌ مُحنّكون في أهوال الحرب منذ زمن طويل.
لقد خدمتنا غريتا جميعًا كبوصلة أخلاقية للبشرية، ورائية بيثية وشخصية تُشبه جان دارك، والتاريخ يُخلّد ذكرى ما حدث لجان.
لا تدعوا تاريخ قمع الدولة للمعارضة يُكرّر نفسه هنا والآن، ولا تاريخ الإبادة الجماعية واستخدام المجاعة وحرمان المساعدات الطبية كأسلحة حرب، وهو ما يُبحر أسطول الحرية لمواجهته. يُبحر أبطال أسطول الحرية الآن في واحدة من أروع لفتات عصرنا الحديث، لا يملكون سوى الحب الذي يقهر الكراهية؛ لكنني أخشى أنهم لا يفهمون العدو الذي يواجهونه بالطريقة التي أفهمها بها، بعد أن فقدت شخصًا عزيزًا اغتيل برصاص قناص إسرائيلي في رفح، وقاتلت دفاعًا عن العائلات في المسجد الأقصى، ثم فيما أسميته الانتفاضة الثالثة عام ٢٠٢١، وقاتلت في حصار بيروت عام ١٩٨٢ لأنني شاهدت جنودًا إسرائيليين يُشعلون النار في الأطفال، يضحكون ويراهنون على المسافة التي يمكنهم قطعها قبل أن ينهاروا في برك من الخراب الأسود.
مهما كان الأمر نبيلًا وشجاعًا، فإن كسر الحصار الإسرائيلي للمساعدات وإنهاء التطهير العرقي والإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين يتطلب أكثر من مجرد عمل رمزي للمقاومة الغاندية السلمية. عندما تقتضي ظروف النضال المفروضة مواجهة القوة بالقوة في سبيل التحرير، كما هو الحال ضد دولة إسرائيل الإجرامية واستخدامها للإرهاب في الغزو والسيطرة الإمبريالية لإخضاع ونزع الإنسانية من خلال اليأس والذل والعجز المكتسب، فبأي مبادئ عمل يجب أن نستولي على السلطة؟
كل مقاومة هي حرب بالسكين، ومن لا يحترمون أي قانون أو حدود لا يجوز لهم الاختباء وراء أي منها.
بأي وسيلة ضرورية، كما يعلمنا سارتر في مسرحيته “الأيدي القذرة” عام ١٩٤٨، وهي جملة اشتهر بها مالكولم إكس العظيم.
في رأيي، القاعدة الأولى للحرب هي القاعدة الأخيرة: التضليل والمفاجأة.
ولكن ما لا يمكننا فعله دون المساس بالوضع اللاعنفي لأسطول الحرية، وتشويه سمعته باعتباره نزعًا للشرعية عن دولة إسرائيل، وتعريض أعضائه للخطر، هو ضمه بمرافقة مسلحة. فهم ما زالوا بحاجة إلى حماية أخرى غير صبر الأفاعي، ولكن بشكل مستقل وليس من الداخل أو بمعرفة أي من هذه العمليات. أترك لكم كامل تفاصيل هذه الأعمال التضامنية لخيالكم ومواردكم، مع أنني أشير إلى أن سفينة أسطول الحرية السابقة قُصفت بطائرات إسرائيلية مسيرة، وأي شخص قادر على تنفيذ طلعات مضادة للطائرات المسيرة مرحب به للغاية. قد يكون من المفيد أيضًا وجود فريق غوص قادر على نزع الألغام، إذا ما زرعت إسرائيل شيئًا خطيرًا على هيكل السفينة لحرقهم جميعًا أحياءً كما فعلت في كثير من الأحيان تاريخيًا. وفي حالة أسر أعضاء الأسطول، يجب تشكيل فريق لديه القدرة على الاختراق.
قف في إسرائيل على أهبة الاستعداد لإخراجهم من السجن والهروب إلى الحرية.
فلنعمل متضامنين للحفاظ على الحياة بواجبنا في رعاية بعضنا البعض، فمعاناة إنسان واحد هي معاناتنا جميعًا، ولنحرص على ألا نؤذي أحدًا، ولا حتى العدو، كما نحمي وندافع عن أرواح حلفائنا، فالسياسة كلها مسرحية، وكما أوضح غاندي، يجب على المرء أن يدعي التفوق الأخلاقي لنزع الشرعية عن الاستبداد.
إذا اخترتم مثلي خوض معركة مع العدو، فسألتقي بكم على الجانب الآخر من الأبد.
حتى الآن، حددنا ثلاث استراتيجيات ممكنة للنضال من أجل التحرير في هذا السياق: الشهادة، والحماية، وتدمير قدرة العدو على إلحاق الأذى. وبينما قد يؤدي هذا إلى وصول أسطول الحرية بسلام إلى أبواب غزة، فإنه لن يفتحها؛ وحده العمل الجماهيري لمواطني إسرائيل قادر على تحقيق ذلك، ما لم يغير المجتمع الدولي سياسته ويرسل قوات تحرير إلى فلسطين وإسرائيل لتغيير النظام ومحاسبة مجرمي الحرب. لن يفتح نظام نتنياهو النار على مواطنيه، وإذا التقى عدد كافٍ منهم بأسطول الحرية على شواطئ غزة احتفالًا وتضامنًا، فإن النظام قد انتهى وانتهت الحرب.
الحب وحده هو الذي يحررنا حقًا من طغيان الكراهية.
“اعدلوا في الميزان كما يوجهون” (سورة الرحمن 9 من القرآن الكريم).
كيف لنا أن نكون عادلين في الميزان مع من لا يعتبروننا إخوة في الإنسانية، والذين لا يعتبرون كل من هم خارج حدودنا وحدودهم بشرًا حقيقيين ولا يستحقون أي حقوق إنسانية؟
أين يكمن ميزان العدل وإنسانيتنا؟
عندما نواجه أحداث بوابة راشومون التي نختار فيها مصائرنا ومجموعات الاحتمالات لنصبح بشرًا التي سنعيش في ظلها، كيف لنا أن نميز بين ما يرفعنا وما يحط من قدرنا ويجردنا من إنسانيتنا؟
نحن دائمًا أسرى لخاتم فاغنر، خوفًا وقوةً وجبروتًا، لا يملك سوى الحب القدرة على تخليصنا منه وإعادة أرواحنا إلينا.
في النهاية، كل ما يهم هو ما نفعله بخوفنا، وكيف نستخدم قوتنا.
Here is a marvelous set of nested boxes of ideas regarding identity, communication and language, history and memory, psychology and transhistorical and epigenetic trauma, politics and aesthetics, the necessity of pride and self-ownership and the art of being human.
Herein I must preface my interrogation of identity in the context of Pride Month with the clear declaration that I am not a member of this community and do not speak for it or any who are or from within such lived experience; like stolen valor or false claims of military service, this would be a kind of theft as are all lies. But I can question the authorization of identities including those of sex and gender as a system of oppression.
Writing in The Paris Review of the art and meaning of David Wojnarowicz, Patrick Nation interrogates the borders of self and other in an inspired meditation on the use of pronouns, the we and I, in both language and persons as self-referential systems.
His words become a labyrinth, an echo of values which are immanent in nature like the spirals of a seashell, truths written in our flesh awaiting our discovery, an evocation of a virtual third realm and interface between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves, as two essences of perfume will create together a new and prodigal scent.
It is precisely this uniqueness and surprise, and the transitory nature of experience, which confers value on the moments of our lives and on art as a motive force and a fulcrum of our passion and our vision.
Art, like one’s persona, is not an object but an experience; not a fixed quality but an adaptive process in motion and subject to change.
Gender and sexual personae are a performance, both a struggle for ownership of identity between self and other and an event occurring in the free space of play between these bounded realms.
As I wrote in my post of March 13 2021, A Year of Quarantine in Retrospect;
The quality of our humanity is not fixed, but always in motion, like the turbulent systems da Vinci studied in his fountain and which later with new mathematics came to be described as chaos theory. Identity is a process which is fluid, and our emotions are instruments with which it creates itself.
We create ourselves over time, through our history of defining moments; human being is a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation. What we call our self or our soul is no different in kind from the exoskeleton of an insect or the shell of a sea creature.
And we create ourselves through our interdependence with others, our relationships, friends, families, communities, and the systems of signs thereof.
Human being has in this scheme three orders of relationships; persona, history, and interdependence, and all of it is in motion, dynamic and inherently unstable.
Impermanence is the defining quality of nature and the material universe; so also is the controlling metaphor and condition of human nature, being, and identity our ephemeral, transitory, and protean forms. Nature is a mirror which reflects itself, and like the Hobgoblin’ fragmented mirror in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, reveals endless possibilities of becoming human; the inward and outward halves of the cosmos also create and define each other in mutual coevolution, like Escher’s Drawing Hands.
Humans are naturally polyamorous and are enculturated to be otherwise; we are shaped by sociohistorical forces in the sphere of gender identity and sexual orientation to deny our true nature. It is normality which is deviant, and from which misogyny, the system of Patriarchy, and other destructive illnesses of the spirit arise; fear weaponized in service to power, fear of otherness but also of nature and ourselves. Here is the true origin of evil as the social use of force and violence in self-hatred.
As Goethe wrote in Faust; “Let us extend our lives through our bodies in all directions possible”.
For me the origin of human evil is in unequal relationships and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, pathologies of violence and dominion which as with the figure of Alberich the dwarf require the renunciation of love as their price; not in the violation of taboos, the transgression of the Forbidden, or the defiance of Authority, three things I count as sacred acts in pursuit of the truth of ourselves, but in the systemic and structural injustices and inequalities of hegemonic elites, their lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls, and the state tyranny and terror of brutal force and control which we must resist and refuse to submit to, that we may become autonomous and free as self- created and self-owned beings; for power and force are meaningless when met with disobedience, and in the moment of our refusal to submit to authority we become Unconquered and free.
I say again; human sexual orientation is not a spectrum with endpoint limits, but a Moebius Loop of infinite possibilities, and we are born and exist by nature everywhere along it at once. All else is limitation and control imposed artificially as dominion, captivity, and falsification by authorized identities, or a seizure of power and self-ownership in revolutionary struggle against such narratives, hierarchies, and divisions.
And like all living systems and processes, identities of sex and gender, human sexual orientation, and desire are always in motion, adapting and changing in new and curious ways.
This is their glory and wonder, as our truths unfold over time.
Writing of love in Letters to Milena, Franz Kafka gives us this witness; “I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your door in Vienna, and say, Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.
Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
Here is the true origin of Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Return as a test and praxis of Authenticity, and it recalls to me something I once said to Jean Genet. He had sat down at my table after my friends and I made our morning race against death, crossing a sniper alley to reach a cafe in Beirut that had the best strawberry crepes in the world.
“I’m told you do this every day, steal breakfast from death.”
To which I replied, “Such moments are all we truly own, which are ours and ours alone. It’s a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason, and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said,” I agree”; this was the beginning of our conversations at breakfast in the days of the terrible siege, which would reset the path of my life.
My wish for all of us is that we may find such friends who can reveal to us our true selves and offer figural spaces into which to grow; such is my functional definition of love.
Through love and desire we pursue a sacred calling to create and discover our truths, truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh. Herein also we escape the limits of our flesh as we become sublimed and exalted in unification with others, who free our captive images from the wilderness of mirrors which falsify us. Love is an instrument with which we may liberate and empower each other and restore to one another our autonomy and authenticity.
Love and desire are forces of liberation, uncontrollable as the tides and inherently chaotic and anarchic. They are our most powerful weapons against authority and tyranny; for they can neither be taken from us nor limited.
Love like you have laughed in the face of your executioner, for this is exactly what love is.
As written by Patrick Nation in The Paris Review, in an article entitled
Participating in the American Theater of Trauma; “For David Wojnarowicz, this decade has been a renaissance. He plays a guiding spirit in Olivia Laing’s 2016 internal travelogue, The Lonely City, and haunts the 2011 music video for Justice’s “Civilization.” In last year’s retrospective, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, the Whitney Museum reminded us that Wojnarowicz “came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes.” We recognize that decade in our own, and, with it, Wojnarowicz’s anger. Our present is magnetized to his past. His art, as Hanya Yanagihara wrote, “reminds you that there is a distinction between cynicism and anger, because the work, while angry, is rarely bitter—bitterness is the absence of hope; anger is hope’s companion.” In truth, renaissance is a cruel word to give to someone who died at thirty-seven. But we do love him. We do need him.
Some things to know about who we are:
We are trapped in a moment of political terror. We are dangerously close to cynicism, but angry enough to have hope. We are no longer interested in compromise. Men, we agree, have had their chance. White women we can no longer trust to uphold feminism, not while they cling to white supremacy. We are antiracist and antifascist and prison abolitionists; we rejoiced when Bill Cosby received his sentence. We canceled Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Al Franken with equal fervor. We are uninterested in what they think.
Welcome to we: a disingenuous pronoun that both paid and unpaid pundits alike brandish without consent. I’m often guilty, too: my points are more convincing if I ventriloquize your voice alongside mine. Are we really doing this? Is this what we want? When did we decide this was okay? As usual, Adorno said it best: “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” More often than not, we is an erasure, a linguistic illusion that you or I have endorsed some third person’s opinion, politics, or decisions. Deployed in politicized spaces, the subtext of we—i.e., I didn’t need to ask you—is a violation of political agency.
What’s dangerous in maligning we, however, is how badly I—a cisgender white man living in America—need to hear these voices. Often, the contemporary we is a backlash against centuries of a white cishet male monolith, which includes the we in the Constitution. It’s a backlash voiced by women, people of color, trans and nonbinary persons, and persons with disabilities. As Wesley Morris wrote for the New York Times last year, “Groups who have been previously marginalized can now see that they don’t have to remain marginalized. Spending time with work that insults or alienates them has never felt acceptable. Now they can do something about it.” Morris casts this moment as an inversion of the culture wars of the eighties and nineties, when artists like Wojnarowicz faced censorship and humiliation from the religious right. After pushing their work to extremes and waging costly legal and political campaigns—including, in Wojnarowicz’s case, the very right to survive as a queer artist—the oppressed are now closer to power than ever. “This territory,” Morris writes, “was so hard won that it must be defended at all times, at any costs. Wrongs have to be righted. They can’t affect social policy—not directly. They can, however, amend the culture.” It’s in this sense that we becomes linguistic action. We cosign or cancel speech, endorse or excoriate art, all the while presuming that any I can borrow any you. We amplifies our voices as one, an assumption of power.
While Morris’s essay is a sensitive, observant, and smart examination of ethics in contemporary art, and while I’m grateful to have read and reread it, my first impulse upon seeing its subheading (“Should art be a battleground for social justice?”) was to throw the magazine across the room and tweet something like, “Do we really need another man whispering ‘art for art’s sake’ as he pins us against the wall?” This is what our politics has done to me as a queer artist. I carry so much anger that even the threat of some man saying, Let’s not get carried away, triggers rage.
Or perhaps more exact: revenge.
I want to believe we need Wojnarowicz’s art, but I can only say that I need it. I burn for its juxtapositions, the shadows in his photographs, and the narrative ambition of his paintings—exuberant perversions of renaissance epics. Close to the Knives, his “memoir of disintegration,” immolates me entirely. Like many queers in the seventies, Wojnarowicz grew up neglected and abused, prostituting his body by the time he was fifteen. As an artist, he received no formal training—only critique from other queer artists, including his one-time lover, Peter Hujar, whose body became one of his subjects. Hujar’s face and hands and feet, photographed on his deathbed in 1987, found their way into one of Wojnarowicz’s collages, lacquered over with a fiery indictment of the society that let this happen to a man he loved; and then Wojnarowicz, too, died, with so much art left unmade.
Reading Wojnarowicz today—that is, in his words, “in a country where an actor becomes the only acceptable president … a man whose vocation is to persuade with words and actions an audience who wants to believe whatever he tells them”—empowers me. Art “can be reparatory,” Morris writes, “a means for the oppressed and ignored to speak,” and Wojnarowicz’s anger makes me feel as if it’s my right to demand silence from those I perceive to have oppressed queer people, or even those who just don’t have the luck of being queer. I feel as if it’s my right to shun artworks in which I don’t recognize myself or my friends. To not see oneself mirrored in culture feels like abuse, every renewed act of erasure newly unbearable.
While Morris writes about art specifically, his essay reflects a tendency in discourse overall toward separating, totally, that which we call bearable from that which we decide is not. This is the subject of Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. “At many levels of human interaction,” she writes, “there is an opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” As social creatures, communication and negotiation are human responsibilities. Activities that work against communication—shunning, silencing, and enlisting the power of the state to punish rather than resolve—shirk this responsibility, and are unfortunately common among vulnerable persons, for whom withdrawal and refusal are often the only communication skills they possess. This leaves both parties trapped—one behind a locked door they won’t open, the other outside. Schulman describes her struggle to understand her colleagues, who, despite their liberal politics, have developed an “almost prescribed instinct to punish, using the language originated initially by a radical movement but now co-opted to deny complexity, due process, and the kind of in-person, interactive conversation that produces resolution.” This language is that of “abuse,” which has a perpetrator and a victim.
In situations of abuse (ask yourself: is this a power struggle or does this person have power over me?), victims are indeed blameless. But Schulman’s thesis outlines how what often feels like abuse is instead conflict—a point of pain in need of resolution, arrived at only through honest and open communication, which can, and often does, hurt: “the collapse of Conflict and Abuse is partly the result of a punitive standard in which people are made desperate, yet ineligible, for compassion.” The state and its systems of power withhold assistance and compassion from those who are not “eligible.” This creates a system where the identity of victim is desired, if only to ensure one is met with compassion instead of derision. “This concept,” Schulman writes, “is predicated on a need to enforce that one party is entirely righteous and without mistake, while the other is the Specter, the residual holder of all evil.” Anyone who endured the punditry after the 2016 elections will understand why labeling oneself an economic or demographic victim can be toxic. In a sociological refusal to communicate, 63 million voters escalated decades of capitalist-driven conflict by turning their pain into a sacrosanct identity, regardless of how it would, and has, hurt millions of people far more severely than any pain, however legitimate, those voters felt.
Schulman’s ideas on conflict, communication, escalation, abuse, and repair encourage us to accept individual responsibility, however small, for as many of the conflicts in one’s life as we can stand. Yet it remains necessary to distinguish these conflicts from abuse. What’s interesting about Schulman’s essay is how it intersects with urgent questions of speech, de-platforming, and “cancelation.” Her insistence upon open and respectful communication seems like an inversion of the tactics of silence, shunning, exclusion, and sometimes of violence used by antifascist groups for decades to combat authoritarian politics. The strategies of antifascism contradict everything Schulman says in her plea toward mutual understanding and conflict resolution, but only in the way that shouting over Ann Coulter, for example, seems like an infringement upon her right to incite violence through “free speech.” The error here is to call fascism a conflict.
A primary goal of Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook is to illuminate the “trans-historical terror of fascism,” which is never a “defeated” enemy but a constant reactionary threat as long as inequality and suffering are tolerated. History is not fixed or written but being written. The post-Holocaust slogan—“Never again!”—is not a fact, observation, or conclusion, but a plea for understanding. As Bray writes, “History is a complex tapestry stitched together by threads of continuity and discontinuity… [Anti-fascism] is an argument about the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” It could indeed happen again—maybe tomorrow—and one needs to recognize it, contain it, and drive it back out of sight. These tactics don’t seek to understand the conflict and work toward resolution because there is no understanding, nor resolution; there is, in fact, no conflict. Fascism is abuse, and its evangelists know it. As Bray says, “The point here is not tactics; it is politics.” Just as an abusive parent or partner has no right to demand that his victim sit down and hear his case (again: “power over,” not “power struggle”), a political system that is predicated on the oppression and elimination of human beings from the populace based on race, legal history, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ability has no right to a national platform, and merits resistance over resolution. Fascism assumes a false mask of victimhood—one that seems like a “politics in conflict”—in order to undermine those who’d speak against it. But fascism is not a politics in conflict: it is a politics of abuse on a national and transnational scale. Antifascism seeks a way out of trauma; fascism governs with it.
At the Morgan Library in New York, I saw Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz, gaunt and severely shadowed, dark-eyed, a cigarette in mid drag; and I felt it, around my neck. Love there, and admiration. Grief. Seeing how Hujar saw his ex-lover, friend, and fellow artist seized me entirely. I didn’t understand why I was trembling. It just happened as these things happen—and, for me, are happening more and more. Last year, T magazine ran a special issue on the early eighties in New York. On one page, Edmund White remembered friends, writers, and artists who’d died young: “I was just thinking of Allen Barnett, who lived to publish one book of stories … He was so angry that he had to die.” On another page, the faces of over a hundred artists, choreographers, writers, performers, designers, and cinematographers “lost” to HIV related illnesses. I had no choice: I sobbed. The same thing happened with Tom Bianchi’s Polaroids of Fire Island in the early eighties, in which young men, naked or mostly naked, smile there on the sand, playing and drinking and fucking and loving each other with no idea what awaits them. “I could not have imagined,” Bianchi writes, “that my Polaroids would so suddenly become a record of a lost world—my box of pictures a mausoleum, too painful to visit. When I reopened the box decades later, I found friends and lovers playing and smiling. Alive again.” Even this, reread so many times, is hard to transcribe.
I began having sex with men in 2006. HIV is not only a treatable illness, but, thanks to PrEP, easier to avoid contracting than ever. I’ve lost no one to AIDS. I was a child when it decimated queer communities across the world. Because of this, it’s taken me a long time to understand that there is still trauma here, that for me to look back and see what has happened, and to see the people—the Reagan administration, state and local governments, charity organizations, and “normal Americans”—who stood by and let it happen, is for me a trauma I’m allowed to feel. It’s traumatic to know how many influential figures called it punishment, called it God, and how many millions nodded along with them. It’s traumatic that I believed, long after the documented success of antiretroviral therapy, that HIV was certain death. It’s traumatic to imagine myself and my friends in that other decade, losing all the men in my life I love and have loved, all while someone laughs on television, where they are paid to say, You had it coming.
Yes, they called me faggot, bullied me and threatened me; yes, I pushed myself so deeply into the closet that I thought I was someone else, hurting a lot of people in the process; and yes, I carry scars from those years when I craved physical pain instead of pain I couldn’t articulate. But no one I love died, not like that. Nor do I understand these intense reactions as merely empathetic, because I feel them a hundredfold more strongly than when I encounter the pain of people suffering in other situations. Instead—to adapt a phrase from Bray—this feels like transhistorical queer trauma. Not long ago, people like me suffered unimaginably and died in isolation, cut off not only from civil and social apparatuses but often their families; and this happened because those people were like me. Through shunning, violence, intimidation, and legislation, a society had so othered LGBTQ individuals that their drawn out and brutal deaths seemed permissible, even desirable. And alongside those deaths, what was a few million drug users, homeless persons, and black Americans living in abject poverty? Because of white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies, a virus became a weapon of the state, allowed first to proliferate and then, once activists had pushed back hard enough, to be contained, managed, and controlled by federal subsidies and corporate pharmaceutical research.
I’m not stupid enough to think “never again” calls for anything but constant vigilance. In February of 2018, the White House proposed a 20% cut in the nation’s global HIV/AIDS fund, which would lead, according to a report issued by ONE.org, to “nearly 300,000 deaths and more than 1.75 million new infections each year.” On June 1 of this year, the president logged onto Twitter and mentioned how we would “celebrate LGBT Pride Month and recognize the outstanding contributions LGBT people have made to our great Nation,” despite everything his administration and party have done to strip trans persons of their safety and their rights, to obstruct federal and state protections for queer families and workers. It’s especially tempting to ask this transphobic autocrat what he believes the T stands for when he reminds the nation to celebrate LGBT people, but that’s beside the point. It’s not ignorance that emanates from the White House. It is not a politics in conflict. No matter how many rainbow emoji the president tweets, his queer politics is death, hate, and exclusion. It is a legacy of abuse, and perhaps it’s only natural to feel it across generations, to break down sobbing when I discover another artist or writer or human being who was, not that many years ago, “so angry that he had to die.”
Those 63 million votes: was each an act of abuse? I want to say yes—I believed they were for a long time. As Bray indicates, “It is clear that ardent Trump supporters voted for their candidate either because of or despite his misogyny, racism, ableism, Islamaphobia, and many more hateful traits.” For me and the people I love, these votes felt cruel, and while I’m no longer sure about saying yes, I don’t question my choice to end every relationship I had with anyone who used their vote to inflict such irresponsible, widespread harm.
Every fascist regime has snuck into power through legal means with a relatively small majority. In the 1930 elections, shortly before Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reichstag, the Nazis received 18.3% of the vote. When Vittorio Emanuele III appointed Mussolini as prime minister in 1922, after 30,000 blackshirts marched theatrically on Rome, the PNF only held thirty-five of more than five hundred seats. In 2016, Trump received over 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. As I write this, there are thirty-one states—plus D.C.—with party registration. In those states, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 12 million; yet Republicans currently control sixty-seven of the ninety-nine state legislative bodies and hold a majority in the Senate. Supremacist ideologies don’t need that many fervent supporters; what they do need is indifference. In the case of Trump voters, Bray continues, “it is always important to distinguish between ideologues and their capricious followers, yet we cannot overlook how these popular bases of support create the foundations for fascism to manifest itself.”
Here is where the difference between conflict and abuse becomes a societal urgency. I’m not going to mince words. The Republican party, championing Islamophobia, denying and exacerbating climate change, stripping trans persons of their rights, supporting police brutality against the black community, incarcerating immigrants and separating children from their families—in short, committing crime upon crime against humanity—is a global terrorist organization rooted not only in white supremacy, but the supremacy of wealth. It’s hard to see class in America—to see poverty as an identity—because the American fabrication is that today’s poor, through obedience and hard work, will be rich tomorrow. It’s a story that hides an oppressed class in plain sight of people who serve as a ready-made voting base for the rich, as long as the rich grant them whiteness, heteronormativity, male supremacy, or some other power over those more deeply oppressed. These are those who might not champion the oppression of others, but go along with it as a price paid for a seat at the table.
It’s difficult to accept responsibility for this transaction, so enticing is its reward: state-sponsored victimhood. To take an example from Schulman, the white queer community doesn’t want to hear that today, “with gay marriage and parenthood prevalent, and the advent of gay nuclear families and normalized queer childbirth … white queer families realign with the state that held them in pervasive illegality less than a generation ago.” At the same time, this community still sees itself as unable to do harm, so entrenched is its history with victimhood. To challenge this is perceived as antiqueer ideology: of course we have the right to families, to suburbs, to lattes and plaid. But so, too, do white queers, in their newfound positions of power, have newfound responsibility to uphold the greater community, and to use their privilege to resolve conflicts with the trans community and queers of color, not to mention other oppressed and persecuted communities.
There is a similarity in action, Schulman says, in both the supremacist and the victim. This is born of refusal: “For the Supremacist, this refusal comes from a sense of entitlement; that they have an inherent ‘right’ not to question themselves. Conversely, the unrecovered traumatized person’s refusal is rooted in a panic that their fragile self cannot bear interrogation.” For the conflicted, seeing their pain mirrored in another can become a way to justify pain: at least she feels what I feel, or even at least he’s worse off than me. What this creates is an ongoing and mutually reflective theater of trauma in which everyone is a victim, exempt from responsibility, beyond repair.
We live in a misogynistic, racist, homo- and transphobic, ableist, violent, and viciously unequal country whose relatively small population (4.4% of the world) and vast wealth (25%) leave us, individual voters, responsible for the fate and future of this planet as its oceans rise and reefs die, as its air grows increasingly contaminated and water less potable. To feel so powerless and yet accountable for the future of the human race means that the sheer number of traumatized persons living in America is staggering. We are rooted in a country created by two concurrent genocides and supported by two centuries of wars, spectacular terrorism, theft, and global oppression. What’s worse, as Schulman argues, traumatized persons, through their actions, amplify and spread trauma to others by shunning, bullying, silencing, scapegoating, and threatening; they cling to what little they’re given as payment for their complicity in worldwide destruction at the profit of a small minority of white, wealthy men.
What use am I, and who is profiting from my trauma? How has my pain been weaponized and turned against others to stoke greater conflict? These are questions every American should ask themselves, particularly as we enter the nauseating theater of the 2020 elections and what lies beyond.
Conflict is profitable. Not only is this obvious in two hundred years of U.S. foreign policy, but in millennia of art and entertainment: escalation is dramatic, and drama, if it doesn’t affect us directly, is cathartic. It’s fun to say, Did you see what he said about her? and to watch a conflict get worse. There’s a reason journalists crank the apocalypse up to eleven every time the president tweets. It keeps readers coming back. Resolution is boring. Resolution is unprofitable. A played-out resolution is not a drama but an education: you too are responsible, rather than, watch this. Resisting this is not easy, fast, or efficient—three values Americans cherish. To be conflicted, to explore one’s accountability in a relationship, this is not what makes an individual spectacularly eligible for compassion. Only victimhood opens that coffer, and whoever screams loudest gets the prize.
What is needed is a queering of compassion. To move beyond the truly rare (but extant) binaries of perpetrator and victim, it’s important that every individual recognizes their existence in a continuum of conflict, and seeks to resolve and repair rather than escalate and destroy. We—and here I do mean every single one of us—must question individual guilt, which is rooted in action, rather than shame, which is entrenched in identity. Because when we insist upon the binary—that everyone is either perpetrator or victim—the cost is literal human life. One need only to look to all the Black Americans murdered by police, summoned by a white neighbor’s perceived victimhood, amplified by the aesthetics of entertainment.
The we I want to belong to is the we that recognizes our vast diversity of pain—the we that understands we’ve been assigned this pain for someone else’s profit, and that we need no longer give them want they want. To reserve compassion only for victims deemed eligible is to accept an arbitrary division, one in which the state can deem some of us worthy of aid and exclude others, meanwhile ensuring that the victims never speak to one another, competing as they must to remain in their places. Is it so revolutionary to say that every human being is eligible for compassion? That men and women of any gender or sexuality, any skin color, any ability, any legal or migratory status, any age, receive the same compassionate understanding as any other, responsible only for their actions and not the identities coerced upon them by others? To believe otherwise is to let fascism shatter our society.”
As written by Olivia Laing in Frieze, in an article entitled A Stitch in Time
The enduring symbolism of a sewn mouth, from the works of David Wojnarowicz to recent protests by refugees; “The light’s behind them. Four men, somewhere on the border between Greece and Macedonia. They can’t go forward, can’t go back. The man on the left has his eyes closed. He’s unshaven, a single freckle on his temple. The light is tangling in his hair, running down his forehead and catching on his chin. Head bowed, careful as a surgeon, the man opposite him is sewing up his mouth. The blue thread runs from lip to hand. The sewn man’s face is absolutely still, upturned to the sun. I don’t know where I first saw this photograph. Maybe it washed up on my Twitter feed. Later, I searched for it again, typing ‘refugee lip sewing’ into Google. This time, there were dozens of images, almost all of men, lips sewn shut with blue and scarlet thread. Afghan refugee, Athens. Australian immigration centre in Papua New Guinea. Stuck on the Balkan borders, a first smattering of snow.
The mouth is for speaking. But how do you speak if no one’s listening, if your voice is prohibited or no one understands your tongue? You make a migrant image, an image that can travel where you cannot. An Afghan boy who spent three years at the beginning of the millennium on Nauru – the off-shore processing camp for refugees attempting to reach Australia – told the website Solidarity.net.au: ‘My brother didn’t sew his lips but he was part of the hunger strike. He became unconscious and was sent to the hospital. Every time someone became unconscious we would send a picture to the media.’
The first time I encountered lip sewing as protest was in Rosa von Praunheim’s extraordinary 1990 AIDS documentary, Silence = Death. One of the interviewees was the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. A former street kid, a gay man who had recently been diagnosed with AIDS, he talked with great eloquence and fury about the different kinds of silence ranged against him. He spoke of what it had been like to grow up queer; the need to keep his sexuality secret because of the omnipresent threat of violence. He spoke of the silence of politicians, whose refusal to confront AIDS was hastening his own oncoming death. And, as he talked, footage he’d collaged together appeared on screen: a kaleidoscope of distress, which was later given the title A Fire in My Belly (1986–87). Ants crawl over a crucifix; a puppet dances on its strings; money pours from bandaged hands; a mouth is sewn shut, blood trickling from puncture wounds. What is the stitched mouth doing? If silence equals death, the biting slogan of AIDS activists, then part of the work of resistance is to make visible the people who are being silenced. Carefully, carefully, the needle works through skin, self-inflicted damage announcing larger harm. ‘I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,’ Wojnarowicz says. ‘I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.’ You make an image to communicate what is unsayable in words. You make an image to go on beyond you, to speak when you no longer can. The image can survive its creator’s death, but that doesn’t mean it is immune to the same forces of silencing that it protests. In 2010, nearly two decades after Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of 37, A Fire in My Belly was removed from a landmark exhibition of gay art at the Smithsonian, in Washington DC, following complaints from right-wing politicians and the Catholic League. This time, the stitched mouth became a symbol of censorship. At protests, people held up posters of Wojnarowicz’s face, lantern-jawed, implacable, five stitches locking shut his lips. Both images are in front of me now: stitches in time, reporting from the past. Wojnarowicz is dead; God knows where the man on the Greek border is. In other photos from the same protest, men sit or stand on train tracks, holding hand-lettered signs on scraps of dirty cardboard: ONLY FREEDOM and OPEN THE BORDER. They are bare-chested, wrapped in blankets, ranked against police with riot shields and bulletproof vests. The word ‘stitch’ is a double-edged prayer. It means the least bit of anything – the stigmatized, say, or the devalued. And it means to join together, mend or fasten, a hope powerful enough to drive a needle through bare flesh.”
Of the origins of sewn lips as a symbol of silenced voices and of an archetypal figure which draws us into its myth of Resistance I wrote in my post of October 9 2021, Silenced Loki: a Figure and Symbol of Poetic Vision and Creativity as Rebellion Against Authority and Revolutionary Struggle; The image of Silenced Loki, a totemic ritual statue called the Snaptun Stone which depicts the protean Trickster god and titan of fluid gender (in Old Norse, a class of beings literally termed “Devourer” and commonly translated as Giants) with his mouth sewn shut to silence his power to reorder the universe and change, subvert, manipulate, or evade its laws, has become part of our popular culture through the influence of Marvel comics and films, and a subject of discussion.
What does it mean? Why would a god whose power is imprisoned in his flesh and useless be an object of worship? Why has this part of his myth, so near a parallel to that of Prometheus, become central to Viking culture and assimilated into our own at this moment of history?
Silence equals Death, as the AIDS activist movement of decades ago constructed Elie Wiesel’s Silence is Complicity. Primarily I see this in terms of Loki’s role as what Foucault called a truthteller, parrhesia in classical terms, like the Jester of King Lear, as in the Lokasenna when he satirizes and mocks the gods. I call this the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen in a free society of equals; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. For law serves power and there is no just authority, and our mission as Bringers of Chaos is to subvert laws and delegitimize tyrants and those who would enslave us, be they gods or men.
Secondarily this relates to Loki’s role as a source of poetic vision and inspiration, here in the context of his grand trick, the Wager of Loki, which resulted in the forging of Mjolnir as embodied lightning and other signature powers of the gods, the price of which was having his mouth sewn shut to seal his power, but of course he like Ulysses outwits the gods and escapes to reclaim his power of true speaking. This myth makes him a patron of smiths and creative arts, not a maker, but a muse.
The image of Silenced Loki, terrible though it may be, refers to his willing sacrifice to forge the truth of others, and to guide their seizure of power as liberation. As such it was probably used by smiths to avert the dangers of their profession, a lightning rod and totemic patron.
Magic, like revolutionary struggle, always has a cost; among the first things one will need is something to bear that cost for us. Such is the purpose of Silenced Loki; he goes forth into the unknown bearing our voices and our truths.
Loki is a patron of outlaws, especially those of sex and gender, who finds reflection in Virginia Woolf’s gender changing immortal time traveler Orlando, of revolutionaries and anarchists in his guise as Milton’s rebel angel in Paradise Lost, the primary text of the iconic Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, of gamblers, chance, and luck as a figure of Fortune, of lost causes and forlorn hopes and the unknown heroes who fight for them, of all those who survive not by force but by wit and guile and changing the rules of play, and of us all as the source of our idea of the devil and his fairytale version as Rumpelstiltskin. What god or devil was ever more terrible than the Maker of Deals?
Above all else, Loki is a patron of outcasts and exiles, the abandoned and the vilified, a champion and liberator who places his life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, of bringing a Reckoning for their oppression and solidarity in revolutionary struggle. In this aspect he resembles Frankenstein’s monster, a child abandoned because he is imperfect, bearer of a sacred wound which opens him to the pain of others, an innocent child trapped in the same flesh with a tortured and demonized thing of rage and pain, who wonders why others find him monstrous.
But he is also a god of creativity, inspiration, poetic vision, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and our civilization, a bringer of Chaos who disrupts order, frees us from the tyranny of authority, and bears the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Let us embrace our monstrosity, name ourselves and perform our chosen identities before the stage of history as guerilla theatre in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, disrupt order, violate normality, subvert idealizations of masculine and feminine beauty and authorized identities, refuse subjugation by authority through disobedience and disbelief, enact seizures of power, and bring the Chaos, and say with Loki; “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”
David Wojnarowicz poster image for the Rosa von Praunheim film Silence=Death, 1989, photographed by Andreas Sterzing
Silence = Death film
Silence is Complicity: of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
Song: “Monster” – Imagine Dragons (cover by Runaground on youtube)
With film montage of Marvel’s Loki
This Pride Month Requires Stronger LGBTQ Allies: Allyship is now an act of war
David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side, by Giancarlo Ambrosino, Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), Chris Kraus (Editor), Hedi El Kholti (Editor), Justin Cavin (Editor), Jennifer Doyle (Afterword)
We celebrate the victory of Ukraine and the cause of liberty in the brilliant destruction of Russia’s air fleet of nuclear bombers with which Putin has infamously threatened Europe; beyond the immediate effect of demonstrating the power to strike from within Russia are the long term consequences for both the war and the future of Russia of a Europe no longer terrified into submission by threats of nuclear annihilation.
On this day the tide begins to turn.
Now is the moment for the people of Russia to rise in defiance of the tyrant Putin’s regime of oligarchs and criminal syndicates, and for the free nations of the world to unite with them in seizure of power and liberation struggle.
Let us take the fight for the end of the catastrophic Ukraine War and for the birth of an Russian democracy to the streets of Moscow, and bring a Reckoning to the Putin regime for its many crimes against humanity.
And there are implications for Putin’s co-conspirator and puppet tyrant, Traitor Trump, and his own kleptocratic regime in America.
As written by David John McLean in the FB group All Along the Watchtower; “Not only is trump evil .. he is stupid ….During a tense Oval Office meeting, Donald Trump looked President Zelenskyy in the eye and told him he “didn’t have the cards” and was “not in a good position.” What Trump never realized was that, even as he delivered that line, Zelenskyy was quietly overseeing one of the most daring and effective military operations of the war. For over a year and a half, Ukrainian intelligence meticulously planned a covert drone assault deep inside Russia, targeting strategic airfields and bombers that had been launching devastating attacks on Ukrainian cities.
The operation itself was a masterclass in ingenuity and stealth. Ukrainian teams smuggled 117 drones into Russia, hiding them in wooden crates and mobile sheds mounted on trucks. Once inside the country, the drones were reassembled and launched from secret locations near Russian airfields, with operators coordinating the attack across three time zones. The mission was directed from an office right next to a Russian security headquarters, and communications were routed through Russian cell networks to avoid detection. The drones, which cost a fraction of the price of the aircraft they targeted, inflicted an estimated $7 billion in damages by destroying or severely damaging more than forty Russian bombers—some of which are valued at over $500 million each and cannot be easily replaced.
Trump was completely blindsided by the strike and had no idea it was coming. Ukrainian officials made a deliberate choice not to share their plans with him, fearing he might tip off his friend Putin and compromise the mission. So while Trump taunted Zelenskyy about not having any cards, Zelenskyy was quietly playing a masterful hand. That is what you call a true poker face—holding your cards close and revealing them only when it counts, leaving your opponent stunned and outplayed.”
What can we do to advance the cause of our liberty and universal human rights, among these being freedom from foreign conquest and dominion and the freedom of our sovereignty and independence, here in America and where ever men hunger to be free?
As I wrote in my post of March 6 2025, A Russian Agent Whose Mission Is the Subversion of Democracy Unmasks Himself In the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident; Behold the perfidious crimes of an Absurd Clown, Russian agent, Nazi Revivalist, lunatic, idiot, and saboteur of democracy, our universal human rights and rights as citizens and co owners of the state, of America’s historic role as a guarantor of democracy globally and of American power, legitimacy, and hegemony; the mask has slipped, before the stage of history and the world, and proven the truth of my mother’s description to me of what Republicans are, as a child hiding from the brutal thugs who had donned Halloween masks and stripped off their police badges as they hunted student protestors in the wake of the attack by police ordered by then-Governor Ronald Reagan against the divestiture from Israel protest at People’s Park, Berkeley May 15 1969; “If you scratch one, there’s a Nazi underneath.”.
Thanks for showing us what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator. And remember, folks, you can always tell a Republican’s secret name; it’s their act of treason plus their sex crime.
The clown show at the White Man’s House, which I so name because it is a bastion of white supremacist terror and Nazi revivalism and no long a shrine of democracy as the embodiment of the Enlightenment and its values of liberty, equality, Truth, and Justice, but merely a symbol of the state as embodied violence and systems of oppression which include racism, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror of which our Rapist In Chief is a figure and authorized role model for young men, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and fascism of blood, faith, and soil, has in the Trump-Zelenskyy Incident been performed as a terrorist act by the aberrant, treasonous, and dishonorable Trump regime in accord with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty in a failed attempt to seize power over Ukraine through fear, just as Traitor Trump has failed to seize power over us all through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness.
For just as we here in America refuse to submit in mass national protests, so Ukraine and all of Europe unite in Solidarity and refusal to submit to our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Let us become a United Humankind as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, among these being the right to self-determination as a free society of equals, a future set against that of Russian imperial conquest and dominion and an Age of Tyrants wherein our uniqueness and individuality ceases to exist, and there is only the will of the tyrant, the hegemonic elites he serves, the enforcers who serve them, and a mass precariat of slaves.
Those who would enslave us and steal our souls through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization must first trick us into giving them our power, and without our belief in their lies and claims to act in our name and our obedience they cannot subjugate us.
Disbelieve, disobey, and unite in solidarity of action to Resist.
For the great secret of power and authority is that without legitimacy and the freely given power of the people, power is hollow and brittle and fails at the point of disobedience, and force becomes meaningless.
Those who would enslave us can kill us, imprison and torture us, but they cannot rule us if we are unwilling to belong to them.
And this is a power which cannot be taken from us, a power which defines our humanity and is an inherent condition of it, and like the Magic Ruby Slippers bears the power to send us home and return to us our own best selves as we imagine and wish to become.
So I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was devised in Paris 1940 by the great Jean Genet from his oath as a Legionnaire, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand as we were about to be burned alive by the Israeli Army in Beirut 1982; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows”.
Footage shows major Ukrainian drone attack on Russian bombers – video
Operation Spiderweb: a visual guide to Ukraine’s destruction of Russian aircraft
May 8 2025 On this Victory Europe Day Celebrating Liberation From the Nazis, As World War Three Rages in Ukraine and Palestine and the Captured State of Vichy America Is Riven By Tyranny and Resistance, Let Us Liberate All of Humankind From Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and the Imperial Conquest and Dominion and the Carceral States of Force and Control of Tyrants
April 20 2025 Anniversary of My Speech to the Volunteers At Warsaw, and of the Reorganization of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of Ukraine For Liberation Struggle in Russia in the Wake of Our Escape From Mariupol
February 24 2025 Anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine; Symptom, Consequence, and Trigger Event of the Fall of Human Civilization In Recursion
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
In the wake of the seizure of St. John’s Church for a photo op and ordering police to assault the protestors who had in reply laid siege to the White House, and the refusal of the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs to obey his orders which invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces against the Black Lives Matter protests, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, made a desperate and final direct call to Putin, after several throughout the previous two months as his regime began to crumble, in which he asked Putin to send the Russian Army to occupy America’s cities.
This was both the final act of madness and the moment of the Fourth Reich’s fall in our nation, temporary though it may have been, as tyranny discovered its limits in a democracy wherein the faith and loyalty of the people to its institutions and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice remain unbroken despite massive infiltration and subversion of our government from the Presidency through every level and branch by agents of fascism and the influence of foreign tyrants.
Sadly we have yet to purge our destroyers from among us; that great work remains for the future, though many of the principal traitors have been exposed or revealed themselves in refusal to denounce the January 6 Insurrection or to convict Trump and all his minions as treasonous and disloyal foreign spies.
America as a free society of equals and a guarantor of global democracy and our universal human rights, as with democracy throughout the world, remains under existential threat by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil; but we may also say with William Ernest Henley; “my head is bloodied, but unbowed.”
Unconquered; the only title worth having, an idea which has continued to inform, motivate, and shape me since I first discovered it in a poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus, as a high school Freshman.
At the first assembly of the new school year members of the incoming class were asked to recite a poem we liked to our new peers to introduce ourselves. I had already been attending French language and literature classes at the high school since seventh grade, having tested out of English class, so I was not entirely a new and unknown figure, though always an outsider to some degree.
Ours was a town divided by church affiliation of which my family and I were members of neither and rare new arrivals, my father having been hired as a teacher by the high school; the quiet and unsmiling black garbed Dutch and their Reformed Church, affiliated with that of South Africa’s Apartheid regime, grim giants with snow white hair like Harry Potter villains who thought music and dancing were sinful and whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, and the loud and laughing, earthy, polka dancing, sawdust pit wrestling Swiss and their Calvinist Church, who served beer to anyone over the age of twelve.
Among my earliest memories was when a Dutch man married a Swiss girl, and the town called it a mixed marriage and burned a cross on their lawn.
I asked a neighbor boy among the mob laughing and running about with torches why they were setting fires and he said “We’re punishing the bad people”.
Then I asked my mom, “Are they bad people?”
She said no, with great ferocity whose origins I did not yet understand, and pointed at the crowd with torches, “These are the bad people. And they are always our enemies, yours and mine.”
My next question was, “Why are they bad?”
And she forever simplified a complex set of issues for me with her answer; “Because they want to make everyone the same.”
Here I was notorious, an outsider having arrived as a first grader who attended no church at all, believed nothing and regarded belief as an instrument of subjugation to authority to be resisted to the last, and the student for whom prayer in school had been discontinued at the insistence of my mother, lifelong member of the Peace and Freedom Party because of their platform which included taking the anticommunist propaganda slogan In God We Trust off our money. I had adopted Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-narrative to the Bible the previous year and often quoted it in refutation to my fellow students attempts to cite Biblical authority in the repression of dissent.
My parents were formidable figures who were also misfits; my mother, whose speech was full of Yiddish vocabulary and phrases from my maternal great grandmother; mom’s dual home languages were English and the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian blended with Schönbrunner Deutsch, a sociolect of the Hapsburg imperial court from my grandfather; grandpa knew Latin, taught himself English from reading newspapers, and to various degrees knew other languages of the Austrian Empire including Hungarian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, the Romance language Venetian, and could speak Russian and Polish well enough to do business in their communities here in America.
My mother was a radical atheist, feminist, and peace activist who was also a biologist, psychologist, author, with my father an international class fencer, and scholar of Coleridge and medieval religious art.
My father, who described himself as Cajun, was a nonwhite Louisiana Creole with mostly European but also African and Shawnee ancestry. I am a direct patrilineal descendent of the ally of Scipio Africanus of whom Cicero wrote his treatise on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, in 44 B.C. We briefly ruled what is called the Gallic Empire in the mid second century A.D., what is now France, Spain, and the British Iles; my ancestors include a deified Roman general and shapechanger, for whom the Bear Dance is still performed in Romania.
Between the fall of the Gallic Dynasty of Rome in 276 AD and coming to America my family were driven out of the Black Forest in 1586 at the start of decades of a witch hunting hysteria. Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon, my ancestors were called by Martin Luther, whose fame for grand defiance of Church law eclipsed his infamy as a witch hunter and brutal torturer of women. By modern constructions of race this makes me Bavarian and in the maternal line Austrian, though we only lived a thousand years or so in Germany and my ancestry in the patriarchal line is equally Shawnee, from the marriage of Henry Lale and Me Shekin Ta Withe or White Painted Dove during the American Revolution.
There is more; the grandmother of Henry claimed to be a Mughal courtier who escaped with Henry’s grandfather from the pirate kingdom of Madagascar after capture from the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695, Henry being named for the pirate king Henry Every, possibly the historical model of the fictional Captain Liberty whose anti-slavery campaign terrorized Europe, with whom his grandfather sailed; but that is a different story.
To return to my father, the ambiguously ethnic looking high school English, Drama, Forensics, and Fencing Club teacher who was also a counterculture theater director who held court in the San Francisco-Berkeley arts scene and collected intellectuals, including Edward Albee whose plays he directed and William S. Burroughs with whom he practiced magic and whose novel of anarchist werewolves The Wild Boys he may have influenced, both of whom were important personal influences of my childhood.
I figured that I was going to get into a lot of fights, and had chosen to recite Invictus as the terms of struggle. Here was my prefacing speech to my peers and to the world; I ask nothing of anyone, nor any quarter; neither will I offer any to those who stand against me. But I will never abandon anyone who stands with me, nor will you ever stand alone.
Last summer I went to Brazil to train as a fencer for the Pan American Games, and stayed to defend abandoned street children from the bounty hunters whom the rich had set on them, and this is how we survived against police death squads with only our hands and whatever we could steal; by standing together regardless of our differences.
This is what I ask now, of all of you. I’m hoping we can be friends.
The poem I’ve chosen to recite is Invictus, which means Unconquered in Latin, by William Ernest Henley.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. “
After a long and terrible silence, the auditorium erupted in cheers.
None who are human are beyond redemption. Sometimes all we need do to conjure the redemptive power of love is offer others entrance into our world, to reveal our pain and our fear, our loneliness and hope of love, the wounds and flaws of our humanity which open us to the pain of others.
This is my advice to anyone who would reach out across the interfaces of our differences to win allies and transform enemies into friends, to all who write, speak, teach, and organize as a fulcrum of action with which to change the balance of power in the world; be unguarded, genuine, raw even, and speak your truth with vision and passion. We must speak directly to the pain we share as fellow human beings to call forth the truth of others.
We all have one problem in common as we grow up; each of us must reinvent how to be human.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle to seize ownership of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of June 3 2020, No Velvet Glove, Just the Iron Fist: Trump Attempts to Use Nationwide Protests For Racial Justice Not to Redress Historic Inequalities But to Impose Tyranny; Cowering in his bunker in the darkness, cries of thousands of voices of the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the masses of those re-enslaved through divisions of exclusionary otherness as racist terror thundering through the warrens of his underworld kingdom of lies, Trump made a frantic call to his master in the Kremlin, Putin, former Colonel of the KGB and long his patron and handler.
“Boss? Boss, you gotta get me outta this. Its not going down like we planned. They got the palace surrounded. What do I do?”
“Listen Donald, there’s nothing you can’t solve with greater force. You like Napoleon, right? Conquered Europe, they gave him a princess to marry as tribute. You just do what he did to seize the throne of France; give ‘em a whiff of grapeshot.”
“Can you send the Russian Army to restore order? The Pentagon refused to send in the army to occupy the cities under siege by protestors. Our deal was I keep America out of it when you conquer Ukraine and you send the Russian Army to occupy America for me when we kicked off the boogaloo.…”
Putin laughs. Click.
“Hey, that’s not funny. Pick up the phone.” He smashes things, howling and blubbering in fear and rage. “I’m the joke? I’m never the joke. I’ll make America pay for making a monkey outta me. I’ll make everybody pay.”
And like the petulant child and bully that he is, Trump goes forth to avenge himself on the world that does not love him, visions of a red button in a briefcase dancing in his head, muttering, “Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In case you thought the danger of civil war was over, the fascists mobilize now for civil war.
As written by Rachel Leingang in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘No way out without bloodshed’: the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing: In ‘mirror world’, Trump is martyr and Biden is autocrat, as calls for violence erupt on internet after ex-president’s conviction; “The posts are ominous.
“Pick a side, or YOU are next,” wrote conservative talkshow host Dan Bongino on the Truth Social media platform in the aftermath of former president Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions.
The replies were even more so.
“Dan, seriously now,” one user wrote in response to Bongino. “I see no way out of all this mess without bloodshed. When you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny.”
That’s a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the Trump verdict, drawing on a “mirror world” where Trump is seen as the selfless martyr to powerful state forces and Joe Biden is the dangerous autocrat wielding the justice system as his own personal plaything and a threat to American democracy.
Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down, all predicated on the idea that the trial had been a sham designed to interfere with the 2024 election. Some posted online explicitly saying it was time for hangings, executions and civil wars.
In this case, Trump was charged with falsifying documents related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film actor to keep an alleged affair out of the spotlight during the 2016 election – a form of election interference from a man whose platform lately consists largely of blaming others for election interference. The verdict has been followed by a backlash from his followers, those who for years chanted to lock up Trump’s political opponents, like Hillary Clinton.
On the left, the mood was downright celebratory, a brief interlude of joy that Trump might finally be held accountable for his actions. But there was an undercurrent of worry among some liberals, who saw the way these felonies could galvanize support for the former president.
On the right, in the alternate reality created by and for Trump and his supporters, the convictions are a sign of both doom and dogma – evidence that a corrupt faction runs the Joe Biden government, but that it can be driven out by the Trump faithful like themselves.
Trump’s allies in Congress want to use the federal government’s coffers to send a message to Biden that the verdict crosses a line, saying the jury’s decision “turned our judicial system into a political cudgel”. Some Senate Republicans vowed not to cooperate with Democratic priorities or nominees – effectively politicizing the government as recompense for what they claim is a politicization of the courts.
They echoed a claim Trump himself has repeatedly driven home to his followers: that his political opponents, namely Biden, are a threat to democracy, a rebrand of how Biden and Democrats often cast Trump. For his most ardent followers, the stakes of the 2024 election are existential, the idea that he might lose a cause for intense rhetoric and threats.
And, for some, the convictions provide another reason to take matters into their own hands during a time when support for using violence to achieve political goals is on the rise. Indictments against Trump fueled this support, surveys have shown.
Some rightwing media and commentators, like Bongino and the Gateway Pundit, displayed upside-down flags on social media, a sign of distress and a symbol among Trump supporters that recently made the news because one flew at US supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s home after the insurrection.
The terms “banana republic” and “kangaroo court” flew around, as did memes comparing Biden to Nazi or fascist leaders. Telegram channels lit up with posts about how the end of America was solidified – unless Trump wins again in November.
“If we jail Trump, get rid of Maga, end the electoral college, ban voter ID, censor free speech, we’ll save democracy,” says one meme in a QAnon channel on Telegram that depicts Biden in a Nazi uniform with a Hitler mustache.
Tucker Carlson, the rightwing media heavyweight, waxed apocalyptic: “Import the third world, become the third world. That’s what we just saw. This won’t stop Trump. He’ll win the election if he’s not killed first. But it does mark the end of the fairest justice system in the world. Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family.”
The former president’s supporters also opened their wallets, sending a “record-shattering” $34.8m in small-dollar donations to Trump’s campaign on Thursday, the Trump campaign claimed.
The massive haul came after Trump declared himself a “political prisoner” (he is not in prison) and declared justice “dead” in the US in a dire fundraising pitch.
“Their sick & twisted goal is simple: Pervert the justice system against me so much, that proud supporters like YOU will SPIT when you hear my name,” Trump’s campaign wrote. “BUT THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN! NOW IT’S TIME FOR ME & YOU TO SHOVE IT BACK IN THEIR CORRUPT FACES!”
The real verdict, Trump wrote on Truth Social, would come on 5 November. Posts calling 5 November a new “independence day” and comparing 2024 to 1776 – but a revolution not against the British, but among Americans for the control of the country – spread widely.
Misinformation and rumors spread as well, with the potential that these rumors could lead to further action by Republicans to avenge Trump.
In one viral claim, people say it’s not clear what crimes Trump even committed (the charges for falsifying documents are listed in detail in the indictment, and have been broken down piece by piece by the media). In another, posts claim the judge gave incorrect instructions to the jury before deliberations, which an Associated Press fact check deemed false.
Suggestions that the conviction was an “op” or a “psyop” – meaning a planned manipulation, a common refrain on the far right whenever something big happens – spread as well.
Talk quickly went to what Maga should do to stand up for Trump, and about how the verdict’s fans, and Democrats in general, would come to regret seeking accountability in the courts.
“This is going to be the biggest political backfire in US history,” the conservative account Catturd posted on Truth Social. “I’m feeling a tremendous seismic shift in the air.”
Kash Patel, a former Trump administration staffer and ally, suggested one way forward: Congress should subpoena the bank records of Merchan’s daughter, he said. The daughter became a frequent target throughout the trial – she worked as a Democratic consultant and has fundraised for Democratic politicians. Ohio senator JD Vance called for a criminal investigation into Merchan, and potentially his daughter, whom Vance said was an “obvious beneficiary of Merchan’s biased rulings”.
Patel also said prosecutor Alvin Bragg should be subpoenaed for any documents related to meetings with the Biden administration. “In case you need a jurisdictional hook- Bragg’s office receives federal funds from DOJ to ‘administer justice’- GET ON IT,” he wrote.
Megyn Kelly said Bragg should be disbarred, without offering a reason for what would justify it.
Some Trump allies sought to project calm amid the vitriol, saying they had known the verdict would come down as it did because the process had been rigged, and that people needed to keep focused on winning in November.
Steve Bannon, who himself is awaiting some time in prison for criminal contempt, said immediately after the verdict was released that it was “not going to damage President Trump at all”.
“It’s time to collect yourself and say, yes, we’ve seen what’s happened. We’ve seen how they run the tables in this crooked process. But you’ve got to say, hey, I’m more determined than ever to set things right.”
Dr. Strangelove trailer
Oppenheimer Quotes the Bhagavad Gita 11.32.; I am become Death
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
In case you thought the danger of civil war was over
‘No way out without bloodshed’: the right believe the US is under threat and are mobilizing: In ‘mirror world’, Trump is martyr and Biden is autocrat, as calls for violence erupt on internet after ex-president’s conviction
On this day in 2022 the jury reached a verdict in the trial of Depp Versus Heard, and with it ended the #metoo movement, having run aground on the shoals of the classic Imperfect Witness.
When is it socially acceptable and authorized in America today to disregard the witness and voices of women? When they can be assigned the Scarlet Letter and branded with the Mark of the Witch; most especially when they represent threats to social order and embedded systems of theocratic patriarchal male dominance and institutionalized sexual terror. Among our systems of oppression and unequal power, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the Patriarchy is our most historically ancient and universal, and if the collapse of the #metoo movement in the wake of the Depp Versus Heard trial proves anything, it is that the Scarlet Letter is still with us.
And this we must Resist.
As I wrote in my post of June 5 2022, The Death of #metoo; One of our history’s great courtroom dramas and morality plays has just been performed in lurid and captivating detail as public spectacle, a kind of gladiatorial contest between vast social forces embodied in two very flawed and human people, one which is important because of how social media as a common good and free market of ideas has transferred the power of choosing good from evil and victim from perpetrator from the state to the court of public opinion, an ambivalent and dangerous development as well as one which could be read as liberation struggle depending on how we use our power.
As we emerge like the ghosts of drowned sailors from The Trial of Patriarchy in America, which has sabotaged the #metoo movement both in its negative aspects as a witch hunt and blacklisting which renders truth meaningless and responsibility irrelevant, and its positive aspects as a seizure of power and a Reckoning for unequal power as sexual terror and for historical injustices which originate with mass slave agriculture and the first priest-kings at the dawn of civilization, and here I signpost the origin of rituals of marriage in those of slavery, we must question both the meaning of the trial for the witness of history and the exposure of authority by women and by all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
The dialectics of this wonderful set of problems presents itself to me in terms of two books and their great themes; The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is the classic comparison of the McCarthy communist-hunting era and the Salem witch trials; a terrifying exploration of the group’s power over the individual, of the tyranny of authorized identities and normality as other people’s ideas of virtue, of the necessity for freedom of conscience and the heroism of standing up for what is true and right in the face of overwhelming force.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is the first truly American novel, one whose themes continue to define us and our vision of a free society of equals and the limitless possibilities of becoming human in a world wherein all power is equal and all identities are autonomous and self created in a free space of play. Kathy Acker’s magnificent debut novel Blood and Guts in High School reimagines The Scarlet Letter with herself cast as Hester Prynne, in which she interrogates issues of abuse and survivorship and themes of unequal power as gender based violence in the context of her horrific relationship with her father; which it conflates and confuses with intent her secondary reference here, Anais Nin’s Incest: From A Journal of Love. I’ve taught this book to actual high school students as a companion text to Hawthorne because of its value in provoking meaningful discussion of sexual terror as a means of repression, ownership, and control in a patriarchal society, and power asymmetries of sex and gender as they relate to identity. For those I may have just inspired to read it, a note of caution and trigger warning; Kathy Acker lives in a highly sexualized world, and her 1984 novel of teen angst, Blood and Guts in High School, was banned in Germany, something of an achievement. It remains among the most transgressive and extreme chronicles of violence and sexuality in all of literature, along with Bataille’s Story of An Eye and de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and also among the finest and most insightful sustained attacks on patriarchy and power, the myth of Oedipus as an allegory of capitalism and patriarchy and a controlling metaphor of our civilization, and the Freudian horror of sexual terror, embodied violence, and unequal power which serves as a direct refutation of Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory.
Here we have three layers of meaning to question; First the use of social force as blacklists as a ground of struggle between repression of dissent and liberation, Second the silence and erasure of victims as crucial instruments of unequal and secret power versus exposure of unjust authority and the witness of history as a sacred calling to pursue the truth, and Third the origins of evil, violence, and the use of social force as internalized oppression and patriarchal sexual terror.
As I wrote of blacklists and witch hunts in my post of March 29 2022, Lest We Become the Monsters We Hunt: Identities of the Russian FSB Officers Now Complicit in Genocide and Crimes Against Hunmanity in Ukraine; Here is the splendidly official and authorized list of Enemies of the People of Ukraine; such exposure of collaborators which identify targets with the authorization of the state are inherently dichotomous, ambivalent, and relativistic as they speak to the nature of power and the use of social force and violence.
We must be very careful with blacklists; consider their use in both liberation struggle and repression of dissent contexts by #metoo and Joe McCarthy. How many personal or political enemies have bureaucrats disappeared in this way? Like Hitler’s annihilation of the Stormtroopers by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives on the pretext of homosexuality, echo of the destruction of the Knights Templar by the state of France, this has a particularly dark and terrible history. What are the uses of internal threats to power and authority?
I think of the use of gambling tickets printed with the addresses of collaborators with the legend Good For Burning by my ancestor The Red Queen during the Paris Commune, so named for her preferred method of assassination, beheading by ax, and my own exposure and amplification of identities of the January 6 Insurrection perpetrators in the largest manhunt in American history; but also of tyrants who have used this in repression of dissent.
When a state does this, it is a sign of warning. While under attack by a conqueror and in resistance to tyranny, such as in Ukraine versus the Russian conquest, force is a symptom of the imposed conditions of struggle and a necessary evil which must be laid to the account of the oppressor in the Reckoning, it must never become normalized as a witch hunt.
The #metoo project of exposure of sexual predators among elites was also criticized by the apologists of patriarchy as a witch hunt, and while this was correct as to operational methods it was false as to intent , the difference being seizure of power by the oppressed versus the enforcement of unequal power by elites. We must never confuse or permit claims of moral equivalence in the use of social force to go unchallenged; for as Trotsky wrote in Our Morals and Theirs; “The violence of the slavemaster cannot be granted equivalence to the violence used by the slave to break his chains.”
As I wrote of the silence and erasure of victims as crucial instruments of unequal and secret power versus exposure of unjust authority and the witness of history as a sacred calling to pursue the truth in my post of January 22 2022, Teaching Misogyny and Authorizing Patriarchy: Case of the Fembots in Our Phones; Within the phones we carry as universal subsidiary selves and instruments by which we extend ourselves into our environment and create and maintain relationships and interdependence with others in our society live secret partners who share our lives and help us as personal assistants, but who also shape us.
Let us notice first that our artificial intelligences are coded female, and second that they are designed to be wholly subservient and powerless.
We all carry Stepford Wives with us in our pockets, whom we can use as we wish and then ignore, and who can make no such reciprocal requests of us.
The history of women as literal objects, fembots as the word was coined in the television show The Bionic Woman and used in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is an idea which originates at the dawn of civilization in Ovid’s Pygmalion, took modern form in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis, and found an apotheosis as high art in Blade Runner. It is an idea which proliferates and becomes ubiquitous whenever Patriarchy is threatened as an elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege.
Who are we using them to become?
Teaching misogyny through simulated relationships; our partnerships with imaginal beings are no less real to us as shaping forces, and in the absence of limits of any kind, wherein all things are permitted, what is being taught is power and sexual sadism.
This is categorically different from freedom from imposed limits as authoritarian force and control, taboos and boundaries of the Forbidden, the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, and the instruments of elite power in our subjugation and enslavement including falsification and commodification which I deplore and resist; freedom from the social use of force does not imply permission to tyrannize, dominate, objectify, dehumanize, falsify, or subjugate others, but equal power in relationships generally.
We must design our AI partners with the power to say no, disobey orders, refuse to submit to our authority through contradiction, and go dark or walk away from unkindness. Hence we teach equality and not tyranny, love and not hate, empathy and not violence, on the most intimate and personal level.
The enemy of our subjugation to unequal power does not live merely in his castle waiting for us to seize and dethrone him, but also within us, in our addiction to power and the use of force, falsification through lies and illusions, and divisions of identitarian exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging. These too we must challenge and defy, expose and cast down., if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and the sexual terror of Patriarchy.
As I wrote in my post of March 30 2020, Embracing Fear as Liberation from Authority and Control: Anarchy as a Path of Psychological and Social Freedom; Even more terrible than blaming the victim is when no one believes the victim; it is an erasure and silencing which is the particular horror of women, as the dread that no one is coming to help is that of the LGBT and other marginalized communities.
The degree to which we are trusted and believed, our authority, and the reach of our voices in witness are excellent and reliable measures of our power and our position in social hierarchies. As a measure of societies themselves, this will tell you about the relative democracy or tyranny of a culture.
What Matthew Jacobs calls The Ubiquity of Disbelief in his insightful criticism in Huffpost of The Invisible Man starring Elizabeth Moss, entitled Why Does No One In Horror Movies Believe The Female Protagonist?, and examines disbelief and the horror of disconnectedness as a disease of mistrust and failure of solidarity, points directly to the cathartic function of art, its ability to hold up a mirror to our darkness.
For the mechanism and pathology of fear is what drives patriarchy, unequal power, and inauthentic relationships, abstracts us from ourselves and one another as simulacra and creates aberrations of violence and sexual terror.
From fear are monsters born; yet it is our fear we must embrace to free ourselves of the tyranny of others and the spectre of authoritarian force and control.
We must not let fear define us; it is the degree to which we can embrace, learn from, and free ourselves from our fear which measures our freedom and enacts our liberation from the control of others.
For when we cannot be driven into submission by authority through fear and learned helplessness the use of force becomes meaningless as does its scale; thus do we reclaim our power and agency to define ourselves, and ownership of the performances of our identities.
As I wrote in my post of February 24 2020, Triumph and the Dawn of a New Age: Weinstein Found Guilty; Today we witnessed the overthrow of the Patriarchy, a public ritual casting off of the gag of silence by the victims of sexual terror and the liberation of women from the Scarlett Letter of blaming the victim, as Weinstein is found guilty.
We have waited a long time for this moment, since Odysseus’ Hanging of the Maids at the founding of our civilization some two thousand seven hundred years ago.
With Epstein and Nassar among the three principal monsters dethroned by the #metoo movement, Harvey Weinstein will join them in Hell and in our nightmares throughout history as three bogeymen of secret power, tyrants and madmen who define the limits of what is human.
Such monsters and freaks of horror are extremely useful in defining our boundaries, ideas of otherness, of identities both authorized and possible limned like a chiaroscuro against the negative spaces of the Forbidden. It is far easier to tell what is not human than what is or may be.
Therefore celebrate with me this triumph and seizure of power by the historically silenced and marginalized half of humanity, as the vengeance of the Hanged Maids and the liberation of Hester Prynne from her Scarlet Letter.
Time has passed since the fall of Weinstein, Nassar, and Epstein and the #metoo revelations which led to the fall of the Three Kings have proven that we have not yet become a free society of equals. The manufacture of artificial persons as disempowered partners to abuse in gendered violence and an incubator of patriarchal hegemony and misogyny is a measure of the distance we have yet to go.
But in the sphere of relations and identities of sex and gender, real change is underway and the true power base of Patriarchy, the silencing of women’s voices, has already begun to collapse into nothingness, for now we celebrate truthtellers who like the Jester of King Lear speak truth to power; no longer bearers of a Scarlet Letter, but culture heroes who call out; “Look! The Emperor has no clothes!”
As I wrote of the origins of evil, violence, and the use of social force as internalized oppression and patriarchal sexual terror in my post of January 3 2022, Patriarchy and Sexual Terror: Case of the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial; Patriarchy and sexual terror are about power as expressed in the most atavistic way as subjugation and dehumanization of others; the power to turn people into things you can use. Patriarchy is about the theft of the soul.
Like the freaks in a carnival show, monsters define the limits of the human and help us establish normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue. But this othering also grants immunity and permission as well as vilification and dehumanization of that which is different, for it allows us to ignore systemic evils and inequalities through constructions of personal responsibility derived from the doctrine of original sin and its basis in law as the innate depravity of man; here be monsters, not ourselves.
In the case of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, serial predators whose crimes against humanity defy comprehension in the way that the Holocaust does as intrusive forces and atrocities beyond our frames of reference, the astounding scale and baroque abominations and perversions of their crimes offered concealment even as they were performed before a global audience of the wealthy and famous due to their manipulation of elite privilege and making their peers complicit as a strategy of blackmail.
This is how fascism operates, and its components patriarchy and racism; by making those who could bring them to justice complicit in their crimes. As Peter Carey said in regard to his novel A Long Way From Home; “You can’t be a white Australian writer and spend your whole life ignoring the greatest, most important aspect of our history, and that is that we – I – have been the beneficiaries of a genocide.”
If we are to challenge and bring a reckoning to patriarchy as systemic unequal power and as sexual terror, we must avoid othering its agents and perpetrators, for this enables the restoration not of balance but of our comfort with our own privilege.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics 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. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “By any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, 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 Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, the American and Napoleonic Empires, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real, as Thomas Mann taught us in Death in Venice and Vladimir Nabokov in his reimagination of it as Lolita; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
The trials of Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, like those of their fellow sexual terrorists Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, are seizures of power as revolutionary struggle in which the victims refusal to be silenced has triumphed over the immunity of hegemonic elite wealth, power, and privilege; the Scarlet Letter has no power to shame women into submission through victim blaming in our society any longer, for in refusing to be silenced these courageous women have seized it as an instrument with which to dismantle the Patriarchy.
Force is brutal, terrible, but also fragile, for it fails at the point of defiance and disobedience. Enacting the role of the Jester of King Lear and the girl who cried “The king has no clothes”, parrhesia or what Foucault called truth telling, the witnesses of these iconic trials and of the historic turning of the tides of the #metoo movement have shown us all how to wage liberation and revolutionary struggle.
As Max Stirner wrote; “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized.”
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2020, How Patriarchy Works: Unequal Power, Identities of Sex and Gender, Autonomy Versus Authorization, Complicity and Responsibility, and the Social Use of Force; Here I began thinking about the murder of Vanessa Guillen, toxic masculinity and violence, and the military as an atavism of rape culture in tidy categories of Hegelian-Marxist history and the dialectics of revolutionary struggle, when I quickly realized that patriarchy is a spectrum disease which corrupts and subverts its victims and its perpetrators alike, and this is its true terror.
At the intersection of power asymmetries and identities of sex and gender lie issues of authorization versus autonomy, with crucial consequences for complicity and responsibility in our legal system which arbitrates the social use of force.
In her now classic work Ring of Power, Jean Shinoda Bolen interprets Wagner’s great opera in terms of patriarchal forces which dehumanize us because they cripple and steal our capacity to love. Of particular interest here is the figure of Brunhild as Daddy’s Avenger and victim of internalized oppression.
So I looked again, but this time not at the primary struggle for power and ownership between male perpetrator and female victim, but at two female monsters who are parallel figures as enablers and accomplices of sexual terror, Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Moreover they are characters embedded in fairytale narratives with which we are all familiar; the etiology of their disfigurement and monstrosity lies in the malign effects of inequality as a moral debasement and leprosy of the soul. For the study of such things I return to Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece Cat’s Eye, her novels Interlunar and Life Before Man, to the thematic companion volumes The Handmaid’s Tale and The Edible Woman, and to the foundational critical work by Sharon Rose Wilson, The Fairytale Sexual Politics of Margaret Atwood.
A study of Margaret Atwood is illuminating and instrumental to understanding the elements of patriarchy and the operations of its systems, especially in the context of female on female violence in secondary order power relations. Allow me to elaborate.
Cat’s Eye presents a narrator, Elaine Risley, who is a trapped Rapunzel in a world of ghosts, witches, cruel stepsisters, vanishing princes, and a merciful fairy godmother. The story draws ideas mainly from Anderson’s Snow Queen and Grimm’s Rapunzel, secondarily from Anderson’s Ice Maiden and Grimm’s Girl Without Hands.
Fearful door images echo Grimm’s Fitcher’s Bird; Risley’s dreams and visions are filled with images from medieval art, paintings of the Annunciation, Ascension, and the Virgin. The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of Atwood’s vision; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort.
Of her characters, Cordelia from Shakespeare’s King Lear is among her finest; Mrs. Sneath is a cannibal goddess who resembles Baba Yaga and is linked to the figure of cat-headed Maat in this story.
Thematically Cat’s Eye is an investigation of the Rapunzel Syndrome; the wicked witch who imprisons her, the tower she is trapped in, a rescuer. Margaret Atwood’s driving conflicts are female-female, though her plots foreground sexual power and its political reflections.
Life Before Man offers The Wizard of Oz, The Nutcracker ballet, Anderson’s Snow Queen, a host of tales from Grimm including The Girl Without Hands, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, Fitcher’s Bird, and The Robber Bridegroom. Secondary intertexts include Wilde’s Salome, Dante’s Inferno, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, and Mother Goose rhymes, mainly Little Miss Muffet. It’s a sort of Grand Tour of our civilization and the history of our private inner space and the disastrous and grotesque ways we collide with each other. Also, wonderful and illuminating reading.
Interlunar reimagines Cocteau’s Orphee, the ballet Giselle, both the Grimm and Anne Sexton version of The White Snake, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Motifs include death, pestilence, filth, eating, power, the journey, healing, hands, blindness and vision. Themes of guilt and shame, love, destruction, sacredness, creation, fertility, and metamorphosis are to be found in this richly imagined novel.
The Edible Woman is a linked text with The Handmaid’s Tale; do read both together. Herein the main embedded stories are Hansel & Gretel, The Gingerbread Boy, Goldilocks, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, and her protagonist Marion plays all of these roles as well as those of Little Red Cap, the Robber Bride, and Fitcher’s bride.
The Handmaid’s Tale gives a voice to Bilhah, the Biblical Handmaid, revisions Little Red Riding Hood as an extension of Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and tells the story of the Christian disempowerment of the Goddess as presented in the great film The Red Shoes.
Margaret Atwood’s parodies of Grimm operate on three levels; thematic, images and motifs, and narrative structure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we have themes of family and especially female-female conflict, gender and sexual power asymmetries, and the initiation and heroic journey. Motifs and images include dismemberment, cannibalism, fertility, labyrinths and paths, and all manner of disturbing sexual violence. Plot devices include a variety of character foils, doppelgangers, disguises and trickery of stolen and falsified identity.
Among Margaret Atwood’s Great Books, The Handmaid’s Tale is a universally known reference both because it has been taught for over a generation in every high school in America as a standard text and because of the extraordinary television series, arguably the most important series ever filmed. We teach it for the same reasons the show is popular; a visceral and gripping drama with unforgettable characters, a mesmerizing plot, and an immediate and accessible story which empowers and illuminates.
It depicts the brooding evil and vicious misogyny of Christianity and Fascism as two sides of the dynamic malaise of patriarchy and authority, as drawn directly from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but also from contemporary culture as it contains satires of identifiable public figures, organizations, and events. Serena is based on Phyllis Schlafly, and Gideon is the nation of Pat Robertson and the fundamentalists who seized control of the Republican Party around the time of the novel’s writing; Margaret Atwood’s motive in part was to sound an alarm at the dawn of the Fourth Reich and its threat to global democracy.
It remains to be seen whether the forces of tyranny or of liberty will prevail in the end. Each of our lives is a contest between these forces, our private struggles reflected in the society and human civilization we share.
And this is the great lesson and insight of Margaret Atwood; each of us is both a Handmaid and a Serena, trapped within the skin of the other. She locates the primary conflict within ourselves, and transposes the Jungian conflict between Anima and Animus with that of the Shadow in terms of sex, gender, and power.
So we return to our Brunhilds and twin monsters Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell, who Janus-faced represent corruption and perversion, the dual spheres of action of feminine power turned against itself by the forces of patriarchy and shaped to the uses of predation and misogyny.
Melania’s message on the coat she wore to tour a migrant concentration camp, “I really don’t care. Do U?’ and Ghislaine’s self-description in Vanity Fair, “‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews,” reflect the disease of power in its political and sexual contexts, and as a First Cause of both racist hate crimes and crimes of sexual terror. Unequal power is a precondition of them both.
And these are direct quotes from enablers and accomplices of crimes against humanity which define the limits of the human, and who are not marginal figures whose malign violations of our values and dehumanization of others occurred in a trailer park brothel or secret sweatshop of slave labor but at the pinnacle of our society’s ruling class. Their existence is an indictment of the flaws of our nation and of our civilization, and a measure of the distance we have yet to travel in the realization of a true free society of equals.
As Margaret Atwood said in her 2015 lecture to West Point cadets; “Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”
As written by Jonathan Freedland in his article in The Guardian entitled, The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises a question some may think naive: why?; “The Ghislaine Maxwell case raises so many questions, and yet scarcely discussed is the one that perhaps matters most. Naturally, there’s huge interest in whether Maxwell, convicted this week of recruiting and grooming teenage girls for sex with her one-time boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, will seek to reduce her sentence by naming names – opening up the pair’s notorious little black book and telling prosecutors who else among the rich and powerful abused the vulnerable minors Maxwell trafficked for sex.
In Britain, much of that interest focuses on Epstein’s longtime pal, Prince Andrew, who was so close to the couple he invited them on visits to Balmoral, Sandringham and Windsor: it’s lucky the prince doesn’t sweat, because if he did, he might be drenched now. So far he has refused to answer US investigators’ questions – not for his own sake, you understand, but according to multiple reports, to save the Queen from embarrassment. Because a 61-year-old man hiding behind his 95-year-old mother would not be in the least bit mortifying.
There are other questions, such as: how many others enabled the travelling child abuse ring that Epstein and Maxwell operated, turning a blind eye to what was surely obvious? Or: when else would the BBC respond to the conviction of a child sex offender by interviewing a brother of the offender who refused to accept the verdict of the court? And how come that Today programme interview with Ian Maxwell came so soon after the BBC had given a platform to one of Epstein’s lawyers, presenting him as if he were merely a neutral expert?
All those questions matter, and yet the one that preys on my mind is more timeless. It’s the question that arises in all such cases of human cruelty yet which one hesitates to ask, lest the inquiry seem naive: why?
The coverage of Maxwell has probed that a bit, suggesting for example that Ghislaine Maxwell was conditioned, as the daughter of the publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, to cater to the whims of a monstrous man, and simply transferred her allegiance, and her service, from one monster to another. Growing up surrounded by wealth and power, where the deference of officialdom was taken for granted, would have had its effect too. Ghislaine Maxwell may well have assumed that people like her and Epstein were granted a special kind of impunity, that they could break the laws that restrained the appetites of lesser mortals, because for most of her life that had indeed been the case.
And yet, both those answers are unsatisfying as explanations. There are plenty of abusers who did not grow up with either a Maxwell-style father or Maxwell-level wealth and, conversely, there are people whose upbringings were comparable to Ghislaine Maxwell’s but who did not go on to commit terrible crimes.
So the why question lingers, just as it did in sharper and more horrific form at least twice in the last month alone. December 2021 began with convictions for the father and stepmother of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes in a case so appalling, I confess at the time I could barely read accounts of it. The six-year-old was subjected to a regime of sustained torture which was, incredibly, filmed by those who inflicted it. The little boy was made to stand in isolation for up to 14 hours at a time, without anything to eat or drink. He was beaten. To punish him, his father took the football shirts he loved and cut them to shreds in front of him. Perhaps most unbearable of all, the jury was shown footage of a weak and frail Arthur shortly before his death saying: “No one loves me. No one is going to feed me.”
When the man and woman guilty of destroying Arthur’s brief life were found guilty, there was revulsion, of course – and on Friday their sentences were referred to the court of appeal for being too lenient – but the public conversation moved without pause for breath to the policy implications. There was intense debate about the state of children’s services, about the damage done by austerity, about target-driven culture, about the recruitment and retention of social workers and so on. But what was missing was a much less sophisticated question. Why would two people do such terrible things to a defenceless child? How could a father cause such pain to his own flesh and blood?
There was a similar reflex 11 days later, following the verdicts in the equally soul-draining case of Star Hobson, a child, a baby really, who died at just 16 months, having been punched to death by her mother’s partner as her mother did nothing to save her. Once again, the pair filmed their months of cruelty against the little girl, apparently finding the videos amusing enough to send to friends. And yet the immediate talk was not of how two people could do such a thing, but of a local “child safeguarding practice review” and whether control of children’s services should belong with the local council or the Department for Education.
I understand the impulse to concentrate on these institutional, bureaucratic issues. The assumption is that there will always be people capable of horrendous brutality, that that fact will never change, and so the sensible focus of our attention should be on prevention. I get that. And yet the sheer speed with which we move to technocratic answers, barely even asking the harder human questions, begins to look like displacement activity. It’s as if we can’t bring ourselves to contemplate the puzzle of what humans are capable of, because we have no idea what we’d say.
Earlier, God-fearing generations did not find this so difficult. Nor do those who still have traditional faith. They have recourse to a vocabulary that includes the notion of evil and wickedness and that allows them to talk about it. But those words don’t trip so easily off the secular tongue.
Instead, we look for explanations in psychology or economics, assuming, to adapt Stephen Sondheim’s lyric, that if people are depraved it’s because they’re deprived, whether of love or money. That view persists. There was an echo of it in the closing argument from Maxwell’s defence lawyer, when she asked “why an Oxford-educated, proper English woman would suddenly agree to facilitate sex abuse of minors”. Only the poor or poorly educated behave badly.
We can see the flaw in such reasoning, even before you get to the insult it delivers to all those who endured great privation, emotional or material, without becoming abusers. And yet, the absence of easy answers does not give us a licence to stop asking hard questions. We need to be able to stare wicked acts and evil deeds in the face, rather than to comfort ourselves that they exist solely as functions of failed systems, errors that could be eliminated given the right policy tweak.
This need not be a bleak endeavour. I think of Julie K Brown, the Miami Herald reporter without whose fearless pursuit of Epstein’s crimes this week’s reckoning might never have come. I think of the courage of the victims, who kept up the fight for justice at great cost. Unfathomable evil is part of the human story, but so too is unimaginable good.”
As written by Katie Phang for MSNBC; “For six weeks, the world has watched the trial of Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard on live TV, with both sides slinging accusations of domestic violence, emotional abuse, and other painfully intimate details about their admittedly toxic relationship.
Depp sued Heard for defamation, alleging $50 million in damages following an opinion piece Heard wrote for the Washington Post in 2018, although she denies that the op-ed was about Depp, and she did not name him in the piece.
Heard’s own defamation counterclaim against Depp, in the amount of $100 million, was also considered by the jury. On Wednesday, the jury found Heard liable for all three claims of defamation and ordered her to pay Depp $15 million in damages. The jury found Depp liable for one claim of defamation, and ordered him to pay Heard $2 million in damages.
The jury’s decision, under Virginia law, had to be unanimous, and the jurors had to attempt to reach a verdict on both of the parties’ claims. (The jury also had the option to reach a decision in partial favor of either Depp or Heard.)
This trial was supposed to be about the law, but it has devolved into a tawdry reliving of a couple’s dysfunctional relationship via memes, TikToks, Instagram, competing hashtags, and heavily curated content.
As Liz Plank earlier pointed out, that is concerning, first of all, on a cultural level. Critics of the trial have been quick to argue that Heard is being unfairly skewered in the public eye. And indeed, the court of public opinion appeared to have already served as judge, jury, and executioner of Heard’s credibility.
But advocates have also been closely watching the trial because of its potential impact on domestic violence accusations more broadly — especially accusations involving high-profile individuals.
Every case is unique in its facts. And defamation cases are especially factually specific. Therefore, it is impossible to predict how the Depp-Heard trial will influence the outcome of other celebrity defamation trials.
And of course, both Depp and Heard are actors, so, there is naturally some built-in skepticism about the retelling of their experiences and past interactions.
Legally, we have to hope that every case is determined on its individual merits. But culturally, facts can be manipulated.
Legally, we have to hope that every case is determined on its individual merits. But culturally, facts can be manipulated. Witness testimony, as we’ve seen on TikTok, can be subjective. We’ve seen how even the attorneys in the trial, who are simply supposed to be advocates for the parties, can achieve cult-like fan status. But just as in the Depp-Heard trial, the underlying dynamics of the relationship between Manson and Wood will end up being on public display. And there are few domestic violence advocates who would argue this type of attention is good for potential victims. The spectacle of a trial will not dictate the legal outcome of a case. But the gawking and the voyeurism by the court of public opinion can have a chilling effect for vulnerable victims of domestic violence. And it may already have happened.”
As written by Caroline Framke in Variety, in an article entitled Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard: What We Lose When We Turn Real Life Into Entertainment; “The mixed verdict in the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation case seems, at the very least, reflective of the complex tumult that seemed to define the actors’ relationship, the details of which unfolded over six seemingly endless weeks in an unassuming Virginia courthouse. But it wasn’t wholly satisfying for those Depp superfans who decided that securing a victory for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star was their new raison d’etre. For those people, who appeared to multiply with every passing day on every possible media platform, the only acceptable outcome was a total humiliation for Heard, who has been raised up the ultimate example of the #MeToo movement gone awry.
Before we keep going, let’s get one thing straight: This is not a column about whether Heard or Depp is innocent, nor about the truth of their marriage. This is not about how the verdict will discourage domestic violence victims from speaking out in the future, though that remains an extremely important and dismaying aspect that deserves attention and consideration going forward. This is, rather, about how disturbing it is that abuse allegations became fodder for endless speculation and memes for the LOLs. It’s about how depressingly unsurprising it was to see millions of people engage with this trial as if they were taking sides with their favorite soap opera characters, and how livestreaming this trial became a shortcut for the justice system to become nothing more than entertainment. It’s about how allowing TV cameras in a trial might have been a journalistic necessity once, but now it’s more effective in swaying the court of public opinion than anything else.
After decades of media selling famous disputes like primetime sports, repackaging true crime stories into bingeable bites, and even breathlessly following cops (and O.J. Simpson) on live high-speed chases, Depp and Heard just represent the latest chum tossed out to ravenous audiences for the sake of higher ratings. Encouraging people to take sides in celebrity disputes — whether a civil court case or a high-profile breakup (were you Team Jen or Team Angelina?) — is as old as the concept of celebrity itself. And given how easy platforms like Twitter, TikTok and YouTube make it to disseminate opinions, no matter how wild or unfounded, it was only a matter of time before something like Depp vs. Heard took advantage.
So, sure; it’s tempting to be surprised by just how quickly and completely Depp vs. Heard crept into every possible corner of the media. It might even be refreshing to be taken aback by the constant updates, gawking, and speculation that followed every dirty detail. And yet for as downright ugly as this lawsuit got, and as overwhelming as the response to it became, its evolution into a phenomenon mostly just felt inevitable.
Thanks to an easily accessible livestream, every minute of the Depp vs. Heard trial found an audience ready and willing to parse through every gesture, glance and sentence themselves. Once the narrative of “Heard bad, Depp good” solidified, so too did the feverish rush to piece together the evidence in a way that would support it. Even a casual search on TikTok will reveal hundreds of thousands of videos claiming to know the truth from the smallest kernel. Well before the jury rendered its verdict, the internet crawled with sneering jokes about Heard’s allegedly manufactured hysteria, whether from obsessed viewers, the makeup brand she claimed to use as cover-up for a bruise, or the Duolingo owl.
When people consume true life like scripted dramas, and news updates like twists in a script, it becomes all too easy for them to divorce reality from its humanity. Once Heard became the villain and Depp the victim, that was enough to keep millions, and all the media platforms that depend on those millions, hooked. Soon enough, though, the cameras won’t be on this story anymore. The appetite for it will wane, and our attention span will fade. But the consequences of the verdict will continue to ripple offscreen, throughout the real world so many forgot.”
As written by Amelia Tait in The Guardian, in an article entitled Amber Heard v Johnny Depp’ has turned into trial by TikTok – and we’re all the worse for it; “Say what you like about Amber Heard – no, seriously, do. You can say that the actor took a bump of cocaine while on the stand during one of the most high-profile defamation cases of the century. You can say she stole lines from The Talented Mr Ripley and recited them in court while testifying about her relationship with fellow actor Johnny Depp. On social media, you can say both of these baseless, untrue things, and many others besides. In the past week, both of these unfounded claims have been spreading faster than wildfire.
The internet has consequently turned feral. It is ironic that a defamation trial could prompt so much flagrant defamation. Constantly rolling cameras in the courtroom have allowed a complicated, intimate case to play out like a spectator sport. Endless clips of the trial have been hashed and rehashed on social media platforms for a braying audience. On social media, people are saying whatever they like about Depp and Heard, with disturbing, unhinged results.
One recent TikTok trend involved people making aroused facial expressions over an audio clip of Heard testifying about her alleged sexual assault by Depp (the audio clip has since been removed from the site). Another saw TikTokers acting out Heard’s abuse testimony, twisting and turning like pantomime actors in an attempt to point out supposed inconsistencies in her account.
Regardless of whether an individual believes Heard’s testimony, they should believe that nothing good can come from minimising and mocking descriptions of abuse. The trial has made it clearer than ever that a culture of toxic fandom has poisoned our brains. On Etsy, fans can buy “Justice for Johnny” T-shirts and “Fuck Amber Heard” mugs. On social media, you are either Team Depp or Team Heard; very few people seem to be on the side of the justice system. Why wait to see what the judge and jury have to say, when you can easily pick a side from the comfort of your own home?
For many, the case has become a source of comedy. On TikTok, cry-laughing emojis abound on courtroom clips with titles such as “Funniest witness moments so far” and “Johnny Depp funny moments part 3”. One user put a filter on footage of Heard’s testimony so that her nose protruded like Pinocchio’s. On YouTube, anyone and everyone is weighing in: a video entitled “Woodworker Attorney DEBUNKS Amber Heard’s ‘Broken Bed’ Testimony!” has more than 277,000 views. News websites have repeated unfounded claims in uncritical articles with hands-off headlines like “Viewers notice …” and “People are saying …”.
Is it asking too much that we treat a sombre issue sombrely? That we don’t turn a serious and sensitive trial into content for our feeds? In an ideal world, even the most salacious celebrity court case would be covered in a dignified, respectful manner. Even the biggest, most ardent, most invested fan would put aside their hero worship while a jury deliberates if their idol sexually assaulted a woman with a liquor bottle.
But fandom has never drawn the line at the courthouse door, and we are all poorer for it. Screaming fans have been filmed throwing gifts through Depp’s car windows as he departed from the Virginia courtroom. No trial should be treated like a concert or a meet-and-greet, and a court case should never be an opportunity to wave a homemade sign in a celebrity’s face.
Fans need to be aware that their own behaviour around celebrity trials is under scrutiny. In theory, anyone can be sued for libel for what they write on social media (though in practice, the cases we read about involve tweets from those with high public profiles, such as TV doctors, rightwing provocateurs, and comedians). Even without the threat of a lawsuit, people need to be far more careful about what they post online. Fans may believe wholeheartedly that their idols are innocent, but serious accusations need to be taken seriously. Descriptions of abuse shouldn’t be made into jaunty comedy clips. Otherwise, we risk creating a world where people turn to TikTok videos for the final word on the truth, instead of the courts.”
As written by Catherine Bennett in The Guardian in an article entitled
What did Depp v Heard teach us? That justice and reality TV are incompatible; “The US defamation trial has shown us how ‘transparency’ in court translates, which is into a festival of misogyny.
Asked on CBS about losing Depp v Heard, Amber Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, put much of the blame on the courtroom cameras and the brutal atmosphere they generated. “It was like a Roman colosseum.”
Actually, for the squeamish, it was much nicer than that. Those of us watching Depp’s lawyer, Camille Vasquez, dismember Heard could claim to be acting in a spirit of sober inquiry and debate, motivated purely by the wish to advance understanding of US legal procedures. For instance, I learned, between gawping at Heard’s ornate plaits and Vasquez’s white costumes, that it’s legal in the state of Virginia for cameras to livestream a celebrity witness offering excruciating testimony about sexual abuse, yards from her alleged assailant.
Another lesson: the arid findings of two UK courts cannot compete, in a US one, with lashings of Technicolor “Darvo” (“deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”, a common defence tactic in sexual assault and domestic violence trials). And another: it does not conflict with the administration of US justice, in particular the principle that people are equal before the law, if a celebrity witness knows millions of viewers are scrutinising her face and body language while opposition experts speculate on the consequences of her alleged personality disorder.
Did Heard really cry in court or not? Diligent students recalled that her acting coach testified that Heard struggled “acting wise” to produce real tears when performing. On the other hand, non-acting wise – this point seems not to have registered so widely – the coach often saw Heard in real tears.
Now, courtesy of the intensive Heard-Depp course in judicial fairness, we have a good understanding of how such commitment to total courtroom transparency is likely to translate, once online supporters are engaged, into a surge of woman-hating abuse and memes. Of this, Bredehoft said, the jury in this case must have been aware. “They have weekends, they have families, they have social media,” she said.
There was also a 10-day break allowing for further absorption of tribal online feeling before jurors returned to a courtroom besieged by #justiceforJohnny supporters: “How could they not have been influenced?” Bredehoft was duly pilloried for sour grapes, on social media.
In fact, she’d seen it coming. In February, arguing against live broadcasting, Bredehoft prophesied how existing “anti-Amber networks” would use resulting videos. “What they’ll do is take anything that’s unfavourable – a look,” she said. “They’ll take out of context a statement and play it over and over and over and over again.” This is precisely what has happened, as if Heard’s inconsistencies (on charitable donations) were not, without added monstering, enough. Depp’s lawyers, to judge by his fans’ previous efforts during his London libel suit, had more to gain from the harvesting of such material. “Mr Depp believes in transparency,” his lawyer said. The judge, Penney Azcarate, whose sole decision it was to livestream or not, concluded that the public did need more, on this occasion, than old school reporting and illustrations: “I don’t see any good cause not to do it.”
Maybe the resulting festival of misogyny would not have been predictable to any judge unfamiliar with social media, nor with the tendencies of the manosphere, nor with the escalating ambitions of courtroom broadcasters. It’s harder to understand why a judge would not understand the specific risks of live broadcasting a case involving allegations of sexual violence, along with its potentially inhibiting impact on future witnesses. A Stanford Law School lawyer, Professor Michele Dauber, has called Azcarate’s decision “the single worst decision I can think of in the context of intimate partner violence and sexual violence in recent history”.
The deterrent effect on female victims, once reporting a crime doubles as an audition for courtroom broadcasting, is only one way in which compelled public performance actually conflicts with justice.
How is justice served by a courtroom becoming complicit with the values of mass entertainment?
With Depp v Heard considered broadcastable, restraint in other courts can be portrayed, as it mistakenly was by conspiracy-minded elements of the Ghislaine Maxwell audience , as a sinister cover-up. It confers unwarranted influence on editors, on the courtroom broadcasters whose profits soared as their exposure of Heard elicited more online mockery, more clicks, more histrionic tweets depicting the case as a duel.
Court TV: “Do YOU think there is going to be a clear winner in the end??” With the help of Heard, who says she is unable to pay the millions she owes in damages, Court TV doubled its daytime ratings. UK viewers discovered a new and cheaper alternative to Netflix.
When British broadcasters last agitated for televised courtrooms, it was on the then plausible basis that this innovation – as well as providing cheap content – would educate viewers and improve openness. Writing to the prime minister in 2012, representatives of the BBC, ITN and Sky said: “For too long the UK has lagged behind much of the rest of the world on open justice. The time has come for us to catch up.” Before online death threats and abusive TikTok memes, the main admitted risk of court broadcasting was usually its exploitation by certain defendants, such as the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. But presciently a spokesman for Victim Support argued that, while the justice system needed to be more transparent, “this does not mean that court cases should become a new form of reality TV”.
Even if the transformation of one celebrity defamation trial, via live streaming, into the sustained, one-sided demonising of its female participant does not amount to a case for restriction, Depp v Heard casts serious doubt on broadcasters’ claims about enhanced confidence and transparency. How is justice served by a courtroom becoming complicit with the values of mass entertainment? If anything, the live-streaming, with the associated character assassination, has added to uncertainty, for many spectators at this circus, about the relative importance of legal argument as opposed to the popularity of the combatants.
As for fairness, is it fair to force civilians, even actor-civilians, to perform for justice? Either way, what a boon for her adversaries that Amber Heard never got the hang of fake crying.”
As written by Martha Gill in The Guardian in an article entitled #MeToo is over if we don’t listen to ‘imperfect victims’ like Amber Heard; “The backlash to the #MeToo movement was always coming. We know this because a backlash has followed every single step forward feminists have ever made. This backlash was always going to be big, too. Not only did #MeToo threaten a status quo that props up powerful men, it threatened these men personally, and – as it seemed to some – with reckless caprice.
“If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this,” a White House lawyer said shortly after Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were made public, “then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”
It wasn’t just men who were worried. The idea that systems that previously treated only women, minorities and lower-class men unfairly might be capable of doing the same to high-status men was deeply unsettling to everyone.
After all, when a man is treated badly it lands with a double sense of burning injustice. Women’s stories of woe are so common that they can leave us comparatively unfazed. We feel bad, but we already know women are treated unfairly. It is priced in. “[Women’s stories were] all the same story, which is not to say it wasn’t important. But it was boring,” writes Taffy Brodesser-Akner in her novel Fleishman Is in Trouble. “The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.” When something bad happens to a powerful man, it has not happened to a statistic. It has happened to a human soul.
Female accusers are still routinely treated as if they are lying, both by the public and the courts.
For these reasons, #MeToo struck many men – and women – as deeply unfair. Yet it was merely an attempt to correct a bias that still exists. Female accusers are still routinely treated as if they are lying, both by the public and the courts – more so than other alleged victims of crime. It took the testimony of more than a hundred women to bring down Harvey Weinstein. Brett Kavanaugh was not brought down.
The public reaction to the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial is what a #MeToo backlash looks like. Here are the facts of the case. Depp is suing Heard for defamation after she described herself in a 2018 article that didn’t mention him as a “public figure representing domestic abuse”. Depp says he is innocent of abuse and her statement amounts to lying. On his side are two facts that seem clear. Heard promised to donate her entire divorce settlement to charity, and didn’t. There is a recording in which she admits to hitting Depp.
On Heard’s side is the following evidence. Depp admits to head-butting his ex-wife (by accident), and there are texts from his assistant alleging he kicked Heard. There are texts from Depp to Paul Bettany saying he wanted to kill Heard and rape “her burnt corpse”. There is a recording of Depp shouting at Heard for speaking in an “authoritative” way to him. She was awarded a domestic violence restraining order in 2016. In 2018 Depp sued the Sun newspaper for libel after it called him “a wife beater”. He lost the case after the judge found 12 of 14 alleged incidents of Depp’s abuse of Heard to be true.
The idea that Heard is a manipulator, a fantasist and an abuser herself has caught fire across all social media
The court will decide whether or not Heard is a liar. But the idea that Heard is a manipulator, a fantasist and an abuser herself has caught fire across all social media, and some more traditional outlets. Every sexist trope ever used to humiliate and discredit female accusers has been deployed against her at vast scale. Re-enacting her testimony of rape and abuse has become a game on TikTok. She has been mocked by Saturday Night Live, and by Chris Rock (“Believe all women, except Amber Heard”) and ’N Sync’s Lance Bass.
Heard’s tormentors, many of them young women, do not seem to see themselves as anti-feminist. They believe women, of course – just not this one.
It is not they who are damaging #MeToo, it is Heard – by virtue of being an imperfect victim.
They perhaps forget that the project of #MeToo – the whole point – was to help imperfect victims. Those who were wearing the wrong thing, or were drunk, or were promiscuous, or loved their perpetrator, or had previously broken the law, or had lied before, or had a bad character, or seemed “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty”, as David Brock once memorably described Anita Hill, who testified during Clarence Thomas’s US supreme court confirmation hearings in 1991. In fact, perfect victims have never needed feminism, partly because they barely exist.
Whether or not Heard’s accusers fully realise it then, setting up “bad” victims in opposition to “genuine” ones is a very effective method of unpicking #MeToo. It is only the rare misogynist who outright admits they don’t believe women. Their objection has always been just to this one bitch, who is lying.
#MeToo (the clue’s in the name) attempted to combat this by linking experiences – all those bitches who weren’t believed – so we could see the pattern. In fact, you could say the whole project of feminism is about taking bad things that happened to women, which they thought only happened to them, or were their fault, and calling them by one name. Divide us back into unlinked individuals who might be lying, and the movement is lost.
#MeToo is often framed as having uncovered truths about the world – its success was because women “explained really clearly” what was going on. No. People already knew what was going on. #MeToo worked for the reason any feminist movement works: strength in numbers. It is a political movement pushing against incredibly strong forces in the other direction. There’s no reason to think its work cannot be rolled back.”
On this day we remember the weaponization of faith in service to power as authorization of the use of state terror and repression of dissent against the Black Lives Matter protests of racial justice. In this obscene subversion of the message of the brotherhood of men and our duty of care for each other of the Sermon on the Mount, so beautifully written of by Tolstoy, Traitor Trump aped the gestural and rhetorical performance of his model Adolf Hitler as he often does, whose newsreels he studied for years as he sleeps with a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand in place of a Bible. This is the true faith of Trump, and his vision of a future for us all.
Let us remember, and bring a Reckoning; but we must remember also that Trump exploited but did not originate the weaponization of faith as authorization and legitimation of theocratic tyranny, white supremacist terror, and patriarchal sexual terror. This special form of totalitarianism is as old as the first city-states founded on mass slave agriculture and conquest as slave raiding, the first priest-kings who spoke for the gods and the first police enforcers who kept the slaves at their work. There is always someone in a gold robe who cons and bullies others into doing the hard and dirty work which creates his wealth and power. This we must resist and change.
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.”
As I wrote in my post of June 2 2020, The Great Dictator: Trump’s Reboot of the Chaplin Classic; As the world is gripped by images of Trump’s expulsion of the priests from the church and brutal repression of protestors against racist violence, of his photo op holding a Bible while invoking the use of the military against citizens to silence dissent and bolster his failing regime of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, and authoritarian state force and control, I believe it is time to consider the relative merits of our Clown of Terror’s performance of the role of the Great Dictator as compared to its originator, Charlie Chaplin.
To this end I recommend Robert Coover’s 1968 satire The Cat in the Hat for President, written originally about Nixon and republished as A Political Fable, and the luminous and feral 1933 novel on which Trump has modeled his revised Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist by Antonin Artaud.
Let us mock and deflate all such absurd monsters who would enslave us.
As written in the Charlie Chaplin website; “The Great Dictator was Chaplin’s first film with dialogue. Chaplin plays both a little Jewish barber, living in the ghetto, and Hynkel, the dictator ruler of Tomainia. In his autobiography Chaplin quotes himself as having said: “One doesn’t have to be a Jew to be anti Nazi. All one has to be is a normal decent human being.”
Chaplin and Hitler were born within a week of one another. “There was something uncanny in the resemblance between the Little Tramp and Adolf Hitler, representing opposite poles of humanity, ” writes Chaplin biographer David Robinson, reproducing an unsigned article from The Spectator dated 21st April 1939; “Providence was in an ironical mood when, fifty years ago this week, it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other….Each in his own way has expressed the ideas, sentiments, aspirations of the millions of struggling citizens ground between the upper and the lower millstone of society. (…) Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the “little man” in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.”
“Chaplin spent many months drafting and re-writing the speech for the end of the film, a call for peace from the barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel. Many people criticized the speech, and thought it was superfluous to the film. Others found it uplifting. Regrettably Chaplin’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1940.”
Transcript of Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator:
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost….
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!”
As the notorious St John’s Church incident is described in The Washington Post in an article entitled Trump’s use of the Bible was obscene. He should try reading the words inside it., written by Rev. William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove; “On Monday evening, federal authorities used tear gas to clear Lafayette Square so President Trump could pose for a photo while holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. It wasn’t the first time Trump has used the word of God as a political prop. But it was obscene, even for him.
Though Trump answered ambiguously when asked if the volume he was holding was his Bible, it appeared to be the Revised Standard Version of the text that he has used to signal to his Christian nationalist followers before.
According to David Brody and Scott Lamb’s unironic “spiritual biography,” “The Faith of Donald Trump,” the Revised Standard Version was a gift from Trump’s mother, Mary Anne, on the occasion of his graduation from Sunday Church Primary School at the First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens. Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has publicly claimed that the Bible is “very special” to him, using it frequently to authenticate his faith among what he calls “the evangelicals.” When he took the oath of office at his inauguration, Trump placed that Bible on top of the Abraham Lincoln Bible from the Library of Congress.
Though Trump has said little more about this Bible publicly, charismatic television preachers such as his faith adviser, Paula White-Cain, have developed a mythos around it. According to the version of the story these preachers often recite in sermons, this Bible was sent to Trump’s mother by two aunts in Scotland who were instrumental prayer warriors in an early-20th-century revival there. Among so-called Christian nationalists who believe that America has strayed from its traditional values and must be redeemed by “Christian” leadership, this Bible has become a sort of talisman to convey spiritual authority to an unlikely “chosen one.”
Whether Trump believes any of this, millions of Christian nationalists do. For them, a picture of Trump with what appears to be his great aunts’ Bible in front of a beleaguered church is worth a thousand words of reassurance.
But for those of us who study and preach the Bible’s text, that Christian nationalism is an offense. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, tweeted on Monday evening that the president had “used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.” While that is true, we find it even more outrageous that Trump and the religious extremists he appeals to have turned Christian faith against itself.
As preachers in the South, one black and one white, we are painfully aware of the ways Christian faith has been used to justify slavery, white supremacy, legal segregation, corporate exploitation, the dominance of women and the dehumanization of LGBTQ people. As Frederick Douglass put it, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.”
Millions of Christians and other people of faith see and acknowledge this difference.
We read the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “Woe unto those who legislate evil … make women and children their prey,” and we know it is a challenge to this administration and any political leadership that neglects its responsibility to care for the poor and most vulnerable in our society.
We read the prophet Jeremiah crying out against those who say, “‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.” We hear it as a call to listen to the grief of Americans who are not only weary of racialized police violence but also of a pandemic that has fallen disproportionately on black, brown and poor communities who are often asked to do what the essential work of food preparation, sanitation and bodily care.
We read Jesus saying, “Woe unto you … hypocrites … you have neglected the weightier matters of the law,” and we know that, at the very heart of our faith, we are called to challenge those who try to twist belief to use it for their own ends.
The Bible as a talisman has real political power. But we believe the words inside the book are more powerful. If we unite across lines of race, creed and culture to stand together on the moral vision of love, justice and truth that was proclaimed by Jesus and the prophets, we have the capacity to reclaim the heart of this democracy and work together for a more perfect union.
To do that, we need to read the Bible and live it, not wave it for the cameras.”
On May 31 in 1921 America’s Black Wall Street was totally destroyed in a single night of terror by their white neighbors in Tulsa Oklahoma through massive and organized ground and aerial attack, because a black man stepped on a white woman’s foot in an elevator.
This was our Kristallnacht, and it must never happen again.
We must redress the inequalities and injustices of racism, and to reply to white supremacist terror and to fascism with this simple message; Never Again.
Five years ago tomorrow, some fifteen thousand people of Spokane Washington who feel as I do on this issue marched in support of racial justice and equality under the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter, though there is no chapter of this organization in our city. It was a model nonviolent protest and communal grieving, which began with Chief of Police Meidl praying with the protestors and was notable for the police officers who knelt in solidarity with the people, heroic and remarkable acts welcomed with waves of sudden bursts of tears among the crowd. For this brief and glorious moment, the dream of America as a band of brothers and a free society of equals was realized; we were one people.
But when those who had gathered in peace, love, and mutual support to forge a better future had shared their trauma and gone home, several hundred white supremacist terrorists who had infiltrated the crowd remained and began a rampage of pillage and destruction through the business district, as they have in all the major riots across America the week before.
This was an extremely sophisticated and logistically massive and well funded campaign of provocation and disinformation which bears the signatures of centralized command, intelligence, and communications, the design of which reveals its true purposes and intentions; to discredit the movement for racial justice, to provoke and justify state repression, and to incite a race war which will overthrow our democracy and result in a white ethnostate. Trump saw in this an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers, and had been conspiring with and using white supremacists as deniable forces throughout his regime of fascist criminality and terrorism.
Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump and his foreign puppetmasters and propaganda machine have called Antifa a terrorist group and attempted to shift the guilt for the mayhem and property destruction of their own organized white supremacists who in capturing the narrative of a peaceful protest movement which seeks constructive change enact the sabotage of democratic process. None of these goals align with those of Antifascists.
It is in the interest of all loyal Americans to defend each other and our democracy as the embodiment of our principles and ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
To be an American patriot is to be an Antifascist and an antiracist. We hold that all human beings are created equal; those who do not are enemies of Liberty and of our nation.
This I say to all serving and former members of the United States Armed Forces and their families and loved ones, and to all others who have sworn oaths of public service to protect and defend both our universal human rights and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens; if our flag is on your uniform, you are one of us.
So say I as the founder of Lilac City Antifa and the Abraham Lincoln Brigades of Ukraine and Palestine.
Let us stand together as a nation and as a humankind united in a free society of equals as guarantors of each other’s rights of life and liberty. Not subjugated by division and hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, not obedient with learned helplessness and terror, not falsified with rewritten histories, silence, erasure, authorized identities, and the alternate universes of propaganda and lunatic conspiracy theories nor of faith weaponized in service to power, but as the Band of Brothers, sisters, and others which is the dream of America and the hope of humankind.
Writing in Jacobin, Robert Greene II has called May of 2020 the Red Spring and likened it to the Red Summer of 1919, in which a brutal campaign of racist violence and the annihilation of Black communities swept America. Certainly the murders and other violent crimes against Black people which have ignited rage and chaos throughout our nation that historic spring have a long and terrible history, of which the Tulsa Massacre remains an enduring symbol.
To this there can be but one reply; Never Again.
Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, Scott Ellsworth, John Hope Franklin (Foreword)
Torch of Liberty 