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)
Among the many horrific incidents of capitalist state terror and police crimes against humanity designed to repress dissent and break the power of organized labor, the Memorial Day Massacre of 1937 remains an example of the principle of witness as articulated by the heroine of the telenovela series Wednesday; “If we don’t tell our stories, they will.”
Along with the falsification of rewritten histories as authorized identity is the terror of silence and erasure as a system of control and repression of dissent.
The idea of witness, crucial in Elie Wiesel’s ars poetica and ideology as argued in his famous speech Silence is Complicity, here combines with Michel Foucault’s dialectics in Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia to form a praxis of democracy as a sacred calling to pursue the truth.
As I wrote in my post of December 24 2022, Nevermore A Silent Night, For Silence Is Complicity; Tis the night before Christmas, a liminal time throughout the diaspora of our civilization which was reshaped historically by Paul’s reimagination of classical mystery faiths and Judaism as they collided and transformed each other, a night of magic, the redemptive and totalizing power of love, the rapture and terror of dreams and the power of wishes to redefine us and our possibilities of becoming human.
Clustered in dense layers around this time are rituals and symbols whose roots in our collective psyche are ancient and powerful, among them the family singing of Silent Night, a carol of great beauty composed in 1818 and made a universal cultural heritage by Bing Crosby’s recording in 1935. Its primary meaning remains the same; while the world sleeps, we are recreated anew and reborn with the dawn, to a new life wherein all things are possible. Choose wisely what you wish for, and who you wish to become.
As Kurt Vonnegut teaches us in Mother Night; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Tonight I write to you not of the freedom and autonomy conferred by such acts of self-creation, nor of poetic vision as a sacred path in pursuit of Truth or of Orphic dream navigation as an art of transformative change, but of the art of making wishes itself. For wishes are a form of what Foucault called truth telling, though he wrote in the context of the witness of history and the Four Primary Duties of A Citizen to question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority. In wishes we speak the truth of ourselves, and shape our lives into an unfolding of our intentions as we have named and so created them, naming, defining, and claiming ourselves as Adam named the beasts. Wishes are a performance of our best selves, and of the truths we have chosen to become and embody; truths written in our flesh.
Herein the key and most precious and unique human act is to perform and make your dreams real.
We must never allow truths to be silenced, nor our souls stolen by those who would enslave us. True faith is living your truth; this sometimes means resistance to falsification and authorized identities as seizures of power and revolutionary struggle, but it always means living authentically and on your own terms, for only you can discover your own best self, and in this you are the only authority and the sole arbiter of choices and decisions, and of human being, meaning, and value.
In the arena of struggle between truth telling and the complicity of silence, I wish for us all Nevermore a Silent Night, for silence is complicity.
To silence in the face of evil there can be but one reply: Never Again.
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 written by Carol Quirke in Workplace Fairness, in an article entitled The Memorial Day Massacre: A Lost Piece of History; “You would think that, having been raised a mile from where 10 workers were killed and 30 more were shot by police while picketing a steel plant, I would have heard of such a tragedy. More confounding, my great-uncle, Eddie Marasovic, was wounded by a police bullet in that violent affair that would become known as a massacre.
Yet I knew nothing of it.
It happened in May, 1937, before I was born, on the prairie outside the Republic Steel plant on Chicago’s East Side. This spit of land, along Lake Michigan’s southern tip, linked the steel plants of southern Chicago to a long string of industry that reached through Indiana, giving rise to what labor economists called the largest steel producing region in the world.
Why did I only learn about the killing of workers from a poster of the massacre that I found in a bookstore, in a city located two states away, nearly half a century after the event transpired?
The Memorial Day Massacre, as many refer to it, was largely repressed by many in the community where it occurred.
In the late 1990s when I began researching it, scholars had also neglected the tragedy for decades. Greg Mitchell’s new PBS film and book, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, explore how vital evidence — a Paramount newsreel — helped union leaders and civil libertarians turn the tide against the extreme pro-police news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the killings.
A single newsreel cameraman, Orlando Lippert of Paramount News, captured the tragedy on film. Lippert’s footage, suppressed by Paramount until a congressional committee under progressive Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. (D-Wisc.) screened it, showed police firing at protesters, striking 40 of them, the vast majority in the back or on the side.
The newsreel provided vital proof of corporate and state violence against working Americans.
How had events transpired as they did?
Tensions had been ratcheting up for months ahead of the tragedy. In 1935, the new Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO), under the leadership of United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis, organized industrial labor, unskilled workers flexed their muscle. And, in late 1936, workers set off the sit-down craze, initiating hundreds of strikes from late November 1936 through the spring of 1937.
Lewis’s CIO achieved an agreement with U.S. Steel, the largest producer in the country, but Thomas M. Girdler, the CEO of Republic Steel, and the heads of other smaller steel companies (known as Little Steel), vowed to keep unions out. When workers called a strike at these plants, unionists rallied at Republic Steel. But Chicago police refused to let strikers picket the plant and on May 28, 1937, they viciously beat strikers, including women.
To build community support, workers organized a Memorial Day picnic for families and labor activists on the prairie several blocks from their plant. More than 1,000 people showed up, many in their Sunday best, and then set off on a peaceful march to form a picket line close to the Republic plant.
Police halted them halfway there. Orlando Lippert’s newsreel of events shows men and women gesticulating to police. Seconds later, the film shows workers fleeing. Police run after them, many with guns drawn, and fire upon the crowd. Four workers died of their wounds immediately, and within three weeks, another six had lost their lives. Others were hospitalized due to severe beatings. One boy, age 11, was shot in the foot.
My grandmother’s youngest brother, my great uncle Eddie, was one of those who had been shot. Ironically, though I learned of the massacre in 1983 at the Northern Sun bookstore in Minneapolis, I only discovered our personal connection at a family wedding several years later. My great uncle’s daughter shared the story of her father having been shot that Memorial Day.
In 1996, in the midst of my graduate studies, examining how news photography shaped labor conflict, I interviewed my aunts and uncles to see if I could find out more. They knew nothing of the Memorial Day Massacre. I became fascinated, not only about the events in Chicago, but about the ways in which it had been forgotten.
Only from an oral history that my brother, Michael, conducted with our grandparents did I find out that my grandfather was working in the Republic plant for 17 days before and after the massacre. He was one of the “loyal workers” the company deployed to suggest the strikers did not represent most workers. He was, in effect, a scab. My uncle Eddie, in contrast, stood on the field that day, fighting for the right to a union.
I have few strands of information, hardly more than whispers, of Eddie’s life.
He continued his employment at Republic Steel for nearly four decades. But these are the lone facts I can dredge up. From family, there is little more. Others, notably urban sociologist William Kornblum in his 1975 book Blue Collar Community, have observed that Chicago’s East Siders did not want to discuss the events that so divided their community.
As documentarian George Stoney found in his exploration of Southern millworkers involved in the 1934 general textile strike, being subject to state violence can cause trauma or shame, making workers suspicious and willing to repress their own experiences.
Even the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) refused to honor the massacre’s victims — it took a decade for the union’s newspaper to print the infamous photographs of its members being beaten and shot at by police, even as other union papers and metropolitan dailies published such imagery. In 1937, SWOC was fighting for its right to exist — and it may have feared scaring off membership by highlighting the massacre.
The intransigence of Girdler and the other Little Steel executives soon stymied the union drive. Little Steel only accepted union representation after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1940 that workers deserved compensation for the companies’ illegal actions against them, and as President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced industry to negotiate with unions if they wanted federal defense contracts.
While workers did not obtain contracts immediately, efforts at curtailing labor spies, corporate mercenaries, and police overreaction to labor disputes mostly succeeded. A committee under Sen. La Follette probed the massacre and exposed the buried Paramount footage.
This spotlight upon extralegal violence helped curb it in the future. Documenting and publicizing the surveillance of workers — and the collusion between private “security” forces, police and the National Guard — lmited such practices. The stifling of violence, and federal support for unions along with workers’ ongoing mobilization, ultimately led a third of the nation’s industrial workforce to enjoy union representation by the early 1950s.
It was only in the mid-1990s that I began to deeply research the story of the massacre. By reading the La Follette transcripts, I was able to find traces of my great uncle.
I knew from a second cousin that her father, Eddie Marasovic, had been shot in his leg, and he carried the bullet in his body to the grave. Unexpectedly I encountered his name, in Exhibit #1463: A medical examiner’s sketch of a body, with dots strewn across the drawing, for all the bullets that more than two dozen activists had borne that day. My great-uncle’s name corresponds to the bullet that wounded his leg.
My family had been touched by history, recorded in history, and yet those marks had been lost to me. Repressed, censored or silenced — I am still trying to learn.”
As written by Howard Fast in a witness statement entitled Memorial Day Massacre: It was a day for parades, picnics and boat-rides–and tear-gas, bullets and death; “Memorial Day in Chicago in 1937 was hot, humid, and sunny; it was the right kind of day for the parade and the holiday, the kind of a day that takes the soreness out of a Civil War veteran’s back makes him feel like stepping out with the youngsters a quarter his age. It was a day for picnics, for boating, for the beach or a long ride into the country. It was a day when patriotic sentiments could be washed down comfortably with Coca-Cola or a Tom Collins, as you preferred. And there’s no doubt but that a good deal of that holiday feeling was present in the strikers who gathered on the prairie outside and around Republic Steel’s Chicago plant.
Most of the strikers felt good. Tom Girdler, who ran Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands, and word went around that old Tom could do worse than earn an honest living hoeing potatoes. The strike was less than a week old; the strikers had not yet felt the pinch of hunger, and there was a good sense of solidarity everywhere. Because it was such a fine summer day, many of the strikers brought their children out onto the prairie to attend the first big mass meeting; and wherever you looked, you saw two-year-olds and three-year-olds riding pick-a-back on the shoulders of steelworkers. And because it was in the way of being their special occasion as well as a patriotic holiday, the women wore their best and brightest.
In knots and clusters, the younger folks two by two, the older people in family groups, they drifted toward Sam’s place on South Green Bay Avenue. Once, Sam’s place had been a ten-cent-a-dance hall; now it was strike headquarters, which meant, in terms of the strike, just about everything. There, the women had set up their soup kitchen, and there the union strategy board planned the day-to-day work; food was collected at Sam’s place, and pickets used it as their barracks and headquarters.
Today, several thousand people gathered around the improvised platform set up at Sam’s place, to listen to the speakers and to take part in the mass demonstration. How serious an occasion it was, they knew well enough; rumors circulated that the police were going to attempt something special, something out of the run of clubbing and gassing which had marked the strike from the very first day; rumors too that a mass picket line was going to be established today. It was a serious occasion, but somehow something in the day, the holiday, the sunshine and the warm summer weather made the festive air persist. Vendors wheeled wagons of cold pop, and brick ice cream, three flavors in one, was to be had at a nickel a cake.
For the young folks, it was the first strike; they sat under the trees with the girls, grinning at the way the strike committee worked and poured sweat; and the women, cooking inside the hall, reflected, as a hundred generations of women had reflected before, that man’s work is from sun to sun, but women’s work….
A group of girls sang. Strike songs were around, a new turn in the folk literature of the nation. First shyly, hesitantly, then with more vigor, with a rising volume augmented by the deep bass and rich baritone of the men, they sang the deathless tale of Joe Hill, the song-maker and organizer whom the cops had killed; they sang, “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong….” They sand of the nameless IWW worker, tortured into treason, who pleaded, “Comrades, slay me, for the coppers took my soul; close my eyes, good comrades, for I played a traitor’s role.”
The meeting started and came down to business. The chairman was Joe Weber, who represented the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee. Outlining the purpose of the mass meeting, he flung an arm at the Republic plant, a third of a mile down the road. Twenty-five thousand men were on strike; their purpose was to picket peacefully, to win a decent raise in wages so that they might exist like human beings. But there had been constant, brutal provocation by the police. Well, they were gathered here, as was their constitutional right, to protest that interference.
Dozens of strikers had been arrested, beaten, waylaid; strikers’ property, as for example a sound truck, had been smashed and destroyed. Even women had been beaten, dragged off to jail, treated obscenely. The National Labor Relations Act guaranteed them their rights; today they were going to demonstrate in support of those rights.
Other speakers backed up Weber. When the audience cheered some point, the children present gurgled with delight and clapped their hands. As soon as the meeting had finished the strikers and their wives and children began to form their picketline. After all, this was Memorial Day; the thing took on a parade air. Some of the strikers had made their own placards; also, a whole forest of them appeared from inside the union hall, made by committees. The slogans were simple, direct, and non-violent: “REPUBLIC STEEL VIOLATES LABOR DISPUTES ACT.” “WIN WITH THE C.I.O.” “NO FASCISM IN AMERICA.” “REPUBLIC STEEL SHALL SIGN A UNION CONTRACT.”
The signs were handed out, many of them to boys and girls who carried them proudly. At the head of the column that was forming, two men took their place with American flags. The news reporters, who had come up by car only a short while before, were hopping about now, snapping everything. For some reason that has never been analyzed, news photographers and strikers get along very well, even when the photographers come from McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. There was a lot of good-natured give and take. When the column began to march, down the road from Sam’s place first, and then across the prairie toward the Republic Steel plant, the news photographers moved with it, some walking, some by car. This fact later turned into a vital part of American labor history.
Republic Steel stood abrupt out of the flat prairie. Snake-like, the line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first: “Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong…”; but then the song died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policement took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed–but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened. It brought to mind how other Americans had faced the uniformed force of so-called law and order so long ago on Lexington Green in 1775; but whereas then the redcoat leader had said, “Disperse, you rebel bastards!” to armed minutemen, now it was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”
About two hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding, striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of holsters.
“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”
The cops said, “You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”
Even if a modern man’s a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol equalizes him with a weakling–and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic, and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing ran like fire through the police.
They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers–at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.
And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.
Now, of course, this brief account might be passed off as a complete exaggeration, as one-sided and so forth–the same arguments might be used that are constantly thrown up whenever it is a case of labor versus capital or labor versus the police. It might be said, as the Chicago Tribune said the next day, that this was the doing of Reds who were plotting to take over the plant, and the police had only done their duty.
But the photographers were on the spot, and everything I have described here and a good deal more was taken down with both newsreel and still cameras. The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel held by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor; and I recommend to the special attention of anyone interested in checking this bit of labor history Exhibit 1418, Exhibit 1414, Exhibit 1351, and the morbid chart of gunshot wounds–in the back–known as Exhibit 1463.
That, in brief–and most brief, since the space here is limited–is a summary of what happened in Chicago on May 30, 1937. These events, which came to be known as the Memorial Day Massacre, shook the nation as did few other acts of anti-labor violence since the Haymarket Affair of the 1880’s. Later, the Senate Committee’s investigation highlighted them, and brought home to the American people the full savagery of the police and the men who ran Republic Steel. But then the war washed the memory out for a time, and to understand fully today what happened then in Chicago, certain other facts must be noted.
Let us look at the situation of the steel industry after the worst part of the depression. Taking United States Steel as an example, we find that by 1935 the firm was well on the way over the hump, with a net profit of $6,106,488. Wheels had begun to turn again in America, and the next year’s profit took an enormous jump upwards, a net of $55,501,787 in 1936. Then the graph inclined even more sharply, and in the first three months of 1937 the company recorded a net profit of $28,561,533.
This was big steel. Republic, a light steel industry, was a part of what was known as little steel, and while the profits there were smaller–$4,000,000 in 1935 and $9,500,000 in 1936–they were part of the upward spiral.
It was within this framework of hot furnaces and mounting profits that the C.I.O. began to organize. And as they built their industrial unions, the steel companies built their armed goon squads. It was in 1936 that the C.I.O. began to make real progress in organizing the steel industry, and by the middle of 1937 half a million steelworkers had joined the union. Over 750 union lodges were formed, and by now most of the steel manufacturers had realized that it was a most destructive kind of insanity to fight organizaion. Again, by June 1937, some 125 companies had signed union contracts. Among these firms, which employed 310,000 workers, were Carnegie-Illinois and several other subsidiaries of US Steel.
But the big independents, the Little Steel combine, still held out. Let us name them as they stood on that Memorial Day of 1937. There was Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel, employing 53,000 workers. There was Bethlehem Steel, with 82,000 workers. There was Youngstown Sheet & Tube, with 27,000. Then there were the smaller firms, National Steel, American Rolling Mills and Inland Steel. All together, these firms employed almost 200,000 workers and they accounted for almost forty per cent of the steel produced in America.
They were lined up for a knock-down, drag-out fight; no quarter asked, no quarter given. Tom Girdler was granted nominal leadership; a latter-day “robber baron,” to use Matthew Jospehson’s phrase, he was a natural for such a position, and we shall see later how his tactics led to the Memorial Day Massacre.
But he did not introduce the concept of violence; it was not necessary for him to do so. As far back as 1933 the steel companies were arming themselves for the coming struggle. For example, the following order was shipped to Bethlehem Steel. The invoice entered on the books of Federal Laboratories, and signed by A.G. Bergman, is dated September 30, 1933:
That makes for quite a sizable armament, but Youngstown Sheet and Tube went in for more and deadlier protection against unarmed strikers and their dangerous wives and children. On June 6, 1934, this firm was billed for the following order:
10 1½” cal. riot guns 201, $60 ea.
10 riot gun cases 211, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. long range projectiles, $7.50 ea.
60 1½” cal. short range projectiles, $4.50 ea.
60 M-39 billies, std. barrel no disc, $22.50 ea.
600 M-39 billy cartridges, $1.50 ea.
200 grenades 106M, 10% disc., $12 ea.
These are only two examples of widespread gun-toting by the steel companies. Nor were these the only techniques they used. They hired spies and special agents. They organized goon squads composed of thugs, professional gangsters, and assorted degenerates. They bribed police chiefs and sheriffs.
And under their natural leader, Tom Girdler, they set themselves for violence.
That was part of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre. Another part was Tom Girdler himself, and it is worthwhile to look into that gentelman’s history.
Matthew Josephson’s fine book, The Robber Barons, should be read as background to any study of Tom Girdler. Girdler is a latter-day Morgan, a Jim Fisk, a John D. Rockefeller–but operating at a time when the tactics of these financial pirates were supposed to be outdated and hopeless. Perhaps in some new edition of Josephson’s book, Girdler will be included, along with a few other of his worthy contemporaries, as a sort of appendix.
Girdler is a farm boy, and he likes to think of himself as a part and a little more than a part of the good old log-cabin tradition. He was fond of saying, in those days of steel trouble, that he liked a good rough-and-tumble fight; and he talked tough and tried to look and act tough. But his toughness was the toughness of the rear-echelon general, the armchair two-gun man. It was never his lot to face even a small reflection of the violence he created.
In the 1920’s, Cyrus Eaton, a Middle-Western manipulator, formed Republic out of four small steel companies. Eaton, too, had dreams of becoming an Andrew Carnegie; but his skill did not measure up to his ambition. He tangled with a very hard-boiled customer, Bethlehem Steel, and in the ensuing struggle Republic’s shares fell from 80 to 2. At that time, Girdler was making a very local name for himself in Jones and Laughlin Steel; Eaton pulled him out, promised him an arm and a leg, and told him to save Republic. In that case, anyway, Eaton’s judgment was not at fault, for not only did Tom Girdler save Republic: he turned it into the most up-and-coming steel company in the land–and in doing so, he took just a little more than the arm and leg; he eased Eaton entirely out of the picture.
There is no doubting that Girdler made the most of what he stepped into. Republic was light steel, specializing in steel for furniture, boilers, automobiles, light trains, various types of metal containers. Nor could this kind of production be changed; the plants, too, were specialized. Reluctantly, Girdler worked with what he had. His own fancy was for heavy stuff: girders, plates for warships–the kind of work Bethlehem did. He looked to a future alliance with Bethlehem, but in the meantime he worked with what he had. He hired scientists and picked their brains in the traditional fashion. He forced the development of more and better alloys, until his stainless steel had gained a national reputation.
The plants were old and inefficient, so he began to replace them. Cyclical depression usually winds up with a replacement of fixed capital which has become outdated, and the fact that Girdler’s action was being duplicated all over the nation in the middle thirties set at least a part of the wheels of industry in motion. At this point, Girdler was not too interested in profits; profits could be assured for a later period if he was successful in replacement and in mergers.
He worked for control of Republic by chasing down small holdings of shares wherever he could locate them. He begged proxies. Because his Ohio plants were a good distance from the ore deposits of Minnesota, he planned and executed a merger with Corrigan-McKinney of Cleveland. When this went through he had a lake port to operate from, and a modern steel plant to add to his growing empire. For four years he worked to get proxies and control, until at last he was sitting firmly in the driver’s seat, with plant after plant coming into the growing orbit of Republic. He went after Truscon Steel, the largest fabricator of building-shapes, doors, lockers and window frames in the Middle West, effected a merger, and built up Truscon until it was the largest plant of its kind in the world. All this cost money, and from 1930 to 1935 Republic lost something around $30,000,000. This did not affect Girdler; he drew his income from his own huge salary. He did not own the combine; he merely had control. No single stockholder held more than 6 percent of the total stock, but by 1935 Girdler was so firmly in the saddle that no one could challenge his rule–and since the financial-industrial empire was growing, in spite of some 2,000,000 additional shares of watered stock, no stockholder or group of stockholders made serious efforts to challenge or unseat him.
For all of his drive and his large talk about free enterprise, Girdler demonstrated in action that he not only did not believe in what American business calls “free enterprise,” but that he personally was working night and day to destroy it in the steel industry. His tactics were toward monopoly. He interlocked with Youngstown Sheet and Tube; he interlocked with Jones and Laughlin. He thought and talked combine–and he operated in that direction with a ruthlessness that bowled over his competitors like tenpins.
And when it came to dealing with his 50,000 workers, he chose the same tactics of ruthlessness and direct aggression.
He liked to refer to himself as a worker, but that was an out-and-out fiction; from his very beginnings in the industry, he had been an ally of management, and then, very soon, he became a part of management.
He entered the industry as a salesman for Buffalo Forge. Then he was employed by the Oliver Iron Company. He was an assistant superintendent with Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and he held similar jobs elsewhere. But always it was over labor or apart from labor. It was Tom Girdler getting ahead and using his brains in the best Horatio Alger tradition, while all around him heavy-set, heavy-muscled men by the thousands worked long hours to turn the ore into metal and to shape it, forge it, tool it. One would surmise from his later actions that he had never held anything else but contempt for those who worked with their hands.
He was schooled well for the battles of 1937. Jones and Laughlin’s Aliquippa Works was known as the “Siberia of America.” Their company town was a place where the few brave union organizers who dared to enter faced death, literally, tar and feathers, or some of the more gruesome and less printable fates that goon squads specialize in. The town was also called “Little Hell,” a more descriptive name.
Apparently it was a place that suited Girdler excellently, for in a space of four years he rose from an assistant to president. And after that, he continued to climb steadily on the irreproachable ladder of success. As he climbed, his technique of dealing with the men he employed became progressively more ruthless. When the Memorial Day slaughter occurred, he was earning $130,000 a year. One might consider his statement that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he bargained collectively with his employees as a piece of not too original verbiage. At the same time, he never gave any indication that the dead men and wounded women and children strewn over the Chicago prairie disturbed either his sleep or his equanimity.
Yet it would give a very false picture of the industrial situation in the second half of the third decade to single out Tom Girdler as industry’s bad boy. Nor could the dreadful occurrence of Memorial Day be understood from that point of view. From that point of view alone, the Chicago incident becomes an isolated instance of one man’s callousness–but it was by no means such an isolated instance.
Half a century before, the Haymarket Affair, also in Chicago, became the labor cause célèbre of the nation and the world. The four labor leaders who were then framed and put to death in Chicago became martyrs or devils, according to the reaction of one class or another. But they could not have been so framed and murdered had there not been complete accord on the part of the most powerful forces in American finance. The same accord operated in the case of Girdler and the Chicago bloodshed.
Girdler was the front, the testing ground, the trial balloon of the most reactionary forces in American capitalism. This is not a matter for speculation. Keen economic observers of the time analyzed the situation of Republic Steel in terms of the shareholders as well as the Wall Street moguls.
I pointed out before that Girdler never owned even a tiny fraction of Republic’s stock. The big stockholders in Republic–and among them were some of the most powerful finance blocks in America–willingly allowed him to climb into the saddle and, once there, made no effort to unseat him. It should be historically noted that the Chicago dead did not arouse either the ire or the disgust of these same shareholders. Their attitude was that of smiling behind their palms, and quietly letting Girdler bear the brunt of the storm. Also, Girdler all during that period was responsible to a board of directors. This board represented, in its composition, far-reaching and important interests; but at no point is there any record of their reprimanding Girdler or disagreeing with his action. Other factors can be cited. A handful of key men in Wall Street could have picked up their phones, called Girdler, and called a quick halt to the bloody, senseless battle with labor which he was promoting; they did not, and there is every reason to believe that they silently backed Girdler in his policy.
Following this line of thought, it is interesting to observe the general press reaction to the Memorial Day Massacre. Although brief, the description of events on that day given earlier in this account makes a fairly good picture of what happened in the meadows outside of Republic. Further documentation, hundreds of pages of detailed testimony, is included in the Senate Report, S. Res. 266, 74th Congress, Part 14, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937. Exhibits presented also run into the hundreds. The testimony is explicit; it goes into minutiae, as may be gathered from the following extract, page 4939. John William Lotito, one of the strikers, is being examined by Senator La Follette:
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Did you see Captain Mooney while you stood there in front of the police?
MR. LOTITO: I think Captain Mooney was standing on the side where the other flag was–that is, to my left.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Did you see what he was doing?
MR. LOTITO: Well, he had his hands up like this here. He was talking to the strikers. His lips were moving anyway. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You could not hear what he was saying?
MR. LOTITO: No.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: About how long would you say you stood there?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, maybe five minutes.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: All right. Now, tell me exactly, from your own knowledge, what happened at the end of this five-minute period.
MR. LOTITO: At the end of the five-minute period? Well, I was talking to this policeman there, and the first thing I knew I got clubbed, while I was talking to him.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: And then what happened?
MR. LOTITO: I got clubbed and I went down, and my flag fell down, and I went to pick up the flag again, to get up, and I got clubbed the second time. I was like a top, you know, spinning. I was dizzy. So I put my hand to my head, and there was blood all over. I started to crawl away, and half running and half crawling, and I didn’t know what I was doing, to tell you the truth. After I got up, why there was shots, and everything I heard, I didn’t know which way to run. Anyway, I retreated back that way.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: You mean back toward Sam’s Place?
MR. LOTITO: And then I got shot in the leg.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: How far away were you from the place where you had been standing talking to the police when you were shot in the leg, would you say?
MR. LOTITO: Oh, I got quite a ways from there, all right.
SENATOR LA FOLLETTE: Can you approximate how far?
MR. LOTITO: Maybe thirty or forty yards away I got.
This is just a page of testimony, chosen at random; there are far more harrowing details that might be listed; but the point is this: all the details necessary are there. They are reports of thousands of eye-witnesses who saw what happened. Newspaper reporters on the scene saw what happened. And if that were not enough, in addition to the still photographers, the Paramount News people took down a detailed photographic record of the whole affair.
In other words, the newspapers knew the facts of the case. They could not plead ignorance, even the carefully conditioned ignorance which allows them to interpret events precisely as they please. With all that, they too acted, with very few exceptions, very much as if they were part of the combine behind Tom Girdler. They lied about what had occurred outside the Republic Steel plant. They lied hugely and in unison, although they departed from the truth on many different levels.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, was overt and completely unabashed. It described the unarmed men and women and children who composed the picket line–none of whom were ever proved to possess a firearm during the march–as “lusting for blood.” It raised a red scare, which was sedulously promoted by the Hearst and the McCormick interests and their fellow hatemongers. The more conservative journals doubted that the police had indulged in provocation and pointed out that force was a necessary ingredient to the preservation of law and order. One looked in vain in such papers as the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune for editorials reproaching Tom Girdler, or his private police, even in the mildest terms. No criminal action was ever taken to seek justice for the men who had died in Chicago. Only the few independent newspapers and the labor press kept the issue alive and fought for justice–and there too is a remarkable parallel to what happened before in the Haymarket Affair.
You may wonder how it was that you do not recall seeing the newsreel which so graphically describes all that happened, and which was shown at the La Follette investigation. The following editorial from the New Masses of June 29, 1937, sheds a good deal of light on that:
The reason given by Paramount News for suppressing its newsreel of the Chicago Memorial Day steel-strike massacre is an obvious sham. Audiences trained on the Hollywood school of gangster films are not likely to stage a “riotous demonstration” in the theater upon seeing cops beating people into insensibility, and worse. Against whom would the riot be directed anyway? The Board of Directors or Republic Steel and the Chicago municipal authorities are hardly likely to be found in the immediate vicinity.
The real reason behind the film suppression is its decisive evidence that virtually every newspaper in the country lied, and continues to lie, about the responsibility for violence in the strike areas. The myth that the steel strikers have resorted to violence to gain their just ends is now the basis for the whole campaign of slander and misrepresentation against them. That is why Tom Girdler of Republic Steel refuses to confer with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and that is why 95 per cent of the press carries on a publicity pogrom against the strikers.
Even after the St. Louis Post Dispatch performed a genuine service to the American people in breaking the story of the film (for which, though it is Pulitzer owned, it is very unlikely to get the Pulitzer award), the venal press still continued to blast away at the strikers with the same old legend. Not a comma has been changed in the editorials which, day after day, have defended the steel tycoons on the ground that there can be no compromise with labor violence.
And all this time, the film record exists–and has been described–which would enable the public to make up its own mind on this very crucial point!
At this point, with the added emphasis of the above editorial, we begin to have a very different picture of the Memorial Day Massacre than that which popularly surrounds it. Not that Tom Girdler’s responsibility is lessened, not that the brutality of his agents is mitigated one iota, not that the Chicago police bear any less the responsibility for murder; but the incident in whole becomes broader and more inclusive. We find that far from being an isolated case of managerial violence, it was a focal point for the theory and the technique of reactionary capitalism in the organizational struggles of the thirties. It was a test case; it was symptomatic. Steel is, as was said, the industry of industries, and in 1937 steel was chosen by the entrenched forces of the open shop as the battleground for the open shop–against industrial unionism.
It is the difficult and tedious task of the labor historian to document every statement he makes. There is a good reason for this, of course; the body of knowledge (press, magazines, most books, etc.) presented to the public, both currently and contemporaneously to the times of which he writes, contradicts almost every premise and almost every fact which he brings forth. Only the labor press, which has a limited readership compared to the commercial press, bears him out. This is not the case with other historians. For example, one could start a story about Lincoln with the accepted premise that we was a great and good man; in the case of Eugene Debs, one would first have to document his actions and prove his intentions.
In connection with that, the charge that labor promotes almost all industrial violence cannot be dismissed as a lie; it must be proved to be a lie–and once proved, this small account of the Memorial Day Massacre can be closed. I have shown some of the facts in the arms orders of the steel companies. After our account of what happened in Chicago, it might do to cite the New York Times headline for May 31, 1937:
4 KILLED, 84 HURT AS STRIKERS FIGHT POLICE
IN CHICAGO, STEEL MOB HALTED.
Technically, that is not a lie. Only four men had died then; eventually five more succumbed from wounds. If you called the picket line a mob, then there is no doubt but that it was halted–although some might prefer the word “slaughtered.” And some of the strikers did fight for their lives against the police. But this is pettifogging; the sense and intent of the headline, which very much set the pattern for nonsensational headlines all over the country, is more than apparent for anyone.
Let’s go on with the record. Monroe, Michigan–ten days after Chicago. There is a Republic plant which employs about 1,350 persons. The strike is called; the workers go out, and for two weeks picket lines are maintained in a disciplined fashion. There is absolutely no disorder.
Then, suddenly, there appears on the scene what we know familiarly as “the bloodthirsty mob of strikers,” and the hospital wards are full, and the damage is reckoned in lives as well as thousands of dollars. But the records show that after due deliberation and planning, Police Chief Jesse Fisher swore in enough special police to form a small army–at an expense of $9,000 to the little town. Leonidas McDonald, a Negro C.I.O. organizer, was attacked by a mob and severely beaten. This incident, which members of the mob assured reporters was carefully planned, touched off the riot. Then Chief Fisher ordered his men to attack the picket line. They went to work with tear-gas shells and grenades. The next day, the hospital wards were full, but Chief Fisher, bursting with pride, set about organizing a shotgun brigade of six hundred men.
It had worked in Chicago. Why not Monroe?
Newspapers told us that in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, the same pattern of violence was being inaugurated by strikers of the Moltrop Steel Products Company. But George Mike was not a picket and not a striker. He was a crippled war veteran, who stood on a corner in Beaver Falls, selling tickets to a C.I.O. dance. A deputy sheriff leveled his gas gun at him and fired. The shell smashed his skull, and he died the next day. Our newspapers, during the same weeks, described the frightful riot provoked in Youngstown by–not the strikers, but their wives. Women too can be a frightful menace to society, if you only see them in the proper perspective. Many of these women carried their small children on this particular day, and no doubt that added to their potential menace. They were coming home from a meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and a few of them paused to rest on an embankment that was a part of Republic’s property. The deputies on guard ordered them off. The women and children responded too slowly, and the deputies helped them along with gas shells. As the women fled, their screams brought men to the scene, and when the men appeared, the deputies switched to repeating rifles.
Result: two dead, thirty injured.
Massillon, July 11, and strikers holding a meeting outside C.I.O. headquarters. Again, the firing starts, and in a little while there are three dead strikers and five more on their way to the hospital. Then C.I.O. headquarters is surrounded, and for an hour lead is poured into the building. And in the building, there is not one firearm.
But the newspapers said, the next day: “STRIKING MOB ATTACKS MASSILLON POLICE.” That was a Middle-Western paper, but most others bore variations of the same.
This sort of record could be continued indefinitely. One labor historian estimates that casualties suffered by the working class in organizational struggles outnumber total casualties suffered by United States Armed Forces in all of this country’s wars up to World War II. Though the violence of Tom Girdler’s Republic Steel was sharp and dramatic, it could be matched by the violence of any one of a hundred other corporations, over a period of half a century.
Some of the background to the Memorial Day Massacre has been presented here. It was shown that the incident itself was both a part and a focal point in the pattern of closed-shop violence. The strange, wild, tragic, and disordered years of the third decade of the twentieth century, here in America, were not unproductive. Out of depression and despair came the greatest organization of labor this country ever knew–the industrial unionism of the CIO. Out of the broad united front against fascism, led by the C.I.O. and other organizations, came the strength and desire to resist Hitlerite Germany and to carry the world through its sharpest crisis.
The America of today is not and cannot ever be the America of a decade ago. History does not stage repeat performances. It is very likely that there will be violence in connection with future strikes; but the American people have learned a good deal. And if such an incident as that in Chicago occurs again, it is wholly possible that those responsible will have to face the anger of millions instead of thousands.”
Presenting “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” Chapter 6: Three Strikes. Dr. Lewis Andreas talks about being at the 1937 Memorial Day massacre and providing medical care during the Depression. Justin McCarthy discusses his job conditions at Ford Assembly Plant prior to the unions implementation. Mike Widman remembers heading up union negotiations and the strike at the Ford Plant in 1940-41. Bob Stinson discusses working at General Motors and how the sit-down strike began. Union songs performed by the Almanac Singers are played throughout the episode.
When Israel speaks to me in my dreams as if the voice of history were that of one human being, it wears not the face of an iconic survivor of the Holocaust and liberator of humankind from the existential threats of tyranny and terror and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force which it once may have, but of the character of Martin Chatwin in the series The Magicians, a victim of monstrous abuse who by seizure of power became himself a monster.
He has a line which like a Zen riddle enfolds and typifies what for myself is the primary question of how to become human under imposed conditions of struggle which require the use of force in resistance, where the use of social force is always ambiguous, dehumanizing, and obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion as bidirectional forces of reaction which create their own antithesis. “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak.”
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, Ortega, Mugabe, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the states they founded; Imperial France, America, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. David Ben-Gurion was by any reasonable interpretation the Messiah, for he won Israel as a place of refuge and belonging after centuries of Exile and the Jewish peoples of the whole world being claimed by no state since the fall of al-Andalus in 1492; but this was little consolation for those who died beneath the tracks of his tanks. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
During the many happy years in which I taught Forensics at Sonoma Valley High School, I began each new year on the first day of class with a demonstration I called Becoming a Fulcrum; placing an object on my desk with the worlds “This is a fulcrum.” Then setting an oblong object on top of that, “It balances a lever. When your parents ask you what you’re learning in Forensics class, tell them you’re learning to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.”
It remains a reasonable mission statement in life, and I place my life in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
We 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.”
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As I wrote in my post of May 29 2021, Palestine and Israel: State of the Peace; A fragile peace holds for now in the volatile, chaotic, and rapidly changing relationships between Palestine and Israel, and between these partners in the imaginations of America and the international community. It is an uneasy dance of identity, memory, and history performed to the lyrical songs of narratives of victimization and endless litanies of woe, songs which seduce and shape us to the service of power and authority.
Before the stage of the world and the witness of history, we can see here in real time the processes and consequences of divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as primary informing, motivating, and shaping forces of human being, meaning, and value.
For those of us who participated on May 10 2021 and in the nineteen days of battle which followed not in the defense of al Aqsa, a thing of grandeur fit for the death of heroes, but in defense of the families at prayer which Israel attacked and the unarmed women and children hunted through the maze of a derelict antiquity, disembodied screams in a land of fear and darkness, the Third Intifada was born on that night as a hope beyond the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity for reimagination, transformation, the redemptive power of love to heal the divisions of exclusionary otherness and the pathology of our disconnectedness, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
What is the state of the peace? How we answer this question hinges on implicit value judgements and becomes a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, and a measure of our character. In this as in many things, I recall Monet’s description of the meaning of his art as a form of metaphysics and investigation into the soul of humankind; “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks outward, but the other looks inward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
So our question becomes, what does this look like from the perspectives of its partners, Palestine, Israel, and America?
America vacillates with Joe Biden on the cusp of a vast and horrific realization; that we have for over seventy years been the sponsors of tyranny and state terror, and responsibility for the endless litany of woes which have shaped the peoples of Palestine are shared by all of us and by our proxy state of Israel. It parallels our national reckoning with the legacies of slavery and our systemic racial inequalities and injustices which awaken with the Black Lives Matter protests, like our reckoning with Patriarchy and sexual terror in the #metoo movement, and with the consequences of capitalism for our extinction in the Green New Deal of our champions Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and the global ecological movement led by the Pythian visionary Greta Thunberg.
An awakening and tidal change whose full consequences and potential for the reimagination and transformation of humankind are incalculable, our political, ecological-material, sexual, and racial social justice movements represent a total civilizational shift and a revolution in universal human rights which will one day utterly change and renew our ideas of human being, meaning, and value.
Francis Fukuyama was wrong when he predicted that we live at the end of history; we live at the beginning of a new history. But he was exactly right when he diagnosed its principles of operation in The End of History and the Last Man; “It was the slave’s continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master.”
I hope we are at the beginnings of becoming human. I fear that our historical legacies may become traps, falsifications, assimilative and colonizing narratives wherein tyrannies of authorized identities may steal our souls. This is the problem of the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen; we are lost in a world of distorted images, captured echoes, and illusions. This, too, we must resist.
Israel is caught in the jaws of its history, held captive by Netanyahu’s regime of kleptocratic fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, but also a victim which has become a dark mirror of her abuser. Israel has learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis; fear, power, and force are not the only things which have meaning and are real, nor do we live in a world wherein love is without redemptive power.
In his massive campaign of ethnic cleansing and repression of dissent, and in his diplomacy of terror and negotiations by missile fire, Netanyahu plays to his own alt-right constituents as their figurehead. But he may have miscalculated international reactions; he has been provoked into exposing the true nature of the Occupation, and the White Hat conferred by narratives of historical victimization is slipping.
The Third Intifada has accomplished its goals of changing the narrative, fracturing American support for Israeli militarism and advancing support for Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction, moving a decades old issue to center stage, and timed to the vote on the massive arms deal now in Congress. Thus for the American Front of the Intifada; in the Israeli Front we have also shifted the narrative toward delegitmation of the Netanyahu regime in support of the democracy and peace movements of the people of Israel, of the Occupation, and of the ideology of Zionism. At least, those were my goals in the wake of our defense of the people of Palestine at al Aqsa.
Others among the defenders of Palestine have their own plans and objectives; certainly Hamas emerged as the clear victor of the struggle, having seized authority from the Fatah government of Palestine through active defense of its people, and rendering the elections Abbas refuses to call irrelevant. Hamas has delegitimized the Palestinian Authority, and stained its partnership with the Israeli government as collaboration, while the Third Intifada, waged by Hamas but also dozens of other factions, special forces from a number of allied governments, and madmen like myself, has called into question the idea of the Two State Solution.
Of Hamas and of all revolutionaries I say this; Any who stand between the tyranny and state terror of conquest, enslavement, and death, and the lives of innocents are heroes and champions of our humanity. The particulars are irrelevant.
Are we not our brother’s keepers?
There is a path forward beyond the dichotomous paradigm of a dual identity; abandon the Two State Solution and reimagine and transform Israel and Palestine as a united nation under secular law and designed to safeguard equality and universal human rights.
America’s enormous financial and military sponsorship of the state of Israel provides a very big lever with which to change the balance of power. I advocate Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanction of the state of Israel when it means peace and demilitarization; we must fund and shape ourselves to constructive and not destructive ends, to love rather than hate and to hope rather than fear.
Build democracy in Israel and we also build justice and equality for its minorities, exactly as in America. I believe we must liberate the peoples of Israel from a fascist regime of blood, faith, and soil, for the beneficiaries of state terror and tyranny are also subjugated by it. This is the great internal contradiction of authoritarian power as fascism; it is a system which dehumanizes and instrumentalizes even those in whose name it perpetrates its crimes against humanity as a strategy of authorization and the manufacture of consent, and why it must inevitably consume itself.
As Israel prepares its Final Solution to the problem of Palestine, America does nothing. Nothing to stop crimes against humanity, and everything to provide the criminals with arms and other support. We bear responsibility for these crimes with our proxies in Israel.
The people who lived near the Nazi death camps claimed they knew nothing of the Holocaust, nothing about the vast rain of human ash which blanketed their towns and stained them with its silent crimes. But we know. How shall we answer, when we knew and did nothing?
The Magicians: Fear, Power, Force, the Origins of Evil and the Carceral State as Embodied Violence
29 مايو 2025 أصول الشر في الخوف والقوة والقوة: أسئلة وجودية في ظل الإبادة الجماعية الإسرائيلية للفلسطينيين بينما لا يفعل العالم شيئًا لإسكات أمطار الموت
عندما تتحدث إلي إسرائيل في أحلامي كما لو كان صوت التاريخ صوت إنسان واحد ، فإنها لا ترتدي وجه أحد الناجين الأيقونيين من المحرقة ومحرر البشرية من التهديدات الوجودية للاستبداد والإرهاب وحلقة واغنريان. الخوف والقوة والقوة التي قد تكون موجودة في السابق ، ولكن من شخصية مارتن شاتوين في سلسلة The Magicians ، ضحية الإساءة الوحشية التي أصبحت من خلال الاستيلاء على السلطة وحشًا.
لديه سطر مثل لغز زن يطوى ويشير إلى ما هو السؤال الأساسي بالنسبة لي كيف أصبح إنسانًا في ظل ظروف كفاح مفروضة تتطلب استخدام القوة في المقاومة ، حيث يكون استخدام القوة الاجتماعية دائمًا غامضًا ، وغير إنساني ، ويطيع قانون نيوتن الثالث للحركة كقوى رد فعل ثنائية الاتجاه تخلق نقيضًا خاصًا بها. “كما تعلم ، عندما كنت صبيًا ، قام الرجل الذي كان من المفترض أن يعتني بي بثني على مكتبه وجعلني مرارًا وتكرارًا في كل مرة كنت وحدي معه. إنها تساعدني على فهم الحقيقة. أنت قوي أو ضعيف “.
هذه هي الكذبة الأصلية للطاغية والفاشي في الدفاع عن السلطة والتبرير الذاتي ؛ الكذبة القائلة بأن القوة وحدها لها معنى ، أنه لا يوجد خير أو شر. إن كيفية استخدامنا للقوة لها نفس أهمية من يحتفظ بها. الخوف والقوة هما وسيلتان أساسيتان للتبادل البشري ، لكنهما ليسا الوسيلة الوحيدة ؛ الحب والعضوية والانتماء لا تقل أهمية. السؤال الكبير الذي تحاول الديمقراطية الإجابة عنه هو كيفية الموازنة بين حقوق واحتياجات الأفراد بحيث لا يتعدى أحد على حقوق الآخرين.
إنه الخط الذي يلتقط تمامًا التناقضات المتأصلة في حلقة واغنري من الخوف والقوة والقوة كأصل للشر ؛ لأن استخدام القوة الاجتماعية هو تخريب لقيمها الخاصة. ومع ذلك ، غالبًا ما تتطلب الشروط المفروضة للنضال الثوري العنف ، وحتى يتم التخلص من آلهة القانون والنظام من عروشهم ، يجب أن أتفق مع القول المأثور الشهير لسارتر في مسرحيته الأيدي القذرة عام 1948 ، التي اقتبسها فرانتز فانون في خطابه عام 1960 لماذا نستخدم العنف ، وجعلنا مالكولم إكس خالدة ؛ “بأي وسيلة ضرورية.”
كما كتبه والتر رودني في The Groundings مع إخوتي ؛ لقد قيل لنا أن العنف في حد ذاته شرير ، وأنه مهما كان السبب ، فهو غير مبرر أخلاقيا. بأي معيار أخلاقي يمكن اعتبار العنف الذي يستخدمه العبد لكسر قيوده هو نفسه عنف سيد العبيد؟ بأي معايير يمكننا أن نساوي عنف السود الذين تعرضوا للقمع والقمع والاكتئاب والقمع لأربعة قرون بعنف الفاشيين البيض. لا يمكن الحكم على العنف الذي يهدف إلى استعادة الكرامة الإنسانية وتحقيق المساواة بنفس المعيار الذي يحكم عليه العنف الذي يهدف إلى الحفاظ على التمييز والقمع “.
وهذا هو المقطع الذي يشير إليه من ليون تروتسكي في أخلاقهم وأخلاقنا: الأسس الطبقية للممارسة الأخلاقية ؛ “مالك العبيد الذي يقيد عبدًا بالسلاسل من خلال المكر والعنف ، والعبد الذي يكسر القيود عن طريق الماكرة أو العنف – دعنا لا يخبرنا الخصيان الحقير أنهم متساوون أمام محكمة الأخلاق!”
ومع ذلك ، أفكر في التفكير في أولئك الشخصيات العظيمة الذين كانوا أبطال التحرير وأشرار الاستبداد. نابليون ، واشنطن ، ستالين ، ماو ، القائمة هي عبارة عن سلسلة لا نهاية لها من الويلات وإخفاقات الرؤية حيث أصبحت عوالم جديدة شجاعة جحيماً وحالات جسدية. بالدليل أقدم الدول التي أسسوها ؛ الإمبراطورية الفرنسية ، أمريكا ، الاتحاد السوفيتي ، الحزب الشيوعي الصيني ، وقبل كل شيء دولة إسرائيل ، حلم ملجأ مزور في رعب الهولوكوست الذي تعلم ضحاياه الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين واضطلعوا بدورهم في احتلال فلسطين. كان ديفيد بن غوريون ، بأي تفسير معقول ، هو المسيح ، لأنه فاز بإسرائيل كمكان للجوء والانتماء بعد قرون من المنفى ولم تطالب دولة اليهود بأي دولة منذ سقوط الأندلس عام 1492 ؛ لكن هذا لم يكن عزاءًا لمن ماتوا تحت آثار دباباته. إن مخاطر المثالية حقيقية للغاية. ولكن كذلك هي مخاطر الخضوع للسلطة والتواطؤ في الصمت في مواجهة الشر.
أنا صياد للفاشيين ، وأخلاقي صياد. بالنسبة لي هناك اختبار بسيط لاستخدام القوة. من يملك السلطة؟
خلال السنوات العديدة السعيدة التي قمت فيها بتدريس الطب الشرعي في مدرسة سونوما فالي الثانوية ، بدأت كل عام جديد في اليوم الأول من الفصل بعرض أسميه “أن تصبح نقطة انطلاق”. وضع شيء على مكتبي مع العالمين “هذه نقطة ارتكاز”. ثم وضع جسم مستطيل فوق ذلك ، “إنه يوازن ذراعًا. عندما يسألك والداك عما تتعلمه في فصل الطب الشرعي ، أخبرهم أنك تتعلم أن تصبح نقطة ارتكاز وتغيير ميزان القوى في العالم “.
يبقى بيان مهمة معقولاً في الحياة ، وأنا أضع حياتي في الميزان مع كل أولئك الذين فرانتس فانون نا
29 مايو 2021 فلسطين وإسرائيل: دولة السلام
يصمد السلام الهش في الوقت الحالي في العلاقات المتقلبة والفوضوية والمتغيرة بسرعة بين فلسطين وإسرائيل ، وبين هؤلاء الشركاء في تصورات أمريكا والمجتمع الدولي. إنها رقصة مضطربة للهوية والذاكرة والتاريخ تؤدى على الأغاني الغنائية لروايات الضحية ، الأغاني التي تغرينا وتشكلنا لخدمة السلطة والسلطة.
قبل مرحلة العالم وشهادة التاريخ ، يمكننا أن نرى هنا في الوقت الفعلي عمليات وعواقب انقسامات الآخر الإقصائي والتسلسل الهرمي لنخبة الهيمنة في الثروة والسلطة والامتياز باعتبارها قوى إعلام وتحفيز وتشكيل أساسية لـ الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة.
لأولئك منا الذين شاركوا في 10 مايو ليس في الدفاع عن الأقصى ، شيء من العظمة يصلح لموت الأبطال ، ولكن دفاعا عن العائلات في الصلاة التي هاجمتها إسرائيل والنساء والأطفال العزل الذين اصطادوا في متاهة من العصور القديمة المهجورة ، صرخات بلا جسد في أرض الخوف والظلام ، ولدت الانتفاضة الثالثة في تلك الليلة كأمل يتجاوز كسر العالم وعيوب إنسانيتنا من أجل إعادة التخيل ، والتحول ، والقوة التعويضية للحب للشفاء. الانقسامات حول الآخر الإقصائي وعلم أمراض انفصالنا ، والإمكانيات اللامحدودة لأن نصبح بشرًا.
ما هي حالة السلام؟ كيف نجيب على هذا السؤال يتوقف على الأحكام القيمية الضمنية ويصبح بوابة راشومون للحقائق النسبية ، ومقياس لشخصيتنا. في هذا كما هو الحال في العديد من الأشياء ، أتذكر وصف مونيه لمعنى فنه كشكل من أشكال الميتافيزيقيا والبحث في روح البشرية ؛ “للإنسان عينان يرى العالم من خلالها. أحدهما ينظر إلى الخارج ، والآخر ينظر إلى الداخل ، وهذا التقاء هاتين الصورتين هو الذي يخلق العالم الذي نراه “.
لذا يصبح سؤالنا كيف يبدو هذا من وجهة نظر شركائها فلسطين وإسرائيل وأمريكا؟
أمريكا تتأرجح مع جو بايدن على أعتاب إدراك واسع ومروع. بأننا لأكثر من سبعين عامًا كنا رعاة للاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة ، وأن المسؤولية عن سلسلة المشاكل اللامتناهية التي شكلت شعوب فلسطين نتقاسمها جميعًا ودولة إسرائيل بالوكالة. إنه يوازي حسابنا القومي مع إرث العبودية وعدم المساواة العرقية والظلم النظامي الذي استيقظ مع احتجاجات حياة السود مهمة ، مثل حسابنا مع البطريركية والإرهاب الجنسي في حركة #metoo ، ونتيجة للرأسمالية لانقراضنا في الصفقة الخضراء الجديدة والحركة البيئية العالمية بقيادة صاحبة الرؤية غريتا ثونبرج.
تغيير الصحوة والمد والجزر الذي لا تُحصى عواقبه الكاملة وإمكاناته لإعادة تخيل البشرية وتغييرها ، وتمثل حركات العدالة الاجتماعية السياسية والبيئية والمادية والجنسية والعرقية تحولًا حضاريًا كليًا وثورة في حقوق الإنسان العالمية والتي ستمثل يومًا ما تغيير وتجديد أفكارنا عن الإنسان والمعنى والقيمة.
كان فرانسيس فوكوياما مخطئًا عندما توقع أننا نعيش في نهاية التاريخ. نحن نعيش في بداية تاريخ جديد. لكنه كان محقًا تمامًا عندما شخَّص مبادئ عملها في كتابه “نهاية التاريخ والرجل الأخير”. “كانت رغبة العبد المستمرة في الاعتراف هي المحرك الذي دفع التاريخ إلى الأمام ، وليس التهاون العاطل والهوية الذاتية التي لا تتغير للسيد.”
آمل أن نكون في بدايات أن نصبح بشرًا. أخشى أن يتحول إرثنا التاريخي إلى أفخاخ وتزييف وروايات استيعابية واستعمارية قد تسرق فيها طغيان الهويات المرخصة أرواحنا. هذه هي مشكلة مرآة Hobgoblin المكسورة في Anderson’s The Snow Queen ؛ نحن ضائعون في عالم من الصور المشوهة والأصداء الملتقطة والأوهام. هذا أيضًا ، يجب أن نقاوم.
إسرائيل عالقة في فكي تاريخها ، أسيرة نظام نتنياهو للفاشية الفاسدة من الدم والإيمان والأرض ، ولكنها أيضًا ضحية أصبحت مرآة قاتمة لمن أساء معاملتها. لقد تعلمت إسرائيل الدروس الخاطئة من النازيين. الخوف والقوة والقوة ليست الأشياء الوحيدة التي لها معنى ، ولا نعيش في عالم يكون فيه الحب بدون قوة فدائية.
في حملته الواسعة للتطهير العرقي وقمع المعارضة ، وفي دبلوماسيته للإرهاب والمفاوضات بإطلاق الصواريخ ، يلعب نتنياهو مع ناخبيه من اليمين المتطرف كرئيس صوري لهم. لكنه ربما أخطأ في تقدير ردود الفعل الدولية. لقد تم استفزازه لفضح الطبيعة الحقيقية للاحتلال ، والقبعة البيضاء التي تمنحها روايات الإيذاء التاريخي آخذة في الانزلاق.
لقد أنجزت الانتفاضة الثالثة أهدافها المتمثلة في تغيير السرد ، وكسر الدعم الأمريكي للعسكرة الإسرائيلية ، وتعزيز الدعم للمقاطعة ، وسحب الاستثمارات ، والعقوبات ، ونقل قضية عمرها عقود إلى مركز الصدارة ، وتوقيتها للتصويت على صفقة الأسلحة الضخمة الآن في الكونجرس. على الأقل هذه كانت أهدافي في أعقاب دفاعنا عن شعب فلسطين في الأقصى.
آخرون من المدافعين عن فلسطين لديهم خططهم وأهدافهم ؛ بالتأكيد ظهرت حماس منتصراً واضحاً في النضال ، بعد أن استولت على السلطة من حكومة فتح في فلسطين من خلال الدفاع الفعال عن شعبها ، وجعل الانتخابات يرفض عباس وصفها بأنها غير ذات صلة. لقد قامت حماس بنزع الشرعية عن السلطة الفلسطينية ، ولطخت شراكتها مع الحكومة الإسرائيلية على أنها تعاون ، في حين أن الانتفاضة الثالثة ، التي تشنها حماس وكذلك العشرات من الفصائل الأخرى ، والقوات الخاصة من عدد من الحكومات الحليفة ، والمجانين مثلي ، قد دعت إلى يشكك في فكرة حل الدولتين.
أقول هذا عن حماس وجميع الثوار. إن من يقف بين الاستبداد وإرهاب الدولة من الغزو والاستعباد والموت وحياة الأبرياء هو أبطال وأبطال إنسانيتنا. التفاصيل ليست ذات صلة.
ألسنا حفظة أخينا؟
هناك طريق إلى الأمام يتجاوز النموذج الثنائي التفرع للهوية المزدوجة. التخلي عن حل الدولتين وإعادة تصور وتحويل إسرائيل وفلسطين كدولة موحدة في ظل القانون العلماني ومصممة لحماية المساواة وحقوق الإنسان العالمية.
توفر رعاية أمريكا المالية والعسكرية الهائلة لدولة إسرائيل رافعة كبيرة لتغيير ميزان القوى. أنا أؤيد حركة مقاطعة إسرائيل BDS عندما تعني السلام ونزع السلاح. يجب أن نمول أنفسنا ونشكل أنفسنا لغايات بناءة وليست هدَّامة ، وللحب بدلاً من الكراهية والأمل بدلاً من الخوف.
نبني الديمقراطية في إسرائيل ونبني العدل والمساواة لأقلياتها ، تمامًا كما في أمريكا. أعتقد أنه يجب تحرير شعب إسرائيل من نظام فاشي من الدم والإيمان والتراب ، لأن المستفيدين من إرهاب الدولة والطغيان يخضعون له أيضًا. هذا هو التناقض الداخلي الكبير للسلطة الاستبدادية مثل الفاشية. إنه نظام يجرد من الإنسانية ويستغل حتى أولئك الذين يرتكبون جرائمهم ضد الإنسانية باسمهم كاستراتيجية للترخيص وصنع الموافقة ، ولماذا يجب أن يستهلك نفسه حتما.
بينما تستعد إسرائيل لحلها النهائي لمشكلة فلسطين ، فإن أمريكا لا تفعل شيئًا. لا شيء لوقف الجرائم ضد الإنسانية ، وكل شيء لتزويد المجرمين بالسلاح وأنواع الدعم الأخرى. نحن نتحمل المسؤولية عن هذه الجرائم مع وكلائنا في إسرائيل.
ادعى الأشخاص الذين عاشوا بالقرب من معسكرات الموت النازية أنهم لا يعرفون شيئًا عن الهولوكوست ، ولا شيء عن المطر الغزير من الرماد البشري الذي غطى مدنهم وصبغهم بجرائمه الصامتة. لكننا نعلم. كيف نجيب ونحن نعلم ولم نفعل شيئا؟
Hebrew
29 במאי 2025 מקורות הרוע בפחד, כוח וכוח: שאלות קיומיות בצל רצח העם הישראלי של הפלסטינים, מכיוון שהעולם לא עושה דבר כדי להשתיק את גשם המוות
כשישראל מדברת אליי בחלומות כאילו קול ההיסטוריה היה קולו של בן אדם אחד, היא לא עונדת פנים של ניצול איקוני של השואה ומשחרר המין האנושי מהאיומים הקיומיים של עריצות וטרור ומהטבעת הווגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח שהיו לו פעם, אבל של דמותו של מרטין צ’טווין בסדרת הקוסמים, קורבן להתעללות מפלצתית שבאמצעות תפיסת השלטון הפך בעצמו למפלצת.
יש לו קו שכמו חידת זן עוטפת ומאפיינת את מה שאצל עצמי היא השאלה העיקרית כיצד להפוך לאנושי בתנאי מאבק כפויים הדורשים שימוש בכוח בהתנגדות, כאשר השימוש בכוח חברתי הוא תמיד מעורפל, דה-הומניזציה, ומציית לחוק התנועה השלישי של ניוטון ככוחות תגובה דו-כיווניים שיוצרים אנטיתזה משלהם. “אתה יודע, כשהייתי ילד, אדם שנועד לטפל בי כופף אותי מעל השולחן שלו וקיבל אותי שוב ושוב בכל פעם הייתי לבד איתו. זה עוזר לי להבין אמת. אתה חזק או שאתה חלש.”
הנה השקר המקורי של העריץ והפשיסט באפולוגטיקה ובהצדקה העצמית של הכוח; השקר שרק לכוח יש משמעות, שאין טוב או רע. אופן השימוש בכוח הוא בעל חשיבות שווה למי שמחזיק בו. פחד וכוח הם אמצעי עיקרי להחלפה אנושית, אך לא האמצעי היחיד; אהבה, חברות ושייכות חשובים לא פחות. השאלה הגדולה שעליה מנסה הדמוקרטיה לענות היא כיצד ניתן לאזן בין הזכויות והצרכים של יחידים כך שאף אחד לא יפגע בזכויות של אחר.
זהו קו אשר לוכד בצורה מושלמת את הסתירות הטבועות בטבעת הוואגנרית של פחד, כוח וכוח כמקור הרוע; שכן השימוש בכוח חברתי הוא חתרני לערכיו שלו. עם זאת, התנאים המוטלים של מאבק מהפכני מצריכים לעתים קרובות אלימות, ועד שאלי החוק והסדר יופלו מכסאותיהם, אני חייב להסכים עם הכתבה המפורסמת של סארטר במחזהו “ידיים מלוכלכות” מ-1948, שצוטט על ידי פרנץ פאנון בנאומו מ-1960. למה אנחנו משתמשים באלימות, והפכו לאלמוות על ידי מלקולם אקס; “בכל דרך אפשרית.”
כפי שכתב וולטר רודני ב-The Groundings with my Brothers; “אמרו לנו שאלימות כשלעצמה היא רוע, ושתהא הסיבה אשר תהיה, היא לא מוצדקת מבחינה מוסרית. לפי איזה סטנדרט של מוסר יכולה האלימות שבה משתמש עבד כדי לשבור את שלשלאותיו להיחשב זהה לאלימות של אדון עבדים? לפי אילו אמות מידה נוכל להשוות את האלימות של שחורים שדוכאו, מדוכאים, מדוכאים ומדוכאים במשך ארבע מאות שנים עם אלימותם של פשיסטים לבנים. לא ניתן לשפוט אלימות שמטרתה החזרת כבוד האדם ושוויון לפי אותו קנה מידה כמו אלימות שמטרתה לשמור על אפליה ודיכוי”.
והנה הקטע שאליו הוא מתייחס מפי ליאון טרוצקי ב-Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “בעל עבדים שבאמצעות ערמומיות ואלימות כובל עבד בשלשלאות, ועבד שבאמצעות ערמומיות או אלימות שובר את השלשלאות – שלא יגידו לנו הסריסים הבזויים שהם שווים בפני בית דין של מוסר!”
אולם בהשתקפות אני חושב על אותן דמויות גדולות שהיו גם גיבורי שחרור וגם נבלי עריצות; נפוליאון, וושינגטון, סטאלין, מאו, הרשימה היא אוסף כמעט אינסופי של צרות וכישלונות ראייה שבהם עולמות חדשים אמיצים הפכו לגיהנום ולמדינות קרסראליות. לראיה אני מציע למדינות שהקימו; צרפת האימפריאלית, אמריקה, ברית המועצות, המפלגה הקומוניסטית הסינית, ומעל לכל מדינת ישראל, חלום מקלט שנרקם באימת השואה שקורבנותיו למדו את הלקחים הלא נכונים מהנאצים ונטלו על עצמם את תפקידם בכיבוש פלשתינה. דוד בן-גוריון היה לפי כל פרשנות סבירה המשיח, שכן הוא זכה בישראל כמקום מקלט ושייכות לאחר מאות שנים של גלות והעמיים היהודיים בכל העולם שנתבעו על ידי שום מדינה מאז נפילת אל-אנדלוס ב-1492; אבל זו הייתה נחמה קטנה לאלה שמתו מתחת לפסי הטנקים שלו. הסכנות של האידיאליזם הן אמיתיות מאוד; אבל כך גם הסכנות שבכניעה לסמכות ובשותפות השתיקה מול הרוע.
אני צייד של פשיסטים, ושלי הוא מוסר של צייד. מבחינתי יש מבחן פשוט לשימוש בכוח; מי מחזיק בכוח
במהלך השנים המאושרות הרבות שבהן לימדתי זיהוי פלילי בתיכון עמק סונומה, התחלתי כל שנה חדשה ביום הראשון לשיעור בהדגמה שקראתי לה להיות נקודת משען; הנחת חפץ על שולחני עם עולמות “זהו נקודת משען.” ואז להציב עצם מוארך על זה, “זה מאזן מנוף. כשההורים שלך שואלים אותך מה אתה לומד בשיעור זיהוי פלילי, אמור להם שאתה לומד להפוך לנקודת משען ולשנות את מאזן הכוחות בעולם”.
זה נשאר הצהרת משימה סבירה בחיים, ואני מעמיד את חיי באיזון עם כל אלה שפרנץ פאנון נא
med עלובי כדור הארץ; חסרי הכוח והמנושלים, המושתקים והמחוקים.
כל מי שצד מפלצות חייב לזכור תמיד את האזהרה של ניטשה במעבר לטוב ולרע; “מי שנלחם במפלצות צריך להיזהר שלא יהפוך בכך למפלצת. ואם אתה מביט ארוכות לתוך תהום, התהום תביט בך בחזרה.”
בסופו של דבר כל מה שחשוב הוא מה אנחנו עושים עם הפחד שלנו, ואיך
During the celebrations of this year’s Memorial Day, when families visit the graves of the sacred dead, I am aware of the numberless comrades I have lost who have no graves to visit, no memorials, and often no one to remember and mourn their passing or weigh the liberty their lives have won for us against our own actions on behalf of others who cannot stand alone; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth.
Their brooding presence gathers close, as stories written in our flesh and histories which inform, motivate, shape and define us; silences like living brands of fire. What do they ask of us, to pay forward the inheritance of our freedom?
In Syria, after throwing open the gates of Damascus for her liberators, I hunted Assad’s torturers through the warrens of underground prisons, fortresses, and the laboratories and factories of a bioweapons program founded by fugitive Nazis at the dawn of the Assad dynasty; and was here reminded of Elie Wiesel’s principle Silence Is Complicity, for the darkness of the tunnels resounded with the stolen voices of the damned and the forgotten.
This is why we must bear witness and remember, and why we must Resist; because the boundary which defines the limits of the human is far too easy to cross, and the way back to our humanity treacherous and uncertain, ambiguous, ephemeral, full of illusions and relative truths.
Always the genie of fear, power, and force whispers to us is our despair and helplessness, our horror and abjection when confronted with atrocities beyond our understanding, and it offers us power as the arbiter of good and evil and the enforcer of moral virtue, saying; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
And to this we must say, Never Again!
As I wrote in my post of September 12 2021, Global and National Threats to Peace and Freedom; I have fought in the Third Intifada in al Quds, where I was shot, bayoneted, blown up, and set on fire, having avoided any serious mishaps, buried a friend assassinated by Israel in Gaza, brought the Chaos and made mischief for tyrants in Barcelona, Yangon, Belfast, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Port au Prince, and Durban, and have spent recent weeks on horseback in remote tribal areas of Afghanistan west of the Khyber Pass, fighting in the Last Stand of Panjshir. I have seen the best and the worst of human possibilities, and have lived this way for nearly forty years, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden and the limits of what is human.
This I can tell you without question; none of us are beyond the redemptive power of love, or without hope. Our future possibilities of becoming human are yet unwritten, and limitless.
We have no shortage of tyrants who threaten global stability, or issues which could engulf whole regions in a general bonfire of the vanities. We are in short supply of compassion, vision, and solidarity among humankind in the face of existential threats to our survival and to our liberty.
It’s time to begin thinking in new ways about our differences and our common needs and resources; we can be tribes no longer, warring for diminishing shares of the earth’s plenty, but a single United Humankind, responsible for one another, for our common resources and the sustainability of life on earth, and for our future possibilities of becoming human.
As I wrote in my post of November 17 2024, Defining Moments: Last Stands; Like the spiral chambers of a seashell, we each of us are made of stories which extend ourselves into the material world as processes of growth and adaptive change; systems of history, mimesis, and identity which I call Defining Moments.
How shall I count mine?
By Last Stands, in which I defied unanswerable and overwhelming force beyond hope of victory or survival.
First among them is the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, the summer before my freshman year at high school, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first grand adventure, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division, as I was through high school. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the morning food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls, and I have been living beyond the walls ever since.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, and to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of Awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true purpose and design of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar to though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender from beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol from March 22 to April 18 2022 and at Panjshir in Afghanistan from the last week of August til September 7 2021, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Eight years later, and after spending much of my high school years working through the trauma of these events and choosing the origins of evil as my field of study, came my second Last Stand, which fixed me on my life’s path in Antifascist action and revolutionary struggle as a member and inheritor of the Resistance.
During the summer of 1982 before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets, committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, and more joined us. From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. Possibly this is all we truly own. It’s a poor man who loves nothing worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before his capture, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path of struggle for liberty against tyranny and autocracies of state force and control, for equality against racist violence and injustice, and against the fascism which combines both state tyranny and racist terror.
He introduced himself as a former Legionnaire by the name of Jean, was mischievous, wise, immensely learned in classical scholarship and possibly had once been educated as a priest, and filled with wild stories about the luminaries of modern European culture. I was stunned when I discovered days later that my strange new friend was one of the greatest literary figures of the century. I had quoted The Thief’s Journal in refutation of something he said, which he found hilarious, while we were discussing Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as compared to that of Jung, a conversation which remained unfinished as he couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually he sputtered, “I myself am Jean Genet.” To me he remains a Trickster figure and part of my historical identity and personal mythology.
With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers running amok in a sack of murder, arson, and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, who had set fire to our cafe and other buildings and were calling for surrender and blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all. I have lived by it for thirty-nine years now.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
Five years after the Siege of Beirut, I fought in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the largest battle ever fought in Africa, even more vast than El Alamein.
In a massive campaign which broke the grip of Apartheid on South Africa and liberated Angola and Namibia, involving over 300,000 Cuban volunteer soldiers between December 1987 and March 1988, in coordination with Angolan and other indigenous forces, international volunteers like myself, and with Soviet aid and advisors, defeated the far larger and technologically superior South Africa and their UNITA and American allies and mercenaries in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, an Angolan military base which South Africa had failed to capture with five waves of assaults. The results included the independence of Namibia, the withdrawal of South African troops from Angola, the replacement of the racist Prime Minister Botha by de Klerk in South Africa and his negotiations with the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and the end of apartheid.
While the spectacle of this grand final battle in a decades long liberation struggle was unfolding, I was making mischief behind enemy lines in the bush. Here I discovered a lost unit, mainly Zulu, which was encircled by Apartheid forces. After reporting what I knew of the area to the command group and a brief conference in several languages, an old fellow who had heretofore been silent stood up from the shadows of the tent, whose shirtless form displayed a fearsome and magnificent scar from a lion’s claws, and said; “We are surrounded and outnumbered with no ammunition and worse, no water, and no one is coming to help us. We must attack.”
The sergeant smiled at this as if he had been given a marvelous gift, strode outside, and gave the order which if you are lucky you will never hear; “Fix bayonets!”
And the men about to die erupted in song. “Usuthu! Umkhonto wami womile!” “My spear is thirsty”, that last.
Like the generations of struggle which liberated South Africa from Apartheid and colonial slavery, this nameless fight in the enormous Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was won against impossible odds because of things common to any liberation struggle; solidarity of action, the embrace of death as seizure of power, and the definition of victory as refusal to submit.
For the great secret of force and control is that it is hollow, brittle, and shatters when confronted with disobedience, and the great secret of authority and legitimacy is that it is an illusion of smoke and mirrors which vanishes utterly when disbelieved.
Believe nothing which is untested, for there is no just authority.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Strategies of division along lines of faith, race, and national identity are a primary weapon of fascism and tyranny in the subjugation of a population in whose name authority claims to act and speak, in the centralization of power, and in the manufacture of consent through abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, as well as in the creation of hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and these processes and systems of oppression are universal to humankind.
Yet war and ruin are not inevitable, for the chaos which seized South Africa as revolutionary struggle is also universal; the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce. As both an existential threat to ossified and failing systems, structures, and institutions, here a three-part harmony of failed political, economic, and social systems, and also as a window of opportunity for revolutionary struggle and transformative change.
Chaos is not simply disorder; chaos destructures order and creates new possibilities of adaptation. Chaos is a force of revolution and liberation, and a measure of the potential for change of a system.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimages Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Leveraging Chaos for change defines revolutionary and liberation struggle, but why is it necessary to bring the Chaos to restore balance to systems of unequal power as a fulcrum of change?
Those who abandon all laws and all limits may hide behind none. When carceral states of force and control, tyranny and terror, reach the stage of totalization of power to authority and become engines of dehumanization, they enter my world, beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, and it is on this ground we must resist them.
All Resistance is war to the knife. Because the choice is between freedom as refusal to submit or abandon others, and the surrender of our universal human rights and of the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
We resist tyranny and terror and all systems of oppression not to enforce virtue, but as each other’s guarantors of our human rights that we may each be free to find our uniqueness; and to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
In my very long life of such struggles defined by many Last Stands, I think of two among them which represent the limits of the human in their horror and atrocities; Sarajevo and Mariupol.
The Russian genocide and erasure of Mariupol was characterized by its organized mass murders, rapes, and tortures of civilians, the mobile factories of cannibalism which turned people into army rations, the use of a new hyperbaric terror weapon as crematoriums to hide their crimes, and the abduction and enslavement of children. All of this the world and I have seen before and doubtless will again; nor was I truly disturbed by being buried in a tunnel collapse under bombardment and crawling out for several hours, through the remains of the dead and among the lost voices of the dying whom I could not help. But I spent a few days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russian Army and their partners, a crime syndicate called the Butterfly Collectors, were doing with some of the stolen children and young girls brought into special facilities on military bases far way in Russia; torture brothels whose spectacles were broadcast to the world on the dark web in shows which I hope you cannot imagine.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
He said he got the idea from the Byzantine Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he defeated and leaving one man in ten with eyes to guide the others home, as a warning to crush resistance by terror.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
As a jailbreak this was to my knowledge unique; I had asked the guards at the gate to see the commander, bearing gifts I knew he wanted greatly in trade for a prisoner whose value he did not know; making a game of it was his idea, which became several days of conversations. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
Here is my theme song for Last Stands, which I posted as I crossed into Afghanistan after the Fall of Kabul to defend Panjshir and before joining the fight at the Azovstal Steelworks in Mariupol.
When Tel Aviv has not a stone left standing upon a stone, there will be balance for Rafah. This I mourn, for there are no good or bad guys here, no team to heckle or cheer; only a people divided by history and dehumanized by violence, in a holy land become an atrocity exhibit and museum of private holocausts.
I for one do not want systems of balance, stability, order; for these things serve power and are words for death. I want a dynamically unstable system of life, growth, and rebirth, and the reimagination and transformation of systems of unequal power. Give me a humankind that seeks greater possibilities of becoming human, wherein we exalt one another, embrace and celebrate each other’s uniqueness, and act as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights, not a cult of death.
Yes, the IDF assassinated someone whom I loved in Rafah, but there is nothing special in this. Merely a sacred wound I bear which opens me to the pain of others on both sides of this war.
There are no Israelis, no Palestinians; only people like ourselves, and the choices they make about how to be human together.
Peace be upon us all.
May 14 2025 America Falls With Our Failure of Empathy, Abandonment of Our Universal Human Rights, Cowardice in Confronting Evil, and Complicity in Genocide: Anniversary of Israel’s 2024 Rafah Campaign
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
September 19 2024 Israeli Terror Attack Kills Americans With Impunity: No BDS, No Arrest of Netanyahu and Other War Criminals, No Policy of Regime Change in Israel
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
June 5 2024 Fifty Seven Years of Occupation, Theocratic State Terror, and Israeli Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil: Anniversary of the Fall of Jerusalem In the 1967 Six Day War
May 24 2024 In the Wake of the great Reckoning For the Crimes of Israel, Recognition of the Sovereignty and Independence of Palestine Raises the Question; Whose Palestine? What Will a Future Palestine and Israel Become?
May 20 2024 The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force: Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
May 14 2024 America Falls With Our Failure of Empathy, Abandonment of Our Universal Human Rights, Cowardice in Confronting Evil, and Complicity in Genocide: Israel’s Rafah Assault Begins
April 27 2024 This Passover, Stand Against Genocide. This Passover, Stand With the Children: the Passover Peace and Divestiture Protests and Occupations
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
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
Yesterday was Memorial Day in America, a Rashomon Gate of relative truths, multiplicities of history from which conflicting and ambiguous narratives of identity can be forged, stories we live within and inhabit and those which possess and falsify us, both those we must claim and those from which we must emerge.
This holiday codifies national identity as veneration of the sacred dead who died to win our liberty, for myself primarily in remembrance of my own fallen comrades among the ghost legions and a celebration of antifascist struggle in World War Two and in the ongoing theatres of World War Three in Russia, America, Ukraine, Libya, Sudan and Mali and the whole of sub Saharan Arica and the region of Lake Chad, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and now Gaza and the divided nation of Israel and Palestine, and should we fail to turn the tide of the Fourth Reich and its puppetmaster Putin’s mad dreams of empire and a conflict which will engulf the whole of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, in which case civilization collapses and the world begins an age of tyranny and total war which humankind will not survive.
A spectre of our doom made all too real and timely as one year ago this week Putin began positioning his nuclear arsenal in Belarus for the Final Solution to the Ukrainian problem, and then Moldova and Poland, then NATO and the EU. Here is bottled death, the death of cities, nations, peoples, our species, and it calls to him like an evil genie, whispering; “Set me free, and I’ll make you powerful.”
We must stop it here, this massive failure of our humanity which is the Russian conquest of Ukraine and the Israel genocide of the Palestinians, because from this point of no retreat history collapses and we become nothing.
History, memory, identity; our symbols and holidays are a ground of struggle, which open and close doors to possible futures.
Who do we want to become, we humans? This is the question which drives and organizes our interrogations of the past and the future possibilities of human being, meaning, and value; not our addiction to power and wealth which the family storyteller of my youth William S. Burroughs called the Algebra of Need in his reimagination of Marx nor the processes of dehumanization of capitalism, imperialism, and carceral states of force and control which my friend Jean Genet described as necrophilia in his famous 1970 May Day speech at Yale in support of the Black Panther Party. These too are crucial to understanding why we are rushing blindly to our extinction, as we are falsified, commodified, and dehumanized by the Wagnerian Ring of fear, force, and power.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Such questions illuminate the interdependence of our social and material systems, and the bidirectionality of forces of action and reaction. For our politics reflects and echoes our relationship not only with ourselves and each other, but with nature itself; our fear or embrace of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
As I wrote in my post of September 7 2019, As the Amazon Dies in a Bonfire of Our Vanities, a Final Message From Its Indigenous Peoples; Vast tracts of priceless and irreplaceable resources are now burning to clear the land for cattle and palm oil monoculture, in the Amazon and Borneo, and so many other sacred places of the earth, its beautiful wildness and glorious marvels sacrificed to profit and greed.
Jean Genet was right to call capitalism a kind of necrophilia; capitalism is a pimp at a bus station, an ambush predator waiting to cut the vulnerable out of the herd and convert beauty into profit, life into dead money. And what is money but a belief system, the promise to pay of a government and its value nothing more than the faith of those who trade with it in the reliability of that promise?
It is insubstantial as the wind, its value shifting with the confidence of those who use it, while real things, a leopard, a hornbill, an orchid, a tribal people living in harmony with nature, have intrinsic value which relies on nothing beyond themselves.
Which kind of things shall we value and preserve, the illusionary or the real, the impermanent or the eternal, the living, transcendent, and ineffable or the dead, meaningless, and profitable?
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2022, Politics Is About Fear as the Basis of Human Exchange, the Origins of Evil In the Wagnerian Ring of Fear, Power, and Force, and the State As Embodied Violence, and Revolution is the Art of Freeing Ourselves From It; A friend whom I regard as wise has asked me the question which redeems the Fisher King in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; are you all right?
Such questions become a moral compass which can reorient us when we are lost among the unknowns and nameless places of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value, for the bearers of questions as truthtellers perform the functions of the Just Humans in Jewish mythology who maintain the world and actualize its ongoing regeneration, an idea which references Maimonides’ principle of continual creation, that the universe is destroyed and recreated with each moment and must be remembered and renewed through tikkun olam or repair of the world lest we be consumed by the darkness of grief and despair, the loneliness of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, the guilt of survivorship, and our helplessness and meaninglessness before the unanswerable tidal forces of death.
Here is my reply; As the line in Hamlet goes, “The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to” remain with us always as an imposed condition of struggle; yet I shall resist and yield not, and abandon not my fellows in their hour of need, as I was sworn to do by Jean Genet, nor shall I go quietly into the night which beckons, but rage against the dying of the light, of the fall of civilization, and of the negation of our humanity.
It gladdens me to hear that you are well in the wholeness of your soul; I am not, for in Mariupol the darkness began to look back at me as Nietzsche warned us.
There I tried to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness, and failed. But as the Matadors said to me in Brazil the summer before high school when they welcomed me into their society, “We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
The question for me now is whether this is enough to tip the scales of history toward democracy and away from fascism and tyranny, enough to salvage some fragment of my humanity as a balance against degeneration, to remain a man and not become a monster and a beast.
As with our myriad futures and limitless possibilities of becoming human, we begin the journey of each new day toward the discovery of ourselves, a grand and fearsome thing which requires the transgression of boundaries and the testing of unknowns. And so hope remains for us all, for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Be well, my friend, and never let our duty of the repair of the world become a task of abjection and despair, for it is a labor of Sisyphus shared by all humankind and must be carried forward by us all together, one day I hope as a United Humankind.
Thank you for your question, Professor Levine. I am not okay, and neither is America nor humankind okay; but one day, if we keep asking questions, we will be.
As I wrote in my post of August 1 2021, Freedom and Revolution as an Art of Fear and Pain: “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free,” so John Stuart Mill exhorts us in Principles of Political Economy, and I am thinking of this in terms of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and the primary strategic problem of how to delegitimize authority and demonstrate the meaninglessness of its power, how to seize power against impossible odds and in the face of twin threats of force and control, the brutal repression and massive military resources of state tyranny and terror and the pervasive surveillance and thought control of propaganda, lies and illusions which falsify us and steal our souls.
My father once said to me; ‘Never play someone else’s game. Whoever sets the terms and the rules of a game wins, so this is what you must seize first, and change the rules.” This wisdom was imparted as an observation of the differences between sports of personal combat, which have rules, and combat in war and revolution or anywhere beyond the boundaries of law or games with rules, which has none. In this it is like the distinction between politics and revolutionary struggle.
The Olympics playing out before us now offer us spectacles of excellence and the limits of human achievement, and I have been watching the fencing competition with great interest as performances which enact metaphors and tactical principles of struggle, a background against which a great theatre of shadow puppets is unfolding here in Brazil where mobilization for the re-election of Lula to the Presidency is coordinated with mass actions of the precariat underclass and workers unions, the resistance of indigenous peoples to genocide, and direct action against the institutions of state terror and tyranny.
As my father was a fencing coach, whose right arm was magnificently adorned with scars from actual sword duels, who taught both privately at our home and as a club at our high school where he also taught Forensics, English, and Drama, it was inevitable that I would have participated to some degree, but I loved saber and was reasonably good at it. How I came to discover this, and what it came to mean to me in time, is a story relevant to my understanding of freedom and the art of revolution as its praxis.
It was the Incident of the Bubble Gum which brought the disciplines of fencing and martial arts into my life, and changed how I was raised and who I became as a scholar and warrior, and as a man and a human being.
As a nine year old I spent recess at elementary school either playing chess with the Principal in his office, reading in the library, or experimenting with the chemistry set in the lab, which doubtless seemed unfriendly and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. This was the Defining Moment when I learned how absolutely crucial and determinative to viability and success it is to simply do what the other boys did, within limits. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals in bottles marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone; only fate or chance had allowed me to escape becoming a nine year old mass murderer. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; and politics is the Art of Fear. This is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Membership, too, is a means of exchange. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong.
Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need now is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
So my father described to me Sartrean authenticity and freedom as an escape from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as a philosophy of total Resistance.
From this time I was engaged in the study of martial arts, fencing, and wilderness survival. Martial arts is a vast subject, and I trained in a number of fighting arts, but competitive saber fencing is a game with a very specific set of conditions which are directly relevant to actual combat, because like politics and war it is an Art of Pain and Fear.
Politics and how we choose to be human together, and the arts of revolution and war as seizures of power when we can no longer hear and speak to one another’s pain and dialog and negotiation finds its limit; these are arts of swallowing pain and metabolizing it as power and freedom.
To be clear, these are arts of power as intimidation, subjugation, and dominion through inflicting pain, and freedom won through discipline in embracing it. A fencing saber is a semi flexible steel whip with which we inflict pain to establish dominance, like a sjambok; fencers run at each other and deliver punishing hits that feel like real cuts, a white hot searing pain so intense it can disrupt consciousness.
On the first pass I preferred trading hits or counterattack to any defense; why defend and be reactive and controlled when you can teach your enemy to fear you? On the second pass a weak opponent will hesitate, betrayed by his flesh and the fear of remembered pain it holds, and be lost. If he is without fear we meet as equals in the second and third engagements, and the game becomes one of chesslike multilayered strategies, diversion and surprise, timing, precision, and control through continuous assault and patterns of attack and entrapment which set up multi-staged openings by making the opponent react in defense to establish habits and expectations of action as norms and misdirection which one then violates with an unpredictable surprise. An art of politics, war, and revolution.
I love saber because it is primarily a contest of will and only secondarily of skill, in which ferocity in attack and willingness to accept pain to achieve victory are decisive, though guile, deception, concealment of intent, and an ability to think moves ahead of one’s opponent improvisationally in a time-compressed fluid and dynamic situation define greatness in this arena.
So also with the arts of revolution as both war and political struggle.
To be beyond control by pain and fear is to be free from the limits of our form and from subjugation by authority, for who cannot be compelled becomes Unconquered. As Jean Genet said to me when we were trapped by soldiers in a burning house, moments before we expected to be burned alive having refused to come out and surrender, “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
To once again tell the tale of how Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance in Beirut during the summer of 1982:
Israeli soldiers had set fire to the houses on my street, and called for people to come out and surrender. They were blindfolding the children of those who did and using them as human shields.
We had no other weapon than the empty bottle of champagne we had just finished with our breakfast of strawberry crepes; I asked “Any ideas?”, at which he shrugged and said with an ironic smile and a very Gallic shrug; “Fix bayonets?”
And then he gave me a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty nine years now; “When there is no hope, one is free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
He asked me if I was going to surrender, and I said no; he smiled and replied, “Nor will I.” And so he swore me to the Oath he devised in 1940 in Paris at the beginning of the Occupation for such friends as he could gather, reworded from the oath he had taken as a Legionnaire. He said it was the finest thing he ever stole; “We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” So it was that I became the bearer of a tradition now over eighty five years old and forged in the most fearsome and terrible conflict the world has ever known, shortly before I expected to be burned alive in the first of many Last Stands.
This was the moment of my forging, this decision to choose death and pain over subjugation, and ever since being struck by it I have been a bell, ringing. And like the Liberty Bell, I am broken open to the suffering of others and to the flaws of our humanity. This has been the greatest gift I have ever been given, this empathy borne of a sacred wound, and I shall never cease the call to liberty, nor hesitate to answer as I am able the call for solidarity with others.
It is a principle of action I recommend to you all, for when we eliminate personal survival from our victory conditions, when we accept death and “the many ills to which the flesh is heir” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, as imposed conditions of struggle against overwhelming force and power, authority, and state terror and tyranny, we free ourselves from the limits of our flesh and can turn pain and fear as the means of enslavement against the tyrants of our dehumanization as forces of liberation and seizure of power. Freud called this death transcendence, and it is a precondition of autonomy in revolutionary struggle as self ownership of identity.
As Max Stirner said, “Freedom cannot be granted; it must be seized”.
Let us resist authority whenever it claims us, by any means necessary, and become exalted beyond ourselves in a liberty which cannot be taken from us.
As I wrote in my post of July 26 2020, Explaining Badly What I Do, For Even I Am Not Altogether Certain: a Confession and Letter to a Suicide Squad; Sometimes my quest found only death and loss, sometimes triumph and illumination, but the struggle itself was always a seizure of power in which something human could be wrested back from the claws of our nothingness.
Among the prizes and exhibits of my memory palace are heroes and rogues, allies and enemies of whom only I, like Ishmael, live to tell the tale; others became legends. So also with the causes for which we fought.
What if we teachers told our students what life is really like, that its full of blood and horror and in the end means nothing at all except whatever meaning we can bring to it, and the best you can do is survive another day and maybe save someone from the darkness before it swallows us all? I’ve looked into the darkness since 1982 in Beirut, when Jean Genet swore me to the Oath of the Resistance, and as Nietzsche warned it has begun to look back at me.
Yet I will struggle with the darkness and cease not, and so remain unconquered in defiance of unjust authority and in refusal to submit, though I have sometimes forgotten why. At moments of doubt such as this I read again Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Henley’s Invictus, I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates; myths, stories, poetry, and history of the grandeur of resistance which confers freedom, beyond hope of victory or even survival.
Refusal to submit is the primary human act. We can be killed, tortured, starved and imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated so long as we refuse to obey. This is our victory, in which we seize ownership of ourselves and create ourselves anew, and nothing can take this from us. In our refusal to submit, disobedience, and defiance of authority we become unstoppable as the tides, for force fails at the point of disobedience and authority has no power which is not granted to it by those it claims, and once questioned, mocked, exposed, and challenged as illegitimate the illusions with which it seduces us vanish into the nothingness from which they came.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Pandora’s Box bears a last gift which is also a curse; we cling to it when it is all we have, and because it cannot be taken from us. I have never been able to decide if this is a good thing or not. Why has this strange gift been given to us?
Maybe it’s only this; that so long as we get back to our feet for yet another Last Stand, there is hope.
And so I open the Forbidden Door to the unknown and step through as I have many times before, a nameless shadow among countless others who await in welcome all those who dare to transgress the limits unjustly imposed on us, a realm of shadows and of the Unconquered, and like lions we roar our defiance into the fathoms of emptiness beyond.
Such is the only possible response to the terror of our nothingness and its weaponization by those who would enslave us; the roar of defiance, as lions who are masterless and free.
To fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again. And to the tyranny and terror of those who would enslave us, let us give reply with the immortal words of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, the play which Nelson Mandela used as a codex to unify resistance against Apartheid among the political prisoners of Robben Island; Sic Semper Tyrannis, Ever Thus to Tyrants.
Known as the Robben Island Bible, this copy of Shakespeare was passed around as the key to a book code for secret messages which referred to page and line; it was also underlined. On December 16th 1977, Nelson Mandela authorized direct action by underlining this passage from Julius Caesar;
“Cowards die many times before their deaths.
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
Tonight the shadows dance, wild and free, bound by no rules but our own; come and dance with us.
Notes on Letter to a Suicide Squad
I wrote this as guidance and general principles of Resistance to tyranny, Antifascist action, and Revolutionary struggle; but also as a letter to a suicide squad who had volunteered to hunt the hunters and rescue their victims, in the confusion of mass action during the Black Lives Matter protests of the Summer of Fire in 2020 which became a moving street fight in hundreds of cities with forces of repression, which the government of the United States of America used as concealment for Homeland Security death squads to abduct, torture, and assassinate innocent civilians at random as state terror to repress dissent through learned helplessness.
My suicide teams were among many reasons why we Antifa as a whole became to my knowledge the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle within her borders since Little Bighorn, as the Triumvirate of President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and Acting Director of Homeland Security Wolf announced articles of surrender ceding federal control of the New York, Seattle, and Portland Autonomous Zones to the People.
This I count as a victory with the fall of Apartheid and the Berlin Wall; it is possible to be victorious against vast and seemingly unstoppable force, if one disbelieves the lies of Authority and disobeys those who would enslave us.
A state which sacrifices its legitimacy for control has doomed itself; if its actions can be exposed and its fig leaf stolen. Such is a primary goal of revolutionary struggle; but the people must also be protected, and publicly witnessed to be so, by those who would liberate them. As Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth says; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner.”
A fascinating essay by Cecil Bloom published in the Jerusalem Post, entitled The 36 Just Men Who Save the World, examines the mythic idea that existence is perpetuated not by the mighty, by Plato’s Philosopher-Kings or Hegel’s World Geniuses, not by Nietzschean Supermen or hegemonic elites, but by ordinary people through everyday acts of kindness toward others, as the movements of a butterflies’ wings may create whirlwinds.
This I call becoming Living Autonomous Zones rather than lamedvavnikim, and among the origins of the idea of mutualism and interdependence as the moral basis for society, one owned and originating in the unauthorized identities of the underclasses as a primary seizure of power from imposed ideas of virtue as submission to authority, the myth of Good Acts as the force which creates and maintains the material universe remains a compelling vision.
“There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints (lamedvavnikim) on whose piety the fate of the world depends. The Book of Proverbs provides an early source for the belief that the just man is the basis of the existence of the world: “When the storm wind passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation” (10:25). That is to say, that the righteous man holds up and supports the world just as the foundations of a building support it. Another source for the legend is from the Mishnaic period (1st-2nd century): “When the righteous come to the world, good comes to the world and misfortune is removed but when the righteous pass away disaster comes and goodness leaves the world” (Tosefta, Sofa 10:1). The specific reference to this phenomenon is in the Babylonian Talmud, which attributes to a fourth-century Babylonian teacher, Abbaye, the statement: “There are not less than 36 righteous men in every generation who receive the Shechina (the Divine presence). It is written, happy are all they who wait for Himâ” (Sanhedrin 97b; Sukkot 45a).
The Hebrew for Himâ (lamed vav) also represents the number 36 in Hebrew numerology (Gematria) and this provides the basis for the number of saints. The number may also be derived from the verse “Happy are all they who hope for Himâ” (Isaiah 30:18), which has been interpreted to mean: Happy are all they who hope for the 36,†that is, who depend or rely on these 36 just men.
There is a less well-accepted belief that there are 72 saints. The Zohar points to Hosea 10:2, which reads: “Their heart is divided.” The gematria of their heart in Hebrew is 72, which some have interpreted as representing 36 saints in Eretz Israel and 36 in the Diaspora.
At first the Talmud viewed lamedvavnikim merely as being good individuals, but later they began to be seen as hidden saints and many legends then circulated about them. Unrecognized by their fellow men and unknown even to each other, they are said to pursue humble occupations such as artisans or water-carriers. They do not admit their identity to anyone and, if challenged, would deny their membership. The Almighty is said to replace a lamedvavnik immediately upon death. A just man is believed to emerge and use his hidden powers when a Jewish community is threatened and return to obscurity once his task has been completed. This belief has given rise to the suspicion that a stranger who suddenly appears and who seems mysterious may be a lamedvavnik. Several legends claim that one of the 36 is the Messiah, who will reveal himself when the time is ripe. Others contend that as soon as a hidden just man is revealed, he dies.
It has been argued that the number 36 derives from sources other than those discussed above. One is that it comes from ancient astrology where the 360 degrees of the heavenly circle are divided into 36 units of dean and these deans were looked upon as guardians of the universe. Another theory is that 36 is the square of six which is said to be the symbol of the created world in Alexandrian Jewish philosophy but both these theories are not convincing.
Little research, however, seems to have been carried out to conclusively identify the legend’s origin. The lamedvavnik tradition is an Ashkenazi belief Sephardim do not recognize it but it has been present in Kabbalistic literature from the 16th century and in hassidic legends from the late 18th century. There are two 18th-century kabbalistic books whose authors, Rabbi Neta of Szinawa and Rabbi Eisik, a shohet from Przemysl, have been described as being lamedvavnikim. Hassidim recognize two categories of saint: those who work in full view and the hidden ones who belong to a higher order of men. Tales of the lamedvavnikim are widespread, particularly in hassidic literature. The noted hassidic scholar, Martin Buber, also introduced the lamedvavnik into some of his writings. Some hassidic tales emphasize the role of the saint behind a boorish or uncouth facade, a theme also used in some stories of the Baâl Shem Tov. Apparently, this was to make people believe that a noble soul could live within every man and that one should not draw conclusions from appearances.
Prominent writers, from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav in the 18th century to 20th-century writers of the stature of S.Y. Agnon and Elie Wiesel have been attracted to the subject. Rabbi Nachman’s The Prince who was made entirely of precious stones introduces us to two lamedvavnikim who, on different occasions, helped a king to beget a daughter and a son and also to save the son from disaster. In Agnon’s The Hidden Tzaddik, the lamedvavnik is a stovemaker who wants to be buried in a plot where the stillborn are buried and whose grave should not be marked with a tombstone. Agnon followed the tradition faithfully, but Rabbi Nachman’s tale indicated that others knew of the identity of the two lamedvavnikim because it was only when the king ordered the Jewish community to help him that the two saints were produced. Elie Wiesel’s One of the Just Men also abandons the idea that the identity of these men is hidden, but Albert Memmi keeps to the traditional view in his The Unrecognised Just Men.
One novel on the subject, Andre Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, achieved best-seller status in 1960. Ernie Levy, a descendant of the 12th-century R.Yom Tov Levy is depicted as being one of the Just Men, inheriting the honor through his family line. The story of the Levy family begins in York in 1185, covers the Inquisition and pogroms in Kiev and describes many other indignities. Ernie is the last of the line and he is destroyed in Hitler’s gas chambers. Schwartz-Bart’s interpretation of the legend is a controversial one because the honor of being a lamedvavnik is not handed down from father to son. Nevertheless, this novel that won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary award, gave rise to much interest in the legend.”
Here is my witness of history regarding how I learned the principles of revolutionary struggle at the age of nine; I spent recess at school during fifth grade either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked as poison with the skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing ball at recess would get a dose. That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear and power as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and fear becomes a lever you can use to seize power and win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?”
Sic Semper Tyrannis, friends.
Suicide Squad film trailer
My teams loved this film, the first of which released in 2016.
We remember the valor and sacrifice of our sacred dead on this Memorial
Day weekend, of those killed in action and all those who served in defense of our liberty and equality and in solidarity with that of others against the malign forces of racism and fascism, tyranny and terror, from the beginning of our day of recognition of the Union soldiers and Abolitionists who died in the Civil War fighting a human trafficking syndicate which had declared itself a nation answerable to no civilized law, and since its proclamation as a national holiday all those who died in our endless and terrible wars including the Second World War and thereafter to free the world of fascist imperialism, terror, and the darkness of organized violence, and all others who have died to achieve the dream of a free society of equals, whether in uniform or not, on the battlefields of civilizational conflicts or as victims of white supremacist terror, at Gettysburg 1863, Normandy 1944, Charlottesville 2017, the January 6 Insurrection 2021, Ukraine and Palestine ongoing now, and countless others.
At this moment humankind is engaged in six major wars and thirty six other conflicts, and I count ten theatres of World War Three being fought by and versus Russia as she attempts to re-conquer her former Empire including here in the captured state of Vichy America under the puppet tyrant Trump, Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich.
In America and throughout the world, Confederate, Apartheid, and Nazi revivalism and fascist tyranny once again emerges from the darkness to subjugate us, and this we must resist.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of being an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
World War Three began its European theatre of operations with the Russian conquest of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, much as the Second World War began with fascist conquests of Spain and Manchuria, and broadened with general invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, as a development of the conflict between Turkey and Russia for imperial dominion of the Middle East and the Mediterranean with the Russian intervention in Syria and Libya in 2015 and in the Nagorno-Karabakh Civil War of 2020; Russia also began a campaign of colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, operates Sudan and Belarus as client states, and invaded Kazakhstan to support a proxy tyrant with brutal repression during the revolt of January 2022. Here in America of course Russia’s star agent, Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, captured the state as its President during the Stolen Election of 2016 and again in 2024, and began systematically attacking the values, ideals, systems, structures, and institutions of democracy.
We are winning in that we have exposed our enemies for what they are and delegitimized them, but the fight is not yet won, not in Ukraine and not in America.
Twenty four centuries ago Pericles of Athens said of the heroes of democracy; “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”
On this Memorial Day let us cherish and exalt the gift of liberty given to us by our fellows, elders, and ancestors, and by all those throughout history who have answered those who would enslave us with defiance and resistance.
Such is our legacy as a Band of Brothers, sisters, and others united by our refusal to submit to force and control, in our struggle for one another as Antifascists and antiracists, and as Americans but also as human beings who hold the universality of our condition above any divisions of otherness, and perform our uniqueness within the limitless diversity of our community of humankind.
As such it remains among our highest principles that we accord others those universal rights which we claim for ourselves, that each of us must possess the right to imagine and become human as a free choice in a community of autonomous individuals, and that we are committed to our common defense of those rights of ownership of identity, freedom of conscience in our faith, and of bodily autonomy which define what is human.
America was founded as an anti-theocratic, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonialist revolutionary experiment in forging a society free of the conceit of aristocratic feudalism that some of us are by nature better than others, and to redress injustices perpetrated against the many by the few.
While in the course of revolutionary struggle and the resistance to tyranny we may find just cause for action in our defense or the defense of others, there is never any justification for wars of imperialist aggression nor to secure strategic resources such as oil or any economic colonialist thievery, nor for wars of dominion or the conquest and assimilation of cultures different from our own. Different is neither better nor worse, merely an opportunity to learn new ways of being human together that we might become better than we were alone.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate as a guarantor of our universal human rights and the principles of democracy as a free society of equals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice.
We now face certain odds of six to eight centuries of total global war and nationalist tyranny, an Age of Tyrants and imperial wars fought with weapons of unimaginable horror and civilizational collapse ending with the extinction of humankind. When I began my publication Torch of Liberty in October of 2018 in reply to an assassination attempt (if they’re going to kill you, there is no longer a motive to keep the whole secret history of one’s life and the history of America and the world a secret), a sniper’s bullet that ripped through my car with explosive force and missed only because a momentary flash of light from a scope gave warning for evasive jinking before or as the shot was fired, I calculated the chances of human survival among our possible futures as great as twelve and as few as two in one hundred.
As of now we are at a point of no return with zero or negative one to two in one hundred futures. The rate of change and degradation and the speed of our extinction is still compounding, bringing the last day of humankind ever closer. America may only have two more Presidential elections before she ceases to exist as a nation, if our species as a whole still survives, though this can change. Every moment of delay, appeasement, bargaining with our head in the lion’s mouth of the Fourth Reich, and failure to purge our destroyers from among us brings us nearer our doom.
What does our future look like? To this end I have assembled here my references in iconic films of war, with a word of caution; the wars of the Age of Tyrants will be fought with weapons unimaginable to us now and incomparably destructive as measured against those of the Second World War.
In America we have tracked and briefly brought to justice the deniable assets of the Republican Party and the criminal and treasonous Trump regime in the January 6 Insurrection, but not its high command, nor its conspirators in Congress, nor its propagandists, nor the plutocrats and elites who fund and benefit from it all. Now all are pardoned by the mad tyrant who commanded them. Our institutions of Law have failed us, captured or subverted by the enemy as is the Supreme Court, and we must look beyond the law for a Reckoning and our survival.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In Ukraine the free world hesitates to confront a Russian empire which uses terror, genocide, and threat of nuclear annihilation in its mad conquest, while in America, Europe, and throughout the world the guarantors of democracy are being destabilized and captured by fascist tyrannies. Again, both of these factors can be changed; in Europe’s elections the tide of fascism may just now have been turned, and a new alliance without America may be forming to liberate Ukraine.
In Ukraine and the Third World War of Russia versus humankind and the elections of democracies which are still viable, appeasement works as well as it did for Chamberlain in World War One, which is not at all, and when someone tells you as did Hitler in 1938 “This is my last territorial demand”, he who trusts the lie is about to become extinct. The first rule of Resistance is: everything the enemy says is a lie. Ukraine is a test of our solidarity and will, and like the 1939 invasion of Poland a gate to the conquest of Europe, and as in Gaza and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians paid for by our taxes and granted permission by American complicity, genocide being a line from which there can be no retreat, if we are to salvage something of our humanity from the darkness.
To quote the lines of Winston Churchill in the magnificent film Darkest Hour, which the historical figure never said; “You cannot reason with a Tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
References
Churchill’s speech in Darkest Hour: You Cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow “Turncoat” Season 2 Episode 11
Ongoing Conflicts and Developing Threats 2025
Conflicts to Watch in 2025
U.S. foreign policy experts rank the thirty global conflicts that could most significantly affect the United States in 2025
How shall we see and understand images of war, death, pain, horror, and evil such as those of war films, which both glorify and authorize violence and the use of social force in the manufacture of virtue and national identity, and interrogate, subvert, and liberate us from such systems of control as stories which possess us and from which we must emerge?
How can we give answer to such darkness in our own lives?
The Second World War: A Complete History, Martin Gilbert
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts
The Battle of Britain: Five Months That Changed History, May-October 1940, Fortress Malta: An Island Under Siege 1940-43, Together We Stand: Turning the Tide in the West: North Africa, 1942-1943, Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe, Burma ’44: The Battle That Turned Britain’s War in the East, Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France, James Holland
Britain and Churchill
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Erik Larson
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts
Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, Giles Milton
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, William Manchester, Paul Reid
France
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian T. Jackson
Paris at War: 1939-1944, David Drake
The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis, Matthew Cobb
Outwitting the Gestapo, Lucie Aubrac
The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, Paul Kix
Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler, Lynne Olson
The Liberation of Paris: How Eisenhower, de Gaulle, and von Choltitz Saved the City of Light, Jean Edward Smith
Italy
Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940-1943, H. James Burgwyn
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Rick Atkinson
Bitter Victory: The Battle For Sicily, July August 1943, Carlo D’Este
Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Peter Caddick-Adams
Anzio: Italy and the Battle for Rome 1944, Lloyd Clark
Naples ’44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, Norman Lewis
Spain
Picasso’s War, Russell Martin
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett
Russia
Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945, Richard Overy
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943, Antony Beevor
Jewish Peoples
Night, Elie Wiesel
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy, Sergio Luzzatto
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom, The Murderers Among Us, Krystyna: The Tragedy of the Polish Resistance, Simon Wiesenthal
Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Moshe Arens
Auschwitz, Laurence Rees
Treblinka, Jean-François Steiner, Simone de Beauvoir (Preface), Terrence Des Pres (Introduction
The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva
America and the Second World War in the Pacific
But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, John Toland
Storm Clouds over the Pacific, 1931–41, Japan Runs Wild, 1942–1943, Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze, Peter Harmsen
The Eagle & the Rising Sun: The Japanese-American War 1941-43: Pearl Harbor through Guadalcanal, Alan Schom
On this anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of police and other madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of imperial conquest and dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
Those who would enslave us make monsters of some of us in order to terrify the rest of us into submission and legitimize the centralization of power to the state.
As Joe Biden said; “As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
Regarding solidarity and the total freedom conferred by the act of refusal to submit as Resistance, I have a story to tell you, and a gift to share with you; membership in a tradition of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Here I offer you the Oath of the Resistance, as it was given to me by Jean Genet in Beirut in 1982.
During the summer before my senior year of university in San Francisco, I had set out on a culinary Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, learning to cook the food I loved, and was in Beirut when Israel invaded Lebanon and trapped me in a city under siege. Feral bands of soldiers were roaming the streets committing atrocities; one such unit of the Israeli Defense Forces set some children on fire, laughing and making bets on how far they could run screaming before they fell into pools of blackened ruin and their screams became silent. I found myself fighting them; others joined me, we joined whole networks of such groups already fighting, and more joined us; together we united in mass action with a vast and diverse resistance and liberation struggle.
From that day forward I was part of the defense of Beirut against the siege, and against the tyranny and terror of the state of Israel and its violations of our universal human rights in wars and Occupations of imperial conquest and dominion, as I yet remain.
A fabulous café that had the best strawberry crepes in the world lay on the far side of a sniper alley, which my friends and I made an extreme sport of dashing across to reach breakfast while the occasional bullet impacted the wall behind us. One day we arrived in our usual high spirits when an elegant gentleman sat at my table, and speaking in French began a conversation with, “I’m told you do this every day, race against death for breakfast.”
To which I replied, “Moments stolen from death belong to us, and set us free. This is all we truly own and which make us human, such defining moments; memories, stories, histories, identities. Against the terror of our nothingness we have only this with which to find a balance; the truths written in our flesh and the joy of total freedom to discover them. It is a poor man who loves nothing beyond reason and has no pleasures worth dying for.”
He smiled and said, “I agree”, and so began our conversations at breakfast in the last days before the Fall of Beirut, unforgettable days for this is where he set me on my life’s path.
There came a day when the barricades were overrun and our neighborhood along with it, one of our last days together. With the streets suddenly filled with Israeli soldiers in a sack of murder and other vileness of terror and inhumanity, ordering people into the streets to surrender, abducting and blindfolding their children to use as human shields, and setting fires to burn alive in their homes anyone who refused, and the discovery of our only weapon being the bottle of champagne we had just finished with our strawberry crepes as the building we were in was set on fire, I asked my breakfast companion if he had any ideas. To this he replied with an apologetic and very Gallic shrug and another question, “Fix bayonets?”
We laughed, and he elaborated; “When all hope is lost, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.” This advice I find necessary to recall from time to time, and which I recommend to you all.
Then he asked, “Will you surrender?’
To which I replied, “No.”
“Nor I,” he said, standing. “As I share with you now, pass to others at need; this is an oath I devised in 1940 in Paris from the one I took as a Legionnaire, for the resistance to the Nazi occupation which friends of mine were forming. It may be the finest thing I ever stole.”
And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me by the great Jean Genet in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, and all who answer tyranny with Liberty, fascism with Equality, and division with Fraternity; to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.”
To fascism and the idea that some of us are better than others by race or any condition of our birth there can be but one reply; Never Again.
To all those who hunger to be free, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon named The Wretched of the Earth, this I say; you are not alone.
Let none stand alone who refuse to submit to the tyranny and terror of force and control, who speak truth to power and question, expose, mock, and challenge authority, who answer division with solidarity, control with disobedience, authorized identities, virtue, and normality with transgression, who run amok and are ungovernable.
Nor can our souls be stolen from us by either the brutal repression of fear nor the seduction of lies and illusions, we who call the enemy by his true names and stand united in the cause of our liberty, for who refuses to submit and cannot be compelled by force and control becomes Unconquered and free.
In Resistance we are all, each of us, Living Autonomous Zones. No one speaks or answers for us, nothing is beyond question, and all authority which claims us is without legitimacy or meaning.
When those who would enslave us come for one of us, let them be met with all of us; let the fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil and the elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege find not a humankind broken by cruelty and state terror nor divided by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, not hopeless and abject as products of a system of dehumanization, commodification, and falsification, not disempowered by learned helplessness nor conditioned to submit to authority and force, but a humankind united in resistance; an unconquerable and United Humankind.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of June 20 2022, Say Their Names: the Visual Iconography of the Black Lives Matter Movement for Racial Justice as Ritual Mourning; As I reflect on the visual iconography and witness of history in film and photography of our epochal reckoning of equality and racial justice, I am awed by the possibilities for civilizational transformation of this moment, by its tidal force as the people reclaim their power from governments throughout the world which have betrayed them in three successive waves of revolution; #metoo, Extinction Rebellion & Fridays for Future, and Black Lives Matter, all driving motives and informing sources which empower the global democracy revolution against fascism and tyranny. If we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of America’s historical memory and vision of ourselves; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort. This image is shaped by the three primary forces of race, wealth, and gender which together act to authorize identity and subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us. And this we must resist.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as written in The Root; “In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America”.
If we count only the known victims of racial violence since Emancipation, we have a legacy of crimes against humanity in a nation founded on the principle that all persons are created equal which reveals this to be an Original Lie; racism is not a failure of our system, but a key element of its design. Now count all the Black people who lived and died as American slaves from the first landing in 1661 to Juneteenth.
The names of the victims of racism in our nation become an infinite loop of misery and despair, a lamentation of the brokenness of the world and of the human cost of a system which uses divisions of exclusionary otherness to change some of us into things to be used for the profit of a few oligarchic families of apex predators. Ideologies of white supremacy perpetuate inequality in our society today; the wolves are still among us, even if they must disguise themselves as sheep.
Among the most terrible instruments of those who would enslave us is this erasure and silencing of Black voices, of concealment of the scope and horror of the legacy of slavery in the power asymmetries and inequalities we are heir to. We have hundreds of years of lost lives and names to reclaim, and we can not lose a single one more.
Every one of those lost lives is an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for Liberty; let us honor them with our actions as songs of survival and revolution, and make of one another living monuments to our unconquered freedom in defiance of those who would enslave us.
Of the many insightful essays written of this moment in history and its transformative and revolutionary consequences for human meaning and being, few are as eloquent as Chaédria LaBouvier’s writing in The Cut, entitled
The Afterlife of George Floyd: A Portfolio by Photographer Eli Reed American iconography of a death, history, and a Black southern homecoming; “It is a beautiful symmetry to have Eli Reed’s photographs capture and canonize this American chapter and George Floyd’s funeral. Reed is one of the best living photographers and is walking history himself; he is the first Black photographer to join Magnum Photos and is a member of Kamoinge, the Black photography collective that has in its DNA Roy DeCarava, a founding father of black-and-white fine photography.
The images are something, as they say down South, perhaps even more so because George Floyd is so present and absent from them. Where is he? It’s just as well that Floyd be in absentia, in a sense, from a photo series about him. Find George Floyd, the human, the person who unsuspectingly became a symbol, the father, the man who called out for his mother as he lay dying. Reed’s photos aren’t the expected intimacy of a funeral’s mise-en-scène with the casket and Floyd’s family — like that of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King — but it is hard to find a real reason why America would have deserved that kind of record for the ages anyway. In lieu of photographing Floyd, Reed’s camera tenderly captures the minutiae of people, in the middle of a pandemic, social collapse, and a revolution, willing themselves to bear witness.
The iconography of George Floyd’s death begins, in the modern sense, in the lynching postcards of the early 20th century. They are a perverse picture of Americana; they are souvenirs from the scenes of murders. Like the leather wallets and belts fashioned from human skin afterwards, these postcards were first and foremost evidence of many things — murder, the unhinged fantasies of White subconsciousness that have long been anchored in the idea of a Black chattel class and a belief in the unalienable right to act out that role play. That a reminder of that kind of unforgettable horror could even be necessary or even desired is an indication of what has long not been well with White America, and for quite some time; Lillian Smith, a Georgia native who framed White supremacy as a mental illness, wrote in Killers of the Dream, “These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy … slip from the conscious mind down deep into the muscles.” James Baldwin put it more explicitly: “And they have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are White.”
Video is not infinite, but it is the strongest contender in humankind’s constant quest to conquer the infinite in real time. In its cruel loopability and limitless excess, what is immortality if not an excess of everything? Everything becomes excessive on video: the length, the audience, the distribution, the distortion, the filters. America has met its match. America has found a medium capable of showing her to herself without tiring and with the matched coldness and unrelenting brutality with which America has always treated Black people.
Perhaps this helps explain why the last moments of Black life on video have found an audience and momentum to catalyze protest and people in our contemporary times. That objectivity and excess of video have distilled the core of the moment in a way few mediums can: The combination of free-range prerogative and unhinged fantasies of White people has long been at the center of these murders and subjugations. The person and the body may be Black, but they are not the subject. It’s what makes Emmett Till’s body so difficult to look at; it is not him, it is not Mamie’s child. It is the site of an imagination, deranged, it is the deadly narcissism of Whiteness’s desires as bluntly as the point can be made, and infinitely as need be. Watching Derek Chauvin kneel on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes is truly unhinged, and we are watching him enact the same fantasy that his forefathers stood proudly for in photographs when Black bodies were swinging from poplar trees. Video does not tire, and as such on a cellular level, we know America and we know that we will see another Black person die on video again. And that has absolutely nothing to do with Black people.
And so, it is in this weird moment — between the slight beginnings of a White reckoning and the evermore Black activism that has always been this country’s moral North Star — that the afterlife of George Floyd begins.
He is a child of Texas, a son of Houston’s Third Ward, Cissy Floyd’s firstborn, and as the sun set on June 9, 2020, he returned to them. Watching the procession of Floyd’s horse drawn recalled Ossie Davis’s eulogy for Malcolm X: “and we will know him then for what he was and is — a prince.” Indeed, Floyd’s homecoming was fit for a king; this has always been the visual thesis of African-American funerary, especially when someone has been stolen from us. The horse-drawn carriage, the gold casket, the choir, the Appian Way procession of the last mile to his grave; George Floyd was given a state funeral by the people, his people.
For it is in the visuals and the iconography of the homecoming — so called by enslaved people because they believed, upon death, their soul would return to Africa — that the person, the human, the humanity reemerges. The last moments of Black life under the duress of unpoliced imaginations, to paraphrase Claudia Rankine, have very little to do with Black life. And if the afterlife is a journey that is filled with abundance, beauty, and absent of all the ignorant, cruel, and dull things that make this physical one at times unbearable, it would make sense that the beginnings of the Black afterlife have absolutely nothing to do with White people. And yet, it is also never not complicated and complex; the Houston Police Department escorted his cortege on its final journey. Make of that what you will.
The visual foundation of Floyd’s afterlife incorporates themes of majesty, splendor, and nobility that are a deeply historical call-and-response to Blackness in funerary and the afterlife across time. It recalls the ancient Egyptians, New Orleans’s jazz funerals, the funeral pageantry of West African tribes, Geechee and Lowcountry funerals, the work of photographer James Van Der Zee and the promised abundance of the “upper room” in works such as Alma Thomas’s painting “Resurrection.” Floyd returned home to the very specific African-Creole corridor of East Texas and Western Louisiana is worth considering. Here, his iconography and afterlife begins in one of the most stunning ancestral regions for African-Americans — and one of the most infamously racist. A place from which the most desperate domestic refugees fled and still, to this day, flee up North for a different type of racism. Floyd himself had fled up North, to Minneapolis, like Mamie Till went up to Chicago. Further east, Emmett Till’s afterlife had its beginnings in this corridor too in the Mississippi Delta — in the Tallahatchie River, to be exact.
Where is George Floyd? How do we find him? We have no clue how and where he will settle in history, art history, how his last moments will enter a canon of filmed death. What we are looking for, beyond the momentum of canonization and movement, is him. Those intimate, quotidian, and mundane things which begrudgingly and solemnly construct a life and one’s work in it. Who will replace his hello to the people who are used to seeing him every day? If he is that person in the neighborhood who takes out the trash for the elderly women who live alone on the block, who will take his place? Who will lead George Floyd’s Bible studies or be the gentle giant in the barbershop, on the block, and at the corner store? How do a community and a family replace what is irreplaceable? Reed’s photographs began looking for these unanswerable questions.
His images recall the tenderness and difficulty of a watercolor portrait. A watercolor portrait is a small miracle; a painter must work quickly, with sustained velocity and controlled chaos, to bend the fluidity of water and the subject’s essence to reveal something luminous, telling, and coherent. Maybe it is the same mastery of application at work here; Reed’s camera captures the uncapturable, what it meant to be in the sticky humidity of that Houston evening that smelled like grief, mosquito repellent, candle wax, and cedar wood. For those not there, Reed’s work acts as a bridge to translate the mourning, the prayer circles, the enormous and quotidian worries of those there — the traffic afterwards, if the chicken left in the sink had fully thawed by the time they got home, if something calamitous would happen on the way back, what would happen now to George’s family, now that he was in the ground and the real shattering, breaking, and healing (maybe) begins. The luminosity of the human experience is here in the artist’s offering to George Floyd, a lion in the winter of his years who has captured wars at home and abroad, still working, this time in the looming discontent of Juneteenth, a plague, and the knocking knees of an empire in collapse. Somewhere in there is a radical love, a belief that George is still owed more, that Black people are deserving of more and that they must have it, and they must have it yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever. Like watercolors, the fervency of this simple truth is hard to capture. It is that love for, and of, and by Black people at the very root of it all which propels the people to the street, prepared to die if it should come down to it. And it is because, like Ossie Davis said of Malcolm, they love us so.
It is, as they say down South, truly something.”
Voices from the Black Lives Matter Protests (A Short Film) | Vanity Fair
Hearing From the Founder of Black Lives Matter
I Am Not Your Negro – Official Trailer
13th full documentary Netflix
The Hate U Give Official Trailer
Get Out Official Trailer
What lies behind America’s mask of equality?
How did 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement change the world? Our panel responds : Osita Nwanevu, Fabiana Moraes, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Zanele Mji, Abeo Jackson and Daniel Gyamerah
One year on, how George Floyd’s murder has changed the world
This article is more than 3 years old
The killing of Floyd by a white officer reflected a common history of violence against Black people that united protesters in a renewed global movement
A crow confronts his image in a pool of water, and as Nietzsche warned the darkness looks back. Of this I have written a paragraph on the Nietzschean idea of the Abyss, and of tragedy as failure to embrace our monstrosity and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh; the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
Here also is a fable for Memorial Day and the sacred dead of war, at whose table I have eaten many times now.
As Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil goes; “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.”
It is also an origin of evil as the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; written in the tyrannies and systems of unequal power which hold humankind in their iron grip of force and control as Kristevan abjection, despair, and learned helplessness, and the ecological catastrophe which threatens our species extinction as disconnection from nature, control of nature as capitalist exploitation of resources and theft of the commons, carceral states of force and control as embodied violence, and our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the Wilderness of Mirrors.
All of this requires the renouncement of love, as Wagner’s figure of tyranny Alberich the Dwarf must do to seize the Ring of power and dominion, a story more familiar to us as Tolkien’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied in his trilogy of novels which recast World War Two as an allegory of the abandonment of addiction to power. This has a corollary; the redemptive power of love, like the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves, can free us from the Ring of Power and bring healing to the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
As written by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose; “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.”
Here follows the paragraph of my thoughts on seeing this image, which if considered as a poem I now think of as the True and False Crows: a fable.
Who is this imposter? If he is me, where now am I? Avaunt, my nemesis, for I shall pursue retribution for this theft of myself beyond all wrath now remembered, through death and hell and the terrors of our nightmares. Come and let us grapple for the truth of ourselves in this place where angels fear, and end not in silence but in exaltation and fire, with roars of defiance hurled against the chasms of our nothingness, supernal and magnificent as the Morningstar, and illuminate for all humankind the path of escape from this prison of illusions and lies.
To this my sister replied, Such poetry!
This is as direct as I can be, O my sister. Should I merit some kind of monument one day, an absurd fantasy as I mean nothing to history and will vanish from the world without a trace, and nothing to anyone beyond yourself as the remnants of family, Dolly as my partner, and those few friends and allies who know my true story and identity which I have tried to leave a record of here in my journal Torch of Liberty, inscribe this therein.
I have tried to salvage something of our humanity and to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world these past forty years since I was sworn to the oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet, and often failed, but this is not what is important.
What is important is to refuse to submit.
And one thing more; to act with solidarity in revolutionary struggle. As the Oath of the Resistance created in Paris 1940 by Jean Genet from the oath of the Foreign Legion in which he once served, and given to me in Beirut 1982 in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a Last Stand beyond hope of victory or survival, and which I offer to all of you as a tradition to bear forward into the future; “We swear ourselves to each other, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows.”
In this my chosen life mission I have held true, for if each and every one of us stands in solidarity with others regardless of how different they may be from ourselves, we will become liberators and guarantors of each other’s uniqueness, and in refusal to submit will be victorious and free.
He said it was the finest thing he ever stole, the Oath of the Resistance, but I often think of this in terms of a definition of the beauty of human beings; to become Unconquered and free as self created beings in refusal to submit to authority and its instruments of violence, force and control, and the repression of dissent, to refuse our dehumanization and the theft of our souls and autonomy and to do all of this in solidarity and absolute loyalty to each other.
As he once said to me; “Is this not the beauty of men, to resist and never yield, to cede nothing to the enemy, not love nor hope, not our history nor the chance for a future of our own choosing, neither our monstrosity nor our grandeur, nothing of our humanity nor of any human being whose life is in our power to harm or help, to live beyond all limits and all laws and to risk everything to do this for each other?”
Here is our Beauty as Keats defined it in his famous quote; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” With this quote I reply to all direct questions asking me to identify my faith, especially by men with badges and guns for official documents, though in Islamic nations I preface it with a quote from his near parallel Rumi; “”Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
I dream of a future something like the future envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations; the idea first put forth in the episode Is There In Truth No Beauty?, described in the first issue of the fanzine Inside Star Trek as; “that beauty, growth, progress — all result from the union of the unlike. Concord, as much as discord, requires the presence of at least two different notes. The brotherhood of man is an ideal based on learning to delight in our essential differences, as well as learning to recognize our similarities.” As stated in the episode The Savage Curtain; “I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us.”
Liberty as freedom from authorized identities and truths, and equality and its corollary solidarity; these are the personal and social preconditions of democracy as a free society of equals.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did in Mariupol and in the year of the fall of Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In this I speak to you of truths which are immanent in nature and written in our flesh; we must embrace our darkness and claim our truths, and celebrate what Walt Whitman called the songs of ourselves as victorious seizures of power, freedom, and joy.
Love and desire are innate capacities of reimagination and transformative rebirth, which like Dorothy’s magic ruby slippers cannot be taken from us and bear the power to send us home to our heart’s desire, to restore to us the self which is truly ours.
My flesh is a map of private holocausts, written with silent screams, nameless loves, causes lost and won, ephemeral signs of our secret histories and the lies and illusions which capture and distort our images in a wilderness of mirrors and the pathologies of our falsification and disconnectedness.
We have but one escape from the limits of our flesh and the flags of our skin; and this is love. In love we transcend ourselves and become exalted; through the redemptive power of love we may heal the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
Love is crucial both to poetic vision and as solidarity in action as processes of self-construal and becoming human; Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
Let us always take the risks of our humanity, and place our lives in the balance with all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth; the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Send me out in flames, for this is how I have lived
Not silent but incandescent in the night
An agent of change and illumination, like fire itself
In Celebration of Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche who awakens, Nietzsche who challenges, Nietzsche who illuminates and inspires; these are the three Nietzsche’s who have been my companions throughout life, my guides and muses, and whom I offer you as a Song of Orpheus and Ariadne’s Thread whereby to find your way through the labyrinth of life.
Protean in his forms, he may take whatever shape is needed in your quest; and will play his roles as befitting at different stages of the journey. There are many Nietzsche’s, who like an endless series of dancing Schrodinger’s Cats offer possibilities which echo and reflect those of his readers as an inkblot test. Who is Nietzsche to me?
Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a space in my life and imagination like no other shaping, motivating, and informing source, because my discovery of him in the year before I began high school first broke the Great Chain of Being which bound me to the will of authority and my fellow schoolmates ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty in a theocratic, patriarchal, and racist society aligned with the Apartheid regime of South Africa, and set me free to create myself in a universe without imposed meaning or value; then helped me to process a primary trauma which became a Defining Moment as I joined the liberation struggle of a foreign land whose glittering citadels of splendor concealed horrible truths.
Nietzsche it was who helped me to balance the terror of our nothingness with the joy of total freedom.
When I speak of the enforcement of normality as an evil to be resisted, it is with the voice of the old woman burned alive in her home as a witch by a mob which included fellow children I grew up with. To fully understand Nietzsche, you must inhabit the historical space of liberation from systemic tyranny which his anti-authoritarian iconoclasm represents.
I grew up in such a world, a premodern world bound to the laws of a cruel and implacable Authority of alien and unknowable motives and those who would enslave us and claim to speak in his name as a tyranny of the Elect, whose hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rely on our commodification as weaponized disparity and theft of the commons, falsification through lies and illusions, subjugation through learned helplessness and divisions of exclusionary otherness, fear as an instrument of the centralization of power by carceral states of force and control through fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, and faith weaponized in service to power as theft of the soul.
Such atavisms of barbarism hold dominion still over much of humankind and possess us as legacies of our history, bound by embedded tyrannies of many kinds, a world America was founded to replace as a free society of equals. Ours is a very fragile civilization, threatened always by chasms of darkness which surround us and with relentless, pervasive, and systemic enemies in fascist tyranny, patriarchal sexual terror, white supremacist terror, the fetishism of death and violence in identitarian nationalism and its police states and imperial militarism, and dehumanization. This we must resist, and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra as a luminous song of resistance.
Among the great loves of my literary life, I first discovered him after reading through all the works of Herman Hesse in seventh grade, in whom I found resonance with the Taoist poetry and Zen riddles which were among my subjects of formal study, then abandoning fiction after the nightmare of Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties and its implied erotic horror, which I had chosen after reading his stunning novel of my favorite game after chess, The Master of Go, and turned thereafter to Plato whom I adored, and read voraciously all his works throughout my eighth grade year. The Trial of Socrates founded our civilization as a self-questioning system of being human together, and in the dialectics of Socratic method offered me tools of self-construal and reinvention which became central to my identity.
My father, who was a theatre director as well as my English, Drama, and Forensics teacher, Debate Team coach, and my Fencing Club coach throughout high school, and who taught me fencing and chess from the age of nine, suggested I might like the discussion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche’s vision of civilization as a struggle between passion and reason, chaos and order, conserving and revolutionary forces, which interlinks with that of Kawabata and of Herman Hesse in The Glass Bead Game to form a unitary vision of a process of becoming human, and informs my reading of literature, politics, and all human activity, to this day.
So it was that during the summer of my fourteenth year before I began high school I discovered with unforgettable joy and recognition a book written by someone who spoke for me, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wedded in my imagination to the context of my encounter with his work was the grand adventure and disruptive trauma of my first solo foreign travel, to Brazil to train for the Pan American Games with fellow fencers.
Let me place this in context; Brazil was my first solo foreign travel experience, flying to Sao Paulo when I was fourteen to train with a group of fencers for the Pan American Games which were planned to be held there; I was the San Francisco Bay Area champion in saber and foil in my age division. I had some newly learned conversational Portuguese, an invitation to stay at the home of a boy I knew from the fencing tournament circuit with whom I could discover the local mischief, and visions of beach parties.
So it was that I entered a world of courtly manners and white-gloved servants, gracious and brilliant hosts who were local luminaries and threw a magnificent formal ball to introduce me, and a friend with whom I shared a mad passion for martial arts and sports, but also a world of high walls and armed guards.
My first view beyond this illusion came with the sounds of rifle fire from the guards; when I looked from my balcony to see who was attacking the front gate I discovered the guards were firing into a crowd of beggars, mostly children, who had mobbed a truck carrying the weekly food supplies. That day I made my first secret excursion beyond the walls.
Remembering this Defining Moment now, the day I looked beyond my limits and transgressed the boundaries of the Forbidden to discover and question the basis of my own privilege and reach across divisions of authorized identities of class and race in solidarity with those who do the hard and dirty work for the rest of us and create our wealth, to whom we have exported the true costs of production and excluded from its benefits as our de facto slaves, what fixes my imagination is that I lived an allegory of awakening which recapitulates the story of the Buddha and has become a world myth as the Prince in the Golden Cage. I had no charioteer to answer my questions and create order and meaning from my trauma of witness; I had a whole tribe of them, the Matadors. We’ll get to that part shortly.
What truths are hidden by the walls of our palaces, beyond which it is Forbidden to look? It is easy to believe the lies of authority when one is a member of the elite in whose interest they claim to wield power, and to fail to question one’s own motives and position of privilege. Terrifyingly easy to believe lies when we are the beneficiaries of hierarchies of exclusionary otherness, of wealth and power disparity and inequalities systemically manufactured and weaponized in service to power, and of genocide, slavery, conquest, and imperialism.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain. For there is no just authority, and as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, he’s “just an old humbug”, and his lies and illusions, force and control, serve no interests but his own.
Being a naïve American boy, I felt it was my duty to report the incident; but at the police station I had difficulty making myself understood. They thought I was there to place a bet on my guard in an ongoing monthly contest for which police officer bagged the most street children; there was a chalkboard on the station wall for this, and a jar of tagged ears. Another betting game called “the Big One”, was for which policeman kicked the most pregnant girls in the stomach and ranked among the top ten causes of death in Brazil for teenage girls, invariably living within slum zones containing the most impoverished and most Black of citizens; this in a city founded by escaped African slaves as a free republic.
I learned much in the weeks that followed; that fully ten percent of Brazilians were abandoned and orphaned street children on whom bounties had been placed as a solution, that a quarter of the population lived in shantytowns, that life expectancy for 80% of the people was 35 years, that 350,000 children died before the age of five each year and only 13% finished primary school, that nearly half the people were illiterate.
And yet it was a rich nation; the Brazilian gold boom of the 1700’s created Europe’s industrial revolution, and at this same time of pervasive and systemic poverty and racism Brazil was the worlds number one coffee, sugar, orange, and gasohol producer, #2 cocoa, and #3 timber and beef producer. But over half of the wealth was owned by less than two percent of its people, like the family who were my gracious hosts.
Above all I learned who is responsible for these inequalities; we are, if we buy the products of an unjust system, remain silent as witnesses of history to injustices, or abandon our duty of care toward others when evil unfolds before us and by a mission of action we may safeguard others from harm. This is the true mission of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; to disrupt our interdependence and the solidarity of our universal brotherhood as a precondition of unequal power.
During the nights of my adventures beyond the walls and actions to help the bands of child beggars and obstruct the police bounty hunts I had a second near death experience, this time similar though not as formal as those of Maurice Blanchot’s mock execution by the Nazis in 1944 and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s by the Czar’s secret police in 1849; fleeing pursuit through a warren of tunnels with an injured child among others and trapped in the open by two police riflemen who took flanking positions and aimed at us while the leader called for surrender beyond the curve of a tunnel. I stood in front of a boy with a twisted leg who could not run while the others scattered and escaped or found hiding places, and refused to stand aside when ordered to do so. This was my Ring of Fire and the first of more Last Stands than I can now clearly remember, and I find hope for us all in the instinctive duty of care of the young boy I once was to whom it never occurred to run, to surrender, or to abandon a stranger to harm, and like Wagner’s great hero Siegfried chose instead the fire.
With all of the horrors I have witnessed in a life lived in the unknown spaces of our maps of becoming human marked Here Be Dragons, beyond the limits of the human and the boundaries of the Forbidden, through wars and revolutions as a maker of mischief for tyrants and a monster who hunts other monsters for the chance to salvage something of our humanity, though in this I often fail as I did this spring in Mariupol and last year in Afghanistan, regardless of the brokenness of the world and the flaws of our humanity, something in us refuses to submit to the abjection and learned helplessness of authoritarian systems and reaches toward exaltation and freedom. Whether such hope is a gift or a curse remains for each of us to discover in how we live our lives.
In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Siegfried walks through the fire and becomes human. There’s a good retelling of it in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling.
When the disembodied voice of my executioner reached out from the darkness of the purgatorial labyrinth in which we were trapped to order my surrender, with the life of a stranger in the balance, I asked how much to let us walk away, and he ordered his men to fire. But there was only one shot instead of a demonstration of crossfire, and that a wide miss; he had time to ask “What?” before falling to the ground.
And then our rescuers revealed themselves, having crept up on the police from behind; the Matadors, who might be described as vigilantes, a criminal gang, a revolutionary group, or all three, founded by Brazil’s notorious vigilante and criminal Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had been arrested the previous year. Into this fearsome brotherhood I was welcomed, and in the streets of Sao Paulo that summer I never again stood alone.
From the moment I saw the guards of the aristocratic family with whom I was a guest firing on the crowd of homeless children and beggars swarming the food supply truck at the manor gate, naked and skeletal in starvation, scarred and crippled and misshapen with diseases unknown to any people for whom healthcare and basic nutrition are free and guaranteed preconditions of the universal right to life, desperate for a handful of food which could mean one more day of survival; in that moment I chose my side, and my people are the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased.
As one of my rescuers phrased it; “Come with us. You are one of us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
May we all be granted the gift of vision of our interdependence and the universality of our humanity, and wounds which open us to the pain of others.
Throughout all of this, Nietzsche’s great song of liberation pulled me into its heart and ignited in me a will and vision to transgress beyond our boundaries into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons.
I thereafter read all his works, though Thus Spake Zarathustra remained a kind of sacred text to me; I used to quote it in refutation to my fellow students who quoted the Bible to me as an instrument of subjugation to authority.
Redolent with the cadences of poetic oratory and a phraseology which echoes that of the beautiful King James Bible, pervasive in my town of Reformed Church stalwarts whose mouths were full of thee’s and thou’s, it was both familiar and utterly strange, an empowering work of liberation proclaiming the death of Authority and the limits of the Forbidden. How I cherished it, this treasure and marvel; by summer’s end I could recite it entirely by memory so many times had I read it.
May we all find such books, which illuminate our imagination and offer to us the Promethean fire.
Read therefore the immortal classics of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Geneology of Morality, The Case of Wagner, The AntiChrist, Twilight of the Gods, and Ecce Homo.
American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and his Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides an insightful overview.
Maurice Blanchot’s lifelong engagement with Nietzsche can be illuminating and wonderful; The Step Not Beyond, a reply to Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle which references Deleuze, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Infinite Conversation all center on his reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return as an Existentialist principle in which the negation of presence is a path of total freedom. In the pivotal 1945 essay On Nietzsche’s Side, Blanchot reimagines Karl Jaspers’ seminal thesis on Nietzsche; thereafter his works interrogate Nietzschean themes including the Will to Power, the nature of time, ecstatic vision and the Dionysian principle, the Death of God as symbol and metaphor of the emptiness of tyranny and the illusion of authority, and the relativity of meaning and value.
A student of the philosopher Henri Bergson, Nikos Kazantzakis’ thesis “Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State” interrogates the reimagined doctrine of Original Sin as the innate Depravity of Man, which is the basis of all our law and an apologetics of authoritarian power which both Nietzsche and Kazantzakis made a life mission of overthrowing, a theme which continued to inform Kazantzakis throughout his life and is central to understanding his unique brand of Existentialism. In large part his works explore the implications of the Nietzschean conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian as personal and social struggle.
Do read also C.G. Jung’s work Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake. An engagement with Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter-gospel and Zarathustra as a figure of Liberation like Milton’s rebel angel, as for both Jung and myself, will lead you as it did me to the works of William Blake and his rebel figure Los; Milton, Nietzsche, and Blake form a line of transmission which unfolds gloriously in Jung’s Red Book.
Last of all I must cite the influence which prefigured and later reinterpreted the meaning of Nietzsche for me, the great storyteller of my childhood William S. Burroughs, whose own ideology was shaped by his friend Georges Bataille’s cult of Nietzsche. Bataille’s On Nietzsche brilliantly interrogates the problem of the Deus Absconditus, the god who bound us to his laws and abandoned us to free ourselves from them, in a fearless reimagination of the will to power as a will to transgress. The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, compiles the secret documents of his occult circle, disciples of Nietzsche who attempted to reimagine civilization and whose ritual transgressions echo de Sade and Jean Genet.
The influence of Bataille on William S. Burroughs cannot be overstated. Burroughs derived his Anarchist Trilogy, The Wild Boys, The Cat Inside, and the Revised Boy Scout Manual, from Bataille’s synthesis of Nietzsche, de Sade, and Freud, though its central premise, The Algebra of Need, references Marx.
This is the Burroughs with whom I found connection as a teenager; the anarchist philosopher for whom the Wolfman was a figure of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, whose novel on the subject, The Wild Boys, was written during the period of his visits at our home and possibly influenced by my father’s tales of our family history.
For Burroughs, writing was conjuration; an act of chaos magic and liberation struggle in which the tyranny of authorized identities and orders of human being, meaning, and value can be destabilized as fracture, disruption, and delegitimation, and created anew through poetic vision.
In this mission William S. Burroughs was the successor and reinterpreter of of Bataille and of their shared model Nietzsche, as ritual transgression, the delegitimation of authority and seizures of power as liberation struggle, poetic vision and ecstatic trance as the reimagination and transformation of our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Burroughs also believed himself to be the literal successor of Nietzsche as the possessed avatar of a chthonic underworld god, a Shadow figure in Jungian terms which represents his animal nature and inchoate desires as a beast with a beast’s soul, unconquerable and free, in reference to the Toad Nietzsche feared he must swallow and that Burroughs’ nanny had cursed him with as a child. A powerful guardian spirit and otherworld guide to be offered, as was I in reciting together the line with which Burrough’s often ended his bizarre versions of Grimm’s fairytales, a line written by Shakespeare in The Tempest for Prospero, who says of Caliban; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
So the circle of meaning returns to swallow its own tail like an Ouroboros or an infinite Mobius Loop in the embrace of our darkness as the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves, of truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, and of the balance we must find for the terror of our nothingness in the joy of total freedom in a universe without imposed meaning, wherein the only being, meaning, and value that exists are those we create for ourselves, even if we must seize them from those who would enslave us.
Walk Through the Fire, song from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode Once More With Feeling
Friedrich Nietzsche, a reading list
Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography, by Lesley Chamberlain
Friedrich Nietzsche, zu seinem Geburtstag 15.10.2022 Revision
Nietzsche, der erwacht, Nietzsche, der herausfordert, Nietzsche, der erleuchtet und inspiriert; das sind die drei Nietzsches, die meine Lebensgefährten waren, meine Führer und Musen, und die ich Ihnen als Lied des Orpheus und Ariadne-Faden anbiete, um Ihren Weg durch das Labyrinth des Lebens zu finden.
Veränderlich in seinen Formen, kann er jede Form annehmen, die für Ihre Suche benötigt wird; und wird seine Rollen in den verschiedenen Phasen der Reise so spielen, wie es sich gehört. Es gibt viele Nietzsches, die wie eine endlose Reihe tanzender Schrödinger-Katzen Möglichkeiten bieten, die die seiner Leser als Tintenkleckstest widerspiegeln und widerspiegeln. Wer ist Nietzsche für mich?
Wie keine andere prägende, motivierende und informierende Quelle nimmt Friedrich Nietzsche einen Platz in meinem Leben und meiner Vorstellungskraft ein, weil meine Entdeckung im Jahr vor meinem Abitur erstmals die große Kette des Seins durchbrochen hat, die mich an den Willen der Autorität gebunden hat und die Vorstellungen meiner Mitschüler von Tugend, Wahrheit und Schönheit in einer theokratischen, patriarchalischen und rassistischen Gesellschaft, die mit dem Apartheidregime in Südafrika in Einklang steht, und die mir die Freiheit gegeben haben, mich in einem Universum ohne auferlegte Bedeutung oder Wert zu erschaffen; hat mir dann geholfen, ein primäres Trauma zu verarbeiten, das zu einem entscheidenden Moment wurde, als ich mich dem Befreiungskampf eines fremden Landes anschloss, dessen glitzernde Zitadellen der Pracht schreckliche Wahrheiten verbargen.
Nietzsche war es, der mir half, den Schrecken unseres Nichts mit der Freude der totalen Freiheit in Einklang zu bringen.
Wenn ich von der Durchsetzung der Normalität als einem Übel spreche, gegen das man sich wehren muss, dann mit der Stimme der alten Frau, die in ihrem Haus als Hexe von einem Mob lebendig verbrannt wurde, zu dem auch andere Kinder gehörten, mit denen ich aufgewachsen bin. Um Nietzsche vollständig zu verstehen, müssen Sie den historischen Raum der Befreiung von der systemischen Tyrannei bewohnen, den sein antiautoritärer Bildersturm darstellt.
Ich bin in einer solchen Welt aufgewachsen, einer vormodernen Welt, die an die Gesetze einer grausamen und unerbittlichen Autorität aus fremden und unergründlichen Motiven und jenen gebunden ist, die uns versklaven und behaupten würden, in seinem Namen als Tyrannei der Auserwählten zu sprechen, deren Hegemonien des Reichtums , Macht und Privilegien stützen sich auf unsere Kommodifizierung als bewaffnete Disparität und Diebstahl der Gemeingüter, Fälschung durch Lügen und Illusionen, Unterwerfung durch erlernte Hilflosigkeit und Spaltung des ausschließenden Andersseins, Angst als Instrument der Machtzentralisierung durch gefängnisbedingte Macht- und Kontrollstaaten durch Faschismen des Blutes, des Glaubens und des Bodens und durch Glauben, der im Dienst an der Macht als Diebstahl der Seele bewaffnet wird.
Solche Atavismen der Barbarei beherrschen immer noch einen Großteil der Menschheit und besitzen uns als Vermächtnis unserer Geschichte, gebunden durch eingebettete Tyranneien vieler Art, einer Welt, die Amerika als eine freie Gesellschaft von Gleichen ersetzen sollte. Unsere Zivilisation ist sehr zerbrechlich, ständig bedroht von Abgründen der Dunkelheit, die uns umgeben, und von unerbittlichen, allgegenwärtigen und systemischen Feinden in faschistischer Tyrannei, patriarchalischem Sexualterror, weißem rassistischem Terror, dem Fetischismus des Todes und der Gewalt im identitären Nationalismus und seinen Polizeistaaten und imperialer Militarismus und Entmenschlichung. Dem müssen wir widerstehen, und ich lese Also sprach Zarathustra als ein leuchtendes Widerstandslied.
Unter den großen Lieben meines literarischen Lebens entdeckte ich ihn zuerst, nachdem ich in der siebten Klasse alle Werke von Herman Hesse gelesen hatte, in dem ich eine Resonanz mit der taoistischen Poesie und den Zen-Rätseln fand, die zu meinen formalen Studienfächern gehörten, und dann die Fiktion aufgab nach dem Albtraum von Kawabatas Haus der schlafenden Schönheiten und seinem impliziten erotischen Horror, den ich ausgewählt hatte, nachdem ich seinen atemberaubenden Roman über mein Lieblingsspiel nach dem Schach, The Master of Go, gelesen hatte, und mich danach Platon zuwandte, den ich verehrte, und alles gierig las seine Werke während meines achten Schuljahres. Der Prozess des Sokrates begründete unsere Zivilisation als ein sich selbst hinterfragendes System des gemeinsamen Menschseins und bot mir in der Dialektik der sokratischen Methode Werkzeuge der Selbstkonstruktion und Neuerfindung, die für meine Identität zentral wurden.
Mein Vater, der Theaterregisseur, mein Englisch-, Schauspiel- und Forensiklehrer, Trainer des Debattierteams und Trainer meines Fechtklubs während der gesamten High School war und mir seit meinem neunten Lebensjahr Fechten und Schach beibrachte, schlug vor, dass ich vielleicht gefallen könnte die Diskussion des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in Friedrich Nietzsches Die Geburt der Tragödie; Nietzsches Vision von Zivilisation als Kampf zwischen Leidenschaft und Vernunft, Chaos und Ordnung, bewahrenden und revolutionären Kräften, die sich mit der von Kawabata und Herman Hesse in Das Glasperlenspiel zu einer einheitlichen Vision eines Menschwerdungsprozesses verzahnt und informiert meine Lektüre von Literatur, Politik und allen menschlichen Aktivitäten bis heute.
So entdeckte ich im Sommer meines vierzehnten Jahres vor dem Abitur mit unvergeßlicher Freude und Anerkennung ein Buch, geschrieben von einem, der für mich sprach, Also sprach Zarathustra. In meiner Vorstellung mit dem Kontext meiner Begegnung mit seiner Arbeit verbunden war das große Abenteuer und das zerstörerische Trauma meiner ersten alleinigen Auslandsreise nach Brasilien, um mit anderen Fechtern für die Panamerikanischen Spiele zu trainieren.
To delegitimize a state and seize power is simple when its authorities are willing to demonize themselves. This great truth has once again been demonstrated by the settler regime of Netanyahu and his loathsome conspiracy of genocide of the Palestinians, which the International Criminal Court has charged equally with Hamas as war criminals.
Regardless of what happens as a consequence of this ruling, it remains a pinnacle achievement of our idea of civilization and our universal human rights, and this we must celebrate until the end of humankind, which this event has possibly made no longer inevitable, if we stop the genocide and conquest of Palestine, bring regime change to Israel, and her war criminals to justice.
In collaborating with Hamas and others in the Black Saturday tragedy to create a casus belli for the imperial conquest and dominion of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing and genocide of her peoples, the Netanyahu regime and the state of Israel have transgressed the boundaries of the human and of civilization and have painted a target on all Jewish peoples throughout the world, in whose name they claim to speak and act as a strategy of their subjugation to the state, and on all Americans as well because our nation for over seventy years has sponsored Israeli tyranny and terror and now both Biden and the Democratic Party and Trump and the Republican Party have made us complicit in genocide as our taxes buy the deaths of children.
We must never accept the enemy’s terms of engagement; the first rule of Resistance is that everything the enemy says is a lie. These past days we are confronted with a horrible example of accepting the enemy’s terms, in this case Netanyahu’s lie that to be Jewish is identical with being a member of the Zionist state; the random murders of Israeli diplomats in Washington D.C. by a man who knew only that they were visiting a Jewish museum. They could have been any one of us; this was a hate crime, not a political act or one of liberation struggle, though the chain of causes reaches back to the orders of Netanyahu.
Kill a man because he is a Jew, a Muslim, because of the color of his skin, nationality, language, or any other kind of identity yet undreamed, and to this I will say; Never Again!
I will gladly die on the steps of a synagogue to defend its people, exactly the same as I chose to do at Al Aqsa to defend Islamic families at prayer from the attack in 2021 by Israel Defense Forces operating with settler militia terrorists.
To make an idea about a kind of person is an act of violence.
I warned as the Gaza War began in the wake of Black Saturday that if America sends warships to Israel to help in her conquest of Palestine rather than humanitarian aid, America loses and our enemies win.
Today I wish to revisit that moment, and interrogate whether or not something of our humanity can be clawed back from the darkness.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror; I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the Nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, checkpoints and bantustans, concentration camps and slave pens, and systems of surveillance, force, and control, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
As written by Andre Damon in the International Committee of the Fourth International’s World Socialist Web Site, in an article entitled International Criminal Court prosecutor charges Netanyahu with “murder” and “extermination” of civilians; “On Monday, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan accused the Israeli leaders of presiding over the “murder” and “extermination” of Palestinians, as part of a “common plan to use starvation as a method of war and other acts of violence against the Gazan civilian population as a means to … collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza.”
In announcing the charges, the prosecutor accused Netanyahu and Gallant of “the following war crimes and crimes against humanity”: “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime”; “Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health … or cruel treatment as a war crime”; “Willful killing … or murder as a war crime”; “Extermination and/or murder … including in the context of deaths caused by starvation.”
The prosecutor declared, “We submit that the crimes against humanity charged were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy. These crimes, in our assessment, continue to this day.”
In addition to Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan also applied for arrest warrants against leaders of Hamas, which no doubt reflects pressure from the capitalist governments and supporters of Israel. However, the main political significance of the request for warrants is clear: The state of Israel is a criminal regime.
The charges fully vindicate the global mass protests that have erupted over the past seven months, which have been subject to vicious slander from the ruling class and the media. Protesters have been beaten, arrested and accused of “antisemitism” for denouncing and seeking to halt one of the greatest war crimes of the modern period.
Responding to the charges, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “With what audacity do you dare to compare the monsters of Hamas to the soldiers of the IDF, the most moral army in the world?”
This “most moral army in the world” has destroyed the majority of houses, schools and hospitals in Gaza, alongside every single university. Its leaders have referred to Gaza’s civilian population as “animals,” declaring, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel,” and asserting their intent to carry out collective punishment against an “entire nation.”
Indeed, it is the “most moral army” since Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
The Biden administration responded with its own furious denunciation of the ICC prosecutor’s charges. In a statement, Biden declared:
The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous. And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.
Indeed, there is no equivalence. The Palestinians are living under horrifying conditions of oppression and illegal occupation by Israel. Even if one were to draw an equal sign between the oppressor, Israel, and the oppressed, the Palestininans, Israel has killed 40 Gazans for every Israeli killed in the October 7 attacks.
Biden’s condemnation of the International Criminal Court came less than 24 hours after he spoke at Morehouse College in Georgia, where he declared, “I’ve called for … an immediate ceasefire to stop the fighting.”
But Biden’s response to the prosecutor’s indictment makes it clear that his criticisms of the Netanyahu government are cynical exercises in damage control, aimed at facilitating and enabling the Gaza genocide.
The Biden administration’s efforts to refute the prosecutor’s indictment consist of one absurdity after another.
“The United States has been clear since well before the current conflict that the ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter,” declared State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
This is not true. In 2021, the International Criminal Court ruled that “the Court can exercise its criminal jurisdiction in the Situation in the State of Palestine,” including both Gaza and the West Bank, following the adoption of the Rome Statute by Palestine in 2015.
Notably, the White House supported ICC proceedings against Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war, despite the fact that neither Ukraine nor Russia was a signatory of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC.
When pressed to answer who does have jurisdiction to say whether Israel is committing war crimes, Miller absurdly replied, “Israel.” That is, the criminals should adjudicate whether or not they are guilty of the crime.
Miller declared that the indictment “could jeopardize ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would get hostages out of Gaza and surge humanitarian assistance.” But Hamas has already accepted the terms proposed by the United States for the release of hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, terms that were rejected by Israel.
Biden was joined by leading officials in both the Democratic and Republican parties in denouncing the prosecutor’s actions. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson threatened to sanction the International Criminal Court, which would itself be a violation of international law.
Aside from defending Israel, the response of US officials expresses the acknowledgement that they are guilty of aiding and supporting all the crimes the prosecutor detailed. Johnson stated this concern explicitly, warning, “If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.”
Indeed, the entire political establishment in the United States, Johnson and Biden included, stands guilty of financing, arming and politically justifying a genocide.
In concluding the indictment, the prosecutor declared:
“If we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as being applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions for its collapse …”
This state of affairs is not a distant hypothetical, but an actual fact. The imperialist powers murder and torture all over the world with impunity. They act as a law unto themselves, defying international law at every turn.
While the ICC certainly carries moral weight, it will have no effect on the policies of the imperialist governments. It has been nearly five months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing and starving Palestinian civilians. Since that time, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered, and the entire population has been denied food, water and medical care.
Workers and young people should have no illusions in the United Nations or any other bourgeois institutions of international law to stop the Gaza genocide.
That can only happen through the mass mobilization of the working class, together with young people all over the world, taking the lead in the fight against Zionism, imperialism and the capitalist system.”
As written by Ivana Kottasová and Madalena Araujo for CNN, in an article entitled Exclusive interview: ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 and Gaza; “The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday.
Khan said the ICC’s prosecution team is also seeking warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as two other top Hamas leaders — Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades who is better known as Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader.
The move against the Israeli politicians mark the first time the ICC has targeted the top leader of a close ally of the United States. The decision puts Netanyahu in the company of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant over Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and the Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who was facing an arrest warrant from the ICC for alleged crimes against humanity at the time of his capture and killing in October 2011.
By applying for the arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders in the same action, Khan’s office risks attracting criticism that it places a terror organization and an elected government on an equivalent footing.
A panel of ICC judges will now consider Khan’s application for the arrest warrants.
Khan said the charges against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”
“The world was shocked on the 7th of October when people were ripped from their bedrooms, from their homes, from the different kibbutzim in Israel,” Khan told Amanpour, adding that “people have suffered enormously.”
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people across several locations in southern Israel on October 7 and took some 250 hostages into Gaza. Many of the hostages are still being held in Gaza – Khan told Amanpour this meant crimes continued to be committed against “so many innocent Israelis … that are held hostage by Hamas and families that are waiting for their return.”
Khan told Amanpour his team has a “variety of evidence” to support the application for arrest warrants against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri, including authenticated video footage and photographs from the attacks as well as evidence from eyewitnesses and survivors.
Khan said Israel had “every right and indeed an obligation to get hostages back, but you must do so by complying with the law.”
Responding to the announcement by Khan, Hamas said in a statement that it “strongly condemns the attempts of the ICC Prosecutor to equate victims with aggressors by issuing arrest warrants against a number of Palestinian resistance leaders without legal basis.”
“Hamas calls on the ICC Prosecutor to issue arrest warrants against all war criminals among the occupation leaders, officers, and soldiers who participated in crimes against the Palestinian people, and demands the cancellation of all arrest warrants issued against Palestinian resistance leaders,” the group added.
‘Nobody is above the law’
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” Khan told Amanpour.
“The fact that Hamas fighters need water doesn’t justify denying water from all the civilian population of Gaza,” he added.
More than 35,500 Palestinians have been killed and more than 79,000 wounded in Gaza since October 7, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Monday. CNN cannot independently verify the figures.
Netanyahu called the decision “a political outrage.”
“They will not deter us and we will continue in the war until the hostages are released and Hamas is destroyed,” he said at a meeting of the parliamentary group of his Likud party.
Other Israeli officials echoed his sentiments. Benny Gantz, a member Israel’s war cabinet, criticized Khan’s decision immediately after it was announced, saying that Israel was fighting “with one of the strictest moral codes in history, while complying with international law and boasting a robust independent judiciary.”
“Drawing parallels between the leaders of a democratic country determined to defend itself from despicable terror to leaders of a blood-thirsty terror organisation is a deep distortion of justice and blatant moral bankruptcy,” he said, adding that the decision by the prosecutors “is in itself a crime of historic proportion to be remembered for generation.”
The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, said the application for the arrest warrents was “a complete moral failure.”
“We cannot accept the outrageous comparison between Netanyahu and Sinwar … We will not remain silent,” he said.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog called it “beyond outrageous.”
When reports surfaced last month that the ICC chief prosecutor was considering this course of action, Netanyahu said that any ICC arrest warrants against senior Israeli government and military officials “would be an outrage of historic proportions,” and that Israel “has an independent legal system that rigorously investigates all violations of the law.”
Asked by Amanpour about the comments made by Netanyahu, Khan said: “Nobody is above the law.”
He said that if Israel disagrees with the ICC, “they are free, notwithstanding their objections to jurisdiction, to raise a challenge before the judges of the court and that’s what I advise them to do.”
Israel and the United States are not members of the ICC. However, the ICC claims to have jurisdiction over Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank after Palestinian leaders formally agreed to be bound by the court’s founding principles in 2015.
The ICC announcement on Monday is separate from the case that is currently being heard by the the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over an accusation from South Africa that Israel was committing genocide in its war against Hamas following the October 7 attacks.
While the ICJ considers cases that involve countries and nations, and the ICC is a criminal court, which brings cases against individuals for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Monday’s announcement is not the first time that the ICC acted in relation to Israel. In March 2021, Khan’s office launched an investigation into possible crimes committed in the Palestinian territories since June 2014 in Gaza and the West Bank.
Located in The Hague, Netherlands, and created by a treaty called the Rome Statute first brought before the United Nations, the ICC operates independently. Most countries – 124 of them – are parties to the treaty, but there are notable exceptions, including Israel, the US and Russia.
That means that if the court grants Khan’s application and issues arrest warrants for the five men, any country that is a member would have to arrest them and extradite them to The Hague.
Under the rules of the court, all signatories of the Rome Statute have the obligation to cooperate fully with its decisions. This would make it extremely difficult for Netanyahu and Gallant to travel internationally, including to many countries that are among Israel’s closest allies – including Germany and the United Kingdom.
Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri have been officially designated as global terrorists by the US, meaning they are under travel bans, asset freezes and sanctions. The US, the UK, Japan, Canada as well as the European Union and others have designated Hamas as a terror group and imposed sanctions on its leaders.”
Passing strange that Hamas always sounds like the voice of reason when their words are placed side by side with those of the state of Israel, is it not?
As written by Jo-Ann Mort in The Guardian, in an article entitled The ICC arrest request is a fire alarm for Israel. Will it take heed? This is a moment of extreme crisis for Israel. Resorting to calling the ruling ‘antisemitic’, as Netanyahu did, won’t cut it; “ Regardless of what the final international criminal court decision will be, Israel has entered a new era regarding its relations with its western allies, including the United States. The actions it takes against the Palestinians will no longer go unaccounted for.
This situation was accelerated by the war with Hamas. But the reality is that the international reckoning would have come regardless. That’s because a 57-year occupation of the Palestinian people without a just resolution, coupled with a fascistic, racist government led by the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – and reinforced by the far-right settler leaders Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and the homeland security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir – cannot play without consequences in polite global company.
It’s remarkable that on the same day as the ICC announcement of a request for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, the Netanyahu government made a move, yet again, to undermine Israeli democracy. The ink on the ICC statement was not even dry before the Israeli communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, a lightweight known to toady to his boss whenever possible, seized reporting equipment from the Associated Press, claiming that it had ignored warnings and was providing news feeds to the now banished Al Jazeera. (He was forced to reverse his decision the same day after fierce US opposition.)
In addition to agreeing to shutter Al Jazeera with the creation of a new Israeli media law (whose legitimacy is being challenged in the Israeli courts), Karhi knows no limits. He has also attempted to dismantle Kan, the Israeli public media outlet, because his boss finds it unsuitable to his personal interests. So far, on that count, he has failed.
Similarly, at the same time that the Netanyahu government raged against the ICC dictate, it allowed renegade thugs to attack trucks on route to Gaza with necessary and urgent food supplies. This has been an ongoing issue in Israel. Netanyahu has refused to halt the raiding of supply trucks by an organized group of rightwing activists, actually aligned politically with Ben-Gvir, the minister in charge of policing, who have taken policy into their own hands by destroying food supplies traveling inside Israel en route to Gaza.
I don’t believe that Israel has a policy of starving Gazans, nor do I believe that Israel – even under this extreme government – and Hamas should be weighed equally. But I can certainly see why some, including the ICC, would accuse Israel of promoting a policy of starvation inside Gaza, based on statements by Gallant, who pronounced at the war’s beginning that he planned for a “complete siege of Gaza”.
The Israeli government must forcibly defend the transfer of needed food supplies.
A competent prime minister – let alone a prime minister who wants to be seen by global allies as responsible, upright and moral – would insist and ensure that these convoys be protected. But then, again, an upright prime minister also wouldn’t continue to allow Ben-Gvir to be part of his government, let alone appoint him in the first place.
Words and actions have consequences.
This is the same government that attempted a judicial coup before October 7 and continues to seek out ways to neuter the Israeli judiciary – one of the mainstays of Israel’s weakened democracy that, at the very least, has provided a backstop against global actions precisely like the ICC action. In the recent past, global institutions and outside nations have been assured that Israel’s high court would override any extreme Israeli government actions.
This is an Israeli government that allows Jewish settlers in the occupied territories in the West Bank to run rampant over civilian Palestinian populations
But not with this government. Instead, one of its key ministers just attended a gathering in Spain of European fascist parties promoting their philosophy to coincide with the upcoming European Union elections, led by well-known personalities such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán and the far-right French leader Marine Le Pen, neither a purveyor of a democratic world order or believers in international human rights.
This is an Israeli government that allows Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank to run rampant over civilian Palestinian populations, destroying crops and property, and endangering innocent civilians, as its government hoards more funds for the settlers, hands out guns to untrained civilians, and refuses to adhere to agreements already signed by Israel to uphold funding and other agreements with the Palestinian Authority.
Meanwhile, even Benny Gantz, considered the realist in the current Israeli war cabinet and a potential rival prime ministerial candidate to Netanyahu, refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority in the ultimatum that he just delivered to Netanyahu about leaving his party’s temporary place in the current Israeli government. He wants Netanyahu to meet certain demands, including formulating a real plan to return the hostages and a day-after scenario for Gaza. But where is the realism in the vision or the demands that will fend off international actions or resolve the existential issue of the occupation? The world is tired of waiting for Israel to offer a credible plan for Gaza – or the West Bank. More nations are announcing that they will recognize an independent Palestinian state.
Any mention of a day after must include the issue of Palestinian freedom. Anyone who has watched the thickening of the Israeli occupation for the past nearly six decades, knew it was just a matter of time before some awful darkness would descend between Israelis and Palestinians to force the hand of the occupation. Clearly, the hideous actions by Hamas of 7 October were not envisioned by almost anyone as the catalyst for where we are today. But here we are.
There must be a strengthening of the Palestinian Authority, and a genuine peace process. Without this, Israel will continue to drift away from the democracy so many Israelis value, desire – and need.
This is a moment of extreme crisis – and the ICC ruling is a fire alarm. Resorting to calling the ruling “antisemitic”, as some Israeli officials – including Netanyahu –have, won’t cut it. Whether the ICC was right or wrong, we have arrived at a moment from which there is no turning back. No one who cares about the future of Israel can stand on the sidelines.”
Tear Down the Wall, by Pink Floyd
Shooting of Israeli embassy staffers underscores US ‘era of violent populism’
23 مايو 2024 المحكمة الجنائية الدولية تتهم قادة إسرائيل وحماس بالتساوي بارتكاب جرائم ضد الإنسانية في حرب غزة
إن نزع الشرعية عن دولة ما والاستيلاء على السلطة أمر بسيط عندما تكون سلطاتها على استعداد لشيطنة نفسها. وقد تجلت هذه الحقيقة العظيمة مرة أخرى من خلال نظام نتنياهو الاستيطاني ومؤامرته البغيضة للإبادة الجماعية للفلسطينيين، والتي اتهمتها المحكمة الجنائية الدولية حماس على قدم المساواة بمجرمي الحرب.
وبغض النظر عما يحدث نتيجة لهذا الحكم، فإنه يظل إنجازًا كبيرًا لفكرتنا عن الحضارة وحقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية، ويجب علينا أن نحتفل بهذا حتى نهاية البشرية، والتي لم يعد هذا الحدث حتميًا بسببها.
لقد حذرت عندما بدأت حرب غزة في أعقاب يوم السبت الأسود من أنه إذا أرسلت أمريكا سفناً حربية إلى إسرائيل لمساعدتها في غزو فلسطين بدلاً من المساعدات الإنسانية، فإن أمريكا تخسر ويفوز أعداؤنا.
أود اليوم أن أعود إلى تلك اللحظة وأتساءل عما إذا كان من الممكن استعادة شيء من إنسانيتنا من الظلام أم لا.
وكما كتبت في رسالتي بتاريخ 11 تشرين الأول/أكتوبر 2023، “فلسطين مقابل إسرائيل في جولة إعلانية عن الغثيان في سلسلة لا نهاية لها من الويلات والفظائع والأهوال؛
وإلى الأمام: إلى رفاقي في المقاومة الفلسطينية:
أهلا بالجميع؛
لدي بعض الأفكار حول الأحداث الأخيرة في غزة، حيث قاتلت وخسرت شخصًا أحببته، وأعمال حماس التي حاربت إلى جانبها وأعتبرها إخوتي في النضال الثوري؛ أعمال 7 أكتوبر أو السبت الأسود والتي تشمل أخذ الرهائن وقتل العائلات، وجرائم الحرب التي جعلت السلام مستحيلاً في المستقبل القريب ونزعت الشرعية عن قضية تحرير فلسطين بجعلها غامضة بالتجريد من الإنسانية والفظائع. هذه هي طبيعة القوة، والخوف الذي يُستخدم كسلاح في خدمة السلطة.
هذه هي الآن مقاومتي من أجل قضية شعبي فلسطين وإسرائيل، شعب قسمه التاريخ والإرهاب الطائفي الثيوقراطي. إنني أتساءل عن أصول ودوافع مثل هذه الأعمال، التي تتاجر بهدف تكتيكي يتمثل في إظهار أن وحوش نتنياهو اليمينية البديلة لا تستطيع توفير الأمن الذي يخضعون به إسرائيل، مقابل هدف استراتيجي للشرعية، ولن يقتصر الأمر على حشد الدعم الأمريكي للطاغية. لكن امنحه الإذن والحصانة للحل النهائي للمشكلة الفلسطينية التي طالما حلم بها.
فكيف يمكننا إنقاذ شيء من إنسانيتنا من هذا؟
وهنا أدعو للتساؤل والأحلام بمستقبل أفضل مما كان لدينا في الماضي.
أشكر لكم لسماع لي.
لقد جلبت حماس الفوضى إلى الإمبراطورية الأمريكية وعطلت شرعية إسرائيل من قبل التحالف العربي الأمريكي ضد السيطرة الإمبراطورية الإيرانية، وكرد فعل على الإبادة الجماعية التي لا هوادة فيها للفلسطينيين على يد دولة إسرائيل التي يسيطر عليها الآن نتنياهو ويمينه البديل. عصابة من اللصوص.
هنا الآن نقطة ارتكاز التغيير والمحاسبة لسبعين عامًا من إرهاب الدولة الإسرائيلية والغزو الإمبراطوري في ظل نظام فصل عنصري غير أخلاقي ومثير للاشمئزاز، والذي يقلب قيم تأسيسها من خلال أن يصبح معسكرات الموت التي هرب منها مواطنوها، ويخون الأمل والمثل الأعلى لدولة إسرائيلية. اللجوء من الكراهية والانقسام الطائفي باعتباره انعكاسًا للنازيين الذين استوعبوا القمع منهم كفاشيات دم وإيمان وتراب.
ربما حطمت حماس كل هذا من خلال أسطورة مراقبة الدولة وسيطرتها كوسيلة مفيدة وفعالة لإخضاع طبقات العبيد في أي دولة، وأسطورة مناعة وتفوق المخابرات الإسرائيلية وهيمنتها العسكرية التي تمثلها. إن هذا الاستفزاز الذي يجسد قوة الدول الاستبدادية والإمبراطوريات، والأعمال الانتقامية المحسوبة من قبل إسرائيل والتي ستتبعها، صممته حماس في هذا الاستفزاز لنزع الشرعية عن إسرائيل وكسر تضامن حلفائها والمتعاونين معها في الإرهاب، والذي تظل أمريكا تمثله. الراعي الرئيسي والشرير.
الكثير من ردود الفعل على هذه المأساة هنا بين أصدقائي وفي وسائل الإعلام تبدو محيرة، عالقة في معضلة كلاسيكية يتبادل فيها أبطالنا وأشرارنا الأماكن، لأنه في تمرد العبيد المذهل هذا حيث ضحايا الإبادة الجماعية والمحو هاجم أسيادهم، معذبو الأرض الذين قد نتعاطف معهم عادة، انتهكوا اثنتين من أعز قيمنا الأخلاقية وقواعد السلوك؛ إنهم لا يدافعون بل يهاجمون، مما يجعل مبررات الحرب واستخدام القوة الاجتماعية غير ذات صلة على الرغم من أن هذا التفسير غير التاريخي للأحداث يتجاهل سبعين عامًا من القمع ويسمح للمحتل بتصنيف النضال التحرري لضحاياه على أنه إرهاب، وهي حجة يمكننا بالتالي وإبطال التضليل المؤيد لإسرائيل والدفاع عن السلطة، ونقطة ثانية وأكثر خطورة بكثير؛ لقد احتجزت حماس رهائن وقتلت مدنيين، بما في ذلك الأطفال، وهي جرائم حرب تنتهك حقوقنا الإنسانية العالمية وتضع مرتكبيها خارج نطاق كل القوانين
جميع الحدود.
لقد كتب أحد الأصدقاء اعتذارًا عن تصريحات نابعة من الرحمة والتي يمكن الخلط بينها وبين دعم إسرائيل كدولة وليس كشعب، وهو تمييز يحدث فرقًا كبيرًا؛ وعلى هذا كتبت الرد التالي:
لا يوجد أشخاص أخيار في هذه القصة، بل مجرد شعب قسمه التاريخ ويتعامل مع بعضهم البعض بوحشية تهدد إنسانيتنا نفسها. لقد قاتلت في غزة وخسرت شخصًا هناك، ومن خلال شهادتي التاريخية أقول إن هناك نوعًا واحدًا فقط من الحقيقة التي لا تصبح بوابة راشومون عندما يتم استخدام الإيمان كسلاح في خدمة السلطة من قبل أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا، وهذا هو صحيح بالنسبة لكلا الجانبين في هذه الحرب أو أي حرب أخرى؛ من ينزف؟ من يعاني؟ من يحتاج إلى أعمال النعمة والرحمة؟
ليس من يستحق التعاطف، لأنه في كثير من الأحيان لا يوجد أبرياء، وكما يعلمنا شو في بيجماليون من خلال خطاب ألفريد دوليتل الشهير، فإن هذا يضع عبئًا أخلاقيًا على الضحايا وهو أمر غير عادل؛ فقط من يعاني ويحتاج إلى مساعدتنا، في هذه اللحظة، دائمًا الوقت الوحيد الذي لدينا.
ويأتي بعد ذلك التضامن في العمل والمقاومة والنضال التحرري؛ تيكون أولام، وهو مفهوم يهودي للعدالة التعويضية والتطبيق العملي أو عمل القيم، والذي كثيرًا ما أصفه بأنه شفاء لعيوب إنسانيتنا وانكسارات العالم.
ليس هناك ما يدعوك للاعتذار؛ تعمل الدول جاهدة على الخلط بين شرعية الدولة وخلطها مع أولئك الذين تدعي أنها تتصرف باسمهم، وذلك باستخدام روايات الإيذاء، لأن من يرتدي القبعة البيضاء هو بطل ولا جدال فيه. كل الدول تفعل ذلك، لأن من طبيعة القوة أن تصبح مركزية كقوة وسيطرة. ومن بين الفظائع الحقيقية لسياسات الهوية، الاستيقاظ لإدراك أن المرء هو المستفيد من الإبادة الجماعية، ومن العبودية، والنظام الأبوي، ومن عدم المساواة في السلطة بأي شكل من الأشكال.
لذلك نحن ضائعون في برية المرايا لأثرتون؛ الأكاذيب والأوهام والتاريخ المعاد كتابته والتزييف. لكن قدري هو أن أشكك في كل الأشياء، وكثيرون منهم لا يجتازون اختبار عدم الإيمان.
انتبه دائمًا للرجل الذي يقف خلف الستار.
في هذه الحالة، أتساءل عن أصول ودوافع الحرب الخاطفة التي تظهر ضعف إسرائيل، وهو هدف تكتيكي، على حساب الأهداف الاستراتيجية؛ وتشمل النتائج المباشرة توحيد الدعم العالمي لإسرائيل وتقسيم التضامن الحاسم بين الديمقراطية المناهضة لنتنياهو وحركات السلام داخل إسرائيل عن النضال من أجل تحرير طبقة العبيد، الفلسطينيين، التي كانت حتى هذا الحدث التخريبي في طور التحول إلى وحدة موحدة. أمة.
كوي بونو؟ لا الفلسطينيون ولا الإسرائيليون، على الرغم من أنهم في دولة إسرائيل الشمولية الإمبريالية وفاشية الدم والإيمان والأرض يتقاسمون عدوًا مشتركًا. ويستفيد نتنياهو ونظامه، على الرغم من أن وعده بتوفير الأمن لشعب إسرائيل قد ثبت أنه وهم، وأن المخابرات الإسرائيلية والجيش الإسرائيلي المخيف هو نمر من ورق كما أرادت حماس؛ ولم يتضح بعد ما إذا كان هذا يضعف يده أو يقويها.
فالأمن وهم، وهو الوهم المناسب للطغاة في صناعة الموافقة على الخضوع. وفي منطقة كفاح التحرير هذه، كان انتصار حماس في اختراق الجدار بمثابة خير لا لبس فيه.
هدم الجدار، كل الجدران. ليست فقط جدران حدودنا وسجوننا، بل جدران الأفكار بين الشعوب قبل أي شيء آخر. وعلى المدى الطويل، هذا وحده هو الذي سيجلب لنا السلام والبشرية المتحدة.
إن تكوين فكرة عن نوع من الناس هو عمل من أعمال العنف.
بغض النظر عن المكان الذي تبدأ فيه تقسيمات الانتماء والاختلاف الاستبعادي، سينتهي بك الأمر دائمًا على أبواب أوشفيتز.
لماذا تعيدين يا إسرائيل إنتاج ظروف صدمتك التاريخية كحراس السجن، مع آخرين في دورك السابق؟ لماذا، عندما يكون بوسعنا أن نكون ضامنين لحقوق الإنسان العالمية لبعضنا البعض في مجتمع حر متساوٍ؟
دعونا نخرج من تراث تاريخنا، ونخلق أنفسنا من جديد.
ماذا حدث بعد ذلك؟
إن الأحداث التخريبية والاستقطابية غالبا ما تضعنا أمام خيارين؛ من هي قبعتك البيضاء ومن قبعتك السوداء في هذه القصة؟ من ستعود إلى مسرحيته عندما يدخلون الساحة عند الظهيرة؟ سوف نبدأ في التحول إلى بشر عندما نحرر أنفسنا من طغيان الخير والشر، ونصبح عرضة للأكاذيب والتضليل من جانب أولئك الذين يريدون استعبادنا والذين يدعون أنهم يتحدثون ويتصرفون باسمنا، وخاصة في الأنظمة الثيوقراطية. فكما كتب فولتير؛ “أولئك الذين يجعلوننا نصدق السخافات يمكنهم أن يجعلونا نرتكب الفظائع”. جوت ميت أونس؛ إنها أفظع صرخة معركة، لأنها تسمح بأي شيء.
اليوم تبدأ الإمبراطورية في الرد، حيث أعلن بايدن أن أمريكا ستقف إلى جانب إسرائيل، مع الدولة في الانتقام من خلال الغزو وليس مع شعبها في تحرير الرهائن، في الأعمال الانتقامية الشنيعة التي وعد بها نتنياهو، بعد أن نفذها أعداؤه. الحصانة والعقوبات من أجل الحل النهائي للمشكلة الفلسطينية الذي طالما حلم به. كل من هذا الثلاثي الفوري
الحدث الأكبر للحرب الشاملة كعقيدة أنشأها هتلر وفرانكو وتم اختبارها في غرنيكا والظروف التي خلقتها هي عواقب التواطؤ الأمريكي، لأننا كأمة فشلنا في تفعيل سياسات المقاطعة وسحب الاستثمارات وفرض العقوبات ضد إرهاب الدولة الإسرائيلية والطغيان الذي كان من الممكن أن يمنع ذلك، وإذا أردنا أن نكون محررين وليس غزاة، فيجب علينا على الأقل أن نضغط الآن على إسرائيل لرفع الحصار عن غزة والاعتراف بحماس كحكومة شرعية لها. دعونا نرسل المساعدات الإنسانية، وليس الجيوش.
إذا أرسلنا سفنا حربية لمساعدة إسرائيل في غزو فلسطين، وليس المساعدات الإنسانية للفلسطينيين، فإن أمريكا تخسر ويفوز أعداؤنا.
لقد أعلن نتنياهو وبايدن عن نيتهما الرد على القوة والخوف بمزيد من القوة والخوف، حيث تقبل إسرائيل عرض التكافؤ الأخلاقي للإرهاب الذي تقدم به شريكتها في هذه الرقصة، حماس. وهذا لن يجلب إرهابًا أقل بل أعظم، ولن يجلب الديمقراطية ومجتمعًا حرًا متساويًا، بل مركزية السلطة في أيدي الدول الشمولية للقوة والسيطرة. ومن وجهة نظر إسرائيل وأمريكا أو أي دولة، هذا هو الهدف الحقيقي للتهديدات الخارجية.
وكما قال والدي ذات مرة؛ “السياسة هي فن الخوف، والخوف هو أساس التبادل الإنساني. الخوف خادم غير جدير بالثقة وسيد رهيب. إذن، من ستكون أداة؟
من بين قوى الخوف والقوة والقوة المتكررة التي هي الأصل الحقيقي للشر وأشكاله مثل العنف والحرب والدول البوليسية، أقول لك هذا الشيء الحقيقي الوحيد؛ الخوف والقوة لا يمكنهما الرد على الخوف والقوة. الحب وحده يستطيع أن يفعل هذا، وقوة الحب الخلاصية يمكنها أن تحررنا من خاتم القوة الفاغنري، ومن التزييف، والتسليع، والتجريد من الإنسانية.
لماذا كل منا سجان بعضنا البعض، ولسنا محررين بعضنا البعض؟
Hebrew
3 במאי 2024 בית הדין הפלילי הבינלאומי מאשים את מנהיגי ישראל וחמאס באותה מידה עם פשעים נגד האנושות במלחמת עזה
לעשות דה-לגיטימציה למדינה ולתפוס את השלטון זה פשוט כאשר הרשויות שלה מוכנות לעשות דמוניזציה לעצמן. האמת הגדולה הזו הוכחה שוב על ידי משטר המתנחלים של נתניהו וקנוניה המתועבת שלו לרצח עם של הפלסטינים, שבית הדין הפלילי הבינלאומי האשים אותו באותה מידה עם חמאס כפושעי מלחמה.
ללא קשר למה שקורה כתוצאה מפסיקה זו, הוא נותר הישג השיא של רעיון הציוויליזציה שלנו וזכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו, ואת זה עלינו לחגוג עד לסוף המין האנושי, שאירוע זה הפך כבר לא בלתי נמנע.
הזהרתי כשהחלה מלחמת עזה בעקבות השבת השחורה שאם אמריקה תשלח ספינות מלחמה לישראל כדי לסייע בכיבוש פלסטין במקום סיוע הומניטרי, אמריקה מפסידה והאויבים שלנו מנצחים.
היום אני רוצה לחזור על הרגע הזה, ולחקור אם משהו מהאנושיות שלנו ניתן להחזיר מהחושך או לא.
כפי שכתבתי בפוסט שלי מ-11 באוקטובר 2023, פלסטין נגד ישראל סבב עד Nauseum בסימן אינסופי של צער, זוועות וזוועות;
קדימה: לחבריי בהתנגדות הפלסטינית:
שלום לכולם;
יש לי כמה מחשבות על האירועים האחרונים בעזה, עזה שבהם נלחמתי ואיבדתי מישהו שאהבתי, ופעולות של חמאס שנלחמתי לצדם ונחשב כאחים שלי במאבק מהפכני; פעולות של ה-7 באוקטובר או השבת השחורה הכוללות לקיחת בני ערובה ורצח משפחות, פשעי מלחמה שהפכו את השלום לבלתי אפשרי בעתיד הקרוב ועשו דה-לגיטימציה לסיבת שחרור פלסטין על ידי הפיכתה לדו-משמעית עם דה-הומניזציה וזוועות. כזה הוא טבעו של כוח ושל פחד מנשק בשירות לשלטון.
זוהי כעת ההתנגדות שלי למען עמי פלסטין וישראל, עם מפולג על ידי היסטוריה וטרור תיאוקרטי עדתי; אני מטיל ספק במקורות ובמניעים של פעולות כאלה, שסחרות במטרה טקטית להדגים שמפלצות הימין של נתניהו אינן יכולות לספק את הביטחון שבאמצעותו הן מכפיפות את ישראל, למען ביטחון אסטרטגי של לגיטימיות, ולא רק יחברו את התמיכה האמריקאית בעריץ. אבל תן לו רשות וחסינות לפתרון הסופי של הבעיה הפלסטינית שעליה חלם זמן רב.
איך נוכל להציל משהו מהאנושיות שלנו מזה?
כאן אני מזמין שאלות וחלומות על עתיד טוב יותר ממה שהיה לנו בעבר.
תודה ששמעת אותי.
חמאס הביא את הכאוס לאימפריה האמריקאית ושיבש את הלגיטימציה של ישראל על ידי הברית הערבית-אמריקאית מול השליטה האימפריאלית של איראן, ובתגובה לרצח העם הבלתי פוסק של הפלסטינים על ידי מדינת ישראל שנכבשה כעת על ידי נתניהו והאלטרנטיבה שלו. להקת גנבים.
כאן נמצא כעת נקודת המשען של השינוי והחשבון לשבעים שנות טרור מדינת ישראל וכיבוש אימפריאלי במשטר אפרטהייד מוסרי ותועב, אשר הופך את ערכי הקמתו על ידי הפיכתו למחנות ההשמדה שאזרחיו נמלטו ממנו, ומסגיר את התקווה והאידיאל של מפלט משנאה ומפילוג עדתי כהשתקפות של הנאצים שמהם הפנימו את הדיכוי כפשיזם של דם, אמונה ואדמה.
חמאס ניפץ את כל זה, פוטנציאלית, עם מיתוס הפיקוח והשליטה של המדינה כאמצעי שימושי ויעיל להכנעה של עדות העבדים של כל מדינה, ומיתוס הבלתי מנוצחים והעליונות של המודיעין וההגמוניה הצבאית הישראלים. דמות של עוצמתן של מדינות קרסראליות, עריצות ואימפריות, ופעולות התגמול המחושבות של ישראל שיבואו בעקבותיהן מתוכננות על ידי חמאס בפרובוקציה זו לעשות דה-לגיטימציה לישראל ולשבור את הסולידריות של בעלות בריתה ומשתפי פעולה בטרור, שאמריקה נותרה בה. ספונסר ראשי ונבל.
כל כך הרבה מהתגובות לטרגדיה הזו הן כאן בין חברי והן בתקשורת נראות מבולבלות, נתפסות במזלגות של דילמה קלאסית שבה הגיבורים שלנו והנבלים שלנו מחליפים מקום, בעבור מרד העבדים המדהים הזה שבו קורבנות רצח העם והמחיקה תקפו את אדוניהם, עלובי כדור הארץ שבדרך כלל אנו עשויים להזדהות עימם הפרו שניים מערכי המוסר וכללי ההתנהגות היקרים ביותר שלנו; הם אינם מגנים אלא תוקפים, מה שהופך את ההצדקות למלחמה ושימוש בכוח חברתי ללא רלוונטיות אף שהפרשנות הא-היסטורית הזו של אירועים מתעלמת משבעים שנות דיכוי ומסמיכה את הכובש על ידי סיווג מאבק השחרור של קורבנותיהם כטרור, טיעון שאנו יכולים לפיכך לבטל כפרו את הכיוון הישראלי המוטעה ואת האפולוגטיקה של הכוח, ונקודה שנייה וחמורה הרבה יותר; חמאס לקח בני ערובה והרג אזרחים כולל ילדים, פשעי מלחמה שמפרים את זכויות האדם האוניברסליות שלנו ומציבים את העבריינים מעבר לכל החוקים
כל הגבולות.
חבר כתב התנצלות על אמירות שנולדו מחמלה שעלולות להתבלבל עם תמיכה בישראל כמדינה ולא כעם, הבחנה שעושה את כל ההבדל; ועל כך כתבתי את התשובה הבאה:
אין בחורים טובים בסיפור הזה, רק עם המחולק על ידי ההיסטוריה המתאכזרים אחד את השני בפראות שמאיימת על האנושות שלנו עצמה. נלחמתי בעזה ואיבדתי שם מישהו, ומעדי ההיסטוריה אני אומר שיש רק סוג אחד של אמת שלא הופך לשער ראשומון כאשר האמונה מנשקת בשירות השלטון על ידי אלה שישעבדו אותנו, וזוהי נכון לשני הצדדים במלחמה זו או בכל מלחמה; מי מדמם? מי סובל? מי דורש מעשי חסד ורחמים?
לא מי שזוכה לחמלה, כי לעתים קרובות אין חפים מפשע, וכפי שמלמד אותנו שואו בפיגמליון עם נאומו האיקוני של אלפרד דוליטל, הדבר מטיל נטל מוסרי על הקורבנות שאינו צודק; רק מי שסובל וזקוק לעזרתנו, ברגע זה, תמיד הזמן היחיד שיש לנו.
סולידריות של פעולה, התנגדות ומאבק לשחרור כולם באים אחרי זה; תיקון עולם, מושג יהודי של צדק ופרקסיס מתקן או פעולת ערכים, אותו אני מתאר לא פעם כמרפא את פגמי האנושות שלנו ואת שברו של העולם.
אין לך על מה להתנצל; מדינות עובדות קשה מאוד כדי לבלבל ולערבב בין הלגיטימציה של המדינה לבין אלה שבשמם היא מתיימרת לפעול, תוך שימוש בנרטיבים של קורבנות, שכן מי שחובש את הכובע הלבן הוא גיבור ומעבר למחלוקת. כל המדינות עושות זאת, שכן טבעו של כוח להתרכז ככוח ושליטה. בין הזוועות האמיתיות של פוליטיקת זהויות יש להתעורר ולהבין שאדם הוא הנהנה מרצח עם, מעבדות, מפטריארכיה, מכוח לא שוויוני בכל צורה שהיא.
אז אנחנו אבודים במדבר המראות של את’רטון; שקרים, אשליות, היסטוריות משוכתבות, זיוף. אבל גורלי הוא להטיל ספק בכל הדברים, ורבים מהם אינם עומדים במבחן חוסר האמונה.
תמיד שימו לב לאיש שמאחורי הווילון.
במקרה זה אני מטיל ספק במקורותיו ובמניעים של בזק המדגים את פגיעותה של ישראל, מטרה טקטית, במחיר של יעדים אסטרטגיים; התוצאות המיידיות כוללות איחוד תמיכה עולמית בישראל וחלוקת הסולידריות המכרעת בין תנועות הדמוקרטיה האנטי-נתניהו ותנועות השלום בתוך ישראל ממאבק השחרור של קאסטת העבדים שלהם, הפלסטינים, שהיה עד לאירוע מפריע זה בתהליך של הפיכה מאוחדת אחת. אוּמָה.
קוי בונו? לא פלסטינים ולא ישראלים, אף שבמדינת ישראל הטוטליטרית האימפריאלית ובפשיזם הדם, האמונה והאדמה שלה הם חולקים אויב משותף. נתניהו ומשטרו מרוויחים, אף שהבטחתו לביטחון לעם ישראל הוכחה כהזויה והמודיעין והצבא הישראלי החשש הוא נמר נייר כפי שהתכוון חמאס; אם זה מחליש או מחזק את ידו עדיין לא נראה.
אבטחה היא אשליה, כזו שנוחה לרודנים בייצור הסכמה להכפפה. בתחום זה של מאבק שחרור ניצחונו של חמאס בפריצת החומה היה טוב חד משמעי.
תוריד את החומה, את כל החומות. לא רק חומות הגבולות והכלא שלנו, אלא חומות הרעיונות בין העמים יותר מכל. בטווח הארוך, רק זה יביא לנו שלום ומין אנושי מאוחד.
ליצור רעיון על סוג של אנשים זה מעשה אלימות.
לא משנה היכן אתה מתחיל עם חלוקות של שייכות ואחרות מוציאה מהכלל, אתה תמיד מגיע בשערי אושוויץ.
מדוע, הו ישראל, לשחזר את תנאי הטראומה ההיסטורית שלך כסוהרים, כשאחרים מלוהקים לתפקידך הקודם? למה, כשיכולנו להיות ערבים לזכויות האדם האוניברסליות זה של זה בחברה חופשית של שווים?
בואו נצא מהמורשת של ההיסטוריה שלנו, וניצור את עצמנו מחדש.
מה קורה לאחר מכן?
אירועים משבשים ומקטבים מעמתים אותנו לעתים קרובות עם בחירה; מי הכובע הלבן שלך ומי הכובע השחור שלך בסיפור הזה? משחק של מי תחזור כשהם ייכנסו לזירה בצהריים? נתחיל להיות אנושיים כאשר נשחרר את עצמנו מהעריצות הזו של טוב ורע, הפגיעים כל כך לשקרים והכוונה שגויה של אלה שישעבדו אותנו ואשר מתיימרים לדבר ולפעול בשמנו, במיוחד בתיאוקרטיות. שכן כפי שכתב וולטייר; “אלה שיכולים לגרום לנו להאמין באבסורדים יכולים לגרום לנו לבצע זוועות”. גוט מיט אונס; זו זעקת הקרב הנוראה ביותר, שכן היא מאשרת כל דבר.
היום האימפריה מתחילה להכות בחזרה, כשביידן מכריז שאמריקה תעמוד לצד ישראל, כשהמדינה תנקום באמצעות כיבוש ולא אנשיה בשחרור בני הערובה, שימו לב, בפעולות התגמול המתועבות שנתניהו מבטיח, לאחר שנמסרו על ידי אויביו. חסינות וסנקציה לפתרון הסופי לבעיה הפלסטינית שעליה חלם כל כך הרבה זמן. הן הטרייה המיידית הזו
אירוע גדול של מלחמה טוטאלית כדוקטרינה שנוצרה על ידי היטלר ופרנקו ונבדקה בגרניקה והתנאים שיצרו אותה הם תוצאות של שותפות אמריקאית, שכן אנחנו כאומה לא הצלחנו לחוקק את מדיניות החרם, ההסרה והסנקציה נגד טרור מדינת ישראל. ועריצות שאולי הייתה מונעת זאת, ואם אנחנו רוצים להיות משחררים ולא כובשים, עלינו לפחות עכשיו ללחוץ על ישראל להסיר את המצור על עזה ולהכיר בחמאס כממשלתו הלגיטימית. בואו נשלח סיוע הומניטרי, לא צבאות.
אם נשלח ספינות מלחמה לעזור לישראל לכבוש את פלסטין, ולא סיוע הומניטרי לפלסטינים, אמריקה מפסידה והאויבים שלנו מנצחים.
נתניהו וביידן הצהירו על כוונות לענות על כוח ופחד בעוצמה ובפחד רב יותר, שכן ישראל נעתרת להצעת השוויון המוסרי של טרור מצד בן זוגה לריקוד זה, חמאס. זה לא יביא טרור קטן יותר אלא גדול יותר, לא דמוקרטיה וחברה חופשית של שווים אלא ריכוז הכוח למדינות טוטליטריות של כוח ושליטה. מנקודת המבט של ישראל ואמריקה או של כל מדינה, זו המטרה האמיתית של איומים חיצוניים.
כמו שאבי אמר פעם; “פוליטיקה היא אמנות הפחד, והפחד הוא הבסיס לחילופי דברים אנושיים. הפחד הוא משרת לא אמין ואדון נורא; אז, של מי הכלי זה יהיה?”
מבין הכוחות הרקורסיבים של פחד, כוח וכוח שהם המקור האמיתי של הרוע ושל צורותיו כאלימות, מלחמה ומדינות משטרה, אני אומר לכם את הדבר האמיתי האחד הזה; פחד וכוח אינם יכולים לענות על פחד וכוח. רק אהבה יכולה לעשות זאת, והכוח הגואל של האהבה יכול לשחרר אותנו מטבעת הכוח הווגנרית, מזיוף, סחורה ודה-הומניזציה.
למה אנחנו כלואים זה של זה, ולא אחד את השני משחררים
Like a coven of Dr Frankensteins stitching together a monster of dissimilar parts, each of them with his own agenda and eyeing his fellows for the moment to drive home the knife, the factotums, grifters, flak catchers, and zombiefied minions of Trump in the Party of Treason have voted to approve and send to their co-conspirators in the senate Trump’s Big Bill to Sabotage Democracy and usher in the most massive transfer of wealth in our history, from the poor and working middle classes to the billionaire class.
This is class war, which will create a new precariat and hollow out the middle class, and I urge and advise us all to fight it as such, By Any Means Necessary.
Vote while your vote still has meaning, protest while you still can without being abducted by Homeland Security without cause or charges and sent to a foreign prison to be forgotten, wage lawfare and political and legislative action while such institutions are not yet infiltrated, subverted, and captured by the Fourth Reich. Because that day fast approaches, when America is truly fallen and your citizenship is meaningless; because voting is better than shooting.
So say I from a life which has witnessed far too much of the latter.
I remember vividly the Cambodian refugees who arrived en masse in Sonoma, and were assigned to my mother’s English class at the high school for acculturation and language skills. Filled with stories of horrors they were, and shaped by them as well. During the Presidential election of 1980, when Carter was replaced by Reagan, the whole community vanished for weeks; when they returned to class she asked them where they went. Her star pupil replied; “To the hills. New President, soldiers come now.”
Mom told them; “That can’t happen here.”
This was answered with utmost seriousness in funereal tones; “That’s what we thought, before Pol Pot.”
I imagine we all thought so, in what now seems a long time ago in a vanished age in a world far, far away, before Trump.
As I wrote in my post of July 19 2023, The Republican Party Plan to Dismantle Democracy If Trump Is Re-Elected; This upcoming election will not only decide who is to be the next President of the United States, but also the direction of our future and the shape of humankind to come, possibly for centuries.
Will we choose liberty or tyranny, inclusion and diversity or racism and white supremacist terror, gender equality or patriarchal sexual terror, a secular or theocratic society, truth or falsification and an empire of lies?
Since the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by fundamentalists and the infiltration and subversion of the state by the Fourth Reich under its figurehead Traitor Trump, most dangerous Russian agent to ever attack America, we have begun a slide into totalitarianism halted but not yet reversed in the Restoration of America under Joe Biden.
We are not safe yet, nor will we be unless we expose and confront our destroyers and purge from among us those who would enslave us. I believe the natural consequences of treason to include forfeiture of assets, loss of citizenship, and exile.
As I have said for many years now, thanks for showing us all what’s under your masks, Republicans; Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
So what’s in this bill, now passed by the house and on its way to the Senate to become law?
As written by Chris Stein in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ spending bill, from tax cuts to mass deportations: All the key points laid out in the US president’s House-approved sweeping bill as it awaits Senate consideration; “The Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Thursday passed the One Big Beautiful Bill act, which would enact Donald Trump’s taxation and spending priorities. The legislation will now be considered in the Senate, where the Republican majority will probably make its own changes.
Here is what the version of the bill passed by the House would do:
Extend tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term
After taking office in 2017, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered taxes and increased the standard deduction for all taxpayers, and generally benefited high earners more than most. Those provisions are set to expire after this year, but the Big Beautiful Bill makes them permanent, while increasing the standard deduction by $1,000 for individuals, $1,500 for heads of households and $2,000 for married couples, albeit only through 2028.
An array of new tax write-offs – but only while Trump is president
The bill creates many new tax exemptions, several of which stem from promises Trump made while campaigning last year. Taxpayers will be able to write off income from tips and overtime, and interest made on loans for cars assembled in the United States. People aged 65 and over are eligible for an additional deduction of $4,000, provided their adjusted gross income does not exceed $75,000 for single filers or $150,000 for married couples. But all of these incentives expire at the end of 2028, right before Trump’s term as president ends.
An expanded Salt deduction
In addition to paying federal taxes, residents of many states must also pay state and local taxes (Salt). Prior to 2017, they could deduct these payments on their federal returns, but the tax law Trump signed that year capped these deductions at $10,000, an amount taxpayers in states with high Salt burdens such as New York, New Jersey and California often exceed. House Republicans who represent districts in those states spent weeks demanding the Big Beautiful Bill increase that limit, and succeeded: the bill passed by the House raises the deduction to $40,000 per year.
Money for mass deportations and a border wall
As part of Trump’s plan to remove undocumented immigrants from the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will receive $45bn for detention facilities, $14bn for deportation operations and billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents by 2029. More than $50bn is allocated for the construction of new border fortifications, which will probably include a wall along the border with Mexico. And immigrants hoping to claim asylum or otherwise seek relief through immigration courts will face a host of new fees that advocates say may keep them out of the country altogether.
A much higher budget deficit
All these tax breaks and other spending come with a major cost. Congress’s non-partisan fiscal scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), estimates the bill’s tax policies alone will add nearly $3.8tn to the federal deficit.
A potentially potent restriction on federal courts
Trump’s supporters routinely attack judges who rule against him, and the bill includes a provision that prohibits federal courts from enforcing contempt citations related to temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions. At least one federal judge appears ready to issue such a citation in a high-profile immigration case involving the administration. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley’s school of law, wrote that judges could get around the provision for future cases, but hundreds of existing court orders covering all sorts of subjects – including the many lawsuits against Trump’s policies – would become unenforceable.
Transformed social safety net programs
Republicans have attempted to cut down on the bill’s cost by slashing two major federal safety net programs: Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps people afford groceries. Both are in for funding cuts, as well as new work requirements. The Urban Institute thinktank believes, based on an analysis of a similar policy, these could remove as many as 5.2 million people from Medicaid, while the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities forecasts about a quarter of Snap recipients could leave the program, or nearly 11 million people.
More benefits for the rich than the poor
Wealthier taxpayers appear set to receive more benefits from this bill than poorer ones. Taxpayers with the highest incomes will see their household resources increase by 4% in 2027 and 2% in 2033, largely due to the extended tax cuts, the CBO estimated earlier this week. The poorest tax payers would see their resources drop by 4% in 2033, largely due to the downsized benefit programs, according to the office.
The end of Biden’s green energy incentives
The bill will phase out tax incentives created by Congress during Joe Biden’s presidency meant to encourage consumers and businesses to use electric cars and other clean energy technology. Credits for cleaner cars will end this year and incentives for wind and solar energy will only be available for projects that begin construction 60 days after the bill’s enactment and enter service by 2028. Clean energy manufacturing tax credits will be axed by 2031, while Americans seeking to upgrade their homes to cleaner or more energy efficient appliances will get no further subsidy after the end of this year.
An increased debt ceiling
The US government’s authority to borrow, known as the debt limit, will increase by $4tn. Earlier this month, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, predicted the government would hit the limit by August, at which point it could default on its debt and spark a financial crisis.”
As written by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian, in an article entitled Don’t be fooled. Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is typically ugly and typically misnamed: Republicans love to make the most harmful laws sound sensible or even noble. This pretty-sounding package of tax breaks and spending cuts is just the latest example; “What’s big, beautiful and kept a lot of Republicans up late on Sunday night? There might be various responses to that question, but the answer I’m looking for is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Coming in at 1,116 pages, the bill isn’t quite War and Peace but it’s definitely big. Whether the mega-package of tax breaks and spending cuts is beautiful, however, is up for debate.
And there has certainly been a lot of debate. The bill has been in limbo for a while because a few Republicans who consider themselves “fiscally conservative” are happy with the package’s extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and increased spending for the military and immigration enforcement, but don’t think enough social and climate-related programmes have been slashed to pay for it all. In particular, they want deeper cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, which is a government programme providing health care to low-income people. Late on Sunday, however, in an unusual weekend vote, the hardliners relented a little and the House Budget Committee revived the bill. It still faces some challenges, but it is now closer to becoming law.
If you are in a masochistic mood you can read all 1,116 pages of the bill. But the TLDR is that a more accurate name for the package would be the Screw Poor People and Make the Rich Richer Act. Or the Kick Millions Off Medicaid So a Billionaire Can Buy Another Yacht Act. This isn’t to say that every single element of the package is bad. There is one part, for example, where children under eight are given $1,000 for “Money Accounts for Growth and Investment”, AKA “Maga” savings accounts. In general, though, it’s pretty on-brand for Republicans.
The deceitful name is on-brand too. The right is very cunning when it comes to legislative framing: it loves hiding nasty intentions behind noble-sounding names that are difficult to argue with. Emotive words such as “protect” tend to come up a lot. If a bill has “protect” and “women” in its name, you can be sure it’s not about protecting women, but about bullying transgender people. The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2025 (which was blocked by Democrats in the Senate in March), for example, focused on banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. As the National Education Association said at the time, however, it “does nothing to promote equity in resources, funding, or opportunity, or to tackle the sexual abuses of athletes and subsequent cover-ups that have occurred in women’s sports”.
Another thing Republicans love to do is to pass entirely unnecessary bills with highly emotive names, in order to amplify misleading information. Take, for example, the rightwing lie (repeatedly amplified by Trump) that Democrats want to execute newborn babies. This is obviously nonsense – infanticide is very much illegal in the US – and is a willful misinterpretation of the fact that doctors may sometimes give palliative care to dying babies. This didn’t stop cynical lawmakers from coming up with the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act (a bill that has gone through a number of iterations but was passed by House Republicans earlier this year) requiring doctors to provide care for children born alive during an attempted abortion. Again, there are already laws in place that cover this. The bill was completely unnecessary but it gave Republicans a great opportunity to conflate abortion and infanticide. “Tragically, House Democrats opposed the bill, voted for infanticide, and opted to deny medical care to crying newborns on operating tables struggling to live,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said after most Democrats voted against the legislation.
Republicans have always understood how to use language to manipulate people far better than the Democrats. You may have forgotten the name Newt Gingrich but the former Republican House Speaker has been an integral part in the rise of Trumpism and the current culture wars. Back in 1990 his political action committee distributed a pamphlet called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” that instructed Republican candidates to learn to “speak like Newt”. Gingrich was very keen on exploiting emotive language and saying outlandish things that would make headlines and get the media inadvertently amplifying a preferred narrative. The Republican party may now be full of toadies – but you can’t deny they’re all fluent in Newt.’
As written by Steven Greenhouse in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘Pro-worker priorities’? Trump’s budget bill offers the exact opposite: The ‘big, beautiful’ measure going through Congress would cut health, food and education benefits – and offer a huge boost to the richest; “With Donald Trump pushing hard to give big tax cuts to the rich and do huge favors for crypto billionaires, it was jarring to see a photo of a Trump aide carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Worker Priorities”. The aide was about to place the sign on Trump’s lectern; it mentioned such “pro-worker priorities” as ending federal taxes on tips and overtime pay: catchy, but scattershot policies that will help only a fraction of the nation’s workers.
Not surprisingly, that sign made no mention of Trump’s many anti-worker policies that will do serious harm to millions of workers and their families. Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, which is advancing in the House, includes the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid, a nearly 30% reduction in food assistance, and a $350bn cut in aid that helps working-class kids afford college. Trump has also pushed to end home-heating assistance and to make it harder for millions of Americans to afford Obamacare. If that isn’t painful enough, GOP deficit hawks have vowed to torpedo the budget bill unless it includes even more cuts. Under the current Trump House bill, at least 13.7 million people would lose health coverage – and the deficit hawks’ demands would increase that number.
Even some prominent Republicans acknowledge that the Republican bill contains policies that will screw workers. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri, slammed the Trump-GOP push to chop hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid. “These are working people and their children who need healthcare, and it’s just wrong to go and cut their healthcare when they’re trying to make ends meet, trying to help their kids,” Hawley said. He added: “No Republican should be supporting Medicaid benefit cuts.”
To give a truer picture of what Trump is all about, that Trump aide should have also been carrying a sign that said: “President Trump’s Pro-Billionaire Priorities”. Those priorities are more ambitious and will cost far more than Trump’s “pro-worker priorities” – they include over a trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy, stratagems to help crypto billionaires grow ever richer, and big cuts to the IRS budget to reduce the chances that the ultra-wealthy will get audited. To please his billionaire finance buddies, Trump has sought to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created to protect typical families from financial scams and extortionate banking practices. And let’s not forget the many ways Trump is helping to steer more business to Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s biggest campaign contributor (to the tune of $270m backing the president and other Republicans).
The Center for American Progress points out that the Trump/Republican budget bill would, if implemented, “be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in US history”. Another progressive thinktank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes that the budget bill would cut $1.1tn from food aid, Medicaid and other health programs while lavishing $1.1tn in tax cuts upon those earning over $500,000. Not only that, the 1m households earning over $1m a year would receive $105bn in tax cuts in 2027 – that’s more than the tax cuts going to the 127m households earning under $100,000.
Republicans defend their painful program cuts as healthy, saying they will hold down the budget deficit. But there is of course a far less painful and more worker-friendly way to reduce the budget deficit: don’t extend the trillions in Trump tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor the rich.
When Trump boasts about the “big, beautiful” bill, he talks only about the tax cuts, but never about how the cuts in Medicaid and Snap (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) will hurt millions of families. The Republican party consistently fails to note that one in four small-business owners and one in four veterans live in households that receive help from Snap, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Under the planned cuts to Snap, 42 million people – including one in five children in the US – could see their food assistance reduced.
According to the Penn Wharton Budget model, when one factors in the Medicaid and Snap cuts along with the tax cuts, the Trump-House bill would cause Americans earning less than $17,000 a year to lose $1,030 on average in after-tax income starting in 2026. Households earning between $17,000 and $51,000 a year would lose around $700 on average. The very wealthy do far better. For those in the richest 0.1% – that is, households earning at least $4.3m a year – their after-tax income would jump by over $388,000.
That doesn’t sound very pro-worker to me. It’s a perversion of the truth for Trump to boast of his pro-worker bona fides when he steadfastly refuses to push for the two things that would do most to lift workers’ living standards: push to raise workers’ pay and push to strengthen labor unions and worker bargaining power. Not only has Trump done nothing to increase the paltry $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, but he killed a Biden-era regulation that required federal contractors to pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour. Now many of those workers will see their pay sink to $13.30 an hour. What’s more, Trump has sought to sabotage unions, not strengthen them. He has moved to strip 1 million federal employees of their right to bargain while also seeking to cripple the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers’ ability to bargain for better pay and conditions.
As for Trump’s call to end the tax on tips, that will help many restaurant servers and hotel housekeepers, but the Yale Budget Lab says that provision has a narrow scope and will help less than 3% of all workers.
Last year, candidate Trump said: “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But second-term Trump is doing just the opposite. His budget calls for a devastating 40% cut in rental assistance that millions of Americans rely on to pay their monthly rent. Candidate Trump also said: “Your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline – all can be cut down in half.” But for millions of Americans he is increasing that burden by pushing to end a program that helps six million struggling households afford to heat and cool their homes.
Many blue-collar Americans are eager to send their kids to college, but Trump and House Republicans would make that harder. Around one in eight Americans have federal student loans, which have been key to enabling millions of people to afford college. But Republicans want to eliminate subsidized loans for undergraduates and increase the minimum monthly payments that low-income borrowers already have a hard time paying.
Trump boasts he is pro-worker, but he is doing absolutely nothing to help with what many workers say are their biggest priorities: making housing more affordable, reducing the cost of childcare and healthcare, making it easier to send one’s kids to college, and bringing down prices. Billionaires can rejoice that Trump is capitulating to them and their priorities, but American workers shouldn’t be fooled into believing that Trump is addressing their needs.”
As written by Dan Rather in Steady; “Donald Trump and his MAGA buddies in Congress are attempting to slip one by the American people. The mega-spending bill that Trump calls “one big, beautiful bill” is 1116 pages long, contains huge spending and tax cuts, and was dropped on the U.S. House of Representatives just seven days ago. The first committee vote was taken on Sunday night, in case you missed it. And many Republicans hope you did.
Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing for a vote on the massive domestic policy bill by the end of the week, in time for Memorial Day.
Someone needs to call a timeout, or this massive remake of the federal government could be a done deal faster than you can say three-day weekend. The incredibly short timeline is no accident. Trump and Johnson don’t want to give anyone time to read the fine print.
Because then folks would know that the bill would cut $625 billion from Medicaid, pushing more than 8 million of our most vulnerable from its rolls.
People would also be aware that cuts to the food stamp program would target families with children, seniors, and veterans.
Voters would find out that someone making less than $15,000 a year would see their federal taxes increase by 74.3% by 2031. That is not a typo.
Trump claims all of these cuts are necessary to make his $4.5 trillion tax cut for billionaires and corporations permanent.
Now you understand the reason for the rush. Get it signed, sealed, and delivered before the ink is dry, and Americans will be none the wiser. Though it will still have to be reconciled with the Senate bill.
The timeline is so short that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not had time to fully vet the bill and produce estimates of its budgetary impact. How can lawmakers read, research, and debate the bill in mere days? They can’t.
Even with the absurdly short timeline, Johnson is facing opposition from both ends of his party. Four hardline fiscal hawks stalled the bill in committee but ultimately allowed it to move to the full House. They didn’t vote in favor of the bill; they just voted “present.”
This does not bode well for the speaker, who will have to make significant concessions to appease the hawks and get them on board. But every concession he gives them will likely mean a “moderate” Republican will balk. Republicans have only a seven-vote majority in the House.
Those less radical Republicans know the spending cuts and tax giveaways are deeply unpopular. Though the cuts are being framed as a way to root out “waste, fraud and abuse,” most Americans aren’t buying it. They strongly oppose cuts to entitlement programs like Medicaid. They do not favor big tax cuts for billionaires and other very wealthy people.
Where is the president on all of this? For a decade, Trump has repeatedly said he would not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. As recently as May 4, he said he would veto any bill that included Medicaid cuts. He has been mum on the topic since.
The “big, beautiful bill” dubbed the “big bad billionaire bill” by the Democratic Women’s Caucus has the potential to hurt the overall economy too.
The CBO determined that the tax cuts will add at least $4.6 trillion to the national debt, causing Moody’s to downgrade the U.S. credit rating over the weekend. This change could affect the markets and the interest rate the U.S. government can get to borrow money.
The consequences of some of Trump’s executive orders are now affecting real people in real time. First, the tariffs. Over the weekend, Walmart, the retail version of the canary in the coal mine, said it would be passing on price increases caused by the tariffs to Walmart shoppers. This incensed the president, who jumped on Truth Social to yell at the country’s biggest retailer, insisting that Walmart should, “EAT THE TARIFFS and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
And with one social media post, Trump finally admitted what he’s long denied — tariffs raise prices. The Budget Lab at Yale estimates the average American household will pay an additional $2,300 a year.
Walmart capitulated, sort of — saying it would pass on just some of the increased costs. The specter of higher prices and inflation has pushed consumer sentiment to its second-lowest level ever.
While the rich are about to get even richer, the rest of America is forced to suffer because of decisions made by the president.
The effects of staffing and budget cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are becoming more pronounced. As tornadoes bombarded Kentucky over the weekend, the state’s weather office scrambled for staff. The office in Jackson, Kentucky, no longer has overnight forecasters after DOGE cut hundreds from the National Weather Service. And that’s just one area of one state. Coming soon: hurricane season, on June 1.”
As written by the Alt National Park Service on their FB page; “Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” isn’t just about tax cuts it quietly guts federal protections and reshapes entire agencies. Here’s what’s buried inside:
– Closure of the U.S. Department of Education
– 25% expansion of logging in national forests, bypassing environmental reviews and fast-tracking timber production
– Rollbacks on clean energy incentives, cutting tax credits for EVs and renewables, gutting key climate provisions
– More public lands opened up for drilling, mining, and logging, with royalty breaks for fossil fuel companies
– Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, ending U.S. participation in global climate efforts
– Executive Order 14215, forcing independent federal agencies to follow White House legal interpretations and centralizing authority under the presidency
– Pension changes for federal workers hired before 2014, cutting take-home pay by raising required contributions, reducing future payouts, and eliminating early retirement supplements
– REINS Act-style regulation repeal, where major federal rules expire unless Congress re-approves them every 5 years allowing Trump to quietly erase protections without rewriting laws
– Expanded executive control over agency budgets, allowing the White House to move federal funds internally without explicit congressional approval
– Restoration of impoundment powers, giving Trump the ability to block or delay spending already passed by Congress reviving powers stripped after Watergate
– Creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), placing White House–aligned teams inside every federal agency with access to internal systems and influence over hiring and daily operations
– Sharp cuts in regulatory enforcement, with agencies like the EPA, CFPB, and Labor and Transportation Departments halting enforcement of key safety, environmental, and anti-discrimination rules
– Trump’s personal control over economic policy, strengthening his power to direct tariffs, pressure private companies, and dictate pricing with little resistance treating the U.S. economy like his own business
This bill isn’t just “big.” It’s a roadmap for dismantling oversight, hollowing out federal protections, and handing Trump sweeping, unchecked control. Read the fine print.”
As written by Robert Reich in a Substack article entitled Why the one big beautiful bill is the single ugliest you can imagine; “Friends,
The old professor in me thinks the best way to convey to you how utterly awful the so-called “one big beautiful bill” passed by the House this morning actually is would be to give you this short 10-question exam. (Answers are in parentheses, but first try to answer without looking at them.)
1. Does the House’s “one big beautiful bill” cut Medicare? (Answer: Yes, by an estimated $500 billion.)
2. Because the bill cuts Medicaid, how many Americans are expected to lose Medicaid coverage? (At least 8.6 million.)
3. Will the tax cut in the bill benefit the rich, the poor, or everyone? (Overwhelmingly, the rich.)
4. How much will the top 0.1 percent of earners stand to gain from it? (Nearly $390,000 per year.)
5. If you figure in the benefit cuts and the tax cuts, will Americans making between about $17,000 and $51,000 gain or lose? (They’ll lose about $700 a year.)
6. How about Americans with incomes less than $17,000? (They’ll lose more than $1,000 per year on average.)
7. How much will the bill add to the federal debt? ($3.8 trillion over 10 years.)
8. Who will pay the interest on this extra debt? (All of us, in both our tax payments and higher interest rates for mortgages, car loans, and all other longer-term borrowing.)
9. Who collects this interest? (People who lend to the U.S. government, 70 percent of whom are American and most of whom are wealthy.)
10. Bonus question: Is the $400 million airplane from Qatar a gift to the United States for every future president to use, or a gift to Trump for his own personal use? (It’s a personal gift, because he’ll get to use it after he leaves the presidency.)
Most Americans are strongly opposed to all of these things, according to polls. But if you knew the answers to these 10 questions, you’re likely to be in a very tiny minority. That’s because of (1) distortions and cover-ups emanating from Trump and magnified by Fox News and other right-wing outlets; (2) a public that’s overwhelmed with the blitzkrieg of everything Trump is doing and can’t focus on this; (3) outright silencing of many in the media who fear retaliation from the Trump regime if they reveal things that Trump doesn’t want revealed.
Please do your part: Share this as widely as possible.”
As written by Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman in the New York Times, in an article entitled Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025: The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies; “Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.
Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.
Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.
Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.
He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.
He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”
“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.
“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”
Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.
The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”
The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.
Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.
That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.
Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.
“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”
The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.
Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.
The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.
“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”
Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.
Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.
Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.
Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)
Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.
Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.
Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”
Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.
The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.
Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.
“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.
Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.
Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.
“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”
Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.
On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.
Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.
The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.
Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.
Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.
“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”
Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.
“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.”
As written by Lee Moran in Huffpost, in an article entitled Authoritarianism Expert Warns Why It’s Critical To Listen To Trump’s Words Right Now: Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained how authoritarian takeovers usually go down; “Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned on Wednesday that when Donald Trump talks about obliterating and then politicizing the civil service, and seizing control of every aspect of government if he wins the White House in 2024, he really means it.
“Nobody is ever prepared” for an authoritarian takeover of their country, Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi.
“They think they are going to be the exception. They don’t listen to the warning signs until it’s too late,” she continued.
But Trump is actually “being very clear” with what he is saying, said Ben-Ghiat.
Last week, a New York Times article said Trump would seek to expand presidential authority “over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
Ben-Ghiat cautioned: “Authoritarians always tell you what they are going to do as a kind of challenge and as a warning, and people don’t listen until it’s too late.”
If Trump wins election again, he will “be finishing the job that he started, and by the way that’s not just destroying democracy internally,” she added. His other main aim was “to take America out of the realm of democratic internationalism and align it with autocracies. That will happen as well.”
Republicans create a monster of unlike parts in the Big Bill
Trump’s ongoing threat to American democracy/ MSN
Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ spending bill, from tax cuts to mass deportations
All the key points laid out in the US president’s House-approved sweeping bill as it awaits Senate consideration
Torch of Liberty 