Madness and vision, the glorious rebellion against Authority which confers freedom and an Unconquered and self created being as a Living Autonomous Zone and agent of change, the consequences of our civilization’s war against nature and the wildness of ourselves, and the dialectics of gender identity; herein I write in celebration of Emily Bronte, on her birthday tomorrow, July 30.
Why is this important, and why now? Herein we may read the futures we must choose between, as we pass through this Rashomon Gate Event of transformative change, ambiguous and relative truths and ephemeral and shifting meanings, and shape ourselves to the image we want to become as we begin civilizational collapse and catastrophic ecological change from which humankind may never survive, in imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle wherein a captured America under the Fourth Reich balances on the edge of becoming a failed state and throughout the world democracies fall and are succeeded by fascist tyrannies, and the hammer of the Third World War threatens to forge us into aberrant and unrecognizable forms.
Herein I write in celebration of the author and her perplexing novel, which continues to provoke impassioned discourse and afright the horses. Emily Bronte saw herself as the Titan Prometheus, cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel, and bearing the stolen fire of the gods. I have always seen in her a kindred spirit, and myself mirrored in her strange and transgressive reimagination of the Bible.
Wuthering Heights reimagines the mythology of human origins as the awakening and progress from an animal state, much like Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or Ted Hughes version of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Like its models Paradise Lost and Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights is both central to the tradition of Romantic Idealism and a critique of it, a dialectical interrogation of the values of Platonic philosophy. Its themes and ideas echo through the works of Iris Murdoch and continue to be relevant after two hundred years.
Published a generation after Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and referential to its themes, with the roles of Victor Frankenstein and his monster transposed to Catherine and Heathcliff and the relational dynamic shifted from parent-child to that of lovers, Wuthering Heights is among the origin texts of feminism. I recommend it for an introductory course of study on feminism in literature along with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
Sylvia Plath embodied and re-enacted the relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff with Ted Hughes; Ted Hughes cast himself and Sylvia Plath in the roles as Orpheus and Eurydice as a life performance, the myth being Emily Bronte’s primary source in Wuthering Heights, and we can study its actual praxis in their biographies as theatre. Its nuances as a central myth of our civilization can also be seen in its fairytale version, Beauty and the Beast, in the gorgeous film by Jean Cocteau.
Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Emily Bronte’s secondary sources include the myth of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Plato’s Protagoras, poetic versions of his myth by Goethe and Byron, and the play by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
My history with this book begins when as a curious twelve year old I asked my mother, “How do people know if they are a boy or a girl? How do we choose?”
To which she replied, “Everyone is both, of course. Discovering how we like to play the game is one of life’s great adventures.” And she gave me Wuthering Heights to read.
Its relevance to my question was not immediately apparent to me. We may ask, as I did when I first began to read it, “But mom, where is her ax?” To which the answer was, “She has come to redeem and awaken our true nature, not to slay monsters or destroy our cages”.
With time I came to understand Catherine and Heathcliff as the dual nature of a whole person, in a story of transformative rebirth and the renewal of the world. Only secondarily is the novel about revolutionary political and social change, seizure of power, and freedom from arbitrary categories of being.
It is a measure of the distance we have come since it was written that my expectation as a young reader was that Heathcliff was obviously of demonic origin, and there would be something like Buffy’s Ax of Slaying somewhere.
Plus, written by one of the infamous girls called the Three Weird Sisters in reference to the Fates and to the witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and not about magic? Alas, we await that version of the novel.
The novel that Emily Bronte wrote is very different. There are at least three stories here, a narrative puzzle box which employs the device of self referential interlocking layers of thematic and narrative structure as if written two hundred years later; the relationships of creative and destructive forces in the universe as reflected and embodied in ourselves and our passions, the origin myth of human emergence from an animal state, and the power dynamics of sex, gender, and identity in male-female relations.
Heathcliff is a monster, and the story arc foregrounds his redemption through love, but I find interesting the fact that he is a monster who is theriomorphic, based on Emily’s beloved dog, whom she used to batter in psychotic rages and ritualistically provoke into savagery as a proxy of her own wildness. Yet this transgressive and bizarre cross-species relationship, a complex bestiality with its chiaroscuro of sadomasochistic and fetishistic elements, has never been reimagined in literature as the allegorical fable of the limits of the human and our relationship with our own animal nature as the werewolf story it so obviously is.
Also, the frame story is one of madness and love; it describes a path of return to sanity in a healing process akin to modern psychotherapy practice and referential to Hamlet. Was the return from madness her own?
Her novel is a song of the destructive power of love, filled with glorious perversities, seizures of power, pagan rites, but above all of gender relations in which men are brutes who may become human with the intercession of feminine redemption and of the transformational creative power of love.
Wuthering Heights is a reimagination of Beauty and the Beast and the myth of Orpheus, steeped in archaic scholarship and following a process of initiation suggestive of Jungian shadow work and individuation, as told by a Byronic heroine. I believe she thought of it as her contribution to the storytelling game on the fateful night the world was given Frankenstein, as in the film Gothic. The next story in that game was told by Jeanette Winterson in her novel Frankissstein: A Love Story.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
Above all I celebrate Emily Bronte’s willingness to embrace the darkness, and like a goddess or demiurge to transform us with the creative powers of life and of love from beasts into human beings, an unmaking of Circe’s Swine.
Things I have learned from Wuthering Heights; be fearless, be free, and own your passion- it is the key to liberation as a self-created being and to the discovery, shaping, and ownership of identity. Love without limits, and embrace its redemptive madness, because it’s the only thing that makes life worth living.
Thanks, mom.
Here I turn to the parallel and interdependent text to which it was written in direct replay, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
What do the figures of Frankenstein and his monster teach us about ourselves and others? Why has Mary Shelly’s reimagination of Romantic Idealism become central to our civilization?
As I wrote in my post of October 24 2021, Embracing Our Monstrosity: Hierosgamos in Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights; Our monsters, ourselves; genius, madness, inspiration, the quest to become as gods; who among us has not longed to steal the divine fire, to look beyond ourselves, to defy all limits and laws? To be, even for a moment, the unconquered Victor Frankenstein?
Yet as Prospero said of Caliban, we must also say of Frankenstein’s monster; “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
As I have written of Vander Meer’s retelling of Frankenstein in the novel Borne: Mary Shelly’s glorious novel was also about the abandonment of a child who is no longer perfect, among a number of other themes, including the origins of violence.
A major theme of the novel Frankenstein is the monstrosity of God, who like Victor creates and then abandons his child when it is imperfect and no longer a reflection of his, when we become our own free and independent beings. Yes, Victor wants to become a god, which is why the story resonates with everyone, and is an allegory of the failure of science to realize Idealist visions of humanity, the novel being both a codification and critique of Romantic Idealism.
But in his quest to become a god, Victor also desires to be worshipped and obeyed; he wants to free himself from subjugation by authority, but not to liberate others. Instead of changing the nature of power, force, and control in casting down from his throne a tyrant god who bound us to his laws and then abandoned us through the abolition of the Law, of the social use of force, and of the centralization of power and authority to an elite as would a true revolutionary, Victor’s tragic flaw of pride compels him to become the next tyrant and enact the role of his former nemesis.
It is a cycle of substitutive tyranny which as Vladimir Nabokov pointed out in his novel Lolita, a brilliant critique of the failure of Idealism which led to his father’s execution in the Russian Revolution as an aristocrat, has been recapitulated throughout the world in revolutions which become tyrannies, especially under the imposed conditions of anticolonial struggle.
In our history we may study the real world consequences of the tragedy of Victor Frankenstein on a national scale, and this is far from unique as a consequence of the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god and underworld king; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics and self-justification of power; the lie that only power has meaning, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important. The great question which democracy attempts to answer is how to balance the rights and needs of individuals so that none may infringe upon another’s.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; Napoleon, Washington, Stalin, Mao, Chavez, Mugabe, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer as examples of state terror and tyranny the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
All those who hunt monsters must remember always Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil; “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.”
I like the character of Victor, and have used variants of this name as aliases because he is a figure of Milton’s rebel angel, but also I admire the monster, a figure of the Shadow based on Caliban in The Tempest. The story is about their relationship as parent and abandoned and damaged child.
Frankenstein addresses themes of science versus nature, reason versus passion, and both of these within a Promethean rebellion against God, authority, and universal Law as a form of Idealism, and the historical liberation from theocratic tyranny which came with atheism and democracy in the Enlightenment and birthed the American and French Revolutions against Church and Monarchy; this from the perspective of the monster’s creator.
From the monster’s view, the novel portrays the disfigurement of the soul through abandonment by a parent who also functions as a figure of a creator-god and of Authority, known as the problem of the Deus Absconditus which refers to the god who bound us to his despicable Laws and then ran away before he was caught, and who drives the child to achievement and supremacy as his proxy of success and vindication before the world rather than empowering the child’s own agency to discover and follow a unique bliss and personhood- what the Greeks called Arete or Virtue but also denoting superiority as with the apex predator and ideal of patriarchal masculinity Achilles in the Iliad, one of Mary Shelly’s sources- in a chosen arena but who like Alberich in Wagner’s Ring must renounce love to win supremacy and power, rendering all victory meaningless and hollow, dehumanizing the child and shaping a vessel of rage and vengeance, a tyrant forged in the violence of the struggle to free himself from enslavement, with the iron self discipline and will to enact subjugation of others in their turn in order to win a space of relative safety and freedom, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others. It is about birthing monsters, and the chaotic plasticity of identity and relationships.
As written by Octave Mirbeau in The Torture Garden; “Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding. Aren’t the gods monsters? Isn’t a man of genius a monster, like a tiger or a spider, like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things? Why, I too then-am a monster!”
So say all revolutionaries who free themselves and others by seizures of power and transgression of the Forbidden, but also all fascist tyrants and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege who claim the right to subjugate us because they are better; Hannibal Lecter, Hitler, and the far too real monster who admires and has modeled himself after both, Donald Trump.
To be a Nietzschean Superman, beyond good and evil, is a glorious and liberating thing, wherein we break the Great Chain of Being which binds us to a monstrous god and to those who claim to speak in its name as Authorities of faith and state, but when we create ourselves anew, who then shall we become?
Let us remember always the companion text to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which tests the propositions that evil things may be done for good purposes, and that for the Superman and in an amoral universe without meaning or value other than what we ourselves create good and evil are meaningless or equivalent. With the figure of Raskolnikov Dostoevsky invents fascism and interrogates the figure of the fascist tyrant, and predicts the inevitable failure and collapse of all such states from their internal contradictions.
All that matters in the end is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
A story which is at once Greek tragedy and Freudian study of the process and relations between the id, ego, and superego, with a third parallel storyline relating a Romantic reimagination of Biblical Genesis like that of Blake, it is both the apotheosis of Romantic Idealism and its first criticism, exegesis and classical myth, dialectic on responsibility and discourse on Aristotle’s categories of being, critique of Rousseau’s natural man and of Nietzsche’s Superman which it also inspired in a recursive loop of influence across the seas of time. Its author was a Pythian visionary whose insight reached centuries into the future, and whose immense scholarship reimagined some of the greatest works of our historical civilization.
Mary Shelly’s influence echoes through time, multiplies, and reshapes the contexts of its polymorphous meanings. One cannot think of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa without thinking of his original, the dual-aspected monster-child created to bind our nature with reason like the project of the Enlightenment whose apotheosis witnessed a statue of the goddess of Reason looming over the guillotine, nor read her sources and references in the prophecies of William Blake and Milton’s Paradise Lost without reevaluating them in terms of Mary Shelly’s novel; her work resonates through past and future, and what touches, it changes.
Who can read the work of Emily Bronte without the meaning of her great novel Wuthering Heights changing with our awareness that its author thought of herself as Victor Frankenstein and as the titan Prometheus cast out of heaven like Milton’s rebel angel? That Heathcliff is her monster, a demon to be united with in an exalted Nietzschean rapture of transformative rebirth? And does this not change one’s reading of her source Frankenstein?
A nested set of puzzle box themes and contexts, multiple narrative threads which create paradoxes of meaning, role reversals and inversions of identities, and the questioning of the mission of civilization and the morality of progress; Mary Shelly and Emily Bronte together created the modern world with their great books Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights 1992 film starring Juliet Binoche, Sinead O’Connor as Emily Bronte
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and slavery, designed famine and war crimes against children and other civilians in service to kleptocratic colonialist regimes and Imperial conquest and dominion; this is the state of Israel in all her horror and terror, and now of Vichy America under the Trump regime and his Theatre of Cruelty.
Israel and America together are Atrocity Regimes of no laws but authoritarian rule by force and fear, no morality but hate, no grand dreams of our humanity and citizenship as equals but nightmares of fascisms of race, faith, and national identity.
Herein we witness again a great and terrible truth; no matter where you begin with ideas of kinds of people, with hierarchies and taxonomies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
In Gaza we find a scrying glass of our future as the Trump and Netanyahu regimes plan for the whole of humankind. To this nightmare of tyranny and terror under the iron regimes of those who would dehumanize us, enslave us, and steal our souls we must give the reply written on the gates of Auschwitz by her prisoners; Never Again!
Images of mass starvation from the use of famine as a weapon of genocide and war by Israel confront us daily in our news, and for over fifteen months now, yet the world does nothing to break the Israeli blockade of food and medical aid; indeed both Biden and Trump have bombed our counter-blockade positions in Yemen and made all Americans complicit in genocide as pour taxes buy the deaths of children.
As I wrote in my post of March 19 2024, Israel Unleashes the Third Horseman: Famine in Gaza; Netanyahu now rides upon his black horse of famine, bringing his mad dream of the Final Solution of the Palestinian Problem with all of its attendant shadows lingering from the Holocaust.
As the passage in Ezekiel 14:21 warns us when the Infinite unleashes the “Four disastrous acts of judgement” to bring a Reckoning against the Elders of Israel for crimes of idolatry, the use of social force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
Israelis and Palestinians are one people divided by history, divisions shaped in service to power by those who would enslave us.
Perhaps Aynn Rand saw truly in this one prediction of the collapse of our civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions, as she is often paraphrased from her novel The Fountainhead; “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
If we wish to preserve our humanity, our reply must always be “All of us, in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and an emerging United Humankind.”
The Gaza War has as its major theme the question of human rights, and if such an idea will have a place in whatever future we may choose. Here then is a retrospective of my witness of history of this conflict, and of its consequences for human being, meaning, and value, and of the choices we make about how to become human together.
As I wrote in my post of February 8 2025, Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians; Once you open the door to theocratic tyranny and terror, there is no going back; we must go through it, and reach our liberation on the other side.
Our Clown of Terror and Rapist In Chief Traitor Trump wishes to erase the Palestinians and in their place build a Riviera and playground of wealthy fools and hegemonic elites as a new crusader kingdom, dazzled by fantasies of limitless wealth and a power base independent from the limits of the American political system. This aligns with the historical forces at work which drive the global embrace of authoritarian regimes and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, as capitalism in its terminal stage seeks to free itself of democracy as its host political system.
We have see this dream of madness and cruelty before, during the Crusades which continued from 1096 with the capture of Jerusalem to 1718 in the Austro-Turkish War; the central conflicts involved in the idea of colonial empires authorized by the Infinite as war, plunder, and amoral rapacity versus the ideals of chivalry and the social use of force as defense of the innocent and the powerless are beautifully interrogated in the film Kingdom of Heaven.
If Trump and Netanyahu are permitted to realize their dreams of imperial conquest and dominion through the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians, we will witness the re-enactment of the horrors and travesty of the Crusades, as Vichy America establishes a colony of Christian Identity-Zionist elites beyond the reach of all law by which to destabilize and capture Europe and much else.
And the world will enter a new dark ages as democracy and civilization falls to an Age of Tyrants and wars of imperial dominion fought with weapons of unimaginable horror, possible for seven or more centuries as were the Crusades, and ending with the extinction of humankind.
This we must resist, by any means necessary.
As I wrote in my post of October 11 2023, Palestine Versus Israel Round Ad Nauseum In An Endless Litany of Woes, Atrocities, and Horrors;
Forward: to my comrades in the Palestinian Resistance:
Hello everyone;
I have some thoughts on the recent events in Gaza, Gaza where I have fought and lost someone I loved, and actions by Hamas whom I have fought alongside and count as my brothers in revolutionary struggle; actions of October 7 or Black Saturday which include the taking of hostages and murder of families, war crimes which have made peace impossible in the near future and have delegitimized the cause of liberation of Palestine by making it ambiguous with dehumanization and atrocities. Such is the nature of power, and of fear weaponized in service to power.
This now is my Resistance in the cause of the peoples of Palestine and Israel, a people divided by history and sectarian theocratic terror; I question the origins and motives of such actions, which trade a tactical goal of demonstrating that Netanyahu’s alt-right monsters cannot deliver the security by which they subjugate Israel, for a strategic one of legitimacy, and will not only weld American support to the tyrant but grant him permission and immunity for the Final Solution of the Palestinian problem he has long dreamed of.
How can we salvage something of our humanity from this?
Herein I invite question, and dreams of a better future than we have the past.
Thank you for hearing me.
Hamas has brought the Chaos to the American Empire and disrupted the legitimation of Israel by the Arab American Alliance versus the Imperial Dominion of Iran, and in reaction to the relentless genocide of the Palestinians by the state of Israel now captured by Netanyahu and his alt right band of thieves.
Here now is the fulcrum of change and reckoning for seventy years of Israeli state terror and imperial conquest in an amoral and loathsome apartheid regime which inverts the values of its founding by becoming the death camps its citizens escaped, and betrays the hope and ideal of a refuge from hate and sectarian division as a reflection of the Nazis from whom they have internalized oppression as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Hamas has shattered all of this, potentially, with the myth of state surveillance and control as useful and effective means of subjugation of the slave castes of any state, and the myth of the invincibility and supremacy of Israeli intelligence and military hegemony of which it is a figure of the might of carceral states, tyrannies, and empires, and the calculated reprisals by Israel which will follow are designed by Hamas in this provocation to delegitimize Israel and fracture the solidarity of her allies and collaborators in terror, of which America remains the principal sponsor and villain.
So many of the reactions to this tragedy both here among my friends and in the news media seem baffled, caught in the forks of a classic dilemma in which our heroes and our villains trade places, for in this stunning slave rebellion wherein the victims of genocide and erasure have attacked their masters, the Wretched of the Earth with whom we might normally empathize have violated two of our most cherished moral values and rules of conduct; they are not defending but attacking, which makes justifications for war and the use of social force irrelevant though this ahistorical interpretation of events ignores seventy years of oppression and authorizes the conqueror by classifying the liberation struggle of their victims as terrorism, an argument we can therefore nullify as pro Israeli misdirection and the apologetics of power, and a second and far more serious point; Hamas has taken hostages and killed civilians including children, war crimes which violate our universal human rights and place the perpetrators beyond all laws and all limits.
A friend has written an apology for statements born of compassion which might be confused with support of Israel as a state rather than as a people, a distinction which makes all the difference; and to this I have written the following reply:
There are no good guys in this story, just a people divided by history brutalizing each other with a savagery that threatens our humanity itself. I have fought in Gaza and lost someone there, and from my witness of history I say there is only one kind of truth which does not become a Rashomon Gate when faith is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, and this is true of both sides in this or any war; Who is bleeding? Who is suffering? Who requires acts of grace and mercy?
Not who merits compassion, for often there are no innocent, and as Shaw teaches us in Pygmalion with the iconic speech of Alfred Doolittle this places a moral burden on victims which is unjust; merely who is suffering and needs our help, in this moment, always the only time we have.
Solidarity of action, resistance, and liberation struggle all come after this; Tikkun Olam, a Jewish concept of reparative justice and praxis or the action of values, which I often describe as healing the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
You have nothing to apologize for; states work very hard to confuse and conflate legitimation of the state with those in whose name it claims to act, using narratives of victimization, for who wears the white hat is a hero and beyond question. All states do this, for it is the nature of power to become centralized as force and control. Among the true horrors of identity politics is awakening to realize that one is the beneficiary of a genocide, of slavery, of patriarchy, of unequal power in any form.
So we are lost in Atherton’s Wilderness of Mirrors; lies, illusions, rewritten histories, falsification. But it is my fate to question all things, and many of them do not bear the test of unbelief.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
In this case I question the origins and motives of a blitzkreig which demonstrates the vulnerability of Israel, a tactical objective, at the cost of strategic goals; the immediate results include unifying global support of Israel and dividing the crucial solidarity between the anti-Netanyahu democracy and peace movements within Israel from the liberation struggle of their slave caste, the Palestinians, which was until this disruptive event in the process of becoming one united nation.
Cui Bono? Neither Palestinians nor Israelis, though in the imperial totalitarian state of Israel and its fascisms of blood, faith, and soil they share a common enemy. Netanyahu and his regime benefit, though his promise of security for the people of Israel has been proven illusory and the feared Israeli intelligence and military a paper tiger as Hamas intended; whether this weakens or strengthens his hand is yet to be seen.
Security is an illusion, one convenient for tyrants in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated. In this area of liberation struggle the victory of Hamas in breaching the Wall has been an unambiguous good.
Bring down the Wall, all the walls. Not only the walls of our borders and prisons, checkpoints and bantustans, concentration camps and slave pens, and systems of surveillance, force, and control, but the walls of ideas between peoples most of all. In the long run, only this will bring us peace and a United Humankind.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
No matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Why, O Israel, reproduce the conditions of your historic trauma as the prison guards, with others cast in your former role? Why, when we could be guarantors of each other’s universal human rights in a free society of equals?
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Let us emerge from the legacies of our history, and create ourselves anew.
What happens next?
Disruptive and polarizing events often confront us with a choice; who is your white hat and who your black hat in this story? Whose play will you back when they enter the arena at high noon? We will begin to become human when we free ourselves of this tyranny of good and evil, so vulnerable to the lies and misdirection of those who would enslave us and who claim to speak and act in our name, especially in theocracies. For as Voltaire wrote; “Those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities”. Gott Mitt Uns; it is the most terrible battlecry, for it authorizes anything.
Today the empire begins to strike back, as Biden declares that America will stand with Israel, with the state in exacting revenge through conquest and not her people in freeing the hostages mind you, in the abominable reprisals Netanyahu promises, having been handed by his enemies immunity and sanction for the Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem he has so long dreamed of. Both this immediate trigger event of Total War as a doctrine created by Hitler and Franco and tested at Guernica and the conditions which created it are consequences of American complicity, for we as a nation have failed to enact the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction policies against Israeli state terror and tyranny which might have prevented it, and if we are to be liberators and not conquerors we must at minimum now pressure Israel to lift the Blockade of Gaza and recognize Hamas as its legitimate government. Let us send humanitarian aid, not armies.
If we send warships to help Israel conquer Palestine, and not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, America loses and our enemies win.
Netanyahu and Biden have declared intentions to answer force and fear with greater force and fear, as Israel accepts the offer of the moral equivalence of terror by her partner in this dance, Hamas. This will bring not lesser but greater terror, not democracy and a free society of equals but the centralization of power to totalitarian states of force and control. From the perspective of Israel and America or of any state, this is the true purpose of external threats.
As my father once said; “Politics is the art of fear, and fear is the basis of human exchange. Fear is an untrustworthy servant and a terrible master; so, whose instrument will it be?”
Of the recursive forces of fear, power, and force which are the true origin of evil and of its forms as violence, war, and police states, I say to you this one true thing; fear and force cannot answer fear and force. Only love can do this, and the redemptive power of love can free us from the Wagnerian Ring of Power, from falsification, commodification, and dehumanization.
Why are we each others jailors, and not each others liberators?
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2025, Anniversary of the Third Intifada of 2021, Now Ongoing In the Tenth Theatre of World War Three Which Contains and Supersedes the Gaza War; Both visitors to the Holy Land seeking signs of the Invisible manifest in its Disneyland of conflicted faiths and those trapped within its nightmare of walls, checkpoints, razor wire, pervasive surveillance, universalized violence, identitarian politics, and the tyranny and terror of one of our world’s most horrific regimes of force and control are here become the ghosts of the Holocaust; Israel echoes with the silent screams of stolen voices and the devouring shadows of a history weaponized in service to power as narratives of victimization and security as power, a strategy designed to first break our solidarity with division and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as falsification and then dehumanize and subjugate us as masters and slaves and as genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Israel as a dream of refuge and of universal brotherhood and love has been betrayed and subverted by Israel as a xenophobic theocracy, military empire, and slave camp; here Auschwitz has been institutionalized on a national scale, its former prisoners now its guards.
Why would anyone choose to recreate a hell they had escaped from, even as its masters rather than its slaves?
I understand all too well the seduction of power as security in a world of hostile and chaotic forces, and how overwhelming and generalized fear can be shaped by authority to centralize power by offering us loaned power over Others as figures of existential threats; to be the arbiter of virtue through force and control. But security is an illusion, the state as embodied violence obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance, and our common pain unites us in ways which transcend the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, which only love can free us from.
Love as solidarity in action can redeem the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world, Tikkun Olam in Hebrew, and liberate us to live as guarantors of each other’s humanity.
As I wrote on the first anniversary of the Third Intifada on this night years ago; This must be the most written about, studied, debated, experimented with and fought over issue in global politics since the Second World War of which it is a result, this nation wherein one people are divided by history as Israelis and Palestinians, and a measure of our humanity, as the classic example of the double minority; what do you do with one city and one nation claimed by two historical communities, as a basis of identity as faith and nationality and the consequences and praxis of identity politics as violence?
Here a nation and a people are riven by dissociative identity disorder, conflicted and locked in titanic struggle as with the fragmentation of identity, memory, and consciousness of multiple personalities, madness on a national and civilizational scale born of the legacies of history and life disruptive events, epigenetic trauma, grief, terror, guilt, despair; and also rage.
In the duality of Israel and Palestine are made plain the origins of evil as violence and tyranny in the recursive and interdependent Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as overwhelming and generalized fear and existential threats are weaponized in service to power by authority, which forms carceral states of force and control as unequal power and embodied violence, through elite hierarchies and divisions of belonging and otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
Here fascism as a systemic evil operates as possession and theft of the soul. What can we do about it? As Lenin asked in his essay of 1902; “What is to be done?” How free ourselves of the systemic forces of our subjugation to authority, elites, and those who would enslave us?
We must first recognize and be cautious of those who claim to speak for us and act in our name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism. To free ourselves of the lies and illusions, falsification and rewritten histories, conspiracy theories and alternate realities through which we become dehumanized, we must be truthtellers engaged in the pursuit of truth as a sacred calling, and perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
We must second seize our self-ownership and autonomy in refusal to submit to authority, for the great secret of power is that it is empty and hollow, and is delegitimized through refusal to trust and believe authority, and of force that it is brittle and finds its limit at the point of disobedience. Simple acts, but also inherent powers of human being which cannot be taken from us; for who refuses to submit is free, and becomes Unconquerable.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks that others make for us, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for self-ownership and for freedom of identity.
There is no just authority.
Tonight I sit at home among the vast darkness of my hills, a night which follows days of rain and filled with the songs of frogs and birds, a serenity disturbed only by the chiaroscuro of my memories of this night of 2021 one year ago, in the defense of al Aqsa. Like flashes of lightning, the hand of the past can bring the Chaos and reach out to seize and shake us, destabilizing us and our constructions of normality with unpredictable and sudden disruptive events unmoored from their anchorages in time.
But Chaos is also a measure of the adaptive range of a system, which brings both the terror of our nothingness and the joy of total freedom in our reimagination and transformative rebirth of ourselves and our limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Guillermo del Toro, in his magnificent epic of migration and racial equality Carnival Row, has a scene in which two young successors to leadership of traditionally rival factions find themselves in love and in need of allies in a subplot which reimagines Romeo and Juliet; the rebellious hellion Jonah Breakspear asks his Machiavellian lover Sophie Longerbane, “Who is chaos good for?” To which she replies, “Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
One may think of Bringing the Chaos in terms of the redemptive power of love, of solidarity, of our duty of care for others, of seizures of power as the restoration of balance, of Resistance and revolutionary struggle as placing our lives in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and as tikkun olam or healing the brokenness of the world.
In Jerusalem and al Quds, we are betrayed by the normality of submission to authority and the divisions of unequal power, dehumanized by those who commit atrocities in our name, and made complicit in crimes against humanity through narratives of victimization which as Voltaire teaches us permit anything.
Gott mitt uns; it is an ancient terror. And this we must resist.
Old myths, and old grievances, woven into the fabric of our psyche and our civilization. And like all history, memory, and authorized identity, mimetic forces from whose legacies we must emerge.
In this moment I turn once again to the brilliant diagnosis of the illness of power as captured identity as written by Alon Ben-Meirin in Huffpost, though his prescription of a two state system is debatable and for myself must be superseded in time with a secular state with one law for all and no official divisions of tribe, language, or faith, in an article entitled In The Grip Of Powerful Illusions; “The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears to be illogical and unsettling as a majority of Israelis and Palestinians realize that coexistence, whether under conditions of enmity or friendship, is a fact that neither side can change short of a catastrophe.
The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process appears to be illogical and unsettling as a majority of Israelis and Palestinians realize that coexistence, whether under conditions of enmity or friendship, is a fact that neither side can change short of a catastrophe. Both sides understand that the general parameters of a sustainable peace agreement must rest on a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with some land swaps. However, both sides choose to revel in illusions and live in defiance of time and circumstances. They seem to prefer continuing violent clashes and bloodshed over peaceful coexistence, while blaming each other for the unending destructive path that tragically both have chosen to travel.
There are fundamental imperatives, coupled with long-term mutual security measures, which represent what was on the negotiating table in 2000 at Camp David and in 2010/2011 and 2013/2014 under the Obama administration’s auspices in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Each round, with various degrees of progress, aimed at finalizing an agreement and yet ultimately failed to do so. The question is: why?
Biased and selective perceptions, reinforced by historical experiences, religion, and incompatible ideologies, have locked both sides into immobile positions. The factors that maintain and enhance these patterns include emotions such as fear, distrust, and insecurity. The psychological outcome is mutual denial of the narrative of the other and mutual delegitimization.
Put together, the operative result is stagnation and polarization. What is therefore needed is a consensus-oriented dialogue at the leadership level by both officials and non-officials, and people-to-people interactions, to resolve the issue of perception – a tall order given the current environment that buttresses rather than ameliorates prejudiced perceptions.
There are certain psychological concepts which are relevant to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the concept of illusion is an essential one. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud offers the following definition: “…we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”
What is characteristic of illusions is that: 1) they are derived from deep human wishes, and 2) the belief is held (or would be held) in the absence of any compelling evidence, or good rational grounds, on its behalf.
It is impossible to deny that both Israelis and Palestinians are in the grip of very powerful illusions which only serve to prolong the conflict and prevent any mutual understanding. In particular, the belief shared by many Israelis that they have a biblical right to the land (including Judea and Samaria) and that God gave it to the Jews in perpetuity is undoubtedly an illusion of yesterday.
This belief is not affirmed because there is real evidence that God deemed it to be (although two Jewish kingdoms did exist–the first in the tenth century BCE and the second beginning in 539 BCE–on the same land), but because it satisfies a deep-seated psychological need for a God-given Jewish homeland.
The belief that by expanding the settlements Israel will augment its national security and maintain its hold on the entire land is an illusion of tomorrow, which generally ignores the presence of Muslims in the same land for more than 1,300 years.
It is important to note how these illusions sustain and reinforce one another, and constitute a psychological barrier which is much more impervious to critical reflection. Israel’s illusions have served to create the logic for occupation.
The Palestinians, for their part, are not without their own illusions. They also believe that God has reserved the land for them, and appeal to the fact that they had inhabited the land for centuries. From their perspective, the presence of the al-Aqsa Mosque, which was built in 705 AD in Jerusalem, attests to their historical and religious affinity to the Holy City.
They also cling to the idea that they will someday return to the land of their forbearers, as they have and continue to insist on the right of return of the Palestinian refugees, even though this has become a virtual impossibility.
The Palestinians hold fast to their illusions of yesterday and tomorrow just as blindly and desperately as the Israelis, which leads to resistance to and fear of change. As such, unless both sides change course and accept each other’s affinity to the same land, specifically because it is religiously-based, the situation is bound to lead to a catastrophe.
This has contributed to making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict both chronic and intractable, as the various illusions are continuously and consciously nurtured by daily hostile and often violent encounters between the two sides.
In seeking to bridge concepts that could link between the domains of psychology and politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it could be proposed that a collective mutual resistance to change (both conscious and deliberate, and inner unconscious) protects a vulnerable identity.
Compared, for example, to the stable and mature political identities of the American, British, and French nations, the political identities of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples are, in a way, in their adolescence.
Identities in this setting are more vulnerable, and the protagonists are naturally more defensive and resistant to change. By its very nature, the players must find it difficult (if not impossible) to articulate this publicly, as to do so is to admit to this vulnerability.
The concept of psychological resistance to change may well affect the political setting in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular; it is closely connected to perceptions at many levels and provides protection for vulnerable identity formation.
It is this mindset, strengthened by historical experiences, which transcends the more than seven decades since the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began. Individuals and groups, Israelis and Palestinians alike, have and continue to interpret the nature of the discord between them as “you versus me” in a prejudiced and selective way.
In turn, this has stifled any new information and enabled the continuing resistance to change, which could shed new light on the nature and substance of the conflict and help advance the peace process.
The concept of unconscious resistance to change in this setting links well to the view of perceptions driving the polarization in the conflict. Historical experience, which formulates perceptions, serves among other things to enhance the sense of identity of “who we really are,” a formative collective assumption that sits at the bedrock of both key players and drives functional and dysfunctional behavior.
In principle, such a mindset prevents either side from entertaining new ideas that might lead to compromises for a peaceful solution. The paradox here is that majorities on both sides do want and seek peace, knowing full well that this would require significant concessions, but are unable to reconcile the required concessions with imbedded perceptions that have precluded these compromises as a result of resistance to and fear of change.
Therefore, any framework for peace must include provisions that would dramatically increase the odds in favor of a solution. First, both sides need to commit to reaching an agreement based on a two-state solution out of the conviction that change, which translates to coexistence, is inevitable. Therefore, they ought to adjust to each other’s requirements, which of necessity requires them to make significant concessions.
Second, to facilitate that, they must undertake reconciliatory people-to-people social, economic, cultural, and security interactions to mitigate their resistance to change, which must begin, at a minimum, one year before the negotiations commence to create the psychological and political atmosphere to cultivate the trust necessary for substantive and successful peace negotiations.
The resumption of peace talks will go nowhere unless Israelis and Palestinians change their prejudiced perception and resistance to and fear of change, and finally come to the realization that their fate is intertwined and neither can live in peace and security without the other.
I feel compelled to conclude my last article for the year with a dire warning that both Israelis and Palestinians alike will do well to ponder upon as they approach the end of the seventh decade of their tragic conflict.
Every Israeli extremist and Palestinian militant, those who want it all must stop and think where Israel and the Palestinians will be in ten years if the current situation persists?
Your illusions of today will not become a reality of tomorrow, and what tomorrow will bring is nothing but more pain, tears, and agony.
Your conflict is evolving ever faster into a religious war. A Muslim-Jewish Armageddon is in the making that will set the whole region on unfathomable fire.
If you are true believers, dare not defy God’s will, for he has thrust you together to put you to the test–you must either live in peace and harmony, or you will be condemned to oblivion and despair.
You possess the power to choose your own destiny. Will it be self-destruction or will it be the fulfilment of a glorious dream?
Rise up and pass a legacy of hope to every Israeli and Palestinian child, for they have the God-given right to grow up and prosper and none should die for your illusions in vain.”
As I wrote in my post of November 9 2023, A Mirror of Our Darkness: Kristallnact; Israel is commemorating this tragedy which opened a door to an even greater tragedy in the Holocaust by doing exactly the same thing to the Palestinians, one people divided by history and faith weaponized in service to power. And this too will open doors to greater state terror and tyranny, unless both peoples can unite against authorities who commit atrocities in their name as a strategy of subjugation and liberate each other from those who would enslave them.
If you think of nations as children who are survivors of abuse, much becomes clear; for once they have seized power they are far more likely to become abusers themselves. This is how fear works, why it is the true basis of exchange, why politics is the Art of Fear, and why states are embodied violence. Both Israelis and Palestinians have been savaged by existential threats long before they began savaging, brutalizing, and dehumanizing each other.
That predatory regimes on both sides have used division and identity politics to centralize power and legitimize authoritarian dominion is a predictable phase of liberation struggle, especially of anti-colonial revolution.
The trick of becoming human, friends, is to embrace ones own darkness in struggle as well as one’s enemies, and emerge from the legacies of our history which shadow us like an invisible crocodile tail.
There is a line spoken by the villain in the series The Magicians, a survivor of childhood abuse and tyrant known as The Beast for his horrific crimes, once the powerless and terrified boy Martin Chatwin and now a monstrous god; “You know, when I was a boy, a man who was meant to care for me bent me over his desk and had me over and over every time I was alone with him. It helps me understand a truth. You’re powerful or you’re weak. “
Here is the original lie of the tyrant and the fascist in the apologetics, self-justification, and psychopathy of power; the lie that only power has meaning and is real, that there is no good or evil. How we use power is of equal importance as who holds it. Fear and force are a primary means of human exchange, but not the only means; love, membership, and belonging are as important.
It’s a line which captures perfectly the inherent contradictions of the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force as an origin of evil; for the use of social force is subversive of its own values. Yet the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle often require violence, and until the gods of law and order have been cast down from their thrones I must agree with the famous dictum of Sartre in his 1948 play Dirty Hands, quoted by Frantz Fanon in his 1960 speech Why We Use Violence, and made immortal by Malcolm X; “by any means necessary.”
As written by Walter Rodney in The Groundings with my Brothers; “We were told that violence in itself is evil, and that, whatever the cause, it is unjustified morally. By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? By what standards can we equate the violence of blacks who have been oppressed, suppressed, depressed and repressed for four centuries with the violence of white fascists. Violence aimed at the recovery of human dignity and at equality cannot be judged by the same yardstick as violence aimed at maintenance of discrimination and oppression.”
And here is the passage he references from Leon Trotsky in Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice; “A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
Yet in reflection I think of those great figures who have been both heroes of liberation and villains of tyranny; my teenage role model Napoleon, Washington who is central to our family history and coined the motto on our coat of arms in the passcode during the Battle of Trenton, Victory or Death, when the whole Revolution was wagered on a forlorn hope, of the tragic drama of fallen heroes like Robert Mugabe, the monstrous tyrants Stalin and Mao, the list is a near endless litany of woes and failures of vision wherein Brave New Worlds became hells and carceral states. In evidence I offer the American and Napoleonic Revolutions become Empires, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, India where the glory of liberation came hand in hand with the tragedy of Partition and is now under the boot of Hindu Nationalism, nearly all anticolonial revolutions which with the first period of liberty as new nations became dreadful tyrannies, and above all the state of Israel, a dream of refuge forged in the terror of the Holocaust whose victims learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis and assumed their role in the Occupation of Palestine. The dangers of Idealism are very real; but so are the dangers of submission to authority and the complicity of silence in the face of evil.
I am a hunter of fascists, and mine is a hunter’s morality. For me there is a simple test for the use of force; who holds power?
A great many wise people have written beautifully of the horrors of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness; herein I wish only to signpost that the forces which lie both within us and without as social conditions and epigenetic trauma, of atavisms of barbarism and systems of oppression, are universal to human beings as imposed conditions of struggle and operate continually even when obscured from view, beyond the horror and abjection of points of fracture of the human soul like those of Kristallnacht and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
I write to you as one who has lived by the battle cry of Never Again! for over forty years now, and it is of deep and vital importance to apply this principle of action not only in Resistance to fascism as an intrusive enemy of all that is human in us, but also to ourselves and our own use of violence and social force toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
No matter where you begin with divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As Nietzsche teaches us in Beyond Good and Evil; “Those who hunt monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
In the dark mirror of Gaza, with its monstrous reflections of Kristallnacht and of Auschwitz, do you like what you see, O Israel?
Speaking as someone who has been defined by my resistance struggle against the Israeli Siege of Beirut in 1982 and for a future in which all human beings are equal and share the same universal human rights, throughout the world and ever since, where ever men hunger to be free, including Palestine, I will fight on to resist our dehumanization by state tyranny and terror and by fascisms of blood, faith, and soil like that of Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s Vichy America, and those who follow in my wake will fight on for a thousand years if necessary.
We can be killed, tortured, imprisoned; but we cannot be defeated.
In this context I paraphrase the iconic speech from Hunger Games; I have a message for Presidents Trump and Netanyahu. “You can torture us and bomb us and burn our nations to the ground. But do you see that? Fire is catching… And if we burn… you burn with us!”
Kingdom of Heaven
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1; Fire Catches
“If we burn, you burn with us”
The Magicians
Carnival Row
News of Gaza: the meanings of the Palestinian Holocaust
June 21 2025 We Balance the Terror of Our Nothingness With the Joy of Total Freedom, the Flaws of Our Humanity With the Redemptive Power of Love, and the Brokenness of the World With Our Absurd Hope For the Limitless Possibilities of Becoming Human: On Sartre’s Birthday, And A Eulogy
June 5 2025 Fifty Eight Years of Occupation, Theocratic State Terror, and Israeli Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil: Anniversary of the Fall of Jerusalem In the 1967 Six Day War
May 29 2025 Anniversary of the Final Day of the Third Intifada of 2021: On The Origins of Evil in Fear, Power, and Force; Existential Questions In the Shadow of the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinians As the World Does Nothing to Silence the Rain of Death
May 23 2025 Anniversary of the International Criminal Court Issue of Arrest Warrant For Netanyahu and Charge of Leaders of Israel and Hamas Equally With Crimes Against Humanity In the Gaza War
May 14 2025 America Falls With Our Failure of Empathy, Abandonment of Our Universal Human Rights, Cowardice in Confronting Evil, and Complicity in Genocide: Anniversary of Israel’s 2024 Rafah Campaign
May 8 2025 On this Victory Europe Day Celebrating Liberation From the Nazis, As World War Three Rages in Ukraine and Palestine and the Captured State of Vichy America Is Riven By Tyranny and Resistance, Let Us Liberate All of Humankind From Fascisms of Blood, Faith, and Soil and the Imperial Conquest and Dominion and the Carceral States of Force and Control of Tyrants
March 19 2025 Tyrants Attack In Campaign Of Genocide: Netanyahu Bombs Civilian Aid Corridor In Gaza To Divide It Into Bantustans As Trump Bombs Yemen To Break Our Counter Blockade of the Israeli Blockade of Humanitarian Aid
February 8 2025 Trump Dreams of A New Crusader Kingdom In Gaza As A Co Conspirator In Netanyahu’s Zionist Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide of the Palestinians
January 29 2024 Where Do We Go From Here? As the Gaza War Becomes A Great Powers Proxy War and a Theatre of World War Three, and the Arab-American Alliance With Our Colony Israel Versus the Iranian Dominion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen With Their Key Ally Russia Make A Wishbone of the Holy Land
September 19 2024 Israeli Terror Attack Kills Americans With Impunity: No BDS, No Arrest of Netanyahu and Other War Criminals, No Policy of Regime Change in Israel
July 24 2024 Tyrant of Völkisch-Nationalen Hebräertum, Hebrew National Socialism, Netanyahu Addresses Congress When He Should Be On Trial For Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity
May 24 2024 In the Wake of the great Reckoning For the Crimes of Israel, Recognition of the Sovereignty and Independence of Palestine Raises the Question; Whose Palestine? What Will a Future Palestine and Israel Become?
Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, Nur Masalha
The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, Ben Ehrenreich
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, Rashid Khalidi
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine, When the Birds Stopped Singing: Life in Ramallah Under Siege, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, Occupation Diaries, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation, Raja Shehadeh
Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury
The Question of Palestine, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said David Barsamian (Editor), Orientalism, Edward W. Said
On Palestine, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948, Ilan Pappe
Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays, Amos Oz
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter
Robert Fisk on Israel: The Obama Years: A unique anthology of reporting and analysis of a crucial period of history, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk
The Unmaking of Israel, Occupied Territories: The Untold Story Of Israel’s Settlements, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount Gershom Gorenberg
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Black
An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, Jeff Halper
Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Joel Kovel
Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, Marc Lamont Hill, Mitchell Plitnick
Mornings in Jenin, Against the Loveless World, The Blue Between Sky and Water, Susan Abulhawa
Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean, Basem L. Ra’ad
I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, A River Dies of Thirst: journals, Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982, Mahmoud Darwish
Palestine on a Plate: Memories From My Mother’s Kitchen, Baladi: A Celebration of Food from Land and Sea, Joudie Kalla
The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey, Laila El-Haddad
Zaitoun: Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen, Yasmin Khan
The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, Claudia Roden
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan
Drinking the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, Amira Hass
Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story, Ramzy Baroud
The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Gilbert Achcar
Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, Marcello Di Cintio
A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel Bari Atwan
Behind the Myth: Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution, Arafat: The Biography, Andrew Gowers, Tony Walker
Hamas: A History from Within, Azzam S. Tamimi
Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, Sara Roy
The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist, Emile Habiby
Dancing Arabs, Let It Be Morning, Sayed Kashua
Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel, Gaza Weddings, Time of White Horses, Ibrahim Nasrallah
A Balcony Over the Fakihani: Three Novellas, A Compass for the Sunflower, The Eye of the Mirror, Liana Badr
Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine, Ibtisam Barakat
So What: New and Selected Poems 1971-2005, Taha Muhammad Ali
Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, Naomi Shihab Nye
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, Return: A Palestinian Memoir, Ghada Karmi
The Parisian, Isabella Hammad
Peace Be Upon You: The Story of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence, Zachary Karabell
Remembering the Summer of Fire, so like the Year of the Barricades, 1968 as lived from the angle of view of a child and become an imaginal space in the Labyrinth of the Gates of Dreams in which we wander; a time of fire but also of rebirth, of the collapse of our society and civilization from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and the shattering of its lies and illusions but also of fearless revisioning of our systems and choices about how to be human together, of the revolutionary struggle to emerge from the legacies of our history and transcend the limits of our flesh.
For what did we hope, with such a mad Quixotic quest?
To renew ourselves like a Phoenix from the flames, and discover new worlds and possibilities of becoming human, of beauty and of truth. Some wished to reclaim an Adamic unfallen condition as Original beings uncorrupted by our society and the authorized identities of the carceral state; others to storm the gates of Heaven and cast down the tyrants from their thrones and be free. Some dreamed vast architectures of ideologies and futures they may shape; others desired only to run amok and be ungovernable. Like many, I shared in all of these dreams and desires.
Here in the streets of fire contested by forces of repression and resistance, all of these things could become possible, without limit, because all of us belonged.
The Summer of Fire marks a possible beginning of a United Humankind, though history may remember this as the founding of the United Nations on October 24 1945, and the Black Lives Matter movement was founded on July 13 2017. But throughout the Summer of Fire, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, the outcast and the marginalized, arose in solidarity with one voice as a United Humankind to proclaim We are all equal, and seize their independence from those who would enslave us. May the memory of this glorious time of liberation struggle echo throughout the memory of humankind forever, and may our actions prove equal to our dreams.
Let us remember always that we fight not only to free ourselves and each other from subjugation to a carceral state of force and control and from its overseers and enforcers the police and the right of the state to grant immunity to police to kill nonwhite people at will and without cause as a white supremacist terror force, but to free ourselves from racism as a system of oppression and control as well as its institutions of unequal power. Such a struggle is ongoing and not limited to tyrannical regimes, and every day we survive to defy authority, every refusal to submit, is a victory.
Such refusals to believe and to obey are the primary acts which define the human, and a power which cannot be taken from us. In times of great darkness such as ours now, as we battle ICE terror forces in the streets, it is well to remember that all darkness is balanced with light, and that the state use of force in repression of dissent obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own Resistance.
The myths we choose to live through possess great power, and our stories are tools with which we can seize control of our own evolution and shape the direction of our future. Let us remember, bear witness, and tell our truths and the story of the Summer of Fire to each new generation. Fire catches.
May we all dream better Brave New Worlds.
As I wrote in my post of June 14 2020, A United Humanity Emerges With Global Revolution; Humankind is awakening to an ancient truth; no state holds power which is not lent by its people. When the state no longer serves the people, that power may be withdrawn.
The resonances and echoes of America’s reckoning with racial injustice now reach throughout the world, and have become a global revolution from which a united humankind is emerging.
We will no longer tolerate fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, divisions of exclusionary otherness, or authoritarian regimes of state force and control. We will settle for nothing less than freedom from our historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, plutocracy; nothing less than true equality and an equal share in our government and the benefits of our civilization.
And one thing more; when a man puts his knee on another human beings throat to shut off his air, that man is a murderer regardless of who he is, whether he has a badge or is more white than the victim he subjugates, for both are exactly equal regardless of any differences. And as all human beings have a duty of care for others, we are all obligated to intervene and save others from harm, to stop the perpetrator in the act of his crime by any means necessary.
Let’s put this racist violence six feet in the ground.
In the words of Mikki Kendall writing in Time; “We have created systems of oppression, and then we object when the targets of that oppression dare to say they have a right to exist, to be safe, to not be killed on a whim.
At some point, America will stop lying to itself, not just about the history of oppression inside and outside our borders, but also about current events. Sometimes, hate wears a white hood. Sometimes, it is in a police uniform. American exceptionalism will not save us from the impact of fascism, and despite every victim-blaming narrative that positions the protests now as being excessive, the reality is that there is no right way to fight for your life and the lives of those you love. If Blackness, Black people and Black culture were erased, not only would the world be poorer for it, but no one left would be any safer. They would just be the next target.”
As Austin C. McCoy writes in Truthout; “Thousands of people in more than 40 countries have taken to the streets in a show of solidarity with Black Americans protesting in the U.S. following the vigilante and police murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
Since these killings, young communists in Greece marched to the U.S. embassy in Athens to protest Floyd’s murder. In Rome, members of the Migrant Women and Daughters Network stood in front of a war memorial and held signs that said “I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter: Justice for George Floyd.” In Amsterdam, thousands packed into Dam Square.”
“These global expressions of solidarity underscore a long simmering discontent with state violence against Black and Indigenous people, and other communities of color. This global uprising is a descendant of Black and multinational anti-colonial, decolonization and internationalist movements of the 20th century, especially those of the 1960s.”
“Demonstrators gathering in nations like Syria, Palestine, Canada and Kenya signal a surge of anti-racist internationalism guided by desires to communicate across national borders and amplifying victims’ names and Black Lives Matter slogans.
This global uprising is a descendant of Black and multinational anti-colonial, decolonization and internationalist movements of the 20th century.”
“A group of Lebanese journalists, organizers and activists produced an online organizing guide, “From Beirut to Minneapolis,” detailing safety tips for activists who might be exposed to tear gas and pepper spray, what to wear during a protest and what to do if arrested. Transnational tactical communication is not a new development, as Palestinians tweeted similar advice to activists in Ferguson, Missouri, during the 2014 uprisings.
The sharing and amplification of slogans are clear examples of protest solidarity. The names of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd ring throughout the world. They appeared on a Kenyan protester’s sign during a demonstration in Nairobi. Floyd’s name rang in London, as demonstrators chanted his name. People expressed Floyd’s and Eric Garner’s desperate refrain, “I can’t breathe” in Paris and on a mural in Syria, another country wracked by state violence.
However, people are not protesting simply to express solidarity. Thousands of protesters throughout the world are demonstrating and revolting against racism, occupation and state violence locally. In Toronto, a diverse crowd of protesters has taken to the streets to support Black Americans and to protest the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Indigenous Black woman, who fell from her apartment building and died while in the presence of police. Palestinian protesters held signs with pictures of Floyd and Eyad al-Hallaq, a disabled Palestinian shot and killed by Israeli police the same week Floyd died. The police killings of Black people in the U.S. stirred memories of 24-year-old Adama Traoré, a Black Parisian who died in police custody in 2016.
Protesters throughout the world are also highlighting the ways in which contemporary forms of state violence, including policing itself, are legacies of enslavement and colonialism. In the U.S., nearly 40 statues and memorials dedicated to the Confederacy and racist leaders have been dismantled, defaced, decapitated, toppled and designated for removal as a result of the unrest.
The global nature of this revolt presents an opportunity for activists to build upon the transnational connections past organizers have forged.
Demonstrators in the U.K. tore down the statue of English slave trader Edward Colston in jubilation and rolled it into the river. In Belgium, masked demonstrators stood on the base of a statue of King Léopold II, whose colonial regime was responsible for millions of Congolese deaths, and chanted “murderer” while waving a Democratic Republic of Congo flag.
These actions to tear down the symbols of colonialism and slavery underscore arguments that anti-racists, reparations advocates and abolitionists have long argued — a historical reckoning must accompany deep structural change. And these protests suggest that this confrontation with history will have to be on the terms of Black people, Indigenous people and other people of color (BIPOC).
It is important to recognize how some of these global protests might be products of the U.S. development and globalization of police tactics pioneered in military and counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin America, Vietnam and the Philippines, as historian Stuart Schrader analyzes in his book, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. International police exchange programs in the U.S. are latest examples of this trend as law enforcement officials from the U.S., Israel and other countries train each other in police tactics.
While 1960s Black radicals in the U.S. argued they were victims of “internal colonialism,” it seems that many BIPOC are seeing themselves as tied together by methods of 21st-century methods of policing and counterterrorism.
As we move into the third week of protests, calls to redirect peoples’ energies to electoral politics and institutional reform will grow louder from pundits.
While it is important to address the ways that police can harm Black people in the U.S. immediately, the global nature of this revolt presents an opportunity for activists to build upon the transnational connections past organizers have forged.
This is a moment for more Americans to study the transnational connections of policing and state violence in an effort to forge a common anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. We need more global protests as well as gatherings to devise ways to eradicate the scourge of state violence that disproportionately affects BIPOC throughout the world. As scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said, “The abolitionist future … has to be internationalist, because that is the only way that we’ll stop drawing the borders that regularize between and among people.”
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We demand an end to the war against Black people. Since this country’s inception there have been named and unnamed wars on our communities. We demand an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people.
This includes:
1 An immediate end to the criminalization and dehumanization of Black youth across all areas of society including, but not limited to; our nation’s justice and education systems, social service agencies, and media and pop culture. This includes an end to zero-tolerance school policies and arrests of students, the removal of police from schools, and the reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services.
2 An end to capital punishment.
3 An end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees, court surcharges and “defendant funded” court proceedings.
4 An end to the use of past criminal history to determine eligibility for housing, education, licenses, voting, loans, employment, and other services and needs.
5 An end to the war on Black immigrants including the repeal of the 1996 crime and immigration bills, an end to all deportations, immigrant detention, and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids, and mandated legal representation in immigration court.
6 An end to the war on Black trans, queer and gender nonconforming people including their addition to anti-discrimination civil rights protections to ensure they have full access to employment, health, housing and education.
7 An end to the mass surveillance of Black communities, and the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and target our communities (including IMSI catchers, drones, body cameras, and predictive policing software).
8 The demilitarization of law enforcement, including law enforcement in schools and on college campuses.
9 An immediate end to the privatization of police, prisons, jails, probation, parole, food, phone and all other criminal justice related services.
“I0 Until we achieve a world where cages are no longer used against our people we demand an immediate change in conditions and an end to public jails, detention centers, youth facilities and prisons as we know them. This includes the end of solitary confinement, the end of shackling of pregnant people, access to quality healthcare, and effective measures to address the needs of our youth, queer, gender nonconforming and trans families.
Reparations
We demand reparations for past and continuing harms. The government, responsible corporations and other institutions that have profited off of the harm they have inflicted on Black people — from colonialism to slavery through food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance — must repair the harm done.
This includes:
1 Reparations for the systemic denial of access to high quality educational opportunities in the form of full and free access for all Black people (including undocumented and currently and formerly incarcerated people) to lifetime education including: free access and open admissions to public community colleges and universities, technical education (technology, trade and agricultural), educational support programs, retroactive forgiveness of student loans, and support for lifetime learning programs.
2 Reparations for the continued divestment from, discrimination toward and exploitation of our communities in the form of a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people, with clearly articulated corporate regulations.
3 Reparations for the wealth extracted from our communities through environmental racism, slavery, food apartheid, housing discrimination and racialized capitalism in the form of corporate and government reparations focused on healing ongoing physical and mental trauma, and ensuring our access and control of food sources, housing and land.
4 Reparations for the cultural and educational exploitation, erasure, and extraction of our communities in the form of mandated public school curriculums that critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery, and funding to support, build, preserve, and restore cultural assets and sacred sites to ensure the recognition and honoring of our collective struggles and triumphs.
5 Legislation at the federal and state level that requires the United States to acknowledge the lasting impacts of slavery, establish and execute a plan to address those impacts. This includes the immediate passage of H.R.40, the “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act” or subsequent versions which call for reparations remedies.
Divest-Invest
We demand investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people. We want investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations.
This includes:
1 A reallocation of funds at the federal, state and local level from policing and incarceration (JAG,
2 COPS, VOCA) to long-term safety strategies such as education, local restorative justice services, and employment programs.
The retroactive decriminalization, immediate release and record expungement of all drug related offenses and prostitution, and reparations for the devastating impact of the “war on drugs” and criminalization of prostitution, including a reinvestment of the resulting savings and revenue into restorative services, mental health services, job programs and other programs supporting those impacted by the sex and drug trade.
3 Real, meaningful, and equitable universal health care that guarantees: proximity to nearby comprehensive health centers, culturally competent services for all people, specific services for queer, gender nonconforming, and trans people, full bodily autonomy, full reproductive services, mental health services, paid parental leave, and comprehensive quality child and elder care.
4 A constitutional right at the state and federal level to a fully-funded education which includes a clear articulation of the right to: a free education for all, special protections for queer and trans students, wrap around services, social workers, free health services (including reproductive body autonomy), a curriculum that acknowledges and addresses students’ material and cultural needs, physical activity and recreation, high quality food, free daycare, and freedom from unwarranted search, seizure or arrest.
5 A divestment from industrial multinational use of fossil fuels and investment in community- based sustainable energy solutions.
6 A cut in military expenditures and a reallocation of those funds to invest in domestic infrastructure and community well-being.
7 Financial support of Black alternative institutions including, but not limited to: cooperatives, land trusts, and a culturally responsive health infrastructure.
Economic Justice
We demand economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership, not merely access.
This includes:
1 A progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state, and federal level to ensure a radical and sustainable redistribution of wealth.
2 Federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized Black people, and compensation for those involved in the care economy. Job programs must provide a living wage and encourage support for local workers centers, unions, and Black-owned businesses which are accountable to the community.
3 A right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing and an end to the exploitative privatization of natural resources — including land and water.
We seek democratic control over how resources are preserved, used and distributed and do so while honoring and respecting the rights of our Indigenous family.
4 The right for workers to organize in public and private sectors, especially in “On Demand Economy” jobs.
5 Restore the Glass-Steagall Act to break up the large banks, and call for the National Credit Union Administration and the US Department of the Treasury to change policies and practices around regulation, reporting and consolidation to allow for the continuation and creation of black banks, small and community development credit unions, insurance companies and other financial institutions.
6 An end to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and a renegotiation of all trade agreements to prioritize the interests of workers and communities.
7 Through tax incentives, loans and other government directed resources, support the development of cooperative or social economy networks to help facilitate trade across and in Black communities globally. All aid in the form of grants, loans or contracts to help facilitate this must go to Black led or Black supported networks and organizations as defined by the communities.
8 Financial support of Black alternative institutions including policy that subsidizes and offers lowinterest, interest-free or federally guaranteed low-interest loans to promote the development of cooperatives (food, residential, etc.), land trusts and culturally responsive health infrastructures that serve the collective needs of our communities.
9 Protections for workers in industries that are not appropriately regulated including domestic workers, farm workers, and tipped workers, and for workers — many of whom are Black women and incarcerated people— who have been exploited and remain unprotected. This includes the immediate passage at the Federal and state level of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and extension of worker protections to incarcerated people.
Community Control
We demand a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws, institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us – from our schools to our local budgets, economies, police departments, and our land – while recognizing that the rights and histories of our Indigenous family must also be respected.
This includes:
1 Direct democratic community control of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, ensuring that communities most harmed by destructive policing have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information.
2 An end to the privatization of education and real community control by parents, students and community members of schools including democratic school boards and community control of curriculum, hiring, firing and discipline policies.
3 Participatory budgeting at the local, state and federal level.
Political Power
We demand independent Black political power and Black selfdetermination in all areas of society. We envision a remaking of the current U.S. political system in order to create a real democracy where Black people and all marginalized people can effectively exercise full political power.
This includes:
1 An end to the criminalization of Black political activity including the immediate release of all political prisoners and an end to the repression of political parties.
2 Public financing of elections and the end of money controlling politics through ending super PACs and unchecked corporate donations.
3 Election protection, electoral expansion and the right to vote for all people including: full access, guarantees, and protections of the right to vote for all people through universal voter registration, automatic voter registration, pre-registration for 16-year-olds, same day voter registration, voting day holidays, enfranchisement of formerly and presently incarcerated people, local and state resident voting for undocumented people, and a ban on any disenfranchisement laws.
4 Full access to technology— including net neutrality and universal access to the internet without discrimination— and full representation for all.
5 Protection and increased funding for Black institutions: including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s), Black media, and cultural, political and social formations.
Carl Gustave Jung has shaped myself and our civilization with his brilliant quest to forge a Grand Unified Theory of the processes of becoming human as a universal faith grounded in a science of the soul, and return medicine to its original function of healing the soul.
Through his vast library of writing across a lifetime of scholarship and the unwavering courage to embrace both our darkness and our light, this is what Jung proposes; we all of us own our uniqueness but exist in a limitless sea of Being in which we all share, and the negotiations between these boundaries and interfaces of self and other are where the art of psychology comes in as a guide of the soul.
The Collective Unconscious which unifies all humanity as a transhistorical colony organism below the surface of our personalities and awareness and referential to Platonic Idealism and the Logos, being human as a process of growth he called individuation and modeled on alchemy as a pancultural spiritual faith, synchronicity as an acausal connecting principle; personality as an organization of a quaternity of energy systems, archetypes as mythic figures who live and are real within each of us and are motivating and informing sources of ourselves and of human history; these and many more ideas are among the unique insights and radical mysticism of Carl Gustave Jung.
In any other age he would have been considered a magician; an interpreter of dreams who claimed to command the ka-mutef or spirit of a Pharaoh which he consulted with on difficult cases, a scholar of comparative alchemy, myth, and religion around whose tower in the Black Forest he wrote of fairies dancing at night. His wisdom was won through relationships with timeless and otherworldly figures and forces, that which is most ancient in us, and his books reclaim the humanity that the modern world has forgotten. In this his project is to redeem what Schiller called “the disgodding of nature”, and aligns with the holistic philosophy of Gregory Bateson; equally it can be considered a form of universal faith of the Sapientia Dei or Wisdom as Jung himself claimed.
What Jung did was to restore to religion its original function as medicine of the soul, universalize it as a syncretic faith, and forge an integrated and consistent method for becoming human with the rigor of scientific method. This method which he called Analytical Psychology echoes the dream incubation chambers of the temples of Asclepius, whose symbol of intertwined serpents is the emblem of the medical profession. Secondarily, it implies a political praxis or action of values as a United Humankind as embodied in the United Nations founded during his formative years as a guarantor of our universal human rights and an instrument of peace versus wars of imperial conquest and dominion. Third, it is also a form of Surrealism.
Surrealism is defined by twin characteristics; the quest to transcend ourselves, often in terms of religious mysticism, and the use of dreams as a door to the Infinite. Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood is a Surrealist classic; Vladimir Nabokov, especially in Ada, is the other best example which immediately comes to mind for me, but many works either advance the Surrealist project of transformation or use dream images and symbols extensively. Jungian psychology can be described as Surrealism, also as syncretic mysticism, as he modeled it on alchemical philosophy and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination. Coleridge had in fact done the heavy lifting for Jung as a philosophical framework, though he built something quite different on its foundation.
Among Jung’s other sources, Tibetan Buddhism has the Bardo, and Islam the alam al mythal, as states of being and interfaces between life and death and the individual and the Infinite, an Infinite which for Jung is not divine but human; Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue is a stellar example of modern mysticism as Surrealism. Through the influence of Philip K. Dick, Surrealism has become pervasive in our culture, and both the science fiction and fantasy genres may be considered special forms of Surrealism with their own conventions.
There is much shared ground in Surrealism with Absurdism, though Absurdism does not always posit an Infinite Being to whom we are trying to reach, especially in its Nihilist form with Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, but it can as the Pauline Absurdism in Flannery O’Connor’s Thomism or in Nicholas of Cusa, precursor of Kurt Gödel’s from whom I derive my epistemology of the Conservation of Ignorance. The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in Jung’s writing as literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, develops with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, and Albert Camus, and continues today in Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
How can I say these outrageous things about Jungian psychology being a system of magic, a syncretic faith, and a school of art? Let me recount for you my relevant history; I have studied and been oriented to Jungian psychology since I was a teenager interested in myths and fairytales from the age of twelve when I read Frasier’s massive work on folklore, The Golden Bough, and then read the original Grimm’s Fairytales which had been presented to me in bizarre variations as our ancestral family history by my father and his Beatnik friend, William S. Burroughs, who practiced magic together.
I was made strange by a primary trauma in which I died and was reborn and experienced a moment of supraconsciousness out of time and beheld myriads of possible human futures, on Bloody Thursday, May 15 1969, when the police opened fire on a protest in People’s Park, Berkeley, the most massive and terrible incident of domestic terror ever perpetrated by our government since the Civil War.
Of the six thousand protesters at the scene, only 111 of the victims reached the safety of hospitals. There has never been a full accounting of Bloody Thursday.
I remember my mother smiling and reaching out to a policeman offering a handful of flowers, and he pumped and aimed a shotgun at her in reply. I have no explanation for how we survived the next few moments. I’d like to think he hesitated to murder for no reason a beautiful woman, with flaming red hair and skin pale as rice powder, fearless and kind and with imperious hazel eyes and a boy less than ten years old at her side, even that she had been identified and orders issued not to shoot a notable academic, surely the greatest scholar of Coleridge and symbolism in medieval religious art of her time and a psychologist and biologist as well as an author of children’s books. But no; chance intervened in the form of a policeman who at that moment threw a concussion grenade into the crowd. There was a flash of light and thunder, and all devolved into chaos and death. Time resumed as the crowd fled and policemen fired at our backs; still we escaped harm.
The moment of my true birth was that in which I stood outside of time, beyond death, and held the universe within me.
What happened next? Governor Ronald Reagan unleashed 2,700 soldiers of the National Guard, who joined the Alameda County Sheriffs, in effect a mercenary force who had donned Halloween masks and discarded their badges, in a two week campaign of repression that included bombing the entire city from helicopters with tear gas. When informed of the elementary school children who were hospitalized as a result, he said; “Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides.”
Here I must share with you the other Defining Moment of my ninth year, in the context of my life mission to unravel the origins of evil as illnesses of power and violence, and of the consequences for me of growing up with three voices, English as my home language, Chinese from the age of nine, and French from seventh grade, and of spending ten years from fifth grade in near-daily study and practice of Zen Buddhist and Taoist disciplines.
How I met my teacher happened like this; during the first weeks of fifth grade I spent recess at school either playing chess with the Principal or experimenting with the chemistry set in the classroom, which doubtless seemed odd, unfriendly, and aloof to the other children whom I failed to play with. Someone retaliated by putting gum on my seat, which I found insulting, so during the next recess I poured some chemicals marked with a skull and crossbones down the spigot of the drinking faucet, reasoning that water pressure would let them pool in the u-tube just below so that everyone who went for a drink of water after playing would get a dose.
This is how division, otherness, and disconnectedness escalate into war, and why interdependence, solidarity, and communication can restore the balance of peace when things begin to fall apart.
That afternoon half a dozen kids were outside throwing up, and I felt not triumph but horror, because I realized I could have unintentionally killed everyone. Having escaped by chance the fate of becoming a nine year old mass murderer, I told my father about it that night.
To this my father replied; “You have discovered politics; this is about fear as the basis of human exchange and relationships. Most importantly, it is about the use of force.
Fear is a good servant and a terrible master; those who use it to subjugate others are motivated by fear themselves, and if you can show them you do not fear them they will be afraid of you, and you can use it as a lever to win dominance. Fear is a ground of struggle. Fear precedes power. So, whose instrument will it be?
Fear, power, and the use of social force are balanced with the need to belong. Sometimes its best to do what others do to fit in, but it isn’t always best, and it can be very wrong. Best is to discover what’s best for you, no matter how different that is, and find belonging on your own terms and no one else’s. Even if you have to create that community yourself.
What you need is a way to confront people directly when you’re upset with them that doesn’t cause more harm than it solves.”
This was 1969 and he arranged for me to study with a scholar of traditional arts who had just escaped arrest during the Cultural Revolution in China.
I called him Sifu Long because of a story he told on the day we met, a version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave with nuances of the Fall of the Angels from the Book of Enoch; I had been startled by the sudden fluid movement of his enormous shadow, like a flight of silent birds, in the still room of his study through moon gate doors which like a gaping mouth opened into the chasms of darkness of a gorgeous pillared temple illuminated only by the many incense sticks which glowed like eyes of fire. And I asked, “Why is your shadow so huge? And it moves.”
“Once we were dragons,” he began, “we were vast, without end or beginning, and we filled the universe. But when humans came there was no place for them, and they could not see us all at once; so we became small, lost our greatness, and found ways to share our world. We abandoned eternity and the rapture of the heavens for the stewardship of humankind, who insist on living in boxes from which they refuse to venture out and discover what lies beyond their boundaries.
But you can see me because your cage has not yet been built, and because we are alike in our powers of vision and illusion, to see the true selves of others. This suggests possibilities. So I will teach you how to fight as you wish, but also how to grow beyond your limits and find your greatness.”
These studies included arts from The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung’s primary reference on Taoist practices, Chan or Zen study, the game of Go, kung fu very like that of the television series with whose protagonist I identified, and possibly best of all Chinese and Japanese language, poetry, and inkbrush calligraphy. Here was a method of questioning oneself with a fabulous knowledge base, with which we may seize control of our own evolution, and which again set its mark of difference upon me as a bicultural person in my origins.
Fate handed me a Gordian Knot of problems to solve five years after this, in the summer before I entered High School, when I went to Brazil to train with a friend as a fencer in preparation for the Pan American Games, and I first escaped my gilded cage and was immersed into a bifurcated and discontiguous world of aristocratic privilege and the vast horrors of the surrounding slums of abandoned street children, beggars, garbage mound gleaners, quasi-slave laborers, and the ruthless and brutal police and gangsters who ruled them in partnership. Here I witnessed the true costs of our luxuries, and when the police came to murder children for the bounty placed on them by the rich, I fought in their defense.
These issues, unequal wealth, power, and privilege, became my subjects of study, and throughout the years since I have struggled to understand them as systems which produce evil, a Wagnerian ring of fear, power, and force, and divisions of exclusionary otherness and elite hierarchies of belonging from which are born fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, overwhelming and generalized fear weaponized in service to power and subjugation to authority. When I speak of evil and its origins and functions, this is what I mean.
During Middle School and High School I read through the University of Chicago’s Great Books of the Western World series, and became interested in the curious and the arcane and made a deep study of grimoires and the literature of ceremonial magic; Grimm’s Fairytales as a lost faith, the Kabala, the art of Hieronymus Bosch of which I made a collage on one entire wall of my bedroom as a gate of dreams, and shaped by the bizarre stories my father’s Beatnik friend William S. Burroughs would tell in the evenings after dinner; his journeys to other worlds, duels with magical beings, the art of curses and wishes, poetic vision as a path of reimagination and transformation, how to believe impossible things and transcend ourselves and the limits of our humanity.
Above all was the shadow work encoded in stories as magic rituals in which he passed to me the chthonic guardian spirit which possessed him as its avatar as the successor of Nietzsche; for all his stories ended with our repetition together of Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest; ”This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”. Thus I became heir to his powers of poetic vision as Jungian shadow work, and as the reimagination and transformation of the possibilities of human being, meaning, and value.
Also there were my conversations with my mother, a psychologist, biologist, and scholar of Coleridge who wrote a study of psychosomatic muteness from Jerzy Kosinski’s childhood therapy journal and Soviet mental hospital records, weaving discussions of religious symbolism and The Painted Bird together as an exploration of the problem of evil, and led me through the nuances of symbolism using as a text Émile Mâle’s The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century. From her I inherit a duality of vision, the symbolic and the psychological, which echoes Monet’s dictum, “Man has two eyes through which he sees the world; one looks inward, the other looks outward, and it is the juxtaposition of these two images which creates the world we see.”
At this point during my last year of high school, I read a just-published book which fixed me on the origins of evil and its functions as a field of study, Robert G.L. Waite’s multidisciplinary work on Hitler, The Psychopathic God, and another which suggested intriguing possibilities and solutions, Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.
My Freshman year at university I designed a Jungian Studies course and talked a professor into meeting with me as a private weekly class for credits, and haunted the library at the Jung Institute of San Francisco, where they had beautifully written studies of my beloved operas and many other things. My initial special studies tutorial included Jung’s three volumes on alchemy as a mystery faith and the structural basis for his psychology as a path of reintegration of the self; Alchemical Studies, which contains his commentary on Secret of the Golden Flower, a primary text which was the basis for my traditional supervised meditation disciplines for a decade with Dragon Teacher and my point of entry into Jung’s world, Mysterium Coniunctionis, and Psychology and Alchemy. Later I made a close study of Aion, the final volume of his four works on alchemy, though I worked through the entire corpus of his works throughout my undergraduate studies.
During this time I was a student in the Nexus program of integrated arts and sciences in four main disciplines plus linguistics, which served my personal mission to explore the origins of evil and its functions through the intersection of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy, as suggested to me by reading Waite.
My literary studies focused on Classical mythology and literature, Arthurian Romance, fairytales, and Shakespearean theatre in an attempt to reconstruct the lost faith of pre-Christian Europe as guided by Jacob Grimm, Ted Hughes, William Blake, Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Shakespeare, and I spent a number of glorious summers pursuing amateur theatricals at the annual Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon and performing at the Renaissance Faire at Blackpoint Forest a short drive from my home in Sonoma. In graduate school I studied Comparative Literature as I developed my reading lists for teaching my high school AP English students including twenty world cultures plus Modern American Literature. And of course I traveled to the places I read about, to disrupt my own expectations.
Regarding the science of history, Marx helped me process two defining moments of my life, traumas which were transformational both to my identity and to my understanding of the human condition.
I first read his works as a teenager in the wake of a trip to Brazil the summer between eighth grade and high school in 1974, training with a friend as a sabre fencer for the Pan American Games, during which I became aware of the horrific gulf between social classes and races in the wealth disparity between my aristocratic hosts and the vast Black slums beyond their walls. At thirteen I had read Plato and Nietzsche, but never seen poverty or racism, though the brutal tyranny of a city under siege by its police had been enacted before me years earlier in the spectacle of Bloody Thursday in Berkeley, May 15 1969. This was the Defining Moment of my Awakening to the brokenness of the world and the lies and illusions of the gilded cage of my privilege.
My response to this first reading, like my second and third a part of reading through the entire Great Books of the Western World series and the guidebooks by Mortimer J. Adler which collect his famous course at the University of Chicago, was that Marx had reimagined sin as the profit motive in a myth of Exile and Return, in an allegorical fable in which the new Adamic Man would be restored to an Edenic state, being immediately captivated by the multitudes of Biblical symbolism which permeates Das Capital. In this interpretation I was influenced by my context of growing up in a Reformed Church community, where spoken English reflected that of the King James Bible whose rhythms shape my writing still, and the influence of Coleridge, Blake, and other Romantic Idealists and religious symbolism in medieval art through my mother, who was a scholar of both.
My second reading of Marx was eight years later as a university student after a culinary tour of the Mediterranean during the gap between junior and senior undergraduate years ended with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut, and my exposure to the brutalities of war and Imperialist-Colonialist conquest as a nation fell to ruins around me. This was the Defining Moment of my calling, in which I was sworn to the Oath of the Resistance by Jean Genet.
During this second engagement with Marx, I laughed all the way through it; the first time I didn’t understand the literary references well enough to get the jokes. This time I saw his delightfully wicked Swiftian satire, and realized his true achievement; like Nicholaus of Cusa and Godel, Camus and Sartre, Beckett and Pinter, Marx demonstrates the limits of reason in an Absurd universe free of any meaning or value we ourselves do not create, and the madness of our historical attempts to control fate and nature including our own in a mad world, where security is an illusion, truths are ambiguous, ephemeral, and relational, and our fear has been weaponized globally by carceral states in service to power, the centralization of authority, and our enslavement and dehumanization. In this second unfolding of understanding I found guidance and allyship with fellow revolutionaries and scholars of Marxist thought and its praxis, as we waged liberation struggle, often with Soviet advisors, against Apartheid in South Africa, American imperialism in Central America, and other theatres of Resistance to tyranny and oppression.
Here also I must note that I had been an enthusiast of history since childhood, as my partner Dolly and I discovered that we shared each other’s dreams of past lives together and worked out an enormous backstory unfolding over centuries for what became our grand romance. As motives for scholarship go, it wasn’t half bad.
As to Philosophy, I remain the boy who in eighth grade read all the works of Plato and Nietzsche, and adopted Thus Spake Zarathustra as a counter text to the Bible. And the next year as a Freshman in high school I became an enthusiast of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus and his disciple James Joyce’s mad quest to create a universal human language in Finnegan’s Wake. High school was also when I first wrestled with the Kabala, though I failed to read it in the original coded scholar’s Aramaic mixed with Andalusi Romance and had to rely on Gershom Scholem’s translation. And of course I had been formally studying Taoist and Zen Buddhist literature from the age of nine. My enthusiasm for Surrealist literature and film through my teenage years may also qualify as a philosophical interest, as might my immersion in magic, though later in graduate school at UC Berkeley Godel, Chaos Theory, Quantum Physics, and Batesonian Holism set their hooks in me.
So for my four disciplines of scholarship; as to my hobby of languages, I grew up with three voices; English, Chinese, and French, with some Japanese and Portuguese before I began high school. And everywhere I went, I made a serious effort to learn the language.
My English is influenced by the King James Bible and the local Dutch community of my childhood hometown, whose speech was full of thee’s and thou’s. My mother’s speech was permeated with Yiddish words and phrases, a legacy of my maternal great grandmother; my maternal grandfather was the source of the family German, actually Wienerisch or the Viennese dialect of Austro-Bavarian, combined with the French-influenced Schönbrunner Deutsch of the imperial court.
My Second Voice from the age of nine was Traditional Chinese; inkbrush calligraphy, the Standard Cantonese of Hong Kong, and the Wu Dialect of Shanghai. During my decade of formal study of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, martial arts, and the game of Go I studied in both Chinese and Japanese.
My Third Voice from the seventh grade is French, a legacy of having been sent to six years of French classes at the high school because I was beyond grade level in English, which I enthusiastically embraced along with Surrealist film and literature.
This Defining Moment bears interrogation; during seventh grade I took the AP English test given to high school seniors for university credit and tested out of English classes through senior year of high school. This was among tests arranged by my parents and teachers who conspired to force me into high school two years early, and had tried with math the previous year, which I absolutely refused but for one class, where I traded seventh grade English for Freshman French literature and language, a chance I fell upon with ravenous delight.
The French teacher was a blonde goddess, and here imagine the reporter Rita Skeeter played by Miranda Richardson who corners Harry Potter in the broom closet in The Goblet of Fire, who motivated her students by offering a trip to Paris, with her, after graduation from high school for the best senior French student each year; competition for this honor was fierce, and I was a very, very good student. Thanks for the soft landing in high school, Miss Starring.
Japanese I count as my fourth language as it developed over the years, becoming a greater passion at university when I was obsessed with Japanese poetry to the extent that I walked some of the Basho Road to see where he had written his masterpieces, and I claimed Zen as my religion on official forms through much of my twenties.
I learned some conversational Brazilian Portuguese from the summer before I began high school, Sao Paulo being the scene of my first Last Stand during the weeks of my campaign to rescue abandoned street children from the police bounty hunters and the trauma of my near-execution, in which I find echo and kinship with that of Maurice Blanchot by the Gestapo in 1944 as written in he Moment of My Death and Fyodor Dostoevsky by the Czarist secret police in 1849 as described in The Idiot, from which I was saved by the Matadors, who welcomed me into their fearsome brotherhood with the words; “You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.”
I currently write and publish in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Zulu, Afrikaans, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and since the invasion in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and recently Italian and Dari, Afghanistan’s major language and like Urdu derived from Persian, all three of which are mutually intelligible. This list changes ceaselessly, as do human identities; ephemeral, impermanent, performative and a ground of struggle.
Including dead languages with no broad communities of native speakers but of scholars of ancient literatures, those of my Buddhist and Islamic scholarship include Classical Tibetan from my time as a monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana Order of Buddhism in Kathmandu, Nepal, where I waged a revolution against the monarchy, and from my studies as a member of the Naqshbandi Order of Sufis in Srinagar, Kashmir, where I fought for independence against the invasion by India; Classical Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and the exception to the dead languages of scholarship classification as a universal language of Islamic faith in which one must be literature to be considered fully Muslim, Classical Quranic Arabic.
So, my literacy includes twenty three languages if we count Latin, which I’ve taught in high school; basic Latin is crucial if you are a new student in America whose native language is not English, especially for university-bound students and solving unknown scientific and technical terms. If you know Latin root words and conjugations, you will master English twice as fast.
Of windows into the other ways of being human I count twenty three languages of conversation, including Hokkien Chinese, Iban, Mentawai, Minangkabu, Buginese, Croatian, Koshur, Gorkali, Newari, Gurung, Thai, Shan, S’gaw Karen, Singpho, Naga, Vlax, Vlachs, Romanian, Hungarian, Shelta, Yucatec, and Quiche. and twenty eight of literacy, a total of fifty one.
As a boy I kept a journal in Enochian, greatly interesting as a foundation of ceremonial magic though not a true language, John Dee’s idea of an angelic language used by Aleister Crowley and taught to me by William S. Burroughs who claimed Crowley as his teacher; but its really more of a cypher derived from Gematria or mathematical decoding of Hebrew in Kabala and medieval occultism hidden within a unique orthographic script for Early Modern English, much like Tolkien’s invented languages, with a modified alphabet and around 200 unique terms. So I don’t count it.
Beyond this, my interest in dreams as a field of study has led me to explore three spheres of ideas wherein dreamwork is primary and which were influences on Jung; I have been a Buddhist monk of the Kagyu Vajrayana order in Nepal, a member of the Naqshbandi order of Sufism in Kashmir, and an enthusiast of Surrealist art, literature, and cinema; and I see the same interconnections and commonalities between them as Jung did.
Having properly situated my understanding of Jung in the topologies of my intellectual environment as I grew up, a crucial stage of investigation in any study of human identity as informed, motivated, and shaped by our historical adaptations, I now turn to the man himself and his work.
Jung spoke in metaphors, densely layered references, and multiple meanings; his psychology is literary and philosophical rather than scientific and medical, a Quixotic quest to map the human soul and to describe a universal process of becoming human.
Poet, historian, literary scholar and philosopher, whose project was surrealist and mystical; Carl Gustave Jung pioneered ideas which have been taken in multiple directions by others, his comparative mythology shaped into a new discipline by Joseph Campbell, his archetypal psychology forged into a new classicism by James Hillman. His massive work on psychological types formed the basis of the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator test; the Rorschach test is an equally famous tool which puts Jungian theory to work.
His last book, Man and His Symbols, is an excellent introduction to his ideas, intended for general readers and accessible enough to use in high school English classes to teach basic symbolism in literature as I did.
Anthony Storr’s The Essential Jung is a great follow-up and broad overview; beyond this I suggest reading Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Psychotherapy by Marie-Louise von Franz, and The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire, continuing the study of all four authors together.
Of James Hillman, read next Dreaming the Dark, and thereafter The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, Kinds of Power, and Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung’s Red Book, A Terrible Love of War, Pan and the Nightmare, and We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse.
Of Joseph Campbell, read next Creative Mythology, Myths to Live By, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine edited by Safron Rossi, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-87, Romance of the Grail: The Magic and Mystery of Arthurian Myth, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, the three volumes of the Masks of God series, Tarot Revelations coauthored with Richard Roberts, and The Mythic Image.
The works of Marie-Louise von Franz balance them as the fourth partner of the set; Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, and Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures, would begin my list.
Boundaries of the Soul: The Practice of Jung’s Psychology, by June K. Singer is still the finest state of the art text for both general readers and clinicians. Also read Singer’s Modern Woman in Search of Soul: A Jungian Guide to the Visible & Invisible Worlds.
His humanistic-existentialist works, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, The Undiscovered Self, and Answer to Job, are wonderful companion studies to the works of Sartre and Camus.
I do like the topical collections assembled from disparate essays in his collected works; Dreams, and also Jung on Active Imagination edited by Joan Chodorow.
His collaboration with Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, is a joint attempt to found a new science of mythology, and a launching point for both Campbell and Hillman.
I especially love Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, notes from the 86 seminars he chaired over 11 university terms exploring the great epic poem which seized and shook me awake in eighth grade, as a 14 year old who for the first time had found a book by someone who spoke for me.
Do read the marvelous Aion: researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, which builds on his foundational studies of alchemy and is illuminating in terms of the Sartre/Merleau-Ponty debate.
His autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections was a treasured companion of mine for years, filled with wit and wisdom, strangeness, visions and occult weirdness. When I first read it I considered it a grimoire, magic having been an enthusiasm of mine throughout my teenage years, parallel and interdependent with my immersion in Surrealist film during weekend forays to Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley where I was wont to run amok.
And then there is The Red Book, in which the genesis of his ideas is written, an extended interrogation of Herman Hesse’s Abraxis as described in the novel Demian, a reimagination and transformation of Gnosticism and the founding of a syncretic faith which touches the whole mystical tradition of humankind, which can be read as a journal of madness like Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or a crisis of faith comparable to Augustine’s Confessions. Jung’s autobiography which I read in high school, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is an except from the Red Book which leaves out the crazy ass parts. The thing is, I like the crazy parts best. Our universe, and humankind, are both irrational. Jung should have learned, with all his wisdom, to do as the humorist Gini Koch advises in her signature line; “Go with the crazy”.
On the subject of Jungian psychology:
A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, by Robert H. Hopcke.
Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, by Connie Zweig & Jeremiah Abrams.
The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, The Aion Lectures: Exploring the Self in C.G. Jung’s Aion, by Edward F. Edinger.
Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts, Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life As an Elephant, by Daryl Sharp.
Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness, by Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson.
Remembering Dionysus: Revisioning Psychology and Literature in C.G. Jung and James Hillman, Susan Rowland
Jung Interviews with Richard Evans
How to Integrate Your Shadow – The Dark Side is Unrealized Potential, by Academy of Ideas
Carl Jung and the Shadow: The Mechanics of Your Dark Side, film by Adrian Iliopoulos on his YouTube channel The Quintessential Mind
Carl Jung’s Philosophy of The Shadow, by BanditRants
The Shadow – Carl Jung’s Warning to The World, by Eternalized
The World Within: Jung in his Own Words interview and documentary
The Wisdom of the Dream documentary
The Liberation of the Heart: Marion Woodman on Truthful Relationships and the Shadows of Power
Marie-Louise von Franz on the Anima in Men
Carl Jung and the Journey of Self-Discovery | Historical Documentary | Lucasfilm
C.G. Jung at Bollingen
September 25 2023 My Library of Possible Selves: A History Of My Identities Through My Languages
Before all else must come the tactics and strategy of Resistance in the moment we now face, always the only moment we have and a Rashomon Gate of possible futures; as both Tolstoy and Lenin asked with such very different answers, What is to be done?
The atrocities and crimes against humanity of the ICE terror force now being called Los Diablos, The Devils in Spanish, and the federal troops occupying sanctuary cities in a campaign of white supremacist state terror and ethnic cleansing, which recalls to me the horrors of the Serbian regime I fought half a lifetime ago at Sarajevo, are an immediate threat we must confront daily, but far from a unique one.
The Fourth Reich of the Trump regime is trying to subjugate us through division and terror, and to this let us give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
In America we are at war with our own government, a captured state of fascist tyranny, and all Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence. And no mater where you begin with authorized political identities of otherness and belonging, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As I wrote in my post of February 10 2025, Resist ICE By Any Means Necessary; If They Come For One Of Us, Let Them Be Met With All Of Us; If you see ICE agents, send up a general warning. Photograph and publish their identities. Track them to their lair, picket their homes, flash mob them, set false trails and load the sites they raid with protestors.
Never let police take anyone alone; they are both infiltrated by white supremacist terrorists and coordinating actions with them as deniable assets like the Oathkeepers, and in addition to the official ICE terror force of Homeland Security which pays six figure salaries to the most brutal psychopathic thugs and racist fanatics gathered from our prisons and security services, states are now hiring bounty hunters with no security clearances or training and paying one thousand dollars per human deported, and that means anyone nonwhite, citizen or not, a policy which has hit the Native American Tribes as racist state terror.
One armed thug with a badge cannot abduct a target when three of us intervene; one hundred enforcers of racist state terror cannot overcome a thousand who Resist.
Men without badges, wearing masks, without warrants and who offer no rights of trial as we our guaranteed by our founding documents, who abduct people at random and send them to secret foreign prisons without probable cause or evidence of any kind, without Miranda rights or hearing the evidence against them in a court of law; such teams as ICE now employs are not police of any kind but extrajudicial crime syndicates of racist terror. Resist to the death abduction of yourself or others.
In the words of the character Mick Rory in Legends of Tomorrow, episode Turncoat; “You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re outcasts, misfits, and proud of it. If the enemy attacks in formation, we pop em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, we raid their camp in the night. And if they’re going to hang you, you fight dirty. And we never surrender.”
How shall we resist? By any means necessary, as Sartre wrote in his play of 1948 Dirty Hands, and was made famous by Malcolm X. All Resistance is War to the Knife, for who respects no laws and no limits may hide behind none.
I am prepared at all times to fight to the death, but this does not mean taking unnecessary risks. One must study the possibilities like a problem in chess, have plans for everything you can imagine, and spring the trap only when it is properly set.
The first lesson of the Art of War is diversion and surprise; and the last lesson is the same as the first. On the modern battlefield any threat that can be seen or identified can be destroyed; so don’t tip your hand.
In the context of Resistance against ICE kidnapping teams, your enemy has military weapons, armor, and communications, and possibly some training; if Trump calls in the National Guard to support them as he has threatened today, they will unquestionably be trained to work as a team in ways far superior to that of any pickup team you may be able to put together, even if your team has better skills individually. This means you must avoid direct confrontation; you must be clever, unpredictable, strike anonymously from the shadows when the enemy is off guard and at their weakest in ways which cannot be countered, and never use the same trick twice.
Of course, you want to train as a team as much as possible, and as broadly as possible which among other things means cross training in each other’s disciplines exactly as all military forces do.
This brings us to one of the crucial and decisive factors in any conflict; the use of force obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion and creates its own counterforce such as Resistance, so the reaction must be part of its design if one is to use force to shape the future.
Another such principle is that in the Calculus of Fear, too little invites Chaos and social disorder, and too much galvanizes Resistance. I’d have thought the world would have learned this at Nanking, but its something tyrants never truly learn. People who have nothing left to lose are uncontrollable and dangerous, like ourselves.
Herein a word of caution; do not meet force with force, fear with fear, terror with terror. Leave evil to the evildoers. This I advise not as a moral principle, but as a strategic one when the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle include a nominally democratic state which may be brought into alignment with its constitutional ideals of the equality of all human beings under the law and of the co-ownership of the state by its citizens, through mass action, solidarity, and performance of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen: Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
The great secret of authority as power, force, and control is that it is hollow and brittle, and becomes meaningless without legitimacy.
The Fourth Reich and its figurehead Traitor Trump and the Party of Treason are counting on losing some of their enforcers to mob violence as a pretext for the occupation of America by federal troops under martial law, a trick they tried four times during the Black Lives Matter protests using police provocateurs and campaigns of arson, looting, and random violence to delegitimize the protests against racist police violence and seize the narrative. In this the enemy failed; during months of mass protests in over fifty cities throughout our nation, only one act of violence by anyone other than police and their co-conspirators happened,, and that was when our Antifa comrade Michael Reinoehl returned fire when fired upon when confronting a motorcade of 600 armed fascists on August 29 2020 in Portland Oregon, and was assassinated by a police death squad days later.
The goal of authority in centralizing power is to win legitimacy, and our goal as revolutionaries is to delegitimize authority and seize the moral high ground. We now find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Gandhi versus the British Empire, and his very elegant solution which tipped the balance was the Salt Tax Protest, during which hundreds of nonresisting Indians were systematically beaten with clubs by police on camera and before the stage of history, reported to the world with the words; “The British Empire has lost any claim to the moral high ground in India.”
Always the question of the social use of force remains central to any action versus or interrogation of evil in its origins as fear, power, and force in recursive processes of the Wagnerian Ring of Power, and any seizures of power in liberation struggle against systems of oppression and unequal power and the state as embodied violence, especially under imposed conditions of struggle which include brutal repression of dissent and thought control by enforcers of the carceral state and its elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
This goal of delegitimation of authority does not override our duty of care for others; if a man kneels on another’s neck he is a murderer and we are obligated to stop him by any means necessary, and if a man points a gun at another let a hundred guns reply.
Everything devolves to fear, power, and force, a maelstrom which only love can free us from, and we who hunt monsters must be very careful not to become so ourselves. As Nietzsche warned; “Those who hunt monsters must be careful lest they also become monsters; and when you look too long into the Abyss, the Abyss looks back into you.”
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear and how we use our power; do something beautiful with yours.
ICE and the federal occupation of sanctuary cities and general campaign of ethnic cleansing and white supremacist terror are our direct threat and must be purged from our society, but this is also a symptom of more general issues of white supremacy as a system of oppression and unequal power designed to create and enforce elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and white privilege, and of the centralization of power to a carceral state of force and control and the state as embodied violence.
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
This is system of oppression which creates and enforces elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege which we must we must destroy utterly if we are to truly become a free society of equals.
As I wrote in my post of December 18 2024 International Migrants Day: “There Is No Migration Crisis; There Is a Crisis of Solidarity”; We celebrate today the human will to become, to explore, to discover new worlds and create new possibilities of becoming human, in the iconic figure of the migrant as the epitome and driving force of civilization.
Often the migrant also enacts the symbol, archetype, and allegory of the Stranger as well, with all of the ambiguities, dangers, and opportunities for the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value implicit in the themes of this primary universal psychodrama.
Often has Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, quoted the book he kept on his nightstand for years in place of a Bible, Mein Kampf, to cheering crowds during an election rally in reference to migrants; “They’re poisoning our blood.”
No matter where you begin with ideas of otherness as a threat to identity, the origin of all fascism, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
Let us give to fascism the only reply it merits; Never Again!
The wave of fascism sweeping the world these past few years originates in a primal fear of otherness as loss of the self; this is weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us, becomes divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and all of this coheres into authorized identities and a savage and cruel identity politics.
The Other is always our own mirror image, and we cannot escape each other. This is why fascism and tyranny are inherently unstable and always collapse in depravity and ruin; when we project what we dislike about ourselves onto others, as objects to abuse as if exorcising our demons, we dehumanize ourselves as well as them. And such denial fails as a strategy of transformation and adaptation to change, aggrandizing ossified institutions and systems until they become threats rather than solutions, and the whole edifice collapses from the mechanical failures of its contradictions as is happening now in America and throughout human civilization.
This is why the embrace of our own darkness and monstrosity is crucial to liberation struggle; how else can we bring change to systems of oppression if we cannot confront it in ourselves? Especially we must hold close and interrogate feelings like disgust, revulsion, rage, and other atavisms of instinct which we drag behind ourselves like an invisible reptilian tail with the recognition that nothing we feel is either good or evil, but only how we use them in our actions toward others.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
Against this Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force we must set a counterfire of solidarity and love, for only this can set us free. We must speak directly to that fear of otherness as loss of identity and of power if we are to turn the tide of history toward a free society of equals and not fascist tyrannies of blood, faith, and soil, toward democracy and a diverse and inclusive United Humankind and not carceral states of force and control, toward love and not hate.
We are stronger together than alone, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated with his bundle of arrows in reference to Ecclesiastes 4:12 and the Iroquois Great Peacemaker called in some contexts Deganawidah. A diverse and inclusive society makes us more powerful if in different ways, wealthier, more resilient and adaptive, offers unknown joys and opens new vistas and possibilities of becoming human.
Change need not mean fear and loss; for it also offers limitless new wonders. We must be agents of change and bringers of Chaos, if we are to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world.
The idea of human rights has been abandoned by its former guarantor nations, with whole peoples in Palestine and Ukraine being erased in wars of ethnic cleansing and genocide as exhibits of atrocities and crimes against humanity, and because of this and many other systems failures civilization is collapsing; ephemeral and illusory things like wealth and power are meaningless in the shadow of our degradation and the terror of our nothingness in the face of death.
A reader’s comment on my post of December 8, The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights, contained the phrase “more hopeful of the good in most people”.
Here follows my reply; I too believed in things like human goodness once, but after forty years of wars, revolutions, resistance, and liberation struggle throughout the world I cannot. What I trust and hope for, if not believe in, is solidarity of action in struggle against systems of oppression and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege. Such is my faith; the equality of human needs and the necessity of our unity in seizures of power to create a free society of equals.
As written by Jean Genet, who swore me to the oath of the Resistance and set me on my life’s path during the Siege of Beirut in 1982; “If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”
How shall we welcome the Stranger?
As I wrote in my post of June 7 2025, A Battle For the Soul Of America and the Freedom of the World: ICE Versus The People; In the streets of Los Angeles and throughout Vichy America, the People rise in mass action and solidarity to do battle with Homeland Security’s army of occupation and white supremacist terror, ICE.
Is this not the beauty of human beings, to resist and cease not, and abandon not our fellows? This is the primary act of becoming human which defines us, this refusal to submit to authority, or to betray our duty of care for others.
Here also is our victory, for who cannot be ruled or controlled, who disobeys and disbelieves the lies of those who would enslave us, becomes Unconquered and free, and this is a power that cannot be taken from us.
This is now the fifth time Trump has tried to terrorize America into submission through use of secret armies of federal occupation; and each of these previous campaigns of repression of dissent, which loosed looting, arson, and random violence under the direction of Homeland Security on our cities to delegitimize the Black Lives Mater protests and seize control of the narrative in service to the centralization of power and authority to the carceral state, each and every such action has failed.
The sole result of all of this state terror and repression of dissent was the defeat of the Homeland Security army in the Battle of Portland and the articles of surrender published by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf and their joint declaration of New York, Seattle, and Portland as Autonomous Zones beyond control of the federal state. To my knowledge, we Antifa are the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on ground within her borders since Little Bighorn.
We have been victorious over forces like that of ICE which the Trump regime sends against us now; it can be done, friends, and we all of us can do it again, here and now.
When the enemies of liberty come for us, as they always have and will, let them find not an America divided by propaganda of otherness and defeated by learned helplessness, abjection, and despair, but a United Humankind of Living Autonomous Zones and the Unconquered, citizens who refuse to become subjects, and a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights.
And if we all stand together and the circle is unbroken, we will be victorious.
For we are many, we are watching, and we are the future.
As I wrote in my post of January 23 2021, Inclusion and the Embrace of Otherness is the Test of Democratic Societies: On Immigration; Our new President Biden and his government seem committed to ideals of equity and fairness, in our system of immigration and in all things, which I celebrate and will help in any way I can; but in this area of policy I believe we need a few things more.
Inclusion and the embrace of Otherness is the test of democratic societies.
We need a version of the English Slave Act; anyone who sets foot on American soil is free, safe, and under our protection.
We need a borderless state with citizenship by declaration; if you accept the responsibilities of membership in our nation and agree to live in accord with our principles and agreements with one another, you are an American. If you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?
We need to reimagine and transform our security services and repurpose Homeland Security and the Border Patrol to provide safe passage to our shores and a humane landing which welcomes new Americans with food, medical attention, and education.
The horrific ethnic cleansing and systematic torture and abuse of the Trump regime did not emerge from nothing, but from an ancient injustice by which our nation created wealth and elite power and privilege for white supremacy; we have drawn a line in the sand to weaponize disparity and generate mass cheap exploitable labor which fuels agriculture, hospitality, childcare, and other markets and industries.
Illegal migrant labor is slave labor.
Let us emancipate our workforce so that everyone working here has the same rights and legal protections as citizens, no worker can be used against another, and all share in the wealth and benefits of their labor.
Théodore Géricault’s painting of 1818, The Raft of the Medusa
A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, Lauren Markham
January 17 2025 Origins of Our Migrant Crisis: Echoes and Reflections of American Imperialism and Operation Condor in Latin America’s Destabilized Nations
Let us enact the Restoration of America; liberty, equality, truth, and justice for all.
First among the policies which I recommend as a platform for change in our upcoming 2028 elections must be the abolition of police; repeal the Patriot Act, disarm and demilitarize the police and abolish the counterinsurgency model of policing, the dismantle the carceral state and its prisons as a strategy of the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor, and the abandonment of the social use of force by the state.
There are many other thoughts I have on the subject of the Reformation of the Democratic Party as an institution of liberation struggle and the Restoration of America, but this must come before all else, because if we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
Let us abolish the police, and begin again with healing the flaws of our humanity and the legacies of our history rather than the enforcement of virtue, authorized identities, repression of dissent and thought control through surveillance and propaganda.
Police abolition is about seizure of power from those who would enslave us and bringing change to institutionalized white supremacist terror, but it is also a ground of revolutionary struggle at the heart of the idea of America as a free society of equals who are co owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens.
The institution of police is profoundly un-American and inherently racist, and it cannot endure alongside any kind of land of the free.
As I wrote in my post of January 11 2025, Why Are Police Evil? Police Are Evil When States Are Evil, and States Are Inherently Evil: the Case of Tyre Nichols; Why are police evil?
Why does the state use police to enforce its authority and laws, and train and arm them not to render aid but to kill, not to redress unequal power and injustices but to perpetrate them as institutional hate crime?
Such questions thunder through the streets of Memphis, America, and the world as brutal repression and state terror is met with resistance, as it did during the historic Black Lives Matter mass protests for racial justice.
On January 10 2023, Tyre Nichols died from being beaten by five police officers on the seventh. That the policemen who murdered him simply because they could were black signposts issues of internalized oppression and systemic white supremacist terror, as elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege require enforcers to keep the slave castes at their work; the phenomenon of the overseer is a symptom of these inequalities and a strategy of loaned power and assimilation on the part of carceral states and colonial regimes, both of which America remains long after the Civil War. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is an exemplar of the overseer, one who has joined an elite who does not regard him or any of his people as fellow human beings; Kamala Harris represents both my hopes and my fears for our future, and may possibly be another such overseer of the carceral and white supremacist state and social system. The emergence of overseers among slave populations is entirely due to the imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle, as a symptom of systemic oppression.
We Americans still have armed police to enforce our subjugation of nonwhite others, through the whole of the passing Biden era whom we elected on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement and our seizure of over fifty American cities for several months of battle against a secret army of Homeland Security terror troops working with deniable fascist assets like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. In this we were victorious, we Antifa being the only force to defeat the federal government of the United States in open battle on American soil since Little Bighorn. The articles of surrender declared by the Triumvirate of Trump, Barr, and Wolf which designated Portland, Seattle, and New York as Anarchist Zones beyond state control is unparalleled in our history. Of this I am immensely proud as a triumph equal to our defeat of the Apartheid regime of South Africa and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, yet the Pandemic was weaponized as a national Quarantine by our betrayers to stop the protests without changing anything.
Why have we not abandoned the use of state terror and abolished the police?
Is it because in creating terror and learned helplessness through the random murders of nonwhite citizens the police are doing exactly what they are chosen and trained to do?
Police are evil because they enforce unjust systems of white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror; police forces are designed and intended as enforcers of unequal power and overseers of carceral states of force and control, states whose purpose is to institutionalize elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness through which caste systems are perpetuated, citizenship made conditional, and those who create the wealth of elites commodified and dehumanized as de facto slaves. Police began as slavecatchers and overseers, and remain so today.
In the murder of Tyre Nichols we have a special unit of overseers who beat a fellow Black man to death simply because they could, but this obscures the central fact of the case that this horrific crime is fully aligned with the purpose of the special unit of which they were members and of the institution of policing in general; to criminalize Black identity and act as a force of state terror in the repression of dissent and the theft of citizenship.
Police are evil when states are evil, and all states are inherently evil, for the state is embodied violence.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
As I wrote in my post of May 25 2025, Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle Against Racist Police Terror As A System of Oppression; On this anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, a transformative moment in the Reckoning of our nation with institutional and systemic racism, a discredited and corrupt police state of white supremacist terror and brutal tyranny of force and control, and the legacies of historical inequalities and injustices as a national epigenetic illness of racism and power, we mourn the tragedy of his murder, one incident of racist cruelty and the arrogance of power among countless others, but we also celebrate the triumphant solidarity and refusal to submit of the Black Lives Matter movement which it triggered, and which may yet redeem us with transformative change and a reimagination of our possibilities of becoming human.
We meet the moment of this anniversary with all its inchoate multiplicities of meaning, shifting and relative truths, bidirectional forces of reaction and resistance, of despair at our powerlessness as victims of the carceral state, systemic racism, and the sacrifice of our nation’s children by the Republican Party on the altar of their power in refusal to confront an epidemic of gun violence and enact reasonable laws to keep weapons of terror, death, and mass destruction out of the hands of police and other madmen and criminals in subservience to organizations of white supremacist terror like the NRA; in the midst of all of this and the epigenetic trauma and shared public grieving of the legacies of historical and systemic racism and the fetishization of violence and of guns as symbols of white male power and privilege, but also rage which may transform into action.
Look at the faces of the victims of gun violence and white supremacist terror. Why did they die?
They died for the power and wealth of elites for whom their lives are nothing. For this crime there can be no justice, as justice too is owned by those who would enslave us. For the dead we can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged, and the systemic inequality of the business of empire which sacrifices children on the altar of imperial dominion and elite hegemonies of wealth and power wherein the carceral state requires an unchecked and limitless civilian gun market to keep arms manufacturers in business so we are always tooled up to fight vast wars of imperial conquest and dominion and defend our markets and control of strategic resources like oil, regardless of the costs of randomly murdered civilians. Indeed this helps the state justify its police forces of occupation and repression of dissent; pervasive gun violence creates fear which the state weaponizes in service to power.
Those who would enslave us make monsters of some of us in order to terrify the rest of us into submission and legitimize the centralization of power to the state.
If we are to be free, we must begin by being equal.
The Hobgoblin’s fragmented mirror in Anderson’s The Snow Queen provides a metaphor of America’s historical memory and vision of ourselves; mirrors, cameras, things that reflect but also capture and distort. This image is shaped by the three primary forces of race, wealth, and gender which together act to authorize identity and subjugate, falsify, commodify, and dehumanize us. And this we must resist.
According to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as written in The Root; “In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. Of them, 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Only about 388,000 were transported directly from Africa to North America”.
If we count only the known victims of racial violence since Emancipation, we have a legacy of crimes against humanity in a nation founded on the principle that all persons are created equal which reveals this to be an Original Lie; racism is not a failure of our system, but a key element of its design. Now count all the Black people who lived and died as American slaves from the first landing in 1661 to Juneteenth.
The names of the victims of racism in our nation become an infinite loop of misery and despair, a lamentation of the brokenness of the world and of the human cost of a system which uses divisions of exclusionary otherness to change some of us into things to be used for the profit of a few oligarchic families of apex predators. Ideologies of white supremacy perpetuate inequality in our society today; the wolves are still among us, even if they must disguise themselves as sheep.
Among the most terrible instruments of those who would enslave us is this erasure and silencing of Black voices, of concealment of the scope and horror of the legacy of slavery in the power asymmetries and inequalities we are heir to. We have hundreds of years of lost lives and names to reclaim, and we can not lose a single one more.
Every one of those lost lives is an Unknown Soldier in the struggle for Liberty; let us honor them with our actions as songs of survival and revolution, and make of one another living monuments to our unconquered freedom in defiance of those who would enslave us.
As I wrote in my post of December 29 2020, A Cry for Justice and Transformation: a Roll of Martyrs in the Struggle for Equality Against Racist Police Violence, White Supremacist Terror, and State Terror and Tyranny; Let the names of the martyrs murdered by our police become more than a litany of sorrows, but a song of revolution and transformative change; George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, Dijon Kizzee, Walter Wallace Jr., Jonathan Price, Casey Goodson Jr., Andre Hill, and countless others whose names have been stolen from us.
How many of their murderers are now on Death Row? How many exiled to the Island of Lost Souls? Here I do not advocate for death or exile as punishments within the power of the state; but merely to underscore the significance of our failure to consequent criminal violence by police, so long as it reinforces white supremacy.
How shall we answer the failure of our nation to achieve the ideals of its founding? How can we begin to reverse the tide of racist and fascist totalitarianism?
Disarm the police. Demilitarize the police and abandon the counterinsurgency model if policing. Abolish the police and replace them with humanitarian social services; transform security services designed to kill and enforce inequalities and injustices into services designed to aid our freedom, equality, and pursuit of happiness, and with an absolute imperative to safeguard our right to life.
We must bring our institutions into service to our people and the principles and values of our Constitution and Bill of Rights; the choice is not between liberty and security, but of security in the service of liberty rather than the reverse.
As I wrote in my post of October 13 2021, Abolish Prisons, Police, and the Carceral State of Tyranny and Terror, Force and Control; I write today to amplify the voices of the imprisoned and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity, and to support the work of the Prison Abolition Initiative and Black Lives Matter.
Such ideas bear the weight of our historical legacies of slavery, racism, and the interdependent purposes of the carceral state to re-enslave Black Americans as prison labor, and to centralize power and authority, both political strategies designed to reinforce the wealth, power, and privilege of elites and to subvert democracy and a free society of equals through divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of exclusivity and membership.
As you may know, I tend to think in terms of literature, and to me this issue constructs and presents itself in the contexts of Kafka’s The Trial, Dostoevsky’s autobiographical novel The Idiot and his prison journal The House of the Dead, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
America, we can do better than this; the Czar, the Nazis, Stalin. They are not, and must not become, our teachers. We must be better, and if we cannot escape the legacies of our history and the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems and institutions of dehumanization and commodification we must seize our power and our Liberty in refusal to submit to authority, by any means necessary.
Let us abolish the police and the instruments of repression of dissent; let us throw open the gates of our prisons, and be free.
In the words of Lenin which began the Russian Revolution, What is to be done? As I wrote in my post of April 12 2021, Cry Havoc: Seize the Streets to Disarm the Police; While the world reels in stupefaction as the true nature of justice in America is revealed in the spectacle of the George Floyd trial, US Army medic Lt Caron Nazario is tortured and terrorized by police, and Daunte Wright in another nonsensical harassment because of a disorderly air freshener impudently dangling from his rearview mirror, is murdered without cause by a twenty seven year veteran of the police force who claims to have mistaken a gun for a taser. And the streets are once again consumed with unruly and uppity protests.
This is what happens when police are permitted to carry guns. No one should be authorized by the state to use deadly force against their fellow citizens. It is an insane idea, which we must abandon.
Where are our leaders and representatives who should be rallying the masses and championing the cry for equality and racial justice at the head of these protests?
In response to the racist murders, torture, and white supremacist terror perpetrated by the police against our Black citizens, President Biden mumbles some boilerplate apologetics of state force and control and asks us nicely not to riot, loot, burn, or otherwise enact public grief, rage, and despair at our abandonment by the government and victimization by its forces of repression.
We must clarify and prioritize this situation for our representatives.
Seize the streets to disarm the police.
Take the streets until we are free of the state terror and racial violence of police. Disarm and abolish police. Hold our representatives accountable for the white supremacist terror of our government, for the carceral state and the institutionalized re-enslavement of Black Americans as prison labor, for the subversion of liberty and equality and the divisions of racist elitism which police and our corrupt justice system enforce.
Liberate America from this horrific and depraved regime of racist patriarchs and their hired thugs. Abandon our endemic and pervasive surveillance and repression of dissent. Abolish the counterinsurgency model of policing. Renounce force and control and the substitution of order for justice.
Law serves power, authority, hierarchy, and hegemonies of elite wealth and privilege; and law must never be allowed to replace morality. Law and order are instruments of subjugation and enslavement, commodification, dehumanization, and falsification; choose Liberty instead.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes.
Let us demonstrate the failure of law and order through disobedience, resistance, and refusal to submit to authority. For authoritarian force and control is powerless against resistance, and we who refuse to submit and obey become Unconquered and free.
Who cannot be compelled is free.
We must free ourselves from the Empire of Fear and work toward the liberation of America and the world from inequality and injustice.
As written by William Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, Act 3 Scene 1, lines spoken by Marc Anthony which can be said by us of all the victims of police violence and white supremacist terror, whose names are an endless litany of wrongs;
“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever livèd in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy—
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men.
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
As I wrote in my post of July 23 2020, Abolish State Terror and Tyranny: Forces of Unequal Power; A precondition of both tyranny and terror is unequal power, and secret power is the most vicious and terrible kind, whether in cases of sexual abuse and exploitation or of an authoritarian state of force and control.
Power operates by the same rules at every level; the differences are those of scale and the instruments of enslavement, dehumanization, and repression available to governments with vast resources and legions of intermediaries with badges and guns.
In all cases the objective of force and control is submission to authority, and this operates through learned helplessness, silence, erasure, and marginalization.
Our best strategy of engagement in resistance to unjust authority is exposure of its crimes against humanity and the surfacing and amplification of the voices of its victims, for in the words of the great champion of the people Bob Woodward, “Democracy dies in darkness”, and we must bring its enemies into the light.
Reverend Al Sharpton’s Eulogy for Amir Locke and All Black Americans, Who Are Nameless Suspects Awaiting Murder By Police, Each and Every One
Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, Stuart Schrader
May 25 2025 Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder and The Meaning of the Black Lives Matter Protests as Revolutionary Struggle Against Racist Police Terror As A System of Oppression
We are seized and shaken in the jaws of the Fourth Reich under the Trump regime here in America, but as the regime begins to collapse under the fracture and division of its delegitimation through exposure of the Epstein Files and the evaporation of the QAnon conspiracy theory and the new myth of Exile which forms the basis of the regime as a theocracy, the people are questioning how we can reshape the Democratic Party, the only organization that can directly challenge the Republican Party, and its political ideology and agenda as an instrument with which to seize power from the Republicans.
This will remain among the great questions of our time so long as the two party system can withstand the impacts of ranked choice voting and the resulting fragmentation and balkanization of power and political topologies, and not only for America but for the world. How can we reclaim the purpose of America as institutionalized Revolution and a guarantor of democracy for all humankind?
With what platform can we rally mass action? What songs of liberty will inspire us to unite in solidarity of action against those who would enslave us?
What does it mean to be an American, in this crisis of the second capture of the state by the Fourth Reich and the near-inevitability of the fall of global democracy and civilization and a future of tyranny and barbaric wars of imperial conquest and dominion, a Second Dark Age which humankind will not survive?
And in all of this, what does it mean to be human?
As a prelude to any future interrogations of our values and their praxis, we must examine the strategies of the 2024 election and why they failed.
First, the Democratic Party abandoned the principle of our universal human rights in meeting the mass protests against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians with a Great Wall of Silence.
Second, they abandoned the entire progressive agenda along with Palestine, universal healthcare and the Green New Deal, a labor centered economy, ecological action and independence from fossil fuels, abolition of police and social justice for nonwhite citizens, open borders and equality for migrants, everything that might actually help us survive and win a true free society of equals. It was monstrous what they did, the Democratic Party, in abandoning the people who can lead us into the future for entrenchment in an increasingly unworkable and obsolete past.
Third the failure was far more broad than that of the Democratic Party in aligning its goals with the will and wellbeing of the People; for in choosing to run a one issue abortion campaign, Harris and her political machine waged a revolution against the system of Patriarchy, two thousand seven hundred years of entrenched power dated from the Hanging of the Maids in Ulysses. It was a glorious and necessary thing, but it proved a bridge too far as nonwhite men joined the Republicans in voting to hold onto the only form of power they had. Even at the cost of ceding the power to hunt and kill them at will by white men and the police who are a white supremacist terror force; and the campaign did nothing to play race against gender identity politics.
Trump voters elected a figurehead who is a white supremacist terrorist and theocratic sexual terrorist because they wanted permission to do the same. This is the tide of darkness we must turn, and it is far bigger and more ancient and universal than Trump or his Nazi-Klu Klux Klan followers.
Our choice of figureheads and leadership for revolutionary struggle is determinative in the success or failure of the next Presidential election, for we are barbarians who vote for one human being who we grant extraordinary powers over our lives. I think we should abandon the office of the President for an executive council chosen, led, and with oversight by the Senate; but in the meanwhile we must find a champion.
While I will be problematizing the ideal platform of my imagination in future essays, here I wish to review the lengthy vetting process of the last election’s Presidential debates in search of clues to possible future Presidents.
As I wrote in July of 2024, Weighing the Biden Restoration of Democracy In the Shadows of the 2019 Presidential Debates; Is stopping the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich and the madness of a second Trump regime in which to complete the subversion of democracy and the fall of civilization to a Dark Age of theocratic fascist tyranny enough to justify a second Biden term?
The Restoration of democracy is necessary, but is it enough? Solidarity in Resistance to fascism and tyranny is unquestionable for myself as both an ideal and a praxis of action, one which in light of the dangers of ideological fracture and division is an inherent truth of democracy demonstrated by history many times, and notably in the collapse of the Social Democrats in Germany over the issue of service in World War One which removed the only viable blocking force to the rise of fascism and similarly the disintegration of the Industrial Workers of the World over the same issue which contained labor unions as a threat to the capitalist oligarchy which now rules America.
So while I resist the second capture of the state by Trump and the Republicans in our upcoming election and cannot compromise on the principle of solidarity of action in liberation struggle, I also cannot vote for or endorse Biden who has made us all complicit in genocide by supplying Israel with arms and refusing to use BDS to stop the bombing of Gaza.
What is to be done, as Lenin and Tolstoy asked with such very different answers?
What we really need is to replace Genocide Joe with a Presidential candidate of moral vision. One who will guarantee our humanity and our universal human rights, end our complicity in the war crimes of Israel, reform our justice system beginning with purging the agents of theocracy from our Supreme Court, enact universal women’s rights of bodily autonomy and reproduction, disarm and demilitarize the police to end their reign of white supremacist terror, enact universal free healthcare as a precondition of the right to life, and transform our reliance on fossil fuels with the Green New Deal to end the threat of human extinction.
Herein I now interrogate the disconnects of meaning and failures of vision of the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency as previously enumerated by way of a forensic examination of its corpse, as illuminated in the shadows of the 2019 Presidential Debates.
As I wrote in my post of December 20 2019, The years Final Democratic Presidential Campaign Debate & A Recap of Those Previous; Bernie Sanders as always spoke with passion and vision and articulated clear plans and objectives in the restoration of America to her former glory. He is the only figure in politics today who operates from a coherent ideology which organizes all his policies, like Plato’s ideal of a philosopher-king.
Elizabeth Warren, the genius of capitalism and chessmaster of the Beltway, was as always twelve moves ahead of her opponents and has read a dozen great books on any topic of policy you might name. Anyone who enters her arena ends up looking like Salieri to her Mozart.
Pete Buttigieg has during the course of this campaign been revealed as yet another wolf in Grandmother’s clothing, waiting to pounce when we are lulled off guard. I so wanted him to be as he represents himself, and not a carnival huckster and master of the bait and switch, sleight of hand, shell game, and the images of funhouse mirrors. He combines so many iconic dreams in his illusory presentation of self, all wrapped up with a pretty bow, yet every time he claims to agree with our goals and ideals he then proposes his own plan which will in fact sabotage all progress. There’s even video of him advocating for coal mining, a policy which for me places him beyond the boundary of ourselves and into the realm of otherness. Sadly, I must name Jiggy a conservative agent of infiltration and subversion. Perhaps his military background renders him unable to think outside of authoritarian structures and hierarchies; that’s the charitable version of why he has sought to deceive us.
He could also be exactly as I see him, now that I realize why he seemed so familiar; for I saw him many times in the great play Angels in America, in his true form as Roy Cohn, former lawyer of Donald Trump. Watch Tony Kushner’s play if you need to confirm it for yourself; it’s the greatest work of twentieth century American theatre, so I can guarantee its worth your time.
Tom Steyer’s concluding sermon was magnificent; “Donald Trump is not against immigration from white people. He is against immigration from non-white people. That’s a racist argument from a racist President and it has led him to break the laws of humanity.”
Amy Klobuchar kept her claws in this time and was funny, brilliant, fearless, and empathetic; every time she spoke I saw her as Mrs. Mazel. Seriously. In terms of performance of identity, tonight was a victory, perhaps one transformational to her political future.
Andrew Yang launched a brilliant attack on the political consequences of economic inequality, “You know what you need to donate to political campaigns? Disposable income.” Recasting his looney Basic Living Stipend as reparations was a stroke of genius.
Joe Biden just makes me want to puke.
And now, a recap of my posts on the debates:
As I wrote in my post of May 10 2019; Biden Presided Over America’s Lost Chance to Defend Women From Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Inequality at Work and Under the Law, and Bequeathed Us the Monstrous Grifter and Overseer of the Carceral State Clarence Thomas; Anita Hill calls out Joe Biden in The New York TImes; Biden presided over the Clarence Thomas hearings and America’s lost chance to defend women from sexual violence, harassment, and inequality at work and under the law.
If Biden had used his opportunity differently, we could have launched our epochal #metoo reckoning and wave of social change nearly three decades earlier. How many women’s lives did Biden doom?
Biden’s defense of the patriarchy is an unforgivable breach of public trust, but only the most visible reason he is unfit for public office. There is also the disturbing and outrageous story of his actions before he became a national political figure, marshalling white supremacists against school bussing and desegregation, exactly opposite the Freedom Riders and Bernie Sanders. Of the two, I know who represents me and who I prefer.
We are presented with the spectacle of a misogynist and racist as a major Democratic Party presidential candidate; Biden is the poster boy for everything that is wrong with the leadership and collaborationist wing of the Democrats, who under their masks are little different from their Republican partners.
I don’t want a choice of reactionary clowns for President. I think we deserve better.
The vast political and financial machine of the Democratic Party is trying to anoint Biden as its chosen contender in the coming fight with Trump for the soul of America and the destiny of the world. This is nothing less than a campaign of repression against Progressive Democrats, which includes the stunning betrayal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All.
We Progressives will be resisting and organizing for revolutionary transformation of our Party, that it may become reflective of its constituency and its principles. At the same time we are being pressured to unite against Trump and support whomever wins the Democratic primary and nomination, and we have a choice of policy to make which will greatly influence our future possibilities and set of choices.
I counsel restraint in limiting ones’ options, caution against taking pre-emptive positions, making non-negotiable demands, unilateral decisions without communicating with ones’ partners, or taking actions which sabotage trust or compromise our principles and values.
As much as I’d love to say we must defeat Trump and fascism by any means necessary, I cannot. Our first duty is to remain true to ourselves and each other; this is also the first principle of Resistance.
Let us not accept binary choices, when both are bad.
Therefore I refuse to sign the Indivisibles 2020 Campaign Pledge to vote for whomever runs for President in the next election as a Democrat. We must define ourselves positively, by what we are for, as well as negatively, by what we are against.
Whoever best represents my values and principles will merit my vote and support, and must at minimum be personally free of misogyny and racism. Thus far, I’m campaigning and voting for Bernie.
And so I have my own campaign pledge, which I ask all of you to take with me:
My America is a free society of equals, wherein we are guarantors of each’s others rights in solidarity and co-owners of the state, and I stand for the absolute legal and structural equality of all human beings.
I will make no compromise with evil.
As I wrote in my post of May 16 2019, the Democratic Party’s Blacklist to Repress Dissent; Yet again the leadership of the Democratic Party has taken steps to crush dissent within its ranks and marginalize the progressives and socialists who are challenging old ways with new ideas.
For those of you who have trouble telling the American political parties apart, the Democrats are ostensibly the liberal partners and opposition of the ruling Republican conservatives.
Let’s test that proposition, shall we? We have the betrayal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All, the timid waffling and deflection on calling for impeachment of the President, the support and pressure of others to support the campaign of racist and misogynist Joe Biden for President, and now this- a blacklist.
Echoing the malign and nefarious Hollywood Blacklist and the political show trials of the McCarthy era, this damning piece of villainy has no place in a democratic society and for me proves a final argument that we must radically transform the Democratic Party as an equal goal of our revolution with thwarting and overthrowing the Republicans.
As I wrote in my post of June 5 2019, Worker Ownership of the Means of Production: Bernie’s Plan to Transform Capitalism and Convert Private Into Common Wealth; By giving workers shares in the corporate profits they produce, Bernie Sanders plans to transform capitalism, the ownership of business, and the nature of wealth. Workers would literally own the means of production through the fund of shares they control and their power as voting shareholders in corporate governance, democratizing the economy and abolishing the division between labor and ownership.
This bold and tantalizing idea has the potential to revolutionize our society in a single nonviolent and fair legislative enactment. No one loses; no one is coerced, there is no authority and no force, no show trials, purges, repression, or any other violence or tyranny such as that which characterized the communist revolutions of the early twentieth century. In Our Revolution, there are only winners.
As Mathew Lawrence writes in The Guardian, “The return of ownership to the heart of progressive politics has come not a moment too soon. Ownership matters. How our economy is owned and by whom powerfully shapes how it operates and in whose interest.”
As I wrote in my post of June 21 2019, Biden Is Unfit to Represent America; Racist, misogynist, dismissive of climate change and reluctant public supporter of womens reproductive rights; Biden is unfit to represent America and is a de facto Republican infiltration agent in the Democratic Party.
With a successful career built on a persona which excuses and contextualizes his horrible actions as jokes, his glib manipulation is obvious to me as the telltale sign of a psychopath.
What then disambiguates Biden from Trump? Only the facts that he is not a known foreign agent and traitor to the United States, and has no known history as a sex predator personally, though his record as an enabler of patriarchal sexual terror and the silencing of women during the Anita Hill hearings is indisputable..
I don’t think that’s enough of a difference to vote for him for President, do you?
As I wrote in my post of June 29 2019, The Presidential Debates Are Now a Referendum on the Democratic Party; Kamala Harris became a celebrity Thursday night for calling out Biden and Trump on their record and for speaking with passion and vision; beyond modeling the target behavior of challenging authority which is the true calling of anyone who does not identify as conservative, she changed the fundamental nature of the debate.
The presidential debates are now a referendum on the Democratic Party; what shall our values and direction for the future be?
In what is now a clear contest between competing visions of the meaning and purpose of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris acted as the picador of the Democratic Socialists and other Progressives, those who embrace egalitarian transformation of our society, sinking barbs into the Collaborationist wing of the party and their counterparts and partners in hegemony and dominion of America the Republicans.
That the Beltway-centric political machine of the Democratic Party has sheltered a racist-misogynist agent of subversion and infiltration whose sympathies and true allegiance are with the Imperialist-Theocratic Gideonite alliance of the Republican Party which has conspired to overthrow global democracy with the aid of a foreign power in treasonous conspiracy sickens and disgusts me.
But the depravity and un-American nature of the Republicans and their Collaborationist Democrat puppets and subsidiaries are not my subject today; today I wish to explore future possibilities and the ideals, values, and principles of an America which has reclaimed its heart.
We face two great challenges today which will drive our range of choices for all our tomorrows; the extinction of humankind and the viability of Earth as an ark of life, and the fall of democracy and civilization.
Democracy as a category subsumes most of the other great issues of our time; the four ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, but also the causes of equality in the aspects of race, gender and sexual personae, religion, and other issues of diversity and inclusion, immigration which includes all of these intersectionally, the transition to a borderless state with virtual citizenship for all who so declare, universal safeguard of human rights and democracy everywhere on earth, freedom of the press and freedom from surveillance, education which is critical to citizenship and democracy, reform of our justice system and the goals of a noncoercive society in which there are no prisons and no police, reform of our security services with the goal of racial justice and equality including disarming and demilitarizing the police and the abolition of Homeland Security and its subsidiaries ICE and the Border Patrol, universal healthcare and the decommodification of the medical industry, worker co ownership and the evolution to a postcapitalist society.
We deserve a world free of need and free of fear, in which we all share our common resources and benefit from co ownership of our government in a free society of equals.
There is much to be done; let us begin the rebirth and moral regeneration of our civilization.
As I wrote in my post of July 24 2019, Joe Biden Architect of the Iraq Invasion; Hey America, if you’d like a version of Trump as our next President who’ll move the evils from the shop window to the back room just like the good old days, and think it would be grand fun and maybe profitable to start a war with Iran or just about anybody, Joe Biden is your guy.
With a history as a segregationist, disbeliever in women’s claims of sexual victimization as the chief derailment officer in the Anita Hill hearings, whose reluctance in support of women’s reproductive rights makes his true position as a theocrat clear, Biden will keep all those different people out of the swimming pool.
As a principal architect of the Iraq Invasion, we can count on him to feed our young hooligans into the war machine and convert their lives into profit, especially when there’s oil to be stolen.
All joking aside, one of my nephews returned from service in Iraq as an oxycontin addict, originally prescribed in a military hospital, thinking he’s Jesus and wandering around the city giving sermons to pigeons. Every politician who voted for war is directly responsible for the terrible costs borne by countless veterans, sometimes as in World War Two for the survival and freedom of us all, sometimes merely for the profit of others.
When our government is an edifice of lies, illusions, and swindles operated for the benefit of plutocrats, who can sort wars of survival from those of greed?
As I wrote in my post of July 31 2019, The Democratic Presidential Debates; Surprises in this last round of Democratic Presidential debates; at least for those who were hoping the two leading Progressives would eliminate each other in a destructive fight.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders teamed up to deliver a decisive rebuke to the collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party; I would dearly love to see them as President and Vice President in either configuration of roles lead us in reawakening America’s values.
Especially fun was watching Biden, patriarch and racist warmonger that he is, flop about and gobble witlessly in fish-eyed stupefaction, caught flat footed and outshone by everybody, as if waiting for his party handlers to arrive and tell him what he stands for.
Tonight vision and passion triumphed over vacuity and image; I hope that this signifies the direction of the future of Democracy and of the Democratic Party.
As I wrote in my post of September 14 2019, on the third Democratic Presidential debate; Triumph of the Faceless Men; the candidates of the Third Democratic Presidential debate were led onstage with bags over their heads, shuffling in servile abjection after the power brokers of the Democratic National Committee, hellbent on foisting upon us a dissent-free monochrome and male campaign unable to challenge the power asymmetries which are driving our society to destruction, or interrupt the flow of bribes from the plutocrats who are breaking our economy and annihilating our future as a nation and a species, have whipped the candidates into line, who with glassy eyes and brute inarticulate sheeplike bleeting and grunts jumped through the hoops set out for them, avoiding unauthorized topics and playing their assigned roles, then except for Bernie Sanders sitting up to beg for their treats of blacklist restricted funding.
Who spoke for the survival of the earth and of humanity, for the rights of self-ownership and the bodily autonomy of women, for the victims of the legacy of slavery and the genocidal campaign of racist state terror and crimes against humanity in the concentration camps at our border?
Only Beto O’Rourke directly challenged the gun lobby, at a time when gun violence is our most immediate threat and inseparable from white supremacist terror, and it is no longer safe to send our children to school or leave our homes to go shopping.
I praise the candidates for returning civility to public discourse, for their display of unity on shared core values and principles; but America is fighting for its survival, beset by existential threats to democracy and to our lives, and we need leadership who will take the fight to the enemy and win back our liberty and our future.
If the current factors of climate change and the extinction of living systems remain unaltered, we may have only three more elections before we are all dead.
We may have less than that before we lose the vote, if we permit tyranny to go unchallenged, and look then to see policies of white supremacy make those of the Confederacy and the Nazis seem moderate, and inequalities of gender which return us to the Dark Ages of misogynist patriarchy.
So no, there were no winners in this circus, and the American people were the real losers. This was a day of the Hollow Ones, who have been eaten by the political machine which has betrayed us yet again.
May we all one day regain our fire and our defiance.
As I wrote in my post of October 15 2019, America redefines itself: the Democratic Presidential debates round ad nauseum; As Biden goggles in stupefaction, coughing up platitudes and party boilerplate like hairballs, a guttering fire which dimly echoes the scripted glibness of his glory days as a diversionary talking head and apparatchik, the Warren-Sanders détente holds while the outliers swarm and hurl barbs at pack leader Elizabeth Warren.
I’d love to have the Progressive alliance of the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders team as President and Vice President in either configuration of roles; and my wish for this election is for them to run together. The balance of Warren the conservative policy wonk and Beltway insider committed to salvaging capitalism and Sanders the Democratic Socialist and ideologue committed to revolution and social transformation achieves an ideal state of dynamically unstable forces able to adapt to changing conditions with agility and harness chaos as an engine of growth and life.
All living systems must have both a revolutionary and innovating force of adaptation through which to evolve and meet the challenge of new threats to our survival, and a conserving force which insulates meaning from change and ensures the survival of our values and principles such as those embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and of those traditions and anchorages which have allowed us to survive thus far. In both natural and cultural evolution, we need both forces working cooperatively to manage change and shape our future.
The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our ideational form, the loss of our culture and traditions.
The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.
For the origins of my idea of life as a game played by representatives of these shaping forces, I refer you to Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, and Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.
To return to the immediate subject of the debates, a brief summary:
Joe Biden would have been a good news anchor, if someone else was writing his copy. I think he should run for President against Trump- but as a Republican.
Biden’s handlers advise him to run on his record. I think he should too; the invasion of Iraq, the Anita Hill hearings, his opposition to desegregation. Whoever’s interests he represents, I do not believe that they are ours.
Kamala Harris has changed the course of history in calling Biden out on his antibusing past, in which his hidden face as George Wallace is exposed, and we owe her a great debt. She has established her role as a champion of the people unafraid to defy authority when it is wrong, and I hope she will continue to do so in whatever office she may hold.
Beto O’Rourke has also championed the powerless, and has a lot of good things to say; I agree with his plan to tax churches which refuse to support gay marriage out of existence. He is a committed crusader against gun violence and racism. He’s also learning fast, and is another figure I expect to see in the future national political arena. Beto, we don’t need to confiscate people’s guns, just make the manufacture or sale of guns and ammunition a federal crime, and possession or bearing arms legal proof of intent to kill.
Pete Buttigieg has great value as a figure of liberty, being a gay combat veteran with an Arabic name. We need more diversity in our representatives. In his own field of expertise he is unsurpassed among the candidates; in his lockup with Tulsi Gabbard over Syria he was absolutely right. He should be Bernie’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Of course, Tulsi Gabbard is wrong about everything. Her attempts to reprise the role of Sarah Palin as a political circus clown fail to amuse.
Amy Klobuchar threw groundless accusations at Elizabeth Warren, enacting Margaret Atwood’s analysis of seizures of power from the patriarchy resulting in female on female violence rather than mutual support. I found this ugliness disturbing. Also the fish-eyed glassy stare of bewilderment as Castro discussed monopolies was that of someone who just isn’t smart enough to follow a high level conversation.
Andrew Yang seems like a nice fellow with a single-issue candidacy, who is utterly clueless about human nature. Give a hundred people a basic living stipend of one thousand dollars a month with no strings attached and 97 of them will refuse to work unless they are bribed, as was endemic and pervasive in the Soviet Union, and was also a contributing cause in the Fall of the Roman Empire. Many will simply go on a bender til the cash runs out. Of the other three, one will take that money out of circulation by ratholing it in savings or buried in the backyard, one will spend it on shiny baubels, and one will squander it on unrealistic ventures and dreams they have no education or background to achieve. Tie the Basic Living Stipend to a target behavior that will pay America forward, like meeting grade targets while enrolled at university or a trade journeyman apprenticeship in critical fields, and we have a winnable plan. Keep trying, Andrew; you’ve got time to learn.
Would it surprise anyone to learn I’m still voting for Bernie Sanders?
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2019, Our Greatest Living onservative Theorist: Elizabeth Warren; Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders form a dyadic pair representing the conservative and revolutionary forces in politics in their purest form; though interdependent, they are polar opposites like the positive and negative sides of a magnet, and play the black and white sides of the board. I regret that our form of government does not allow for two Presidents who harmonize and balance one another; which seems to me ideal.
The revolutionary force, that which innovates and governs transformative change, is in this configuration represented by Bernie Sanders, committed to my own politics of Democratic Socialism.
The conservative force is here represented by Elizabeth Warren, beltway insider and policy wonk, who is committed to salvaging capitalism from the failures of its internal contradictions, and is our pre-eminent conservative political theorist in America today. Points against her in my accounting include her deceit regarding free universal health care, which she has no intention of enacting if elected, and her atrocious choices regarding foreign policy, particularly the carte blanche she offers Israel in the continuance of its state terror and campaign of racist and theocratic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
I personally have a zero tolerance policy for fascist nationalisms of blood and faith, and hope to one day see it reflected in American policy.
So for the 2019 Presidential debates; during the last go round our right to choose a candidate was stolen from us by the power brokers of the Democratic Party, which also denied us a forum for assessing our leadership and our spectrum of ideologies, so of no real use to us in finding a champion of the People with which to seize power from the Republicans.
However, all of my objections to Biden during the 2024 campaign season still apply, and also apply equally to the Collaborationist-Zionist wing of the Democratic Party and anyone whom in future they try to shove in front of us as an anointed candidate.
As I wrote in my post of June 27 2024, This Is Bullshit: the First Biden-Trump Debate of the 2024 Presidential Election; This is bullshit.
Two antique visions of America battle for our future, Traitor Trump the fascist tyrant and Russian agent whose mission is to bring down democracy, versus Genocide Joe the neoliberal who made us complicit in crimes against humanity in Gaza and refuses to protect free speech and rights of protest at universities, abandoning both our rights as citizens and our universal human rights. Our choice of futures is now between a theocratic white supremacist patriarchy led by a rapist, and the Bill of Rights made meaningless. All other issues are misdirections and a Wilderness of Mirrors.
A few short days ago, Biden set hero of the people Julian Assange free, a victory for the transparency of the state and our freedoms of information, speech, and press, but with conditions which echo those offered to the IWW unionists imprisoned by the state long ago for mobilizing against capital and the commodification and dehumanization of the working class. Biden has not championed our rights, but rid his regime of an embarrassing prisoner at the cost of our rights and in abandonment of the idea of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue of truth.
Who thinks Biden is on the side of the people against tyranny, after this? Biden, who began his career leading white separatists against school integration, chief silencer of women’s witness in the Anita Hill trial which bequeathed us the kleptocratic grifter Clarence Thomas, architect of the invasion of Iraq to steal oil wells as a strategic resource of imperial dominion? And who has done nothing to disarm the police as institutional white supremacist terror, nothing to abolish racist terror at our border and replace ICE and Border Patrol with a mercy force to provide safe conduct for migrants, nothing to disarm Israel and end our complicity in genocide.
There are vast differences between Biden and Trump, madness, treason, and fascism among them, but this does not make the Democratic Party’s soft tyranny less terrible than the Republican Party’s theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and Nazi white supremacist terror.
As I wrote in my post of March 6 2024, Super Tuesday Confronts Us With A Grim Choice Of Futures, and We Must Change the Rules of the Game; As I have often said since the October 7 terrorist attack which has upended the political landscape of America in our year of elections between tyranny and liberty, If you enable or enact genocide and crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.
Yet this election may decide the survival of democracy and humankind across the coming several centuries, and I now calculate our chances to escape an Age of Tyranny and wars of unimaginable horrors at less than two percent; I say again, I believe that in less than two possible futures out of every one hundred, something resembling ourselves can look at the ruins of our civilization and our species a millennium from now with questioning and wonder. With all of our technology and our understanding, why did we choose to annihilate ourselves?
The dangers of ideological fracture and division cannot be overstated; the IWW global union movement self destructed over the issue of peace during World War One, as did the Social Democrats in Germany, removing our respective blocking forces for the rise of fascism and resulting in the Second World War; there are many other and more recent examples of movements for change and progress being shattered by forces of reaction and the state, but these two will serve to illustrate what will happen next if Trump once again captures the state.
We must unite in solidarity together to confront this threat and drive fascist tyranny from the stage of history.
Yet Biden’s massive and extralegal supply of Israel with war material while it is used to rain death of the people of Gaza, on the absurd pretext that the criminals who attacked Israel claim to act in their name as a strategy of subjugation of the Palestinians to their theocratic rule, such decisions by Biden personally have made all of us as Americans complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity.
To this I say; Never Again!
Our choice is now to abandon either democracy and all of our rights as citizens, or the idea of our universal human rights and our historic role as their guarantor throughout the world. I’d like to keep both democracy and human rights.
How can we do this and win a future for humankind as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings?
If this is our goal, and with the imposed conditions of struggle as they have resolved themselves on Super Tuesday wherein Trump and Biden will face off once again in the sudden death match of futures that is our Presidential election, only one course of action remains for us which bears any hope for the triumph of liberty over tyranny; change the rules of the game.
I’m sure we can all think of many possibilities for bringing change with such a mission, but tonight I find myself enchanted with the idea of liberating Biden from Biden as articulated by Michael Moore. Who better to trust as our moral compass than the author of V For Vendetta, who wrote the immortal words; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”
Here are my thoughts on our elections in a less hopeful moment, in my post of January 4 2023, On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza; Biden has made us all complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza, war crimes our taxes pay for. America has abandoned the idea of our universal human rights. Our nation has fallen, and with it global civilization based on humanist values and democracy.
Nothing remains to be saved; maybe the Rights of Man and America as a free society of equals was always a performance, lies and illusions designed to distract us from the fact that we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the state merely embodied violence as institutions of force and control.
Joe Biden has betrayed us, failed to place his life and ours in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and instead enabled and conspired in crimes against humanity with Netanyahu and the theocratic fascist settler regime and imperial conquest and dominion of the state of Israel, which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.
And this we must resist, beyond hope of victory or survival, in solidarity as guarantors of each others humanity. To fascism of blood, faith, and soil and to state tyranny and terror regardless of where it surfaces or in whose interest it is perpetrated, we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!
To this my unfiltered reaction to a Joe Biden campaign fundraising post timed to leverage the despair and torment of others in service to power, a comment has articulated one of the primary arguments in the apologetics of power; that we cannot control our proxy state, and secondarily that the crimes against humanity of Israel have the mandate of popular support here in America which place us all with Biden in the fork of a dilemma.
Here is the comment in question; “oh, come on. Dramatic much? Netanyahu is the criminal, Biden doesn’t control him, and cannot abandon our strongest ally in the region. Half the country wants to see Hamas wiped out, so what should Biden do? Listen just to this side? Get real.”
To this I replied; Yes, Netanyahu is a war criminal, but Biden has not only refused to stop funding ethnic cleansing, but has sent military aid to Israel and made us all complicit. We have abandoned the idea of universal human rights in funding the random mass murders of civilians with our taxes, voting to block the UN from bringing Netanyahu to trial for war crimes, and refusal to use our powers of Boycott, Divest, and Sanction to stop the Gaza War and bring democracy to Israel with regime change and the reimagination and transformation of systems of unequal power and state tyranny and terror.
Our nation has chosen to send warships to the perpetrator, and not humanitarian aid the victims, when we could easily have broken the Israeli blockade of food, water, and medical relief with our immense Navy, and silenced the bombs. It is not only the humanity of the Palestinians which has been abrogated here, but of our own as well.
In fact America does control Israel as a client state through our taxes and military support, but to what ends? Do we advance the cause of secular democracy or theocratic tyranny, of peace or war, liberty or submission to force and control, of our universal human rights or hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness based on divisions of race and faith?
In a region of one people divided by history and in our own nation, are we building bridges or walls?
Biden was elected to lead the Restoration of America after the loathsome regime of Traitor Trump, and has betrayed us. There is nothing left of us to save.
America has fallen, both as a democracy due to the capture of the Republican Party by a fascist-theocratic Fourth Reich and the subversions of our institutions and ideals by the Trump regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and because of the Democratic Party’s refusal to confront evil and purge our destroyers from among us, both in our client state of Israel and here in America in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection. All of this generates from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; fear weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us as divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.
In Gaza we see the inevitable results of this process of dehumanization, for to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence, and no matter where one begins with othering we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz. And this we must Resist.
Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?
Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?
Get real, ends the apologetics of power, referencing the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger used so infamously to authorize our imperial wars in Vietnam and Central America including the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, and the massacres of the Suharto regime of Indonesia. A foreign policy modeled on Hitler’s dictum; “Who now remembers the extermination of the Armenians? The world respects only power” does not lead to a more humane future, nor to a United Humankind and a free society of equals.
In this injunction to get real and its legacies of history bearing horrors, atrocities, and crimes against humanity as state policy and fear become an engine of destruction, there are embedded issues and forces central to the questions of our humanity and how we choose to be human together; what is truth, who is authorized to question it, and how can we engage in the sacred calling to pursue the truth without falsification by the lies and illusions of propaganda?
We wander in a Wilderness of Mirrors, wherein all claims must be questioned, especially those of authorities who claim to speak and act for us as a strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent. To this I can but say, democracy requires an electorate able to perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Get real, we are exhorted by those who wish to steal our power. In Gaza, real people are dying because we are willing to sacrifice their lives to our power.
Thus for the ghosts of elections past, conducted in the Old Republic before the Fall of America to the Fourth Reich. Though it remains possible to bring a Restoration of democracy, we must confront the truth of the moment we live in, for it is a Rashomon Gate event of possible futures. And this is why the normal strategies of the Democratic Party no longer work in the imposed conditions of struggle we now face; normal doesn’t live here anymore.
So, what would I like for a President?
I would like a truth teller, who performs politics as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth. Someone fearless in the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and who can bring change to systems of oppression and unequal power with poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value and in our choices about how to be human together. I want a wise, sympatico, visionary President; someone who will place their life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth.
I want a Jester of King Lear, who will speak truth to power and remind us of our humanity while doing so; I want someone like Mrs. Maisel.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Rashomon
King Lear
Civilization as a game played between conserving and revolutionary forces, a reading list
Social power and conflict are about legitimation and the construction of authority; this includes war and revolution, but also politics and the normal functions of a state.
Narrative control is a ground of struggle which mediates between, or is determinative of, seizures of power and its centralization, liberation and tyranny, and the tides of conserving and revolutionary forces.
Of late I am become quite hopeful that the Trump regime is threatened with delegitimation by exposure of its relationship with the Epstein child sex trafficking syndicate which undermines the uniquely American new faith of QAnon and the myth of Exile on which the regime is built as a theocracy.
None of this scandal is new, so why is it suddenly important now?
The credibility and legitimacy of Trump personally, his regime, and the Party of Treason were already a sinking ship of fools, exposed as a swamp of amoral grift and a plutocratic elite shadow state exactly like the imaginary one MAGA voters wanted to banish. Add to this the unfathomable aberrance of state terror and tyranny of the ICE white supremacist terror force, the loathsome death camps and secret foreign prisons, and the violations of both our rights as citizens and as human beings in a nation under federal secret armies of occupation, and Trump’s signature issue of immigration has also been turned back on itself.
Then there are the internal contradictions of the regime’s goals and objectives which are generating mechanical failures, fragmentation and division among its coalition, embodied in the spectacle of the Musk-Trump split; this was inevitable because the voting base and financiers of the regime have inherently opposing motives and plans. The tech plutocrats who bought the Presidency for Trump want to dismantle the state and replace it with a corporate tyranny; and care nothing for the social issues which drive the Republican voters, whose only interest is to hold and maintain white male power as encoded in “tradition”. Men voted for Trump because his white supremacist terror and patriarchal sexual terror grant them permission to do the same, and so long as white men can kill and rape with impunity they are happy.
Into this environment of massive fracture and disruption of the regime exploded the Epstein files like a saboteur’s firebomb. And just like Dorothy drawing back the curtain, the mirage of lies and illusions of the Trump regime is exposed and has begun to collapse.
As written by David Smith in The Guardian, in an article entitled ‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt: As pressure builds over the president’s broken promise to publicly release details about the convicted sex offender, his base has a new target: Trump himself; ““Ifeel so betrayed and so angry. This is not what I voted for.” “This cemented permanent deep state power.” “I’m concerned about being able to trust Donald Trump to keep his word.” “What about justice for these young ladies who were trafficked? What about their justice? Don’t they deserve justice?”
These were just a few of the calls that besieged conservative radio hosts across the US this week. The president’s ardent supporters spent the past decade fulminating over various foes, from Barack Obama and the deep state to undocumented immigrants and transgender children. Now they have a new target: Donald Trump himself.
The “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base is in revolt as never before. The trigger was Trump’s broken promise to publicly release details about Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, who was facing federal charges of sex-trafficking minors when he died in jail in 2019.
Spurred by the president and his allies, Trump’s movement has long latched on to the Epstein scandal, claiming the existence of a secret client list and that he was murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up. But last week the justice department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced there was no evidence that the disgraced financier kept such a list or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Far from closing the case, the memo deepened supporters’ obsession and sense of grievance. A movement defined by the view that elites rig the system against them felt cheated. Trump made efforts to douse the flames with ever-shifting explanations, excuses and distractions but merely poured fuel on the fire.
To some, his erratic and evasive behaviour implies a guilty secret. It also evokes a line from President John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” Having spent years embracing QAnon-tinged propaganda that casts him as the only saviour who can demolish the “deep state”, Trump is now seen as co-opted by its corrupt bureaucracy.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who ran against Trump for president in 2020, said: “I talk to the base every day and nothing animates the base more than the deep state. This Epstein thing was Trump’s promise. This was going to finally expose the deep state. Now Trump says nothing there? It ain’t going to stand.”
Epstein was first charged with sex offences in 2006 after the parents of a 14-year-old girl told police that he had molested their daughter at his Florida home. He avoided federal charges due to a controversial plea deal that saw him jailed for just under 13 months. In 2019 he was arrested again in New York and charged with trafficking dozens of teenage girls and engaging in sex acts with them in exchange for money.
A separate case against Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was jailed in 2022 for helping him abuse girls, detailed Epstein’s connections with high-profile figures such as Britain’s Prince Andrew and the former US president Bill Clinton. Both have denied any wrongdoing.
In 2019 – during Trump’s first term as president – Epstein was found dead in his prison cell after hanging himself, according to the authorities. Sceptics point to suspicious circumstances such as the security cameras around his cell apparently malfunctioning on the night he died, along with other irregularities.
They also speculate that the government is concealing details about the Epstein case to protect wealthy and influential clients, including Trump, a longtime associate who in 2002 told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
On Thursday the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent a letter featuring a sketch of a naked woman to Epstein in 2003. The president denied writing the letter or drawing the figure, and sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters on Friday.
When he was running for president, Trump said he would release files related to the case. But a bundle put out in February contained little new information. Then in June the spotlight turned back on the president when his former adviser Elon Musk claimed – in a now-deleted X post – that Trump is “in the Epstein files”.
Just a month later, a memo from the justice department and FBI said the Epstein files did not contain evidence that would justify further investigation. An almost 11-hour video published to dispel theories Epstein was murdered showed a section of the New York prison on the night Epstein died but appeared to be missing a minute of footage.
The Maga faithful erupted in fury. Media personality Tucker Carlson, activist Laura Loomer and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon claim the government’s handling of the case lacks transparency. The far-right commentator Jack Posobiec said he would not rest “until we go full Jan 6 committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files”.
Baffled, flailing and unusually out of step, Trump used his Truth Social platform to call supporters off the Epstein trail amid reports of infighting between the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and the FBI deputy director, Dan Bongino, over the issue.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals’?” Trump wrote. “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening.” He suggested the turmoil was undermining his administration – “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein”.
Yet while Trump has defeated many political foes, he has never had to take on his own base. Taking a scattergun approach, he said he supported the release of any “credible” files related to Epstein while downplaying the case as “pretty boring stuff”. He suggested without citing evidence they were “made up” by former FBI director James Comey and former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The president even lashed out at his own supporters, calling them “weaklings” for falling for what he called a “radical left” hoax by the opposition to discredit him. “I don’t want their support anymore!” he wrote. Some responded by burning their Maga caps in protest.
Still the pressure continued to build. Mike Pence, his former vice-president, said in an interview with CBS News that “the time has come for the administration to release all of the files regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s investigation and prosecution”. Even Mike Johnson, the loyal Republican speaker of the House, broke from Trump on the issue and urged the justice department to make public any documents linked to Epstein.
A small but growing band of House Republicans followed suit. Musk put dozens of posts on X accusing Trump of a “cover-up”. On Thursday the president made a concession by announcing that he will ask a court to allow the release of grand jury testimony in the case. It was the latest effort to defuse a crisis of his own making.
His political career gained traction with the help of the “birther” movement, pushing the racist idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore an illegitimate president. He was content to accept support from followers of QAnon, an antisemitic theory involving Satan-worshipping cannibals and a child sex-trafficking ring.
Trump also cultivated the ultimate political conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him by Joe Biden, a “big lie” that culminated in the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Now he is finding that the nothing-to-see-here approach does not work for those who learned from him they must not give up until the government’s secrets are exposed.
Charlie Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “He’s being eaten by the very sort of conspiracy theory that propelled him into office in the first place. Donald Trump is a product of as well as a purveyor of conspiracy theories. He has marinated in conspiracy theories and used them to put him into the presidency so you do have what appears to be a giant irony that this particular conspiracy theory is the one that is haunting him.
“The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency far more than any of the other issues that are out there now. Trump is finding out that, if you’ve pushed a conspiracy theory for years, it’s very difficult to suddenly declare that it’s non-existent or a hoax. He’s doing this Jedi mind trick where he is trying to say, no this is not the conspiracy theory you actually care about.”
Trump has already tested his base’s loyalty in recent weeks by bombing Iran and pledging support for Ukraine, despite a pledge to avoid foreign entanglements, as well as signing a tax and spending bill that will strip health insurance from millions of people. But Epstein is different: a binary view of liberal elites as paedophiles, and Republicans as protectors of children, has become foundational.
Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, commented: “One of the reasons why the Maga base was so obsessed is that it gave them licence to genuinely hate and loathe their political opponents, to consider that the Democrats were not merely wrong on the issues, that they were part of this evil paedophile cabal.
“That is the justification for so much of what Trumpism has become and suddenly to pull the rug out from under the base was a radical and a risky move. For once Trump has overestimated his ability to shape reality to his own will.”
It is a rare political gift for Democrats, who have been reeling since Trump’s victory in November and struggling to thwart his expansion of presidential power. Several Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for the release of all Epstein files and suggested that Trump could be resisting because he or someone close to him is featured in them.
Ro Khanna, a congressman from California whose measure that would have forced Bondi to publish all documents related to Epstein online was blocked by Republicans, said: “The Republicans are basically protecting the rich and powerful. That’s what the Epstein case is about: the rich and powerful men who were allegedly sleeping with underage girls and they should not have impunity.
“They’re being protected, possibly because they’re donors to people in Washington, because they play golf with people in Washington. So this is a question of whose side are you on? The Democratic party has a chance to have a rebirth of populism, to say we’re on the side of the people, we get that this town hasn’t worked for ordinary people for too long.”
Some veterans of bareknuckle political fights of the past, however, warn that Democrats are still not rising to the moment. If the tables were turned and a Democratic president was suppressing such delicate information, it seems likely that Republicans would be aggressively flooding the airwaves demanding investigations and impeachment.
Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “It’s just weak. From a leadership perspective, there’s an inability to put the knife in and twist it.
“There is a reluctance because of the tawdriness of it all to appreciate that for Democrats, they lost an election to the most prolific liar because he was perceived as being more honest in the eyes of the American people. This is a prime example to strip him of that in the eyes of his most fervent supporters, and at least move them by some percentage to the sidelines and demotivate them.”
Schmidt advocates a national advertising campaign and series of town halls in which Democrats demand an end to the cover-up and ask what Trump and Bondi are hiding. “This is a moment where Trump is weak, he’s perturbed, he’s disturbed – and what you do is you hit him.”
Public opinion is turning against the president. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 69% of respondents thought the federal government was hiding details about Epstein’s clients, compared with 6% who disagreed and about one in four who said they were not sure.
Tara Setmayer, a Trump critic and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, believes the sense of betrayal could translate into a repudiation in next year’s midterm elections for the House of Representatives and Senate.
She said: “Is there perhaps a political awakening happening with the most rabid of the Maga base? There may be some weakness here that could be exploited. Where it could hurt Trump in the midterms is by depressing the vote of Maga. They’ll stay home and in these key swing districts where one or two percentage points difference can make all the difference in the House.”
Walsh, the former congressman, agreed. He commented: “It’ll cause a lot of Trump supporters to not even vote because remember a lot of his supporters aren’t Republicans; they are attached to him. If they’re utterly disillusioned that the guy they thought was going to be the ultimate slayer of the deep state now is part of the deep state they’re going to check out and that’s going to hurt Republicans.”
He added: “Trump’s legacy is the destruction of truth. He lies as he breathes and his lies to his supporters have made him popular among his supporters, so it’s beautiful that he may actually be crucified on one of his lies.”
July 16 2025 The Epstein Files: A Mirror of Our Monstrosity Under Patriarchy As An Imposed Condition of Struggle, and A Fable of Silencing As Immunity In Service To Power
“ I am a leaf on the wind”; now an iconic line from the telenovela Firefly and film Serenity and pervasive in popular culture, this quote has a unique meaning and history for me; some twenty years before these films I answered a question from a student during a class with this line, quoting the death poem of a kamikaze pilot.
The question; “What are you?” was in the context of a discussion of national identity and how we construct ourselves through history, what I now refer to along with race and other forms of identity as the flags of our skin.
I had just returned from the Siege of Beirut where Jean Genet set me on my life’s path with the Oath of the Resistance, the second of my many Last Stands, and in no way wished to align myself with identity politics or identitarian nationalism by claiming any ancestral homeland, nation, or people in the sense of die Volk as the Nazis used it, as remains true now.
Especially in this moment wherein the spectre of fascisms of blood and soil have once again been raised from the abyssal chasms of darkness by Trump and his regime of white supremacist terror in the pogrom of ICE now ongoing throughout Vichy America.
My solution to the question What am I was to reply “I am a leaf on the wind.” In the shadows of Beirut and becoming involved in liberation struggle and solidarity in Guatemala versus the Mayan Genocide, Central America generally, Angola and South Africa versus Apartheid, and other places, I felt a deep kinship with that kamikaze pilot. Because I am forever a Last Stand, as I place my life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Frantz Fanon dubbed The Wretched of the Earth. This is who I am and shall always be, and it is the only identity that matters.
This remains my reply now, to any attempt to define me not by my actions but by condition of being.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
As I wrote of my last wishes in a poem entitled Final Thoughts;
Bury me at sea, for I belong to no nation but to the world
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.
This is my answer to the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world; to embrace the darkness and live with grandeur in refusal to submit.
As Genet wrote in Miracle of the Rose; ‘A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.’
There remains the question of how to find beauty, joy, hope, faith in our humanity, and love by which to transcend ourselves and the limits of our skin, to balance the terror and horror of our imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle under systems of oppression, to claw back something of our humanity from the darkness.
For such purposes I have built a mirror of Paradise and a refuge from the world in which to recover between adventures, Dollhouse Park as I named our cottage.
A very cool and rainy May, bees converging in swarms on our fruit trees in great numbers, and no false spring and freeze to kill off the buds have this year produced the best crop of cherries we have had in twenty years, with the apple and plum trees heavy with oncoming fruit. And a properly gradual fall allowed the roses to harden before the freeze; we lost none, where last year they nearly all died back to the ground. A week in the nineties this June was followed by a return to days in the seventies with a couple rains; this during the flood disaster in Texas while Europe becomes a desert and burns.
On this twenty first of June 2025 a gentle rain is falling and its 67 degrees at ten in the morning, with a high of 70 today and warming into August; as I reflected on my material context on this date last year, so I now mark the changes in my gardens as a constructed reflection of myself, a fragment of order in an endless wild sea beyond human control.
This is the scope and limit of all human activity, how we have shaped our world in our own image and used it to shape ourselves, to offer beauty with which to drive back the horror, and the hope of being reflected to infinity like the images in facing mirrors just out of alignment.
But its not the whole truth of ourselves nor of our lives.
In the end it is not our intervention in the natural order of the world which determines the ratio of hope and despair, joy and grief, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, fear and desire we must live with as imposed conditions of struggle; but the vast and uncontrollable tidal forces from which all things arise and are destroyed and recreated, like the rain and air temperature determine the growth cycle of roses.
Yet our truths, the ones we create and use to inform, motivate, and shape our own adaptation and evolution in becoming human, joy, hope, love, beauty, and the instrumentalization of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value, remain real because they are real to us; and so long as this is true we too are real, our humanity is real, though flotsam in a vast sea of time and fate.
Let us surrender nothing of ourselves, friends, nor of one another, no matter how powerful the forces arrayed against us; this is the great lesson of the garden as it unfolds over time.
As I wrote in my post of July 21 2021, The Extinction of Humankind Is Now Underway, and Our Last Hope Is A Global Green New Deal; Last night it rained, and happy tree frogs were singing in my gardens here at Dollhouse Park, ending the heatwave which has gripped the Pacific Northwest for weeks as daytime temperatures return to the mid eighties, twenty degrees cooler than a few days ago. Lightning played in circles all around my hill overlooking the lights of the city, as it will in storms, like dancing angels.
With dawn came a chorus of song birds, the croaking of a blue heron from the wetlands at the foot of my hill, and soon the ringing of the bells at the old monastery which magnificently occupies my view in one direction from the front of my cottage, the other a spectacular panorama of the distant lights of the city. My partner Dolly wanted a park, which I’ve been building over the past twenty years, hence the name Dollhouse Park, and for us its just right.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, clematis climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea, a long curving boundary line of rounded granite boulders and mountain ash mixed with mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, and shrub juniper, burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush, ferns, and spirea, lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses, winding along my dirt road. A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving rose walk which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces; yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage. There Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos. A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside behind my cottage into a secret valley.
Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery of Mount St. Michaels on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Yet even here, in an alpine forest within an hour’s drive of five ski resorts and the worlds best flyfishing streams, perched atop a vast glacial aquifer, we are threatened by climate change and global warming; we have just had two weeks of temperatures above or near one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and dozens of fires surround the region, turning the waxing moon last night blood red.
Last week my sister Erin in Las Vegas posted a picture of a reader board showing one hundred thirty degrees. Water is rationed there; in many American cities water is simply running out.
Soon our agricultural areas will be consumed in firestorms, and eighty percent of the earth’s population will be made homeless as rising seas erase our coastal cities.
What will we do when there is no place of refuge we can retreat to? When there is no water to drink nor air safe to breathe?
All that we have built, we humans, relies like Dollhouse Park on limitless free water and air as public wealth and resources, and when they are gone, so are we.
This not a time for symbolic gestures, but for radical action. Time, for humankind, is running out.
As I wrote in my post of July 10 2024, Our Revels Now Are Ended: We Need the Green New Deal Now, Or This Will Be the Coolest Summer Of All Our Tomorrows; I write to you now from Dollhouse Park, my cottage and refuge from the world between adventures, set among two acres of roses and tea gardens on a hill overlooking the lights of the city among alpine forests fifty miles from the Canadian border and within an hour’s drive of five ski resorts where once I could rely on forty feet of snow in the mountains in winter, a wetlands at the foot of my hill, an underground sea of near limitless glacial water just beneath the surface and ringed with lakes so deep the Navy has a submarine training base at one just across the border with Idaho.
Dolly wanted a park, hence the name; I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
As photography is my art and the gardens at Dollhouse Park are my subject, I have a record in albums by month on FaceBook over some years, and for two years now we have had very hard winters in terms of damage to our roses, which number over a hundred of various kinds. Though the snow has been only six or eight inches a few times a year rather than two to four feet as it used to be, and the icy winds no longer desiccate everything with fierce storms during November, the transition between seasons is now too rapid to give the roses time to harden for winter, so they all died back to the ground this year and only started blooming the last week of June instead of May, and in the spring our fruit trees didn’t have time to be pollinated by our bumblebees, so our Montmorency and Rainier cherries are fine but we have no apples or Italian plums.
If the crops die, what will we eat? And globally they are beginning to die, hammered by heat, fire, drought, and floods, and we humans will one day become extinct.
It will never be this good again, and one day humankind will become nothing and unremembered.
One day the seas will die and boil, the coastal cities will be submerged and forgotten, and we will be adrift among a raging lifeless toxic soup of megastorms. What remains of us will be consumed by fire tornados as our world becomes an arid moonscape without water to drink or air to breathe.
On the day the last of us die, proudly trumpeting our splendid dominance of nature, what use will our castles be? From what will our arsenals of death and war protect us? Who will cherish and remember the beauty of our arts and the glory of our triumphs?
All of this is beginning now, not in a distant future. I had predicted 2041 as the threshold event year from which no escape is possible, but it has happened already in 2023 as the world’s mighty debated what can be done and did nothing, as we the people failed to purge our destroyers from among us and abandon the technology which is killing us.
This will be the coolest summer to come in our future. How hot it gets and how quickly may yet be controllable if we act now to abandon fossil fuels.
My hope now is that my roses will live on after me, and I will never need to mourn their passing, or that of the blue heron who reigns over the kingdom of the frogs at the foot of my hill.
Who will remember us, when humankind is gone?
As written in 1817 by Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ozymandias;
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As I wrote in my post of May 22 2025, Creating Spaces of Refuge, Serenity, Beauty, and Reflection To Balance the Trauma, Grief, and Horror of the Criminal Trump Regime of White Supremacist Terror and Theocratic Patriarchal Sexual Terror, His Performances of Tyranny In the White Man’s House As Atrocity Exhibits and Theatre of Cruelties, In This Year of the Fall of America and the Capture of the State As Vichy America Under the Fourth Reich: the Gardens at Dollhouse Park; In this time of shared public trauma as our nation and our civilization begin to collapse and fall, and the Age of Democracy passes into the Age of Tyrants, and as our values and ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice are violated and inverted and our parallel and interdependent rights as citizens and our universal human rights are stolen from us, resilience becomes key to our survival.
While solidarity of action and refusal to submit to authority remain fundamental to our humanity and becoming human, we must also find joy to balance the terror of our nothingness, the flaws of our humanity, and the brokenness of the world.
Such safe spaces of play and means of returning to ourselves under imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle designed to inflict despair, abjection, and submission through learned helplessness will be as unique as we are, but herein I wish to share an example from my own life, on the principle of Virginia Woolf that “If we cannot tell the truth about ourselves, we cannot tell the truth about anyone else.”
Though I greatly relish and glory in my own aesthetics of total transparency regarding my lived truths, in which I am inspired by that of Kenzaburo Oe whose public display of his private life is regarded as terrifying in Japan and part of his personal legend, my offering and example of finding joy as a survival and adaptive strategy today involves nothing more transgressive than gardening.
One can often measure the burden of moral harm and disfigurement of the soul a human being bears by the quietude of their hobbies; for Nietzsche’s warning that the Abyss begins to look back at you remains horrifically true.
What is important about my gardens at Dollhouse Park, so named because my partner Theresa whose childhood nickname was Dolly wanted a park, is that it is an act of love offered to my partner; that I designed and created an idyll of serenity and reflection meticulously constructed to appear natural from a deep personal need for a retreat from the world is secondary.
Relationships are primary because the modern pathology of disconnectedness makes us vulnerable to despair, crushing loneliness, compulsive and self destructive behaviors, and harms our capacity to adapt to change and heal from harm.
Despair and submission is what the enemy wants from us, and this we must Resist.
Find or create spaces of your own, bracketed off from your ordinary life and sandboxed from your public identity and the roles you must play, and you will find it easier to rise from the ashes once again.
So, here is a tour of the world I have made in which to recover between adventures; yours will be different, but you must find or build one of your own if you must fight monsters without becoming one. I tell you this in recognition that it is a mission which I have failed like so many others, for I am a monster who hunts other monsters, and after forty years of living so there is very little humanity left to me.
I am without pity, fear, or remorse, and this is not who you wish to become.
Find your joy, my friends.
My refuge from the world in which I recover between adventures is idyllic and serene, a private wildlife sanctuary with rolling greens dotted by shade and fruit trees and enormous evergreens, tea gardens with one hundred eighty roses, leaning toward David Austin varieties, clematis of blues, purple, and wine red climbing on spiderwebs of fishing line to the roofs, phlox, daylilies, towering hollyhocks and riotously colorful columbines, irises, lilacs, Colorado Blue Spruce set against flaming barberry and gold spirea.
A long curving boundary line of softly rounded granite boulders spaced at eight feet and mountain ash full of white flowers and red berries in their season at sixteen feet defines the Park along a dirt road in the cliffside view direction, mixed with bristling evergreens of mugo pine, bird’s nest spruce, ferns brooding in their darkness, and aromatic shrub juniper, color spots of burning bush, potentilla, Japanese snowball bush festooned with white pom poms, rose glow barberry, goldflame spirea, vivid carnival colours of lilacs, irises, hostas, and roses.
A bird bath of entwined swans offers water at the feeding area just outside my bay window where we can watch the city lights at night from a sofa. The paths are marked with Alberta spruce and arbors of climbing roses, clematis, and Mandarin honeysuckle, and defined with processions of roses and boxwood shaped to green orbs, and stone terraces of roses, phlox, daylilies, raspberries, blackberries, lilacs, and columbines descend the hillside terraces behind my cottage into a secret valley. Here live eighteen deer, a family of racoons, over a hundred quail, eight wild turkeys, five Great Horned Owls, woodpeckers, crows, robins, magpies, doves, goldfinches, chickadees, sparrows, and visited by other birds including ducks and Canadian geese, and in the hills of pine forest which wind up the gulch beyond the wetlands and the frog pond where the blue heron reign to one side live bear, mountain lion, moose, porcupine, fox, and bald eagles, and on the other in sight of the monastery on its nearby hill along a creek in a ravine whose cliffs are unscalable by them a pack of coyotes who think they are my family and will sometimes accompany me on my nightly walks, talking to me in yips and howls. As the line in Coppola’s magnificent film Dracula goes; “There is much to be learned from beasts.”
Our Park is a highly controlled, purpose built, and artificial paradise which I designed to look like a natural landscape, with curving lines of sight to make it seem endless though it is only two acres of gardens among the true wilderness.
Dollhouse Park did not begin this way, as a private park and nature preserve nestled among alpine forest, but as a bare and rocky hill with a view, and shared ideas of home from childhood enthusiasms for fantasies of gothic romance like the Addams Family house, and in Dolly’s case the European grand hotels, castles, musical theatres, and cruise ships she spent twenty years playing piano and living in; museums and theatrical stages for the performance of our relationship full of curiosities, antiquities, and wonders. Dolly sat in a chair watching the sun set from different views for several days, and the one she liked the best was where we sited and built the house, with the front toward the setting sun and the city lights, and the back toward the rising moon, our secret valley, and the hills beyond.
I designed and created it based mainly on Gertrude Jekyll’s designs and some ideas from Penelope Hobhouse. We can see the hill where we first kissed from our home, on a wagon ride in the snow driven by her father; she was twelve, I was a very precocious eight.
A cherub fountain ornaments the front lawn by the arbor at the start of the curving Rose Walk, planted with roses at both sides under dark pink Montana Rose stone and in high summer flanked by walls of hollyhocks with their dinner plate size flowers, which leads around the Cat Tower to the terraces. Yes, it’s just for cats, twelve hundred square feet of it on three levels with two flights of stairs, with connecting doors to the main and lower floors of the cottage and to the Tiki Bar deck overlooking the terraces and secret valley with a forested stream at the rear of the house, where we can watch the moon rise. There in the Cat Tower Amok holds court, he of the ringed tail; he reminds us to run amok and break some rules, violate norms, and bring the Chaos.
He has four new companions in his posse this year; Oscar Wild, so named because he is beautifully striped but wild and very strong and will run all the way up walls, Biscuit who is named for being sweet though I also call her Pwetty Pwincess, the elegant and regal Fluffy who prefers her own company unless her brother Oscar is on hand as guard, and Socks who showed up a couple weeks ago, greeted me on the front porch by putting his paws on my shoulders and head butting me, and now lives in the garage; his fur is morning-coat dove grey.
We also have an enormous German Shepherd named Mala we inherited from her father; it means garland in Hindi, possibly an artifact of a job he had in India as a young engineer, building their national irrigation system. Mala thinks the cats are her herd and follows them protectively, nosing them apart when they wrestle, and they snuggle up with her in front of the fire in the evening. She’s with us always, and patrols the territory with us on our nightly two and a half mile walks; our primary line of defense should something choose to hunt us.
Dollhouse Park is situated in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, in an alpine forest region home to bear, mountain lion, wolf, coyote, fox, porcupine, racoon, hawk, Great Horned Owl, Blue Heron, and the American Bald Eagle; full of predators who would be formidable opponents. A mountain lion, for example, can jump fifteen feet up and forty feet out, and carry five times its body weight in its jaws, and will attack exactly like an African lion. When asked what I would do if a bear, symbol here of near-unstoppable force, took an unhealthy interest in me, I say “I shall sing the Bear Song, and we will dance the Bear Dance.”
But as someone who has lived alone in the bush by subsistence hunting all over the world, in many of its most dangerous cities and in wars and revolutions for over forty years, I follow the principle of my own invention I call Three Plus Three; having three contact and three distance weapons on my person at all times. Mala counts as a distance weapon and alarm system, and my walking stick counts as a contact weapon as I can use it like a saber, katana, jian, assegai, and jodo or escrima fighting stick. In the bush my primary weapon is the Winchester Model 70 Safari Express in 375 Holland & Holland, my backup is a Ruger Redhawk, and as a final resort I carry a kukri with which I can field dress a moose or behead rascals. In cities I carry what I can conceal; in battle I use what I can take from the enemy. Beyond the boundaries of my hill the imposed conditions of struggle determine who I can be and how I must meet the moment, but on my own ground I am untouchable and can dream better dreams.
I well understand the seduction of power to be the arbiter of virtue, of security as freedom from fear, of living as a hunter rather than as prey, and the beauty of weapons and arts of war to confer these things bound together with our sovereignty. And I also know that as Nietzsche warns us this is an Abyss that looks back at us, and makes of us the monsters we would free ourselves from.
This is why democracies throughout the world are falling to tyrannies, and why liberators become tyrants; the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force operates the same on personal and national levels, especially when overwhelming and generalized fear is created and weaponized by authority in service to power, birthing carceral states of force and control and imperial wars of conquest and dominion as consequences of identitarian nationalism.
Beware always those who claim to speak and act in your name, for this is a primary strategy of fascism, and the next step in the tyrant’s process of subjugation is to commit unforgiveable acts in which you are complicit as a forge of identities of blood, faith, and soil.
Hence Modi’s conquest of Kashmir, Putin’s of Ukraine, and countless other atrocity exhibits and failures of humanity throughout history, including Netanyahu’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in the conquest of Palestine in which both Biden and Trump have made all of us Americans complicit as our tax dollars buy the deaths of children and other innocent civilians.
As my father taught me, politics is the Art of Fear.
Subjugation to authority is an escalating spiral of commitment through falsification, commodification, and dehumanization by those who would enslave us and steal our souls.
And it always collapses in ruin because of a simple truth; security is an illusion. Systems of oppression entrap us in the Ring of Power and its recursive forces to create false security from existential threats by the siren call of becoming so powerful we can not be threatened, and I know all too well the seduction of power and of becoming the arbiter of virtue.
As a Freshman in high school, during my first political action in which I staged a student walkout because the local Reformed Church tried to close our Forensics class and debate team for asking inconvenient questions about Apartheid, I actually told my fellow students; “I am your Sheriff, and when we are trespassed against come to me and we will settle it together.” And then I quoted an unforgettable line from a comic book which for years was my guiding principle, spoken by Dr Doom, a villain I had mistaken for the hero; “Only I can bring order to this world of chaos.” When we won and our classes were reinstated, nearly the whole student body carried me on their shoulders through the hallways in triumph.
But these things cannot free us from systems of oppression which perpetuate themselves; only love can do that, as Wagner teaches us in his great opera. I did not see the entire Ring cycle performed until I had graduated high school, and only much later did I begin to understand.
Love, solidarity of action, community, interdependence, mutual aid, and our stewardship and duty of care for each other; these things can free us from the yoke of fear by which elites have stolen our power since the rise of mass slave agriculture and the priest-kings who harnessed us to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege.
To paraphrase Freud; Civilization begins when we cast words instead of stones. So if I meet a bear in the forest, I will sing the Bear Song if I can.
If the fear between us, which divides us and binds us together in the Ring of Power and mutual violence, can be transcended by the love which animates all living beings and makes of us partners in the struggle to become and allies in the struggle to free ourselves from the systems of oppression which seek to enslave us as the raw material of engines of power and destruction.
If we can escape the fate chosen for us by the legacies of our history and those who would subjugate us to meet in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves, but instead meet in solidarity of action to dismantle those systems of unequal power which are our true and mutual enemy.
If we can see beyond the flags of our skin and the limits of ourselves and embrace the truths and uniqueness of others no matter how different from ourselves.
If we can imagine and discover and create among the limitless possibilities of becoming human truths and uniqueness which exalts that of others in a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and co-owners of the state and as human beings.
If, brother bear, we can come together without fear and do the Bear Dance not as each other’s destroyers, but as each other’s liberators.
Upon Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief and Russian agent, Nazi revivalist and saboteur of our democracy, and upon all who serve and obey him, his voters and enablers, donors and propagandists, allies and co-conspirators, do I now and forever brand with my curses.
May the evils that they dream and do turn upon them and consume them.
As they are loathsome things, may they be destroyed in loathsome ways.
May their names be forgotten and the memory of their lives lost to history.
As they are bearers of horror and terror to others, may horrors and terrors pursue them endlessly and for all time.
Here follows a retrospective of such maledictions as I have laid upon the man and his regime, and all who in failing to abandon and disavow the Republican Party of Treason, Tyranny, and Terror have given him their power and unleashed the monster upon us all.
As I wrote in my post of January 14 2025, A Curse Upon Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration; In less than a week’s time a man who modeled himself on Hitler will be Inaugurated as President of the United States, to the hooting and champing of his dishonorable and treasonous Deplorables who celebrate his white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror because they want permission to do the same.
This event of fracture and disruption calls for rituals of grief and healing for our shared public trauma, but also for solidarity in Resistance and performances of acts of refusal to submit and bringing a Reckoning.
If I had enough hands, and windows into their private spaces, I would flay their white skins and mount them on my wall, I would douse them in gasoline while they sleep and drop the match, I would visit horrors on them and give reply to their violations, atrocities, tyranny and terror with those of my own as they merit; but I would not become as they, and we must never allow our enemies to become our teachers.
Look to Israel, a nation which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis, and to the genocide of the Palestinians if you require a scrying glass into our future should we choose the path of force and violence without embracing the humanity of our enemies regardless of their otherness and monstrosity; and we must also embrace our own if we are to free ourselves from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force and its systems of oppression.
The enemy are monsters because they have transgressed the limits of the human, and we must not join them in the place of unknowns. I have lived in this place, marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of becoming human, for forty three years now since the Siege of Beirut, and as Nietzsche warned the Abyss has begun to look back at me.
Imposed conditions of struggle may require seizures of power by force, but in so doing we must not forget to see others as fellow human beings, even if we must meet them in battle as brother warriors to find the truths of ourselves.
When the Matadors rescued me from the police death squad in Brazil over fifty years ago, the leader said; ”You are one of us; come with us. We can’t save everyone, but we can avenge.” This principle serves well enough for Resistance, but the moment we are now living in requires both Resistance, always War to the Knife without law or limit, and Revolution as reimagination and transformative change. Revenge is a weakness we cannot afford if we are to build a better future than we have the past.
Herein I offer all of you a curse upon our enemies, betrayers of our humanity and of our nation; join me in invoking a Reckoning and in Solidarity of action to make it real.
A Curse Upon Our Enemies: Traitor Trump and All Who Voted For Him Or Celebrate His Inauguration:
I invoke death and horror upon all who voted for Traitor Trump or celebrate his Inauguration, Rapist In Chief, Russian agent, and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, and ruin upon all their works. May all they love and dream come to nothing and be destroyed.
By the beard of the Ice King of Entropy and the poison songs of the Queen of Lies,
By the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones and the Wailing in the Darkness,
By the Abyss and the terror of our Nothingness,
May our enemies and all who celebrate today the Inauguration of Traitor Trump live loveless and die unmourned,
May their bodies be prisons of illness and pain, and their souls consumed by their cruelties.
In annotation of the text, I refer in my poem and conjuration here to the old and true forces of our universe, which I sometimes call the Giants of Frost and Old Night to convey something of the wonder and terror of a universe free from any meaning or value except for that we ourselves create but filled with potentialities of both human darkness and light, and also as symbols of Defining Moments which I have lived.
In my imagination I give form and force to The Wailing in the Darkness as an incident in the defense of Mariupol, hours crawling in utter darkness through the bloody remains of the dead in a partially collapsed tunnel filled with the voices of the dying whom I could not help as Russian bombs shook the earth. They are with me still, my companions in darkness at the edge of life and death, and they whisper things in my dreams; of horror and despair, loneliness and abandonment, of being shattered into countless fragments of myself under the hammer of mass trauma to which I can bring no healing and give no answer as to why humans do such things to each other.
At the time this bothered me not at all; I have survived worse and more terrible, as no doubt I will again. But I spent days throwing up and working through the stages of shock when I discovered what the Russians were doing with the children they abducted, who could not even call for help that was not coming from the torture brothels on army bases far away in Russia, and this silencing and erasure is another form of Wailing in the Darkness. So for all of the disappeared and the forgotten, the nameless on whom the elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege and those who would enslave us have built their castles of cruelty and despair.
When I speak of the dead eyes of the Faceless Ones, I am thinking of the Jar of Eyes.
Of Sarajevo I shall speak here not of the monstrous acts of those who would be conquerors, nor of the courageous resistance of their intended victims who held true to their faith and to each other in the face of death and torture, nor even of the valor and compassion of the volunteers of the International Brigade who placed themselves between hammer and anvil, but of a small horror which has come to symbolize for me the unimaginable horrors of war; the Jar of Eyes.
On the desk of a commander of death squads sat a jar full of eyes, and beside it an ice cream scoop which he would toy with, stroking its stainless smoothness with an absentminded and sensual languor while interrogating prisoners.
This he did in imitation of the Roman Emperor Basil the Second the Bulgar Slayer, who after the battle of Kleidion in 1014 Christianized Bulgaria by blinding the army he had defeated, and leaving one man in one hundred with a single eye to guide the others home and terrify the nation into submission.
How do I know this, and what were we to each other, this monster and I? Herein I recall and speak as a witness of history a Defining Moment in which we played a game of chess with the life of a prisoner of his as the prize.
Having materialized at his gate and asking to see the commander, itself unusual and a curious thing to a man with his fearsome reputation, I came bearing the gift of a recording of an opera I knew he loved and could not attend due to his duties and the price on his head as a war criminal, Leoš Janáček’s House of the Dead set in a Serbian prison and based on the Dostoevsky novel, with the promise of more music in trade for a prisoner he held and did not know the value of. He agreed to the bargain, but with one condition; we would play three games of chess after dinner in the following days, and demanded I must win or force a draw once.
We had three meetings over three days of an hour each, over dinner and chess, during which we conversed of the historical civilization he was fighting to defend, a fight which had made him a monster; music, philosophy, art, literature. Once a prisoner was brought in, seated and held fast by guards like a third companion at dinner whom he tortured while we sipped tea and spoke of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov. I think he was lonely.
Within the jar the eyes would float randomly, hypnotic, reflective, capturing ones will to resist with a Medusa-like gaze of objectification and dehumanization appropriated from their tormentors, a talisman of transference of power. A jar of silent screams, erased lives, and the lost witness of history; how can we accuse our destroyers when we have no mouths?
Here among the dragons, where the rule of law cannot reach and our maps of meaning and value have given way to tantalizing empty spaces which beckon with the siren call of the Forbidden, where the only currency is fear and the only relationships those of power and dominion, we challenge and define by their absence and contrary the limits of what is human.
For we are all trapped in the Jar of Eyes, and if we are to reawaken and assume our true forms we must find a means of escape.
As I wrote in my post of October 31 2024, A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression: Halloween; On this Halloween let us enact reversals of order, play tricks which open the gates of our prisons to paths of change, pursue the sacred calling of the truth teller, perform the four primary duties of a citizen; question authority, expose authority, mock authority, and challenge authority, and the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, our society, and the systems and structures of our civilization.
Let us bring the Chaos.
What will you be for Halloween? For the rest of your life? If we can dance our true and secret selves before the stage of the world on this night, why not every night?
Celebrate with me Halloween as a liminal and transformative time of exploring unknowns beyond the boundaries of the Forbidden, the defiance of authority, the sabotage of hierarchies and systems of force and control, and the violation of norms.
Normal doesn’t live here anymore.
Norm, not our old family retainer and master of curious devices but a literary figure of my invention here representing normality and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, is downstairs in the game room tied to an electric chair from the old McKay Carnival I call the Throne of the Sublime, because it is a forge of making angels, though wrathful ones. And it is possessed by the monstrous and deranged souls it has unleashed as an instrument of the Law and the carceral regime of torture and the repression of dissent which it symbolizes, and from which it was liberated decades ago by an Industrial Workers of the World direct action team in a raid on a prison.
Once this was an instrument of state terror, the ultimate resort of institutions of power empty of legitimacy and with only force and violence to control, silence, and erase all who refuse to submit and all Others who are excluded from circles of the elite and the god-authorized Elect, but now serves different purposes in seizures of power and those truths immanent in nature and written in our flesh, set free in exaltation, rapture, and vision, as we are sublimed in the electric arclight of captured bolts from the heavens.
As a carnival game it was converted from terror to joy and from pain to ecstasy as an erotic electro-stimulation device, much like the reference to the game of Gentlemen, Start Your Engines in Neil Gaiman’s telenovela Lucifer, season 2 episode 11.
Here is an echo and reflection of Victor Frankenstein’s theft of the fire of the gods like Prometheus go awaken living truths in our dead flesh, and seize back our stolen power from the Authority or god we created and then subjugated ourselves to; for all transgression of the boundaries of the Forbidden is liberation struggle.
Is any of this story true? Maybe, maybe not. The dialectics of revolutionary struggle and state tyranny and terror in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force are a Schrodinger’s Cat problem wherein many things are both true and false at once, as Rashomon Gate Events of ambiguous and relative truths.
Such questions we must ask America, who like our ideas of what is normal is now being transformed in the crucible of our darkness and the consequences of the January 6 Insurrection in America and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, both now nightmare realms of derelict antiquities from whose historical shadows of authorized identities we must emerge.
This year I am costumed as an Israeli soldier spattered with the blood of numberless innocents who have been butchered with aberrant glee in Palestine for over a year now, where American tax dollars buy the deaths of children and of our civilization. No more terrible and horrific figure of the limits of the human exits than this, the Israeli enforcer of tyranny and state terror authorized to commit genocide by a monstrous god of theocratic violence and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil as imperial conquest and dominion, nor that of his American co-conspirators in crimes against humanity.
I find it illuminating how the meaning of our monsters changes with the context of their signs; today I wore this costume of protest against cruelty and dehumanization to a neighborhood barbeque, like the Red Death at the Masque in Poe’s story, drawn by the music to a backyard full of Trump signs and men adorned with guns as preposterous masculine jewelry, and everyone ran away, even the bikers. I congratulate you, O Israel; if you intended to become a symbol of terror and horror, you have succeeded.
The seduction of power as security is something I understand all too well; but security is an illusion. And it comes with a price.
Some things, however, are certain and unavoidable; first among them the violence of the birth of new possibilities of becoming human and the agony of liberating ourselves from divisions and hierarchies of elite belonging and exclusionary otherness, and from fascisms of blood, faith, and soil. As Trotsky teaches us, the violence of the slave master cannot be compared to the violence of the slave in breaking his chains.
And the second? Normality is deviant. Normal is half our nation voting for treason, subjugation to Russia, theocracy, patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and the subversion of our Constitution and the values of the Enlightenment on which it is founded.
To fascist tyranny and theocratic terror let us say with the glorious rebel Ahab in Moby Dick; “To the end I will grapple with thee, from Hell’s heart I stab at thee, I spit my last breath at thee.”
Let us run amok and be ungovernable.
As I wrote in my post of November 25 2020, Using Chaos and Transgression as Revolutionary Acts to Transform Law and Order Into Liberty and Equality; I am against law and order because law serves power and order appropriates and divides us into hierarchies of elite power and categories of exclusionary otherness, whereas chaos autonomizes and empowers and transgression and the violation of norms and the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, truth, and beauty liberates and seizes power.
Order appropriates; Chaos autonomizes. Law serves power, and there is no just Authority.
Rejoice with me in this time of reversals of order through the performance of Acts of Transgression and Chaos. Let us dance our best and secret selves on the stage of the world, forge new truths, destroy and create ourselves and transform the systems and structures of oppression and tyranny, patriarchy and white supremacist terror, forces of exclusionary otherness and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, into a diverse and inclusive free society of equals.
Dance with us in joy, revolution, and the frightening of the horses.
As I wrote in my post of October 25 2024, A Hymn to Chaos; Tonight a window opens beyond our universe, letting angels through, or devils; and I welcome them both, figures of the twin sides of our nature and the limitless possibilities of becoming human, forces trapped within our flesh in titanic struggle or truths written in our flesh as transformative harmony.
Herein is a liminal time in which we may shape ourselves anew, reimagine our lives and grow beyond the boundaries and limits of our horizon, explore unknowns in the unclaimed empty spaces of our topologies of human being, meaning, and value marked Here Be Dragons, discover new Best Selves and be reborn, become enraptured and exalted beyond ourselves as we ascend through the gaps of the heavens to embrace the wonder and terror of our total freedom in a universe bound by no Law and without any being, meaning, or value other than our own which we ourselves create.
On Halloween night in 2020 I put a curse on Donald Trump and all who voted for him in that election after four years of subversion of democracy and sabotage of America as a Russian agent and figurehead of the Fourth Reich, of white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, robber baron capitalism and ecological disaster which may include the extinction of humankind for the ephemeral profit of elites, tyranny and state terror in the brutal and criminal police repression of the Black Lives Matter protests, and a relentless multifront campaign against our ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and the institutions which serve them including a secular state, an independent and impartial judiciary, and a press free from propaganda and disinformation, especially that of authorities and their carceral states of force and control, free from hate speech, conspiracy theories, rewritten histories, alternate realities; an open public forum of debate free from identitarian politics as fascisms of blood, faith, and soil and of fear and division weaponized in service to power, and an education system which produces citizens rather than slaves as a precondition of democracy.
Curses and wishes give form and direction to vast imaginal forces of poetic vision as reimagination and transformation, and may change the balance of power in the world and the fate of humankind as an unfolding of our intention and the will to become. This one has been reasonably successful from my point of view; presaging the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency and the exposure and purging of our betrayers from among us in the largest manhunt in our nation’s history as we bring a Reckoning to the fascist infiltrators of the January 6 Insurrection and their financiers, apologists, and puppetmasters, and to all those who would enslave us.
This year as I did last, and on every Halloween to come, for evermore, I shall perform the rituals of Cursing the Tyrants and the Casting Out of the Unclean Fascists that it may become final and eternal, propagating outwards into infinity as a wave of change and gathering force as it grows, like revolutionary struggle unstoppable as the tides; but I will balance it as well with wishes of blessing, protection, and good luck for all those whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and those champions who stand with them in solidarity and for a free society of equals.
In this moment, with half the tens of thousands dead in Gaza and throughout Palestine being women and children as well as civilians helpless before the bombs of vengeance as blood sacrifices to fear, rage, and hate, I know who my people are, and with whom I stand even if it is only to die with them.
I will be sixty five years old in a couple weeks, and have been fighting throughout the world and in Palestine and Lebanon since the summer of 1982, and I must question how many more fights I have left in me, especially ones which cannot be won. Far too many such lost causes and forlorn hopes, yet I cannot leave Last Stands unfought. I intend to go down fighting; when you’re all that stands between a people and genocide, between resistance and dehumanization, between liberty and slavery, there is no mustering out.
No one should have to die alone, abandoned and erased from history by a fallen civilization for whom our universal human rights and solidarity as each other’s guarantors of our humanity no longer has meaning or value.
No Band of Brothers, we, but complicit in all evils we do not oppose or remain silent in witness of; especially we Americans whose taxes purchased the bombs of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Herein I claim both the peoples of Palestine and of Israel, versus the theocratic tyrants and terrorists on both sides who seek to subjugate them through fascist divisions of blood, faith, and soil and through fear weaponized in service to power. For the alt-right regime of Netanyahu has conspired with elements of Hamas in the October 7 attack for two purposes; first to stop the growing interdependence and mutual aid of the anticolonial Palestinian Independence movement with the Israeli democracy and peace movements which threatens authority in both Gaza and Israel and may yet emerge as a united and nonsectarian democracy, second to create a casus belli for Netanyahu’s conquest of the region including areas of Lebanon and Syria as a Second War of Independence, and third to delegitimize democracy as a guarantor of universal human rights by making its guarantor states complicit in unforgiveable war crimes in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians by America’s client state of Israel.
If America sends military aid to Israel rather than humanitarian aid to Palestine, the enemy regimes of Netanyahu and Hamas win, and the peoples of both states and our own lose.
To refuse to submit is to become Unconquered, and this is a victory and a kind of power which cannot be taken from us, and through which we may find the will to claw our way out of the ruins and make yet another Last Stand.
How do we create ourselves anew and emerge from the legacies of our histories?
As I wrote in my post of May 28 2023, The True and False Crows: a Fable; 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.
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 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 identity, 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?”
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 last spring 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; plus it contains a marvelous re-enactment of the myth of Persephone.
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.
My friends, please feel free to perform and enact this spell with me; A Hymn to Chaos and Transgression:
I invoke Chaos, freedom, and the limitless possibilities of becoming human against Order, Authority, and the boundaries of the Forbidden.
I perform acts of transgression by which to break the chains of law and illusion woven by those who would enslave us, to seize our power and our autonomy from hierarchies of elite wealth, power, and privilege, from authorized identities and divisions of exclusionary otherness, to create myself in the image of my own imagination and no other, and to shape human being, meaning, and value to the forms of my desires.
In this time of the turning of the tides I refuse and resist subjugation by force and control, I become Unconquered and free, I run amok and am ungovernable, and to Authority I reply with the Four Sacred Acts in pursuit of Liberty and Truth; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
By these invocations of Chaos and Transgression (Herein be free to make wishes, and to consecrate acts of defiance of tyranny, disruptions and subversions of good order and discipline, violations of normality, seizures of power, and celebrations of autonomy and living beyond all limits in the glorious embrace of our monstrosity, of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves) I curse all fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, patriarchy, state terror and tyranny, elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and inequalities of power.
On this night of the renewal of the world in which the old order is consumed in fire and the spirit world moves among us and is unified with our own in its reimagination and transformation, I name to my brothers and sisters of Chaos these enemies of humankind as rightful prey; first, upon all tyrants and their forces of repression of dissent and enforcement of the Law, for order appropriates, law serves power, and there is no just authority; second upon Donald Trump (herein please feel free to name tyrants whom you oppose and seek to cast down from their thrones; mine include Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and many others) and all who serve and support him and the cause of fascism, and all those who in voting for him in the Presidential election of November 3 2020 and in this coming election of November 5 2024 have signed the confession of their treason and allegiance to white supremacist terror, Gideonite patriarchal sexual terror, and to the tyranny and terror of a police state.
So upon Trump, his puppetmaster Vladimir Putin, and all who claim him as their own do I place my curse and invoke ruin upon their fortunes and their lives and destruction upon their cause. May they be forgotten and become nothing.
This I balance with equal blessing, protection, and good luck upon the lives, fortunes, and causes of liberty and equality upon all who are powerless and dispossessed, marginalized by exclusionary otherness, falsified, commodified, dehumanized, silenced and erased, and those who place their lives in the balance with them in solidarity as champions and bearers of the Torch of Liberty and a free society of equals.
Tonight our wildness will eat the moon and set it free.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2 Episode 6 Halloween
Torch of Liberty 